Destiny, clearly
Pfft. I should've known that making plans for hunter pets was something doomed to failure.
I was levelling the hunter some more last night. After clearing through most quest in Western Plaguelands (bar one I couldn't pick up and one that would've led me deep into Eastern Plaguelands, but including the entirety of the cauldron series), I decided I'd go to Felwood and then proceed to Winterspring for my last few levels before Outlands.
After completing an escort quest in Jaedenar, I unwisely decided to just run out. (Mount up, ride out, dismount and feign death - how hard can it be, right? Very hard, turns out, when you get dazed off your mount and half the mobs in the pack that's chasing you resists your feign death. They were green to me by that point, to add insult to injury; I could've easily cleared through them. Sigh.)
So - after dying, releasing to graveyard, and finding myself up in the northern graveyard, I decided I couldn't be bothered running all the way south again in ghost form; I figured I'd resurrect at the graveyard, run up to the northern flight point, fly to the southern one and deliver quests - and by that point, my resurrection sickness would be gone, and I could keep questing. Same amount of time spent, less manual running.
While running up from the graveyard, I ran right into Olm the Wise.
Now, that particular owl is the lowest level white owl available in the game. And he comes with Claw 7 and Dive 3 (the highest levels of those skills I could learn at that point).
And he was the second pet I'd originally planned to tame with my first hunter, about two years ago.
"Oh hey, nice, Olm" I commented out loud to my boyfriend. "I wanted to tame him so badly back when I was playing my Tauren hunter."
"So why don't you tame him now?"
Why not, indeed. "Keeping two pets levelled at the same time is painful" was the original reason I'd given myself for taking only one pet to 70, and then restricting myself to creatures that are close to 70 in level for my second pet; but pet levelling changes were implemented in 2.3.2, and there I was, staring at Olm, at level 53 with a level 53 cat by my side and a good 30% of experience still left to hit 54.
So I ran up to the flightpoint, then ran up further to the furbolg tunnel, ran to Everlook, stabled my cat, took the flight back down to Felwood and tamed Olm.
So far, so good - I've just hit level 55 and both the cat and the owl were level 54 long before that. Here's hoping it lasts.
So much for my taming plans, though. But I don't mind. White owls are pretty.
