Why do you pick the pets you pick?

[Minifig]

Like the topic says.

Why do you pick the pets you pick?

For me, I've always loved the look of the white core hound, Sambas is a lion, king of the beasts .. which is a fitting to tribute to the cat I had for 15 years, and the bird? Well.. I call it Aerokordax, and he's just cool looking.

[Tulune]

I tame various skins of one species, and see which ones I click with.

[Redith]

Because I have allways wanted a mega badass looking bengal tiger and the other non riding skin just wasnt good enough for me, My chromie is the closest pet I can get to a hydra pet and as a BM I like to have a big effen exotic to whoop up on mega bosses. And my black warpstalker is my fave looking mob in the tank family

[Moore]

I normally get a pet I like to look at then I watch it while I play and just see if it has the uh "pizazz" I'm lookin' for.

Like my Loque I named Tegan, she shifts her shoulder blades back and forth when walking and I really like the way it looks like she's stealthy and about ready to pounce. Named her after Tegan from Tegan and Sara of course. :3

[Sarayana]

Some I see from ptr/beta info and dream about taming, plan and research, and imagine how awesome they'll be with my hunter... and some are completely on a whim. I wasn't going to tame Karoma or the undead hawk, but both just ended up suiting me so well. I was going into AQ40 to help a friend tame Lord Kri, and when they reset and he respawned after her successful tame, I decide why the hell not?

[Phyra]

To be honest? My stable is filled with hard tames and rares. I enjoy hunting and the thrill of the chase.

However, those that are active and in my stables often have a lore (geekily) aspect to them, or color match.

My first hunter, a belf, had ALL red pets with an (original) scarlet tracking hound (red hyena) as her main pet... named Love. (Love hurts. )

[Lisaara]

Depends on the toon. I go by the story I've got for her and work from there. :3

[Holgarr]

Well, my first permanent (as in not to be discarded later) pet was the pre-Cata-extinction Mottled Scytheclaw (now called Highland Scytheclaw, but with the same look) because, while I loved Raptors, I hated the silliness of wild animals with beads-and-feathers decorations, and they were my only option - the fact they were the only ones with that wicked squint instead of just recolors of the usual slitted eyes was a nice bonus too.

My Gorilla was originally planned to be Uhk'loc - but I tired of trying to camp him with no result, so I grabbed his "roommate" U'cha instead. Oddly, I think the red ape's grown on me, as I can't picture myself dropping him for the white one now.

Ormagoden, my tamed Chromaggus, was tamed both for the fact he's a unique skin but also a boss - how could one turn down that combo?

The rest are just interesting or unusual looks, and virtually no rares - the red-and-purple Skettis owls, the old greenish Barrens scorpids, the red SM hyena (that's now a mastiff), the mechanical-looking scorpids from the new Tanaris. The only ones I have that come close to "rares" are Lone Hunter and the Darkshore ghost-cat.

[Acherontia]

* Does the pet catch my eye as something beautiful/interesting?
* Does the pet have a "feel" or theme about it?
* Does the pet match my hunter somehow?

If I get a yes to all three of these, chances are I'll find it fascinating and tame it.
THEN...

* Does the pet have pleasing (to me) sounds & animations?
* Does the pet still interest me or is it rather "meh" after running with it for a bit?

Then I know whether I'll KEEP it ;D

[Kormai]

For my original hunter, Kormai, before the expanded stable and my alliance hunter, I just picked pets that I liked the look of. I leveled all the way to 80 with different incarnations of Fluffy Bunnykins, some form of cat model (named Bunnykins in game cuz otherwise the name is too long). Somewhere along the way I realised that differnt pet families did different dps and I should probably fill my stable accordingly. But it was still looks.

Now that I have an alliance hunter as well, I have colour and naming themes for each...otherwise I would get lost in a sea of pets! Since Kormai is Horde all her pets are red/orange/pink (spirit beasts are an exception) and the naming theme is nerdy/geeky/funny. For example, my Loque'nahak is named MeowMist; after MeowMix because he is a cat model and mist because he is a spirit beast and is usually in the spirit realm or whatever. For Kari, my Alliance hunter, all her pets are blue/green/purple and are named after female Force users (spirit beasts are named after male Jedi). I still won't tame a pet though if I think its ugly! I'm having a hard time finding a cat model I like for Kari that isnt red or orange. :S

[Kurasu]

For me, I'm rather the 'looksie' hunter myself. I try and keep at least one type of every 'useful' pet in my stable, but if the pets don't look nice, I have little interest or inclination to keep them. I frequently 'hunt' rares to look at them in the wild, but not so frequently actually *tame* them. At least, not until I've had some time to see them and go 'I really *do* like that!'.

I have a lot of tames that were spontaneous as well. Some of them stuck with me, but I have to admit very few. If I find myself going 'OO PRETTY MUST HAVE!', it's often a mistake for me to actually *get* it. .... not to say I won't keep trying, because there *are* those that I'ev stuck with.

[Shade]

Do I like the pet?

Yes-then tame No-then kill it.

That as about as complicated as it is for me.

I don't have any set theme or story or whatever for my pets. I tend to like to tame the harder to find, more because of the challenge they present then anything else.

[Rozetta]

My pet story is a bit weird. My first real MMO was EQ and I played a rogue, and rogues couldn't even solo a mage pet. Overtime I started to hate pet classes a lot. Through luck I got into WoW Beta in June of 2004. Made a Night Elf rogue and while leveling in Darkshore I was running around clicking on the cat figurines and I got an item that let me have one of the ghost sabers as a pet for awhile. I thought it was pretty awesome.

