Memorable Tames - Lilith

We all have special pets, ones we want due to looks or for reasons of roleplay or what have you. I am going to share one of my more memorable pet tames, just due to distance, and at the time, uniqueness of coloration on the Horde Side of the faction line.

When I first rolled Tzia over on Deathwing, she got to level 10 and I ran her to Mulgore to get a wolf - at that time they had both bite and furious howl, so it was a great choice for a starter pet, and my husband thought so too at the time. I didn't keep the wolf very long though... he had a hell of a time keeping aggro - poor Vash, I didn't know about growl.

My husband, who had a level 25-ish tauren hunter at the time, also did not know about growl. He'd seen other hunters do amazing things with a pet... including having the pet run at the target and hold it there so the other hunter could actually shoot the thing to death! So we both had an idea that somehow pets could do more than what ours were.

I thought maybe I needed a better pet than what I had - more damage would help hold aggro (I'd heard the concept thanks to my husband's best friend and other friends talking about it - had little clue what it meant though)... so I opened a search engine, typed in WoW Hunter Pets and found my now favorite hunter pet site in the world - Petopia.

I stared at all the choices surrounding me - back in those days the opening page was all the pets... litterally every skin available greeted you on going to the site. I know Mania still has that page floating around somewhere... but that was my opening to Petopia - pet after pet after pet in every color of the rainbow.

As some already know, I'm a cat lover in real life. Even the big cats awe me, and one of my all time favorites is the cougar/mountain lion. In WoW, the skin is too dull to realistically mirror those big cats - the springpaws are a little closer but still... not quite there.

Because of my love for the larger felines, my eyes were drawn to the cats, I saw the tigers, went cool, but I'd seen enough people horde side with an orange tiger that I didn't want one. I then saw the black/white tigers and smiled. I'd not seen anyone with one of those horde side on my server. So, I clicked on the black and white kitty.

It took me to the base page that lists all cats that share that particular skin. I think I was 13 at the time I did that, and I saw that Moonstalkers were only a level away, so I dealt with and died through the level and thought the undead were very cruel, since I was questing over in those lands. On hitting 14, I went back to Petopia, to figure out how to get to the pet... I'd noticed the location name when staring at it, and I went back to the game. I turned to my husband and asked, "How do I get to Darkshore?"

I remember him leaning against the doorjamb and just staring at me for a moment. He then said, "Darkshore? Let me look at the map." That, I might add is how I found out there was a map in game. >.<

He popped up the map, flipped continents on me, and pointed it out. He then told me I'd have to take the zep, run to cross-roads, and go through the entire barrens and through ashenvale. The entire mess, I know now, takes around 45 minutes to do. I looked at him, chirpped an okay, asked how to pop the map up again, then ran off to find the Zeplin Tower.

The Barrens killed me, Ashenvale really killed me, and right as I got into Darkshore, some stupid mounted -yes mounted- alliance popped off his mount and killed me. I was level 14 just had spent 45 minutes trying to avoid being killed by scary level hidden mobs, and a minimum 40+ player decides to kill me.

Needless to say, I was not a very happy troll hunter. But I sighed, grumbled about PvP servers, rezzed; and continued up the road, being very careful of the cats around me. When I saw a moonstalker, I waved goodbye to Vash, and started taming the kitty. It hurt, but when the cat glowed and shrank a bit, I knew it was mine, and I called her Lilith.

I did that entire run on my own - litterally without an escort, and have repeated it several times with various characters, even running a friend of mine into Darkshore, just to help him tame a ghost saber.

I had Lilith in the time before cross-realm battlegrounds, before TBC was even a whisper, before even Blood Elves were whispered as a playable class - so that cat was unique to the realm, and I would get whisper after whisper from people as to where I had gotten the cat. I always told them the answer... but I don't think many people went and got one. I was known to a number of people by the unique look of the cat. I was also called a night elf a time or two because the cat was most often seen as a NE pet.

Lilith was my first cat in WoW, and still a good memory. She was the cat that I figured out how and where to train growl on, and with a mix of Petopia and Good Intentions, I learned how to get pet skills.

When Tzia hit 70, I was tempted to name my Blackwind Sabercat Lilith, in memory of her - but Yikes became the cat's name.