Hunter did a bad, bad thing

I feel kind of bad for Ideale. I've been working on three alts, a tauren druid, a troll shaman and a Forsaken mage, and I've been leveling them up to ten a little at a time. I also worked on re-leveling the Forsaken priest I had rotting (haha) on Whisperwind at 19, in hopes of returning her to that level for WSG purposes. And maybe someday getting her to 29, even, so she can have mind-control powers. (Do they even work against other players? I don't know, and I'm not going to bother to find out until I'm at the BG.) I loves the undead.

By working on, I mean that all four are sitting calmly at levels 3-5. *shame* Which alts are getting a real work-out? Daj, who's now at 12 and one bar from 13, and Dayea and Kresha, a night elf hunter and an orc hunter respectively, whom I made for Project Infiltration because I wanted to level Daj.

And then I did a bad thing. I had Tshaya at 22 and was in Darkshore, and had the quest where you collect the naga artifacts at Mathystra, and I thought to myself, "Hmm. I'll be in the area anyway, and half those naga are casters. I should see how long it takes to get a ghost saber." Because if it took forever, I wouldn't even bother getting Daj over there petless.

The kitty spawned on the second figurine, and Tshaya tamed him pretty easily ... and that's the problem. I know that WoW pets are just pixels, and thus are whatever you want them to be, and that under the skins, all of the kitties are the same. And skin-wise, the ghost saber is just the snow leopard but transparent. But Cat, to me, is definitely a male cat, where Serai is definitely female. And upon transparency, he also lost the pretty teal shadowing that Daj's Serai has, which I very much like. And snow leopards are, at least on my realms, much less common especially among Horde hunters than the ghost sabers are. For Daj to tame him, she'd either have two snow leopard-skin, low-level kitties to work on, or she'd have to give up Serai.

But Tshaya's owl, Artemis, is cute and makes these funny, adorable noises when she attacks ... but I'm already attached to the as-yet unnamed Cat ... who's at "Best Friend" loyalty already. And honestly, while Artemis is adorable, her durability leaves much to be desired, PVE-wise. I considered feeding her good, giving her a hug, letting her go near the border with Felwood, and then "finding" her again later, but couldn't bring myself to do it. What will probably actually happen is she'll rest up in the stable until I hit 28, come out for a quick leveling session, then go with me into Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch, because I hear that flappy creatures are hell to fight off in PVP and I know that people mostly ignore the pets in hopes of finding the hunters, and I'll see what happens then.

Do I honestly need 6-10 kitties? No. I can have one non-kitty pet — in fact, I should probably try a couple of non-cats for more than five minutes at a time, just to be a better hunter. So far, Artemis and a wolf have been the only not-cat pets I kept for more than one or two fights. So Artemis stays for now, and when Kresha's done infiltrating Azuremyst and Elwynn, I'm going to try either a bat or a worg and see if I like them. Or maybe give a boar another shot, because they're awfully cute and maybe I can learn to ignore the squealing.

Meanwhile, Ideale's been hanging out in Dustwallow Marsh, bored to death. I think that the mobs there are too easy (at 45) — I miss the thrill of frantically shooting a mob in hopes that it'll die before Mend Pet wears off, and my XP bar isn't filling fast enough. And I'm kind of sick of marshes — with the exception of the Badlands, I've been spending my time exclusively in Swamp of Sorrows, Stranglethorn Vale, and Dustwallow Marsh since hitting 33. So I'm going to finish a couple of interesting quests and then dump the rest, heading off for yellower or even, dare I say, orange pastures.