Fenriswoelfin, a hunter from the German server Teldrassil, sent me a question yesterday that has me stumped. He saw a hunter with a very strange pet cat and he wanted to know where to get one for himself. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen this cat before in my life.
As you can see from the full screenshot (if you click the thumb below), the owner of the cat is level 15. He told Fenriswoelfin that he tamed the cat somewhere around Darnassus. He didn’t remember its original name or if it was a rare or elite mob, but he did say that the cat was a very low level when he tamed it.
So I’m stumped. Anyone know what this cat is and where to find it?
Update: Fenriswoelfin wrote back to let me know that he saw the hunter in the screenshot, Bayrum, again — and his cat is a perfectly normal nightsaber (and it always has been, says Bayrum, puzzled). So yes, this was just a weird texture loading blip. It was fun to chase down, though!
Wow, I’m stumped too. If the information he was given is correct (under level 15 and around Darnassus), then Wowhead has never seen it either. I think I’m about to log onto my pally and go cat searching =)
Maybe its some sort of glitch..
well if the cat is real, i got one more reason to start another hunter =)
i’ve never even been near darnassus, of course i am horde, so i wouldn’t dare go near there, could it be a guards pet?
It looks like a half loaded cat mount with the rider not loaded yet either. Across the back is a saddle blanket. The left side of its mask doesn’t even have a texture map on it. It looks like the person sending in the pic was messing around with the image files of the wow folder like how people can change the name of their bear pets skin so it looks like their pet is a panda.
Another what is this cat pic is this one. I found it in the wow model viewer. WotLK skin?
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a50/mystikravyn/WoW/icetiger.jpg
Autumnn: The ice tiger skin has been in the model viewer for a long time, but I’m not aware of anyplace where it is used in the game yet. Maybe someday. (They used a couple of previously unused skins in Burning Crusade, like the purple tallstrider, so I hold out hope for the ice tiger in WotLK even if it’s not new.)
It’s possible that Fenriswoelfin was messing around with files, but I like to check these things out anyway. Even if we go through a bunch of dead end leads, we eventually get a ghost wolf. :>
Autumnn, that icey cat skin has been in the game for quite some time…unused though. You should see all the cool mount skins they have but don’t use. :(
As far as that cat goes, it looks like a load error. Pretty error, but an error.
Granted..if it was real……I have another cat to level.
I’m also going to guess it’s a load error… that is an awesome looking cat though…
Odd, the title under the pet name is Begleiter von Bayrum – which would translate to Bayrum’s Companion if I recall correctly. If the pet belonged to the hunter, wouldn’t it’s title would be “Haustier von Bayrum” – Bayrum’s Pet?
Nah! This guy tried to mess with the cats file, no if and or buts about it. Not to mention it wasn’t done very well. If it had been a load error, the image wouldn’t have been quite so good.
I would like to see Blizz give us pet armor, just we do on our toons. LOL, the RPer’s would just die.
Its a fake, why would a level 15 be in Feralas?
It looks to me like a regular cat model with the black war saber skin applied to it. My guess would be that someone’s been messing around with their .mpq files.
Woodelf7734, if you look at the location in the mini map display, it say Auberdine, which is not in Feralas. Anyway, I’m convinced the guy messed around with the .mpq files. I don’t see any other reasons why this would happen.
http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Teldrassil&n=Bayrum
This is the armory profile of the hunter in question, perhaps someone with an EU account would like to go and meet them and check? 0:)
I’m curious about the whole “messing with the files” thing. is it legal by Blizz standards? if so where can i find out how to do it, or what key words should I search for?
thank you in advance.
As to the pic of that pet, I have never seen it anywhere on my server.
Stonewulf: So far as I know, it used to be possible to swap around the data files on your computer so that the WoW client would render, say, a hawkstrider whenever it thought it was rendering a tallstrider. This change only affected your own client, of course — everyone else would see the real tallstrider. Petopia actually had an article on this that Brash wrote. I heard that this was either no longer possible or no longer allowed some time back, so I took down the article. But I don’t know much about it beyond that.
Stonewulf: There is a well know hack for changing the sound of a gun
in the wow client. Just drop some sound files with the right name in the right directory. Check out EarPlugs on wowinterface.
Not exactly what you asked for, but maybe it will point you in the right direction. Cheers.
I dug up a Blizzard post on this, by the way, here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20992457&postId=210307000&sid=1#2
It’s apparently neither allowed nor possible any longer, which would seem to rule out a deliberate model swap for this cat.
is it possible that maybe this is only available in german servers?
