Pet Collecting In Week Two of WoD

It's been a little while since my last post, but with good reason! I've been slowly but surely collecting the new WoD pets; there are roughly 30ish pet left for me to collect.

Some of my favorite/notable acquisitions this past week, three out of the seven Mastering the Menagerie pet drops, the OH gifted me the Draenei Micro Defender, and after many days of chasing around dig sites all over Draenor, I finally discovered and completed the Ancient Nest Guardian!


Ziri'ak Junior, grow up big and strong and maybe one day you'll go off on follower missions too. :P

I should also mention that I've collected the 10th anniversary pets, Molten Corgi and Hatespark the Tiny. The former is adorable, even if he butt scoots and leaves behind a hot mess lol.


Blizzard must really adore the corgi, though, because it's being mailed to ALL my characters that log into the game during the anniversary. You can only have one in your journal and you can't cage it; I feel bad about it but I've had to destroy the extras. :(


Hatespark, appropriately named
Hatespark the Tiny, as much as I don't want to talk about him, I feel I have to. This pet is going to fall under the same category as Lumpy did back in the day for me. Terrible collecting experience, left a bad impression on me, glad to have it in my pet army, but it will forever be stained with a not-so-nice memory.

This teeny fire elemental comes from Ragnaros, the last boss of the anniversary edition of Molten Core. The raid is 40 man and tuned for level 100 players (item level 615). Oh, but did I mention it's LFR only? So unless you have a full group of 40 friends/guildmates, you'll be pugging this raid. It's...not fun.

On the first day of the anniversary, I was excited and amped to head out into what I thought would be a nostalgic raid. Instead I faced a terrible bug (or player griefing), where you queued into a completely cleared Molten Core raid. Ragnaros was dead, no reason to be in there. That happened quite a few times initially. Eventually Blizzard sorted it out and prevented players from joining a completed MC, but by then I had already developed a bad impression of the event.

At some point I decided to brave the queue again, and my god. It's not pug friendly in the slightest. I lost track of how many times we wiped and how many hours I spent in there, just on my first run of MC LFR. Yes, I said first, because it was one of FOUR in one night.

You would think that after so much headache and time spent, the pet would be 100% drop, right? Nope. It's not even close to 100% drop rate. On the plus side, there's no loot lockout for the anniversary raid, so you can keep queuing for MC and still be eligible for loot each time. But after hours and HOURS of being in the cesspool that is LFR, no loot lockout isn't much of a consolation.

It's not even that I found the raid too difficult or anything. I think if it had been tuned down to say 10 or 20 man, and I could go in with ONLY guildmates and friends, it would have been a blast. Re-figuring out strats, laughing at each others' mistakes, and just remembering the old days.

But the fact that it's 40 man, and if you don't have that many for a full guild raid, you're force to pug...it's painful. The environment is just terrible; people yelling at each other and arguing over things. People who put only the barest minimal effort into it. And then there are griefers who are only there just to cause chaos and revel in others' anger and frustration. In one of the runs I was in, someone decided to pull an unnecessary pack of imps, wipe the raid, just so he could run to the wall behind the imps and mine a node. REALLY?!


I now know why this pet is named the way it is. If Molten Core LFR doesn't instill some sort of deep anger/hate within you, I tip my hat to you for your resilience.

After four runs, my OH took pity on me and decided to do something about my struggle. He purchased Hatespark the Tiny from the AH for about 15k (paid way too much in my opinion), and surprised me with it. I was very grateful but still upset over the experience at the same time.

It's supposed to be a fun event, right? A way to enjoy a celebration of the past decade of WoW. Yet it was so discouraging. The raid atmosphere AND the low drop rate on the pet. I can see a lot of collectors getting frustrated over this, eventually resorting to just purchasing it off the AH, which makes me sad because it would have been great to actually participate in something enjoyable and festive.

Anyway, I'm going to put it behind me now. As adorable as I think Hatespark is, I don't think I'll be bringing him out much. Unpleasant memories that are still too fresh in my mind. Glad that it's over and the pet's collected, disappointed that it was such a painful experience.