I may not play a hunter, but man do I hunt pets. Just not the helpful kind that actually assist in battle. No, I’m more of a minipet collector, though my true dedication to the pursuit has only happened recently.
I’ve always liked pet collecting on my main. I made it a point to get whatever holiday pets I could for her, along with all of the Horde and Alliance faction pets. At level 60, I prowled my way through LBRS to get myself the worg pup, which is actually what kicked off my love of minipets in the first place. Still, I never went particularly crazy for farming the rare drops. The only rare drop I had is my magical crawdad, and I got that from pure luck after five casts in Terokkar. Really getting into the collecting was always something I planned to do “someday.” A couple of weeks ago, I realized I was really close to 100 pets and the Petting Zoo achievement and figured that I might as well work on getting there. Possibly up to the 150 achieve if I was lucky because the Celestial Dragon is awesome.
Around that time, I happened to notice one of my closest WoW friends hanging out in strange places like Winterspring and Zul’Drak. When I asked her what she was up to, she said she was working on getting to 150 pets as well. I suppose that motivated me, because since then I’ve been actually putting effort into my collection.
So I started looking over my collection of pets, seeing what I would need to do to hit 150. Unfortunately, since I started playing only shortly before Wrath, I’ve missed out on a lot of promotional pets and one time event pets. I’m still missing two Children’s Week pets. And that’s when I realized…..shoot, I have a crap ton of farming to do!
After getting lucky with a quick Sprite Darter drop, I spent a little time on WarcraftPets.com trying to figure out how long I could expect to see an Emerald Whelp drop. When I saw people saying things like “700 kills and still nothing!” I wondered if there was some addon out there that kept track of these things. The only one I saw on Curse was outdated, but in the comments, another author linked to the addon they’d been working on. I quickly downloaded it and was thrilled that it does exactly what I wanted!
Rarity is currently in beta, and from what I’ve found, it’s an awesome addition to pet collecting. Now I know exactly how many times I’ve killed random mobs in Winterspring, hoping that the stupid Azure Whelpling will drop (Hint: way too many times).
From Allara, the author:
Inspired by Bunny Hunter, Rarity tracks how many chances you’ve had to obtain various rare items throughout the game. It will tell you how likely you are to obtain the item, track how long you’ve been farming for it, etc. Primarily, this is useful for farming companion pets and mounts, but it also supports virtually any item including patterns and designs, archaeology projects, etc.
Some of the features are:
- Fully user configurable—you can add things to track on your own
- Supports zone-wide drops (i.e. Hyacinth Macaw)
- Supports containers (i.e. White Polar Bear)
- Supports two-level loots (i.e. Disgusting Oozeling)
- Supports archaeology projects (i.e. Scepter of Azj’Aqir)
- Supports fishing (i.e. Sea Turtle)
- Supports item usage (i.e. Mojo)
- Supports items dropped from bosses that require a group to defeat (i.e. Flametalon of Alysrazor)
- Supports items obtained from the holiday boss bags (i.e. Big Love Rocket)
- Supports some special cases (i.e. Elementium Geode, Mysterious Camel Figurine)
- Supports things other than pets and mounts (i.e. recipes, legendary components, etc.)
- Will properly ignore skinning
- Lets you modify your kill count without having to edit saved vars, in case you started farming before you installed Rarity
- Automatically imports data from Bunny Hunter
- Shows an “achievement” alert when you finally obtain the item!
- Automatically scans you to determine if you already have any companions or mounts
- Shift-click to report your progress to chat
Personally, I mostly love this add on for showing me how many times I’ve killed stuff, and I especially love the achievement pop up telling me when I do actually get the pet. I would have definitely missed looting my Firefly without it, since I was half asleep when that sucker dropped and my bags were full!
Pet farming is generally a mind numbing experience, but addons like this actually make it more fun. Or at least easier to scream about how bad your luck is. If you’ve decided your crazy enough to try for the 150 achievement, definitely download this one to help you along the way.
Oh and as for me? I’m at 132 pets now, with a bunch of rare drops in my collection. 18 more and that dragon will be mine!
The Dancing Tree 