Use your pets as mounts ( with a twist )

[Shuntyxx]

Greetings fellow hunters!

Before I head off to the 'Introduce yourself' topic I thought I'd post this here first. This is an idea I've thought about recently and it is a re-post from mmochampion, from where I was referred to petopia.

Now then for my pitch: we can all pretty much agree that allowing hunters to use all pets as mounts wouldn't really be fair to other classes, since it would create a huge disparity between the amount of mounts hunters could potentially obtain, compared to the rest.

So, what if we had only one? To elaborate: make it an epic class quest, much like the green fire quest for warlocks in MoP ( which, from what I've seen, most people agree is awesome ). It would basically entail you going around the world, performing certain tasks to attune to your pet further. Let me expand on this a bit: we've had some pretty neat new lore about the loa or wild gods in the 'Warcraft Chronicle' ( for those of you loregeeks out there, who don't have it yet, go ahead and get a coppy. You won't be sorry ). One place I can see this going is, us seeking out a wild god ( maybe preparing some sort of a ritual to summon it ), proving ourselves worthy to it ( maybe trials similar to the proving grounds or the legendary MoP quest where we cleanse ourselves in the temple of the white tiger ) and culminating in us comuning with the conciousness or soul of our pet.

Lorewise, I see this starting off at Highmountain. We know that in lore, tauren are great hunters and have a deep connection to the earth and nature ( being modeled after the native american peoples in North America ). The Highmountain tauren are mostly unexplored in lore so far so I really think the quest would fit the genaral theme this way. It could also be tied in the order hall. This is also going to push the 'class fantasy' Bliz has been on about for legion

One issue I see with this is model and size. Now size shouldn't really be that hard to handle. Again, tauren and how their mounts scale in size. Model however is an issue, that I really can't think of solutions to, other than, some pets will just not have that option.

Another thing I want to clarify. If this were to be implemented as just adding the mount to the collecton would cause the same problem with the disparity in mount quantities between classes, albeit with a bit more grinding and running around involved. So instead, I see this as an extra ability ( much like the way current minor glyphs are converted into tomes in legion ). This could either mean that if you want a different pet as a mount, you could do the quest again ( from a certain point near the end so as not to get too repetative and time consuming ) and the new pet would either replace your current one, or just add another 'minor' ability.

I thought this wouldn't turn out so long of a post, so I am sorry about that, but I really wanna hear your thoughts about it.

Shunty xx

Ps. really wasn't sure if this is the correct sub for this kind of topic so feel free to move it to the designated one :<

[Xota]

Some pets wouldn't make good mounts at all, and last I counted there's 136 different models for hunter pets. That's a lot of model checking and altering, and I get the impression that blizzard's artists have a long to-do list and don't like to be micromanaged.

So I'd tweak it a little, and have it be one specific pet. Like during the epic quest chain, the hunter would tame a special eagle, and then at the end of the quest chain, they'd get the ability to use it as a mount (hopping directly onto its back when it's the active pet). Just having one class mount isn't unbalancing, paladins can already have up to 3.