I logged into WoW on Christmas day to pick up my presents from Father Winter. One of the presents – from a previous year – is Father Winter’s Helper, a mini-pet.

(Although Blizzard has gone to calling them pets or companions, I’m still more comfortable with the term ‘mini-pet’. It’s less ambiguous, especially when everyone knows that ‘pet’ very clearly means a real pet – a hunter pet.)

Mousing over the item told me that I already had two of the damned things so I decided to spend a few minutes cleaning out my mini-pet list.

Now you have to understand, I am just a tad bit obsessive about some things. (But at least my therapist says I lack most of the compulsive aspects of OCD.) Since I don’t have any real interest in pet battles in and of themselves but I do consider myself a mini-pet collector, it’s important for me to have a nice clean list with one and only one of each mini-pet that I have collected.

This was the first time I’ve logged for more than a quick mail check in rather a while. And even right after MoP launched I was much more interested in hunter pets than in mini-pets, so I hadn’t done anything at all with the pet battle system yet. I found out pretty quickly that I needed to learn the basic Battle Pet Training skill in order to box up my extra mini-pets and get them out of my list. And since learning that started a quest chain and I had a few extra minutes, I figured I might as well get to the point where I could trap wild pets. I mean, after all I am a collector.

And that, as I am sure you know, is always how these things start.

I randomly chose my Tiny Sporebat to represent Mania in the battle pet arena, so to speak.  Then I went after a Dung Beetle. Then a Water Snake. Then a Spiny Lizard. Then a Toad. That seemed to do it for Orgimmar so then I headed out into Durotar where I found a Creepy Crawly. Then a Hare. Then a …

Yeah. You know how it goes from here.

I only ran into a couple of problems: namely that my Sporebat quickly became bad-ass enough to kill the low-level stuff too quickly to trap them if I wasn’t paying attention. I also kept forgetting to heal the poor thing. And I was briefly very confused when I realized that summoning a mini-pet doesn’t change your battle line-up, but in context it makes a lot more sense that way.

Long story short, I had a lot of fun puttering around collecting mini-pets that I will (mostly) never think about again. I should log in more often!

(Incidentally, I didn’t think of this until it was too late but I suspect it would have been a lot smarter to box up the Horde-leaning mini-pets on an Alliance character and the Alliance-leaning mini-pets on a Horde character. As it stands, I have way, way too many Dragonhawk Hatchlings on my (undead) main. Ah, well.)