How many of you wish you had a oil-stained wolf like the one above? Or maybe a boar that’s on fire? Or maybe one of those Icepaw Bears with glowing frosty paws? Tames such as this were only possible though some “clever use of game mechanics” (aka glitching) and they were all eventually fixed by Blizzard. They did let those hunters who tamed them keep their pets, but taming in such obscure, glitchy ways was obviously not their intention.
Pets that have additional effects or props attached to them almost always lose them upon taming. There are some exceptions, like Gib, but for the most part anything not part of the original model is lost. There’s a good reason for this. The way I understand it, these effects are applied with a hidden aura (buff) and whenever you tame something it is intentionally stripped of every single aura it has. This is so hunters can’t tame a pet while it has a damage buff active or some other game-breaking buff. The downside is we can’t tame pets with these unique effects.
A while ago there was mention by Dave Maldonado on Twitter that they were going to look into making these appearance auras be attached to the pet even after a tame, but nothing ever really came of it. Muffinus stirred the pot recently when he responded to this tweet:
@Dravenor Anything that’s not in the base model (3d model view) is added later and not avail. after taming, maybe hunter pet dress-up items?
— Jeremy Feasel (@Muffinus) September 20, 2014
Hunter pet dress-up items? Sounds like a perfect opportunity to add this sort of functionality to the game. The first time I ever saw the hunter pet collar idea brought up was an old post by Frostheim at the WHU. His idea centered around making it a piece of gear with stats on it that you slot into your pet, but what I’m proposing is that pet collars become the new way we can customize the appearance of our pets. You want an oil-stained wolf? Why not an oil-stained tallstrider or devilsaur?
Continue reading Let’s talk about Pet Collars
