I agree with what you said about the cold environment pets like wolves, bears, etc, and that makes me want to mention something interesting on Thottbot.com. They currently have Seal Lions listed as a pet family. It might be considered a Warlock pet but so is the Remote Control and everyon knows its something every class can use. What’s weird is that Seal Lion’s have cheese listed as their diet. They don’t have ratings on their stats or skills either. It would make perfect sense if they became tamable in the future since they’d fit the area extremely well.

The thing about cats coming back yet AGAIN is plain obvious and along with all the other pets with high dps and dash/dive, they will continue to stay ahead of the competion.

I’m hoping that we can tame the untamable dragonhawks from TBC and we get a new bat. The one thing I’m truly praying for is to see more Hunters with survival as their primary talent tree so I can share ideas and get extra adivce when I need it; hell even more MM hunters would make me happy. I’ve largely had to ignore nearly ALL hunter PvP tips/tactics because so many people use the same, tedious BM build. I look forward to having Readiness, Scatter Shot and some awesome new survival talents under my belt once this expansion launches.

The only other statement I would like to make is this: If you think WotLK will be in stores by November or the Holliday Season, don’t get your hopes up. TBC was delay for a loooong time after it was announced at the first BlizzCon and its likely to happen with this one. Just keep that in mind.

And Mania, I’m not sure if the Sea Lion thing is in the alpha or not, but I apologize if you edit it out.

Yossir, lvl 70 tauren hunter, Staghelm, 0/21/40

1. just like pre-BC (where cats, wolves, and bears ruled) and post BC (where cats, ravagers, boars, and scorpids rule), Post BC will change the list of most popular pets. I also predict cats will stay on that list as blizzard seems to love cats above all else.

2. I also predict pets will largely fit a cold weather theme. WotLK will have alot of wolves, bears, owls, and maybe even a crab or two (hey, deadliest catch quest).

3. Also expect white cats, why force the “I want to tame a level 80 DPS pet” people to be original when they can expand conformity. (yes, I am a bit bitter that with 18 tamable cat 5 skins make up 90% of all cat pets I see).

4. Blizzard still will not add pet slots. Or the long promised ability to learn pet abilities without taming.

5. Their will be at least one pet added which will NOT fit the cold lands theme at all. Expect a crocolisk or a gorilla among the ice.

6. At least one new pet ability will make hunters say “Why blizzard, why?” as it will seem to at first be pointless or useless. Also expect it to be applied in a useful fashion to a specialized niche use (maybe in pvp against casters, or raids against a certain boss).

A lot of these abilities seem a bit, well, over powered. Some of them fly in the face of everything Blizzard has stated they would do to achieve class balance.

The second one is linked into this. This stuff is supposedly from the F&F Alpha. As Mania said, we won’t know how accurate this is until we have official word from Blizz, but think on this, the Alpha should be very easy to control if it’s limited to just a few hundred people known and trusted by Blizzard.

Sometimes the best way to keep information a secret is to release a whole bunch of ‘leaks’ with information that’s 90% made up. Sometimes you do that in order to find out how a community will react to a given spell or talent. You run it up the flag pole, see if anyone salutes, and if they don’t, well, it was an ‘unofficial leak’ and thus never existed.

(I’ll also point out that for the moment, I haven’t been able to find out if these are just in client data or available on pets within the alpha proper. In either case — but especially if they are data-mined — there is a chance that they will never be accessible to hunters. It’s happened before, more’s the pity.)

Believe me, as soon as Blizzard lifts some of their restrictions and we have solid confrmation of these skills, we’ll have a field day discussing them all. :>

[edit by Mania: replaced list of info with link to source]
http://wotlk.wikidot.com/hunter
[/edit]

There’s a 100% chance of Crabs and they will have a new skin. We don’t know if they’ll be tameable though.

And I thought I was cynical.