Unless it’s a totally custom skin, I’m perplexed as to what he swapped in… It looks kind of like a Cougar (http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/skins/skin_tigerskinbrown.shtml) with the Black War Tiger skin colors (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29471), but there’s a couple odd details.
The mask’s patterning for one. No existing cat model looks like that. Also, clearly a lot of the War Tiger’s items are missing, such as shoulder armors most notably. The model doesn’t exactly look like any in game right now.
A very odd cat. Either something new, something german only, or something very editted.
Man, I would LOVE that cat! I am gonna SCOURER Darnassus looking for that cat.
Thanks for the info Mania and Nak, and the cat remains a mystery. I’ve spammed the trade channel on my realm for quite a while and apparently no one knows anything about it. One person suggested that it might have been added with the last patch. I will keep searching for it in both Teldrassil and Auberdine.
BTW Mania, Thank you for this wonderful site. You are a saint to all hunters.
It’s still possible to edit and swap skins and models, though the first one is easier to do than the second. I do not believe the skin seen in the picture is in the game’s database, though I do not feel like going through all the mpqs to find it at this hour. Will do it later today.
The model viewer does not display all skins btw. Two examples that comes to mind is the obsidian riding raptor skin, or the green devilsaur skin. I’ve seen them in the mpq files listing before, and I think they’re still in there somewhere.
Though to be honest, I still say this is a skin swap job, whether or not it’s edited or just found in the mpqs.
Maybe it is a bugged private server where you can go to war with Darnassus and tame him in the Nightsaber vendor’s place?
Shinryu: Thanks for the clarification. :> Let us know what you find in the mpqs.
Volcan: I asked Fenriswoelfin if it was from a private server and he said no. Of course, he could be having fun with us either way, but … *shrug*
I asked my brother today if he knew about it, since he’s played alot longer than I have (and also have played ally side).
He said he had seen it, but LONG time ago on the EU server Twisting Nether (pre-1.6patch I believe). A lowbie hunter (lvl 14 somewhere he believed) was running around with it as a pet inside Darnassus. He played priest so didn’t reflect much on it back then, he had no clue where this hunter could have found it, nor has he himself seen an untamed version of it.
Strange they’re are all on european servers. If you look at the shoulder you can see some of the nightstalker stripes still. I will continue looking.
I’ll take him on my friend list and ask him about his pet.
Then I’ll tell you.
Heya.
When I saw this picture the first thing to come to my mind was a faulty (is that a word?) texture load. The model looks just like any other cat model from the NE area, but the skin is the one from the Riding model. The reason to that some of you doesn’t reqognize it is because the riding cat _MODEL_ has other details on it, like the facecower and the sadle. Therefor you don’t usually see these parts of the texture, since they are cowered by other details. It should be possible to just swap the skin and not the model, hence the texture on the cat looks somewhat misplaced.
But, also I will travel there and keep an eye open. Who knows? :)
I had an idea when I woke up this morning, so I went through the mpq files to find the pvp riding black frostsaber skin, and placed it in a new mpq in place of one of the starter skins for cats in Teldrasil, and the ice skin too just see. When I got inside Shadowglenn, I saw the cat you have a picture of all over the place. Took some screenshots of it and emailed them to you as proof.
So I’ll give the person the benefit of the doubt, as after talking with a few friends, they said their WoW, or someone’s they know, did load up the wrong skins for some mobs before. If the person is honest, then the wrong skin loaded. If not then the person has created a mpq file with the pvp frostsaber mount skin in it to replace a normal cat skin.
Skin swapping and editing, as well as model changing, is not something Blizzard likes. Though they seem to tolerate the skin swap, but they do not like the model swap one bit, as people use it to cheat. One example would be to replace the barrier at the start of Arathi Bassin to something else that you can walk through, allowing the player to start capping flags before everyone else.
Hope this helps you with this mystery. =P
Out of curiosity, where do you go to see this modelviewer thing? I want to see what mount skins they aren’t using :)
Cool cat, and yeah, it looks like a skin swap. I’m not a master at these things, but i think Blizz makes the coloration first, and then adds specials like sticking out armor and saddles. The player with that pet must have swapped skins with a black war tiger, but it seems like Blizz never removed the silver shoulder plates on the war tigers — look closely and you can see them on this cat.
Thanks for posting this, its an interesting thing to think about!!
