Cataclysm Hunter... or Pokemon Trainer?

So, as silly as the title may sound, this to me is about the simplest way to describe the hefty change Blizzard made to Hunters in the 4.0 patch leading up to Cataclysm. Before, you had to really plan carefully as to what pet you brought with you out into the wild... and for the most part this led to something boring enough to make it feel like having different pets was going largely unused.

Wolves and lots of them. If you were running around the wilderness in the pursuit of Fine Loots, you were generally traveling with a Tenacity (tanking) pet and it's wonderful Thunderstomp ability, and if you were doing an instance, by and large there was only one choice: a wolf, all because it gave the hunter (originally the entire raid) a 5% damage buff that was easy to measure. It didn't really matter that you could have a set of different ones in the stable, because if you were the only hunter around what you'd use in almost all cases was a wolf. If you weren't the only hunter around, your choices were less limited but more annoying because to help the raid/group you'd want to take a pet with a different ability, and that usually wound up in one place as well...

Armor reduction pets, and generally a worm. ...and then you weren't even bringing a 5% DPS buff with you which made you less impressive because players can't generally do enough math to figure out what DPS increase a reduction in armor causes, so most of them simply assume that "DPS is moar betterer". ...and then Blizzard went and changed the wolf's buff so that it only applies to the hunter and their pet. So... again, more wolves. It was nice that with a five-minute cooldown you could swap out one pet for another, but obnoxious to deal with in practice if you had to pug something out. Most people were carrying one tenacity pet, one ferocity pet, and then the 1-2 other pets that they personally liked having around to look at. Trying to get flexibility beyond that small selection was frustrating--especially if you'd specced into Beast Mastery because while there were a lot of interesting pet abilities out there, picking one up would mean cutting that rare purple and green sparkle-cat that you can't get anymore loose.

NO MORE!

Now you can have a stable of well, more pets than most people will even want to collect, and by the time you hit 83, you can carry five of them in what amounts to a "hotlist" or basically, the Pokemon Trainer backpack. Seriously. Mind you, Pokemon Trainers hoard a whole ton of Pokemon back in SOMEONE's computer (no idea why it was named that), but can only fit six in their backpack to take with them. That's pretty much the same thing going on here now. You pick your hotlist by talking to a Pokemon terminal, er... Stable Master, and then out into the wilderness you go. There's no longer even a cooldown on swapping them from your hotlist in the field--you just dismiss the one you were using, and summon up one of the other ones on the spot.

Hunters have definitely been gleefully taking advantage of both this and the new pet models. In the past week I've noticed that it's downright rare to see someone traveling with a mere wolf or gorilla. I've been seeing all sorts of crazy pets running around after their masters lately, many of which have been new models but for the most part, a whole lot of different pets which seems to represent that hunters are starting to tote the ones they like more often than the ones they think they absolutely need. Me personally? I've just been cycling through them like mad as I run quests, because I picked up eight more last week. I've got a poo-flinging monkey (Gorillas are not monkeys--Do not anger The Librarian.) a silithid with an exposed and glowing brain, a cute little fox (who will be replaced for a different color soon--don't tell him!) that can do a little dance, an eagle who can fly loop-the-loops, a semi-transparent wolf (who is not replacing Taxes), as well as a gen-u-ine Jowlie Mastiff Houn' Dawg named Slobbers.

This change thing, it is good. :)