A couple months later they added hunters to the game, being a pet class I automatically didn't like them. Once the game went live I made another Night Elf Rogue and really didn't do that much. Most of my friends switched to horde and so I made a shaman, didn't like it. Then I made an undead holy priest and played that all the way to the release of TBC. At that time we all had many different alts, etc.. and when we started running BC dungeons I was always stuck being the healer and even had friends rolling on healing gear just because it had more int than what they had on their mage, etc. I got frustrated and didn't want to be stuck as the healer so I refused to play him. So I made a Blood Elf Paladin and leveled it to 37 and hated it.

Not sure what I wanted to do I remembered back to beta and the Ghost Saber. So I thought why not give this class I totally hate but then have this cool pet? So I made a Blood Elf Hunter and the moment I got to level 20 I ran to darkshore and got my cat.

Fast forward to now and I love the hunter and it will probably always be my main and my favorite pets will always be the cats. My current main is a Draenei and when she hit 20 I went straight to Darkshore and got another Ghost Saber. I refused to have an elephant as a mount so I made sure my rep with Darnassus was exalted when I hit level 40. When I reached level 58 I leveled from 58 to 63 getting my Wintersaber mount and three years later still use it exclusively.

Roz

[Makoes]

For me, I was very frusterated when I reached lv 10...All the hunters where running around with the same pets, there wasnt anything really original or unique. So when I first made it to the barrens on my NE, and saw a hyena for the first time, it just clicked! And then seeing the Red ones in SM, I knew what my companion was going to be. Infact, after the first time I tamed a Hyena in the barrens, it was over a full year before I met another hunter with a hyena.

For awhile I had the ghost saber to, but the cat never clicked. Of course with the old school method of taming beasts to learn new spalls/ranks, I had a wide veriety of pets over time, but the Hyena was the only one I kept. I had, proud to say, managed to learn every spell and rank possible, before the change that took that fun aspect away.
I did not aquire another permanent pet until taming the green Warpchaser in outlands.

[Nick]

I usually pick them for how they look or go with my character, in a sense.

Not much but it usually gets me rare hunting, cause my tauren is an adrenaline junky like that and likes exotic beasts trying to tear her face off. xD

[Novikova]

Usually, just because I like them. Useful abilities are just a bonus.

[Skyshot]

I have a few pets I tamed/retamed for personal reasons or for some good ol' nostalgia.

-Titan (my Chormaggus) is my own little personal reminder of the fun times I had running the 40man raids with my guild back in vanilla WoW. He was my favorite boss challenge. ^^
-Rune, a former Swamp Jag from SoS, was the pet I leveled with all the way from 36 to 60. I loved the look and the super fast attack/run speed (back when those were still in the game).
-Brutus, my Tyrant Devilsaur, was the first pet I tamed in Wrath. After reading about exotics I knew I had to tame the one breed of devilsaur I could never manage to solo in vanilla.
-Perses (Duskfang) is a nod to a good, old friend of mine back when I was leveling up to 60 who had (doesn't play anymore) one of the old unarmored night sabers on his Nelf. He said his mount was named Perses.
-Erebos (a black worg from nagrand) was the one pet you would almost always see at my side back in BC. We killed many alliance and bosses together at 70.

Most of my others pets are there just because I love the look of them. Such as my scarab (Khepri) from HoO that almost chewed my face off with his swarm of friends before the tame was complete. I also made sure to snag his ancient sea turtle stand-in (Proteus) from BFD. The rest I've picked up along the way for one reason or another. My next goal is Princess Huhuran from AQ40. Only this time I won't have to stack nature resist like back in vanilla raiding days.

[GormanGhaste]

...so I had a yellow firefly wasp model, but then I got the new Flamefly minipet, so decided to tame a purple/green firefly instead, but then I realized that my 'temp' tan beetle skin (was planning on taming a scarab from Uldum) matched my new silithid ant skin, so I decided to tame the matching tan silithid wasp skin, which inspired me to tame brownish moth and spider models, but then I unexpectedly ran across those olive spiders (which I've always found attractive) now in western plaguelands, in a very peaceful setting and neutral, so of course I had to tame one, because I have a soft spot for neutral beasts, and then...

[Kalhoun]

I pretty much have to like the model/animal. I do try to keep up with having the most viable pet, but I will sacrifice a little dps on looks (for instance, in BC I raided with a cat instead of a ravager, which was the top dps pet of the time). I wouldn't have traded my black lion in for an ugly bug monster even if you paid for my epic flying skill.

My hunter is now MM for leveling (seemed like BM was slow on the killing side 80+), and since I can't use Moonshine, my wolf-headed corehound, I've been running around with Guinness, my black warpstalker (Gezzarak). I think warpstalkers are friggin' adorable, and she's quickly become my favorite leveling buddy (her swim animation is so cute). Though I don't really care if I have a common or rare pet, I do like the fact that I seem to be the only one in Stormwind with a black warpstalker lately on my server - everyone else seems to have the lava turtle as their tank, though I have seen one or two white warpers.

I tamed Shango the other day because I kept running into him while farming saronite to lvl engineering. I think he's pretty, and he's another skin that I don't ever see around town. I guess since the ZG tiger mount never dropped for me, I can at least have the pet version. I named him Dog. I really don't know why.

The rest of my stable is full of pets that I tamed just to make sure I had all the basic skills covered. I went through each family and picked the skins I liked best. Hardly any are rares or hard tames. I ran into my spirit beast, Skoll, early in the morning the day after Cata dropped. The one pet I'm actually trying to hunt down is Old Cliff Jumper, as he's my favorite wolf skin and I haven't seen hide nor hair of him. Granted I don't all out camp, I just do periodic flybys.

[Cialbi]

For me, I decide upon what utilities I want, then after that it's all about finding whichever one looks best. Not that I'm immune to picking pets that I really like but don't really help me; I have two birds of prey and two silithids, and my boar Argolak never uses Gore since my hunter is BM/SV.