I was only half bitter/sad that said spider was removed in the Sundering. And replaced by some stupid ten-levels-higher rarespawn in the WETLANDS of all places. How could they?! I expect to be able to get my bright green mine spider at level 10 dangit, there was no reason to move the skin back 10 levels!
Deep breath. In, out. Whooooo. Okay.
So they tidied the pet classes up nicely in Cataclysm, which was good. Not to mention we now have soooo many stable slots! I can get all the pets I want! Except I'm BM, as a rule, and a silithid is mechanically a spider +1. I could get a spider, sure, but why would I want to when I can have a brain-bug rampaging about, giving me more utility and looking better as it does it? So I never really did anything with spiders after the Sundering hit.
Fast forward to 4.1. By accident (read: bored forum reading) I stumble across information about the upcoming Firelands nonsense. With pictures! After the initial "wait, am I SURE they're not trolling me? They can't possibly make these tameable" disbelief I accept that yes, spiders that are on fire are real, are tameable, and are coming to a server near you Soon. But they're spiders so... ehhhh. Whatever, they'll make someone happy I'm sure. I come back a couple of times to get a rudimentary understanding of the SPECIAL spiders on fire-- this one will 1-shot you! This one has to swim in lava to be tamed!-- but remain largely disinterested. Ho hum.
And then 4.2 hits.
First off, while I'm not looking, they knee my favorite spec right in the gourds. Repeatedly. One slightly-traumatic instance run with an eye on the meters later, I'm grimly respeccing Survival (motto: "At Least It's Not Marks") and whimpering as I put all my favorite Exotic buddies in the stable, because I can't even put them back in my Call Pet slots while I'm not BM, who the heck thought that was a useful idea, Blizzard I hate you. Second off, I jump on the Mount Hyjal/Molten Front daily quest train and ride it for all it's worth. Woo gold! Woo items to buy!
On my server it started slow. The first day I didn't see ANY of the new beasties. Within a few days I heard through the grapevine (of one of my Alliance priest friends telling me they were there for the Slowfall) that the owl-spiritbeast has been tamed. A week or two later I stumble across a Karkin, and I notice a couple off-color Gondrias. An orange fire spider here, a yellow one there... and then about about a week ago we hit critical mass and now I can't go ANYWHERE in the Molten Front without tripping over a Deth'tilac. Even got to watch someone tame one! I "helped" by yelling at the idiot moonkin to STOP ATTACKING IT. Congratulations, random dwarf, I have no idea how the sea of idiots around you didn't succeed in griefing the tame by accident, but you pulled it off. HIGHFIVE.
In a fit of "well, I don't really care, but it'd be nice to know which of these skins is rare-only and which I-- I mean, any theoretical hunter can grab off of common spiders (yeah uh huh sure)" I peruse the available information. And do the Forlorn Spire dailies over and over and over on my shaman, because FREE LEATHER OK GO. And it creeps up on me, probably because I'm blind and stupid, but one morning after I finish my dailies I turn right the heck back around and take my hunter out there and TAME SOME FIRE SPIDERS. Oh, the taming! I get a Broodling and a Creeper and a Spinner and I waste 20 minutes trying to figure out if I can get my hands on an orange one without epic feats of luck, but no dice, so I crawl back to the city to contemplate these mesmerizing I-promise-they're-not-elementals spiders.
So let's start with green. Green! Ha-HA, getting away with something here! Petopia hasn't even had a chance to properly update that you can get them from something besides a rarespawn. And it's such a bright color! Oh man. Green. Yeah. I'm glad they were up when I looked! Uhm.
About 15 seconds of contemplation in I come to the sinking realization that I do not like this color at all. I am worryingly close to despising it. Something about the color contrast inspires loathing: the legtips are too yellow, the stone bits are too boring to offset the deep green. I'm convinced that lots of hunters can (and should) adore this emerald beast, but it's not for me.
