Oh Noes!

So, WoW is down for some reason (something involving them screwing up while doing rolling restarts and messing with the authentication servers) and in the meantime I thought I'd write a bit about hunter pets. One of my favorite aspects of being a hunter is being able to choose a [preferably] shiny companion to join me on my travels, and hunting the perfect pet. Yesterday I found a model of Quilen (some variety of a Chinese lion-dog guardian) that is very unique. The skin is a purple stone model and I found it after realizing that Quilen are the exotic version of a wolf (crit buff) with a battle res thrown in. After browsing for awhile on Petopia, I found this. It's a very rare model, at level 88 anyway, because you can only tame it while on a specific part of a specific quest-line, and I had not yet seen anyone else with one. Usually uniqueness is a key attribute I search for while researching pets. I also try to find pets that match with my character's color and personality scheme. In this case, her name has to do with the night and her coloring (as a Night Elf) is pink/purple and blue. Therefore I usually seek pets that are either pink, purple, blue, or black. 

During Cataclysm I decided to level her, raising her from her permanent-alt status to a level 85. During that time I had a lot of fun hunting and taming all of the pets I wanted, including Skoll, Skarr, and the oil-stained wolf. (Yes, I know two of those were from Wrath, but I listed them because they were part of the leveling experience, especially because she had been somewhere in the 40s or 50s prior to Cataclysm.)

With a new expac comes a variety of new skins and new families of pets. One such new family, the waterstrider, is very helpful to keep around while leveling in Pandaria, because it provides a water walking buff and we are all ground-ridden until level 90.

Alright, back to either real life or WoW, depending...

[As a final note, the links above are to either Petopia or Wowhead and both are trusted and widely-used sites.]