New Hunter pet family teased at BlizzCon (Gryphons and winged beasts)

Right after BlizzCon, Jeremy “Muffinus” Feasel tweeted that there were hints “somewhere on the internet” about a new Hunter pet family revealed at BlizzCon. Many Hunters, including myself, looked for this hint but couldn’t find anything. I was pretty sure I had watched all of the BlizzCon interviews and read most of the articles, but I was wrong.  Cernunnos over at Petopia finally found it. It was buried away in a video interview done by BlizzPro that hasn’t had many views up until now.

The relevant part is at the 12-minute mark. The new family isn’t given a name, but producer Michael Bybee revealed that once Hunters unlock their class mount in patch 7.2, they’ll also unlock the ability to tame “beasts with wings” such as gryphons.

That’s all the info we’ve got, but I think it’s safe to assume that if it includes gryphons it will also include hippogryphs. Maybe wyverns, too? Pterrordax’s are also winged beasts, but they’re not feathered, so I’m not sure about those. One could also speculate that whatever species the Hunter mount represents could also be a new type of flying beast in 7.2 or later. This family probably won’t be exotic since Survival and Marksmanship will want to take advantage of this as well.

Currently there is only one gryphon skin used for wild beasts, and it’s the old vanilla model. Back in Mists of Pandaria they added new gryphon models, but never used them anywhere besides mounts, so maybe they’ll add those in somewhere? There’s also several colors of gryphon in the game files that aren’t used anywhere yet, including a spectral one. For hippogryphs, there’s quite a few in the game already, including new ones added in Legion. Wain at Petopia has a gallery of all the potential gryphons and hippogryhs here.

New families are exciting, but I hope Blizzard is going to do something about the inconsistency with Hunter pet special abilities sometime soon. We still have about half of the families with nothing at all, including really cool families like Mechanicals. I’m sure this new winged beast family could be given something cool. Perhaps another family that gives blood lust because they flap their wings so hard it speeds up everyone’s casting?  😛

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18 thoughts on “New Hunter pet family teased at BlizzCon (Gryphons and winged beasts)”

  1. I’m not really interested in taming new pets unless they fix the special abilities. Blizzard really needs to take a hard look at their priority list.

  2. I’d much rather have some model updates for existing families before they give us yet another new tameable family. Hyenas especially, but gorillas and tallstriders also come to mind for families that still only have the vanilla model in a few different colors. I also wouldn’t mind having a tameable sunrunner (the glowy horse things from Broken Isles) instead of a hippogryph.

  3. This is nice and all, but like others I’d prefer them to take a look at adding special abilities for pet families and improving pet and Hati AI – not to mention increasing stable space, as I’ve only got about 3 spare pet slots at the moment.

  4. I’ve never been fans of flying pets. Other than birds, it makes no sense really. Plus its a pain when playing with a group when you are melee. I tame this big flying monster, and it shrinks down to a little thing. And why do they need the same path as land pets, they fly, just fly strait regardless of what is between.

    So not a fan of flying pets. I wish they would fix hati. He doesn’t attack till I hit kill, and even then he sometimes stands beside me attacking. Then they might wanna fix the defense pose for pets. Ive notice they run back to the last place they attacked and then attack the current target. But atleast hati attacks.

    Anyone notice the new mounts flying around the lodge. Stand and look up, they are far away but you can click them.

    1. Same, but I even feel bad for the birds having to hover, it’s so dumb. I do love my two-headed girl though. And yeah, the defensive and assist stances are kind of wonky and unreliable, I’m finding that sometimes assist seems to work more like defensive, or maybe it’s just that I’m using it in older content where things maybe aren’t actually hitting me.

      I looked all around the lodge, but I didn’t see anything new; the untargetable vulture-looking things were there, and I noticed Leokk, and protected owls, but nothing unusual. I did, however, find an area I hadn’t seen before, with baby moose playing tag (including a named white one, Tenderhorn), and a cave (Den of the Seeker) with a bound drogbar named Ogdrul. Dunno if this is new content or if I just hadn’t explored around the lodge enough.

  5. All I really want is to tame the Fiery/shadow unicorn things, frogs and snails. But I would love for more abilities, playing SV we are limited to 3 pet families.

  6. Model updates and fixing pet AI needed to come wayyyyyy before this. Getting tired of having to micro manage my pets all the time, especially now that I constantly have two out as BM.

  7. Once i clicked beast lore to cloud serpent, it shows that cloud serpent can eat meat. Although this “beast” does not have wings, this mob can be tamed in future. I hope I can tame cloud serpents.

  8. I’ve always wanted to be able to tame the Barbtail Beavers on the Isle of Thunder. How can we call ourselves Hunters if we can’t even tame a beaver….;)

  9. Thank you Bendrak!
    I would so much love hunters to be able to mount their pets: I have this bear pet, and that bear mount, and we can’t send our mount to combat; as well with Gryphons if we can tame them in the futur (I mean, look at the Wild Hammer Dwarves, they ride their gryphons and fight with them)

    It will never happen, but, eh, it would be cool.

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