I’m pretty sure we’re all clear on the fact that I enjoy rolling hunters. I can’t help it. It’s relaxing. It’s nostalgic.

Alongside this, it means I have tamed a lot of pets in my WoW career. The level 10 pet is very important to me, because I consider it to be the pet that particular hunter will have their entire life– oh sure, they’ll tame others, and may even use others in raids or PvP, but all of my hunters keep their first pet.

And one of my little quirks is that I enjoy taming the… more challinging to obtain pets.

I’ve ran level ten Hordies to Teldrassil. Twice. Once for the owl and once for a cat.

I’ve ran a low level Hordie to Azuremyst for the moth.

I’ve ran a level 10 Hordie to Dun Morogh for the snow leopard.

I’ve ran a level 10 Alliance character to Durotar for a raptor.

A good chunk of those were on PvP servers.

I’ve also done safer but still lengthy trips on other characters: dragging a Tauren to Eversong Woods or Trolls and Blood Elves to Mulgore. (It has occurred to me that an unusually high percentage of my lowbie hunters are Horde. Hmm.)

This was all in my mind yesterday when I did something crazy and made a character on one of my non-”Home Servers”. Thus it was that I made a female tauren hunter (yes I have a billion of those, shuddup, Azeroth needs more, dangit! /shifty eyes) on Wyrmrest Accord, so I could say hello to Faeldray and Tzia, two people who have been a part of the Aspect of the Hare commenting community for a very, very long time and who both have awesome blogs of their own.

We hung out for a while and did some really nifty RP (which I may talk about later, in its own post), but always in the back of my mind as I did the tauren starter quests for the umpteenth time was what pet I should get. It had to be special, something that I could tie in to my developing character story, and preferably something I hadn’t ever tamed before.

Then I had an idea.

Snoeken (Dutch for “Pike”, albeit the fish and not the weapon =P) went on a little adventure.

First, the ride from Thunder Bluff to Orgrimmar.

Taking the zeppelin to Undercity…

And getting on a different zeppelin and going to a very scary place for a level 10:

Howling Fjord.

Then came the ceremonial removing of all the clothes (except the shirt and pants– I’m a decent tauren!) and a deep breath…

And then the corpse hop began.

So, rez timer, we meet again.

The run to Utgarde Keep wasn’t that bad though, and I soon found myself where I needed to be…

Well well well, what’ve we got here?

Brand New Birdie:

The fishertauren and her sea hawk:

My new druid-birdie has a few bugs, it would appear. He flies extremely low to the ground (as opposed to, say, an owl, who flies much higher), and when he flies after you, he remains leaned back in his “hovering” position. The way a druid would look if it was just flying in place. I’ve actually had this happen to me in my druid flight form, if I time myself carefully and jump right when I enter flight form. But it seems to be a perpetual problem for the Daggercap Hawk, and it looks kind of silly. In addition, he doesn’t “highlight” when you click on him, the way other things do.

Regardless of these issues, he is a gorgeous pet– and certainly unique, as well!

Now we just have to cross our fingers and hope Blizzard eventually fixes these issues, rather than conveniently deciding that a level 10 hunter shouldn’t have a bird from Northrend =P

No? Two level 80 Beast Master hunters doesn’t make me an addict yet?

Don’t worry, I’m working on a third…

Edit: Got to admit, I dearly love my taurengirl. I love Tawyn, too, but she is a character whereas Lunapike is more, well… me. Honestly, if it weren’t for most of my friends being Ally-side, I’d seriously considering switching mains to Horde. Tauren for life.

Edited Edit: Don’t forget, I have a level 80 resto druid as well who I leveled as resto. So, I’m not *that* sheltered, right? I’ve branched out *hears groans in the audience* right?

Left to right, top to bottom:

Tux, Level 80; Locke, Level 80; Eltanin, Level 79; Wash, Level 80
Alyosha, Level 70; Ivan, Level 70; Serenity, Level 70; Dmitri, Level 70
Kolya, Level 33; Regulus, Level 38; Alnair, Level 39; Chakapas, Level 37
Clifford, Level 18; Fiskars, Level 18; Scraps, Level 14; Niels, Level 16

And yes, there’s more. Though they are sadly attached to hunters who I don’t play as often. (The pets of six different hunters are represented in this quilt.)

…and yes, looking at this picture fills me with warm fuzzies. <3

So I have a paladin who I’ve been spending a little time on each day, and I have a resto druid who randomly wound up with her very first old-school Badge of Justice the other day (Yes, it is apparently quite possible for a level 65 tree to heal a level 80 tankadin through level 70 heroics), but you gotta understand something. Namely, you can take the girl outta the hunter but you can’t take the hunter outta the girl. Or something along those lines.

Heck, scratch the girl part, you can be a hot blood elf guy too:

Althalor is now level 40. For the uninitiated, that means I now have a level 80 hunter, a level 70 hunter, and a level 40 hunter. And once you toss all my dozens of sub-20 hunters into the mix, I’ve clocked well over 200 collective levels in this class. Probably closer to 250.

Yes, yes, I know. But hey, I can’t help myself. Once you go pewpew, you can’t go… uh… I’ll get back to you on that one.

So yes, I am here to ease the panic that sometimes occurs on blogs, comments, e-mails, and the WoW Twitterati (term coined by one Matticus) when I briefly dip into a non-hunter interlude. Be not afraid– Pike is a hunter, and this is a hunter blog. One lil’ treedrood and one lil’ baby protadin are no match for the Hunter Mafia. I mean, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the leveling of two little alts doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy World of Warcraft.

Eh? Ehhh? See what I did there?

/cough

Okay, I’ll stop now. >.>

(P.S. Okay, so maybe not that many people are panicking. But I can pretend, at least, to make it more dramatic.)