Okay, so yellow! That's a nice one. A nice, bright color--
NO. This is BORING to look at. As I gaze upon it I feel my will to live DRAINING. I would rather go back to that SEVEN HOUR MARAUDON RUN than continue to have this pet at my side. Dismissed!
Okay... red. Heh, I like those ones, the harmless spiders perched atop the lava spires makes me smile. They're cool with the world. They're cool with me. Nothing dislikable there.
And I can almost feel it. I want to like this spider. It's not the most exciting color, true, but the contrast isn't terrible, and it's not soul-suckingly boring. But it's not... it's just not quite THERE. It's a perfectly non-offensive, dull, safe pet, and absolutely not interesting enough for me to use. I want a fire spider, but not THAT badly. Blehhh.
At that point I sat down with Petopia and critically reviewed the skins. Green and yellow and red are out. Orange is slightly better than red, maybe, but I can't even tell them apart without a side-by-side comparison. Purple looks great: exotic color, check. Good color contrast, check. But rarespawn-only difficult tame in one of the most high-traffic areas in the game right now, with every rare-obsessed hunter and their uncle vying to tame him? No. I halfway killed myself trying to tame the Silithid Harvester, and that went something like "show up at spawn spot. Stare piteously at empty spot where Harvester should be. Get bored of that and obliterate every single other rarespawn in the zone. Come back and victory dance as I tame it". An actual competition, drawn out over an extended period of time, would probably result in coronary failure. (I'm a delicate flower, okay. Also I don't handle competition well, to put it mildly.) So purple's out, at least until next expansion when half the rare-hunters already have Deth'tilac and the other half don't know it exists.
Well, dang. I want a fire spider, because they're new and shiny and cool. But unless Petopia and Wowhead AND the Petopia forums are really really really holding out on me, it doesn't look like that's in the cards. But... but molten spider from the plane of fire!
At that point my moping was interrupted by the lightbulb of inspiration. Well, I don't like THOSE skins, but there's one easy-to-get firey spider I haven't tested yet. So I whip off to the Eastern Kingdoms this time and fly alllllllll the way to the Searing Gorge and look around. Not that one, not that one, okay that one. Land, set up an ice cube trap just for fun, wave at Rekk'tilac in the distance, hit Tame Beast.
Hrm. Well, it's certainly very clearly... older than the new spider skins. Wow. I'd almost forgotten the leaps and bounds the art in this game has made over the years. Yikes. There's no arguing that the new rainbow of fire spiders look fancier and more detailed. But as I stare at this fat fat fatty-fat lava tarantula, I realize my hunch. The color contrast is nigh perfect. The color choice itself is pretty darn good. And there's something about its great big fat butt, and those bajillion eyes clogging up its not-tiny head... well. It's no fancy 2011 spider, but I'm not dying of boredom or trying to light it on fire with the power of my revulsion, so I pack it under one arm and shuffle back to the city. A quick clearing of all those unwanted fire spiders later, I have my fatbutt.
It's been a week now, and attempts to make me put away Ishnate (Taurahe for "fat lava", because I like to maintain the illusion that I have dignity) are met with contempt and "but do I haaaaaave to?" I'm not pleased by the absurdly low-quality feel of tarantulas when compared to their newer, shinier, more-on-fire brethren: I definitely enjoy it more when I substitute my mental image of what a lava tarantula should look like. But I adore the shape and the movement and darnit, it's MY fatbutt lavaspider. It's not the brightest bulb in the box, and it's rather distressingly squishy when compared to my BM-enhanced sillythid, and anyways it's not like I PvP, what did I need a root pet for?
For fun. I needed a lava tarantula for fun, and it has delivered. I hope everyone else enjoys their Deth'tilaks, and their Solix, and their Kirix and Anthriss and Skitterflame and all the nice, common fire spiders they can get their hands on. I'll be over here bringing the original fire spider mojo back.
<3 Rekk'tilac means a lot to me, and I'm always surprised how rarely they're seen. I think they're a fantastic model with a ton of personaity and an adorable face. ^^ Glad to see them getting love too!
