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Yesterday was a pretty awesome day for me. A pretty fucking awesome day for me, one of those days that I know that I will remember for a very long time. Because if there is one thing that most of us WoW players have in common, it is this: If you make something almost impossible to get, we are going to want it all the more. Maybe I am really selling players out here because we all want things that are impossible to get: Like Victoria Secret Models. There are things in the game that some of lust over, mostly involving loot with ilevels upwards of 360, but there are other things in the game that a very select group of dedicated  players hunt for. (No not PORNshire.) I am talking about those crazy Beast Master Hunters.

After logging countless months of /played time, there are a couple of things that I have learned about WoW players. The most obvious is that there is something about the game that just appeals to you enough to not only spend your time in front of a screen of some type, yelling at it, but also spending your hard-earned money on it on a monthly basis. (Holy fuck gas is expensive!) One universal truth stands out, and it doesn’t matter if you are an altoholic, or only have rolled one toon in 6 years, you have to like the toon that you are playing to invest your time into playing it.

The name to me is important, but judging from the masses, it doesn’t matter to many of your out there. However, I kinda die inside every time I see a rogue named, “Istabyou.” The class, the build, the role you choose, they all play a huge part in how much you see yourself in the World of Warcraft, but certainly how others see you. Even though Istabyou might be pwning your butt in BG, it might seem okay if it is an Undead griefing you, but it really hurts when it is a pink haired gnome. See what I mean? So no matter what you may feel about what you picked, you already take into consideration what others think of you when you roll your toon. (On a side note, I saw a DK on a flying carpet as I did my daily quests in TB one day. Yeah. That’s bad.)

So all of this comes back to me. I like my hunter, and as soon as Cata launched, my whole objective in life was to level so I could tame Sambas. Talk about a sexy lion. I have not been so excited about a pet since I tamed Loque back in Wrath. I camped, and camped. Looked at all the usual places online for spawn timers, locations, NPC_Scan ID numbers. Clearing the cache became as routine as the Shit, Shower and Shave bit. (All three highly recommended.) I can close once when another hunter tamed him right after I had logged in, and got to hear the play-by-play from him. He was just as excited as I was for him. If I saw Sambas in SW, then I always talked to the lucky hunter, sharing tips and what-nots. Every hunter that has an exotic pet has always shared a respect and love for the class that I have not encountered yet in the game.

Even though I tamed both Sambas and Jadefang in one day, I read something that really made me sad, and to me, marked the death of BM hunters.

The Happiness/Pet Loyalty System has been removed. Hunters will no longer have to manage Happiness for their pets, and the previous damage bonus for pets being happy will now be baseline for all tamed pets.

This seems like it would make things easier, right? Why worry about carrying any kind of ability to top off the happiness of the pet? Happy fucking rainbows and call in a marching band. This strikes down one of the last things that separates hunters from other perma-pet classes, and I am not happy about it at all.

Used to be, before you got a pet right away, you had to track it down at level ten and tame it. Then you let it go. You tamed another one, and let it go. Then you tamed yet another one and then you were worthy of learning how to tame a beast. You learned how to feed it. If you wanted to increase your DPS with the pet you had to go and find another pet that had the ability that you wanted to teach your pet, tame it and after you gained its trust, it taught you the ability. Then, you could let that pet go, and teach your pet the new ability. This, combined with only having a very few stable slots meant that if you wanted to put respectable numbers up, you chose a pet and trained it. You leveled it up, went all over Azeroth searching for the next ability to teach it. Spent hours and hours grinding on (couldn’t resist that) level after level together. Oftentimes, he would stay behind and die for you allowing your to live. Such devotion to his master. You didn’t see that anywhere else in the game, and you would have to be a heartless motherfucker to not get attached to your pet. Some would say, even come to love it. And in return what did your trusty pet ask of you? In return of its very life, all the pet wanted was some fucking food.

Yeah, it seems minor, but like ammo, you had to remember to bring some. No matter what. If you let your pet die too many times, or danced on a mailbox too long, it started to get mad, and a mad kitty is a bad kitty. When that smile turned into a frown, you better believe that you best be making that pet happy because even though you might have spent weeks of in-game time building up a relationship with this pet, it was about to leave your ass, and it might attack you as it went out the door.

I remember running an instance with another hunter who /whispered me.

“How did you get your pet to stay with you the entire instance?”

“Huh?”

“My pet always runs off or attacks me after just a short time.”

“Are you feeding it?”

“Huh?”

As embarrassing as it may have been to run out of arrows during a boss fight, losing a pet was devastating. All that time and effort was gone, and not only did you have to start over, you had a pet that didn’t trust you, and did really cruddy dps no matter what you taught it. Only by investing time with the pet would it trust you and reward you with DPS. It wants love, it wants food. It sounds a little too much like my real-life pets. The lines between WoW and RL have been blurred.

I was a fan of the pet talents that took care of happiness, I am not going to lie. It was nice to not have a bag full of meat, cheese and fish. Or mold. The hunter class has evolved, and is much more fun today than it ever was, but I have to say that this is going too far. I tamed that big core-hound in TB. Had no idea if it was tamable. Cast Beast Lore, and it was. Tamed it. It died when the next one spawned on top of me.  It died again b/c there was no place to rez without aggroing a mob. It was pissed by the time I got topside and rezzed him. Even though pets don’t run off on you anymore, it still freaked me out. I had meat in my bags. Fed it, and kinda bonding with the big ole green fire two-headed hound.

Maybe BRK saw all of this coming. He really was the voice of BM hunters, even though our spec was traditionally not the raid spec hunters choice. My biggest fear is the day that I talk to another BM hunter and he doesn’t care about his pets, and they become just another homogenized stat-stick.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’ -Bob Dylan