The emotion from many years of playing with so many “bonding” moments…

IF nothing else this reminds me of, or actually emotes, feelings of long past camaraderie and bonding that we all have done, all miss, and all sometimes have a hard time putting our finger on what it is we miss.

Wow has certainly made an impact on me in ways I probably will never understand.

P.S. I love that cat too.. still have the quest on my 85 rogue “just in case” someone needs to summon him. : )

I created a Gnome Mage back during TBC, and one of the driving factors to me leveling that character was so that he could craft and ride the (at the time) new Engineering mount. Strange as it may sound, it was his tradeskill that got me to level through some of the more frustrating points. Of course, like most classes, once I got past the early levels I started to really, really enjoy the class.

Anyway.

This Gnome was named “Police”. A damn perfect name for a Gnome Frost Mage with Engineering. And as it turns out, all those gnomish engineering gadgets made him more fun than I expected. Mind Control, Rocket Boots, World Enlarger, Death Ray – each of these were even MORE amusing when used by a bald Gnome.

Fast forward to WotLK and the Argent Tournament. See the Tournament offered factions specific non-combat pets that were BOE! Of course, I just had to have them. I wasn’t about to pay thousands of gold on the AH for a pet, AND I always wanted a high level Horde character. So I decided to spend some money to change one of my characters to Horde.

At the time my choices were:

Paladin – my main character and thus not gonna happen
Warlock – my oldest character, not gonna happen
Warrior – the most obvious choice, but he was on another server and thus more expensive
Mage – No reason NOT to
Druid – I’ve never been a fan of Tauren Druids, and my Druid had already completed the tournament – and I didn’t want to repeat the process on the same character

So it was the Mage.

Let me tell you, that character lost a ton of personality when it became a Blood Elf. Nothing else was different! I still had Engineering, I still had all the Frost Mage tricks, I still had the NAME. Hell I even crafted a Mechanohog for him! But it wasn’t nearly as fun as I had hoped.

After a few months I had all the Horde pets and transferred them over to Alliance via the neutral AH, but the Mage stayed Horde.

Then, about 2 months pre-Cataclysm I was working hard to finish the Scepter of the Shifting Sands questline. The only thing I had left to do was craft the Arcanite Bouy, kill Maws, and turn in the Blue Shard. Except that Elementium Ore was going for insane prices – somewhere around 5k a PIECE – and I needed 9. On a whim I offered on Horde-side to buy some at 1k a piece. And boom, I got all 9.

I was not about to trust the neutral AH with such a valuable items (I’ve been burned before), and that was all the excuse I needed to get my Mage back to a proper Gnome.

And now he’s all kinds of fun again!

And that turned out to be a longer story than I expected…

Related aside, I have The Razza as the ‘main’ pet on my ‘big’ hunter. Another hunter saw me standing around, waved at me, then started summoning and dismissing his pets in front of me. Once I realized what he was doing, I flew off towards the stables, told him to follow, and we proceeded to show off our ‘rare pets’ to each other.

I’ve done the PVP thang, I’ve done the raiding thang … but there’s something about doing the “little things” (pet collecting, companion collecting, even tabard collecting) that makes this game fun for me. I’m probably not the type of person Blizz was targeting for this game since I have that mindset, but oh well. I have fun and that’s all that matters.

Today, at 85, even with all the spirit beasts and hunter pet changes that have since come about, my saber “Eclipse” is THE pet for me. Through all the grief I took from raiders in Lich King (“You should have the wolf pet so we can get the howl buff…” and all the other varieties of pets, I sincerely doubt that I will ever change to a different pet as it just MEANS something to me.

I will admit that my petoholism has gone down in the sense that it’s pretty much restricted to my main now. Having said that, her stables are just about full, meaning yes she does have almost 25 pets. >.>

The only problem that comes out of that is all my hunters are attached to particular types of pets. My main Niqora and her wolf Blacky are stuck together like superglue and…something else really sticky. I have the ideas for a spunky belf with a raptor pet, and an orc hunter with a menagerie of hyenas.

If only we could get as many character slots per server as stable slots per hunter…