Honestly looks like a skin swap to me. And like Wolfington said, It looks like a black war tiger and a regular 40 mount slapped onto a plain ol’ cat model.
i’ll check around myself, but unless Blizzard changed it and allowed the taming of frostsaber companions, I don’t see this remotely happening.
Sure hope those ice tigers are in WotLK though.
hereticrick: You can find the model viewer at http://wowmodelviewer.org/. It’s a handy little tool; Petopia uses it for all the pet pictures. Be careful about where you get it from, though — it’s a popular target for keyloggers to spoof.
And thank you to everyone else, especially Shinryu Masaki who e-mailed me pictures of the results he got when he swapped the black frostsaber skin in for the starter cats in Teldrasil — it looks exactly like the screenshot Fenriswoelfin sent me.
My personal thought, especially in light of Haedraline’s brother said, is that this was most likely a client loading flub that happens rarely. At any rate, it doesn’t seem to be a new pet. But we’ll all keep an eye out and keep hoping for exciting new pets in WotLK.
Thanks again everyone!
i know that cat you can win it in a special WoW card game
Looks cute, but it also looks a bit messed up (around the neck). Reminds me of my hunter when it maps the texture of her Festive Green Robe (town wear) on her armour…
It looks like the person just switched the skin pathways in the .mpq, which is very easy to do.
I switch skin and model pathways all the time for my druid forms, lock and hunter pets. xD
By the way..
Where is the map with those .mpq files?
i’d like to switch some skins meself
to switch skins you would have to work for blizzard as a game animator
My first opinion of this cat was that it was one of the cats from the alliance riders in the barrens. They killed me many times when I was a lowbe so I remember vividly what they looked like. Now if you could kill the owner and the mount didnt despawn, maybe you could tame that, but Im guessing thats not the case…every mount Ive seen in WoW despawns when the rider dismounts. It would be awesome tho..
It’s just a loading hiccup basically. Since even if it had been a personal skin swap, then only the hunter who owns the pet would’ve seen it. Since I distinctly remember there being lots of hunters who changed their Carrion Birds to Hippogryphs and the visual was only to the player, not to the other players in game. So you wouldn’t have to work with Blizard. And this isn’t a rare pet or anything from the trading card game. That’s the spectral tiger mount that is from the game, and it looks vastly different from that =) Plus, I play the card game, so I know for certain there’s no tameable pet from the game, otherwise I’d have it XD
Too bad it isn’t a tameable pet, though I’d rather tame those armored riding wolf modeled Worgs from hellfire citadel.
dude its just a screenshot of the frikkin cat in ashenvale inn. its not a pet!! goto ashenvale inn! its a frikkin scam! jeez!
i looked at this armory link and there i saw this lvl 20 hunter bayrum with aspect of cheetah. But if I remember correctly, you learn this skill with levlel 30…
i have hunters on different germen servers – allianz and horde. but this cat doesn’t exist there
why do you all wonder about this bayrum? it doesn’t matter if he/she used some modelling or not. i think the culprit is Fenriswoelfin whose screenshot it is.
@ 8. Haedraline: i’m playing with a german client. the titel ‘begleiter’ is the right one
@ 42. Deadeyeflint: aspekt of the cheeta is a level 20 skill.
Whether purposeful or not, the bottom line here is: this is not a new pet. It is simply the PvP frostsaber TEXTURE mistakenly loaded onto the regular cat MODEL, as has already been stated. An example of something similar for the clueless: Imagine a very large, muscular man wearing a tight shirt with a logo right in the middle of the chest. Now imagine that same shirt put on a small child and pulled tight – the logo is going to be somewhere on that child’s stomach. It’s the same idea; textures are simply 2d images stretched across the 3d surface of a model. When the texture for a larger, more intricate model with more surface area to cover, like the PvP cat model, is stretched over a smaller one, the texture’s features (like the logo) are in different, usually odd places.
Fenriswoelfin wrote back to let me know that he saw the hunter in the screenshot, Bayrum, again — and his cat is a perfectly normal nightsaber (and it always has been, says Bayrum, puzzled). So yes, this was just a weird texture loading blip. It was fun to chase down, though!
its a armored mistsaber. after you win the card game you can find one mistsaber with a cluster of frostsaber companions
It was the texture from the riding cat, nothing else, but it fits well, just like normal cat skins fit on the riding cats.
Where Can I FInd his Skin Swap Place? :)
it’s just a model edit prolly just a regular cat with a model edit downloaded =)