Virtual pets

I think my brother said it the best when explaining to me how hunter pets work in the game. He said it's pretty much like having one of those virtual pets games that used to be popular, you know, the little electronic game that kids carry around on a keychain that you have to feed and teach tricks to and all that. I never actually had one, but I knew people who did, and made fun of them for it, probably one of the dumber fads that I witnessed.

Well I checked out Petopia to see about skills my pet needs to upgrade, and it turns out she's two levels behind on bite and claw, and she doesn't have enough points to learn the next level or great stamina or natural armor. I sorta didn't pay attention to skill upgrades for a while, mostly because of the hassle of going out and taming various mobs to learn them. Luckily 3 of the 4 mobs I need to find to learn the two bite and claw ranks are in the same zone, so that hopefully shouldn't take too long, although I seem to remember it taking a while last time I did it. I had no trouble taming the pet, but learning the skill from them took a while, and while it hasn't been proven, I still feed the pet until they are happy in hopes that it will help me learn the skill from them faster. I'm not sure I even need to bother learning rank 5 if I'm going straight to rank 6, does anyone know if pet skill ranks can be skipped? I'll get them both anyway I suppose, I like completeness even if it's unnecessary.

These hunter pets can be a bit of a drag sometimes, always having to make sure they're fed and happy, and then the time that goes into learning skills for them as they level up. I'm not even sure what I'd do if there were no sites to help me find the mobs I need to tame to learn the right skills, using the hunter ability to check beast skills would take forever. Now that I think about it, hunters have it the worst when it comes to bag space, always having to keep a bunch of meat on hand to feed the pet, not to mention your ammo, meaning you're carrying around an ammo bag that, while it may have empty spaces from time to time, you can't put anything but ammo in it, essentially giving you one less bag, and with the increase to ranged attack speed they give you, it's really not an option to just use a regular bag for ammo. Now I know warlocks have this problem too with soulstones, and you can buy soulstone bags for those that leaves you in the same situation, but they don't have to also carry around food for their minions.

On the topic of bags, I find it's a good idea to carry around the item specific bags when your character has a gathering profession. Right now my enchanter has an enchanting bag and my herbalist has an herb bag. I find myself running out of bag space very often with gathering professions, and while you may not be able to use the bag to store anything else, they are much cheaper for more slots and will probably be full most of the time anyway so there's a good chance you wouldn't be leaving any open slots unused. I need to look into getting bags for all my characters with gathering professions, it really helped my enchanter out, even though her enchanting bag is always full and one of the other bags usually has a bunch of enchanting mats in it too, but those extra slots mean my regular bags have that many more slots available to carry other stuff without spending a bunch of money for a normal bag with lots of slots. It's one of the little things in the game that I think was well thought out.