My Favourite Hunter Rare

A great blogging friend of mine has just reached her first Blogiverary at WoW Rare Spawns. If you haven’t had a chance to see it before, I strongly urge you to have a look at Euphyely‘s blog as she offers lots of valuable tips and even videos to help find those often elusive rares. As someone who’s been an avid collector of Silver Dragons over the last seven years, first on my Hunter, I can relate to the excitement when my hours or even days of camping a rare pay off.

I’ve always preferred to tame a rare over a common-looking pet, purely for their unique skins. Back in vanilla when some pets even had their own unique stats like Broken Tooth in Badlands. I was once told by a GM “Congratulations, you now have the best pet in the game”.

This picture was taken back in Oct 2007. He was quite tricky to find due to his stealth ability and had a tendency to path along high-traffic areas.

Another one that comes to mind is Lupos in Duskwood. I had camped his spot for about 5 hours at the time (after several shorter attempts) but decided I was finally going to wait the entire duration so I wouldn’t be thinking “he’s probably going to spawn in the next hour”. It was already way past midnight and I remember Coolidge getting on and telling me to go to bed since it was so late but I think that only serious rare tamers like myself will understand this type of perseverance.

The things I go through to take a good shot. Looking back it’s quite embarrassing seeing all the melee hunter shots I took trying to take a nice clear (hopefully close) image of the rare in question. This shot was taken in Oct 2007 having tamed him on my Tauren hunter Tallys about a year earlier.

When I started raiding MC, I went through a stint of wanting to tame the white gorilla in Un’Goro Crater but she was often a tough choice as she spawned right next to the quest gorilla. All up I’ve tamed this particular one about three or four times in total, back before we had our 20 stable slots. So I would often find myself taming a rare only to abandon it for another rare spawn begrudgingly.

Uhk’loc

In this particular instance, I was camping inside the cave for several hours, collecting more empty barrels than I could carry. Blizzard must have had a lot of fun with that Donkey Kong reference (which sadly didn’t stack). I often found myself picking up all the crap, only to destroy it straight after so I could skin their corpse while leaving one free bag spot. I even remember the GL at the time asking what I was doing in Un’goro for all those hours.

Usually, when a rare is in a zone that still involves current content, I get most antsy when it finally spawns. It’s fairly common that I’ll also be competing with other hunters at the time.

Back in Wrath, I was determined to get Loque’nahak in Sholazar Basin as I thought he was just gorgeous, even though people didn’t give spirit beasts much credit back then. I tried for ages trying to find him but being a popular quest hub and an excellent location for gathering nodes, clouds and herbs, this was a hard task. I was ecstatic when I finally found him close to some wasps one afternoon and was praying for the tame to go ahead without incident. My heart always races when I’m attempting a tame like this so I was very relieved when I saw he was mine :)

Skoll was the other one that had my heart racing as more often than not, I would see another hunter camping one of his spots in Storm Peaks. Unfortunately, this also meant that during these tames, I didn’t always end up with screenshots to show as my mind was focused on other things. I recall zooming this way and that to see if I could see anyone in the vicinity hoping no one would break the eye contact needed for my success. Luckily, luck was on my side as I added another spirit beast to my stable.

Two other tames come to mind when I think of a couple who were highly sought after.

One would definitely have to be Sambas. It was quite late one night and I thought it would be worth checking his usual haunts. I noticed a player who was AFK (hovering in the air) just above his spawn spot but I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Sambas was there!! Not only that but the guy didn’t look like he was coming back any time soon so I wasted no time.

I knew time was of the essence and started my tame.

Luckily it happened without any mishap and he was mine too!

Just after it happened, I didn’t want the AFK guy to feel bad so I started running out of the vicinity when another hunter started running after me. That’s right folks! Seems I was faster by only seconds.

Isn’t he gorgeous?

It’s a little funny how two of my most prized pets are both felines by design. I still haven’t decided which colour I’ll be taming in Mists as they are all visually beautiful, but I guess this means I’ll need to clear a couple of spots in my stable =/

Ok, so that took longer than I expected…

For the purpose of this post, I would say the most memorable tame would have to be King Krush.

This shot was taken some time after as I didn’t have a proper ‘Silver Dragon’ shot for my collection. It’s also one of the many times I’ve been caught up in the moment of an exciting tame.

So let me give you a bit of a back story.

My successful tame was not my first. I had attempted late one night after some research of his spawn spots and tips with the tame from other hunters, mainly high haste on whatever gear I could muster, inc potions and BW.

I couldn’t believe I had found him. He was walking along the periphery of the zone when I spotted him coming towards me. So I hastily landed and with macro at the ready, began my tame as soon as he was in range. Things were going swimmingly, when an Alliance Paladin flew over, landed and began to watch. I was praying for him not to hit Krush but was anxious about actually moving so I left it… until he did his mass fear. I couldn’t believe my luck. It seems THAT was the trigger the Paladin needed as he proceeded to kill it. I was stunned! But by then it was too late… the harm was done.

I was so upset after that that I logged out of the game. The next day I told Coolidge about it and said if you see this Pali in PVP make sure you kick his ass. Although I couldn’t quite remember his full name which was annoying.

It took me a long while to actually try this tame again. So one week, I was determined to start camping him again. Other hunters said they had the most success camping his spawn spot by the big bones. It took days of camping to even see him, much to the disappointment of Coolidge as this meant we couldn’t do anything together in-game. I think others were even surprised by the amount of time I was dedicated to this, but I needed to make up for that failed attempt.

On this particular day, it happened!

He spawned just where I thought he would. Unfortunately, I was feared as they took out the BW ability to be immune. So I tried again and finally did it! This was back in Oct 2010 when I did a quick post about it and was using our Guild journal section so I didn’t feel the need to write that much about it. Now wish I had…

My victory shot on top of one of the pylons

Hopefully, this makes up for it :)

So thx Euphy for giving me such a great opportunity to revisit these memorable tames who were each as unique as the last.