Gotta Caught Them All

Announcement: PET COLLECTION COMPLETE

The last time I got to make this declaration was back in 2009, the first and only other time I had ALL* THE PETS IN THE GAME. Back then, my total count was 105. (But that's when every pet took up a bag slot, so it seemed like A TON.) Now it's 717. o.o

The toughest pet to acquire was the Stunted Direhorn, a reward from Brutal Pet Brawler, which requires you to win 250 PvP pet battles through the random "find battle" feature, using level 25 pets. Ugh. Even with a 50% win rate, which is really hard to achieve when you're usually up against people who really know what they're doing to destroy opponents, this would take dozens of hours. I had to grind up Graves, a pet that I normally wouldn't bother to include in my collection, by leveling up to 20 in Heroes of the Storm, just to be competitive enough to retain my sanity while grinding out this truly brutal achievement. So I had to grind a pet in order to grind a pet. FUN TIMES.

The last pet to finish the collection was Deathwatch Hatchling, for which I needed to join a guild that had it unlocked and rep up to Revered. Super thanks to Pet Peeves on Zul'jin for hosting me and the husband. We had a blast running around in our heirloom gear, zooming through Durotar and the Barrens, cracking jokes and battling over the fate of all the critters that crossed our path. If I got there first, they'd get charmed with the Panflute, but if my flute was on cooldown or Jerft saw them first, the poor dears got vaporized with Arcane Explosion.

So now I can, as a guildie so eloquently put it, "enjoy the next few months with no digital carrots on sticks." Until the next patch. And THANK YOU to the friends that helped feed my addiction by sending me pets and murderating Shadow Lord Iskar over and over again. Love you guys.

(*for my collection I don't include pets that originate outside of WoW US servers / requiring $ or promo code, such as BlizzCon/TCG/BlizzStore/other games.)