The Life Aquatic

After spending two marvelous days snorkeling beneath the azure blue waters of the Caribbean Sea (or is it the Atlantic?) I’ve come to the belief that hunters need aquatic pets in Cataclysm. With the addition of a new underwater zone it seems fitting that hunters should get pets suited to thrive in that environment.

Now WotLK gave us some good candidates in the form of orcas and sharks and now thanks to the data-mining fiends over at MMO-C it looks like there will be a few more aquatic additions to the bestiary. I’m not going to post any screenies or go into any details about what they are, other than to say a couple of them match what I’d like to see in the way of aquatic companions.

Aquatic Pets

Sharks – An obvious choice for a hunter pet. Name him Jaws, Jabberjaw, Tiburon, Smiley, Thunderball, what have you.

Now I’ve never actually been in the water with sharks, but my wife has been diving with Lemon and Black tips, and she was none too pleased. I once ate at a restaurant in the Bahamas where they fed all of the scraps to bunch of Bull Sharks that gathered in the waters outside the restaurant (Fun Fact: Bull Sharks are considered by many to be the most dangerous sharks in the world. Sorry whitey). God help you if you ever fell in.

Sharks would make a cool pet. Not only that, but we’d get to use cool RP taming macros like, “I think we’re going to need a bigger boat.” and “Smile you son of a bitch.” Perhaps this post kill macro where you’d shout “This was not a boating accident!” The possibilities are endless I tell you, enldess.

Whales – Another solid choice, and I’d want them to be tenacity pets, our tanks of the sea. Maybe they could get that knockback ability Rhinos once had. Then in addition to my healing macro, “Save the Whales!” I could us my “Ramming speed!” attack macro, and of course my “There be whales here.” macro when calling him.

Narwhal – The Jedi of the sea? These things are just plain awesome. I’d have to macro the lyrics of that silly narwhal song and spam it while I attacked.

Manta Rays – These would be our oceanic scorpids with their poisonous stinger tails. They’d also make cool mounts as well. Being the geek that I am, I’d probably name mine Black Manta. I actually was lucky enough to see one swimming near the shore on one of my vacations to the Bahamas. If more people knew what was in the waters just a few feet from shore, I’d bet a lot few people would ever swim in the ocean.

Frenzy Fish – This would be just a single pet, but graphically it would look like a school of 5 – 6 of them, just like we see in Zangarmarsh. Maybe they could have some sort of interrupt or cast reduction ability.  In lieu of a pet this would also work as a new trap – The Fish Trap. Fun Fact: Lee Majors, forever known to me as Steve Austin the Bionic Man, starred in the 1979 movie Kill Fish. It was about jewel thieves who had to tried to recover treasure from piranha infested waters. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve seen it.

Barracuda – I usually run into a few of these whenever I go snorkeling and to this day they still scare the crap out of me. The largest one I ever saw was about 4 feet long. It was on live aboard dive boat trip I took. The boat captain said his name was “Big Ed”. Apparently, he lived in this particular spot we were anchored and he liked to hide in the shadows of the boat and pick off unsuspecting prey. The should’ve named him “Lazy Ed”.

The barracuda is an intimidating choice for a pet and goes well with this attack macro – “You yell barracuda, everybody says, ‘Huh? What?'”

Eels – I saw a spotted moray eel yesterday. Again very cool, and again they scare the crap out of me. They’re mostly nocturnal so I should consider myself fortunate to have seen one during the day; I do. I also consider myself fortunate that it didn’t decide to bite my arm off like that guy in the movie The Deep.

Anyway, these could be the Windserpents of the sea and have some sort of electrical nature damage attack.

Naturally we’d only be able to use these pets while underwater, however, during the beta they’d need to be bugged so that we could call them anywhere. Think tameable polar bear cubs in WotLK beta. So for a brief period I’d want that ocean shark to be a land shark. Good times.

Do I think this will happen for Cataclysm? Probably not, but it would fun for sure.

Good Hunting!