Which pet got you hooked?

[Cyberninja]

I quit playing Wow for 2 years. This January marked one year that I have been back. When I first came back, I saw all these green paw prints on my maps. I thought "What are those?" And then I found out that they were pets you could collect and battle other trainers/players. I thought that was pretty stupid and what a waste of time. Keep in mind, my first go round with WoW I found the "vanity" pets completely useless. And they pretty much were. For my first several months back I continued with my "battle pets are stupid" line of thinking. But then one fateful day I wandered into a cave in Feralis and saw the Stunted Yeti. I thought "even though pet battling seems stupid, he is pretty cool. Let me see if I can catch one." Of course since I had never done any pet battles, I couldn't get him because any pet that I did happen to have (for example Frosty from the WotLK expansion) was only level one! So I got a couple pets and leveled them so I could capture my yeti. Let's just say after spending 400k at AH and spending WAY too much time capturing my 774 pets, I am hooked Now when I see someone make a comment in chat that "pet collecting is stupid" I just think "you have no idea the fun you are missing".
So the Stunted Yeti is the critter that got me hooked, how about you?

Forgot to mention one thing about my pet addiction: I bought Murkalot on eBay a few weeks back for $152.50...somebody stop me before my real bank ends up like my guild bank-empty...lol

[Ril]

Back in vanilla a black whelpling randomly dropped for me during levelling time, or was it gold farming for the 40g mount? In any case I thought it was cool, especially since I was in a dragon themed guild. So I slowly learned about the other whelplings, then cats (which of cours I needed!), then some rare drops, other vendor pets, and so on. Over the years I built a neat, but limited (they took bag space) collection. Naturally I set out to get them all once they were learnable.

[Luciandk]

For me it was seeing the Celestial Dragon for the first time. I wanted it I decided, and began to collect pets like a mofo. At that time it was extremely hard to get the 150 pets needed.

[Jesjbrown]

Mine was the Fluxfire Feline. Saw it wandering around Gnomergon and decided I MUST have one. It was all over after that. I was hooked.

[Opallena]

I started on mounts, seeing those pretty netherdrakes back in BC made me go "WANT!". But the pet that got me into collecting was the Spirit of Competition. Back then, I actually had a lvl 19 PvP twink (when those were actually a thing), so I was able to get both the pet and the tabard. If I recall correctly, the Spirit of Competition was the first model of that particular type to be available to US players.

Of course, pets still took up bag space then so the only two I really kept were the spirit and Baby Blizzard Bear, didn't bother with anything else until the journal came out in wrath. After I got that achievment, I think I've stayed #1 on my server in pet collecting since at least the end of Wrath. I'm somewhere in the top 10 mount-wise though.

[Birkie]

In vanilla, someone gave me a Siamese Pet Carrier after I healed a dungeon run in the Deadmines (my very first WoW dungeon trip). I was so happy and went around getting any other companion pets I could get my hands on back then. I left sometime during Wrath and my boyfriend was able to lure me back to the game during MoP by showing me the bet battle system.

So basically, I was hooked from the start

[Cyberninja]

Yeah the battle system is what got me completely hooked. Sure, Frosty looks awesome but I couldn't do anything with him. Once I got my Stunted Yeti and actually started doing some real battles, I realized there was actually strategy behind it. I come from a background of about 6 years of Magic the Gathering, Age of Empires, StarCraft etc. so I love strategy type games. I like those battles where you are thinking "That's it, I'm dead after this hit" and then you are like "What?! I have one hit point left? You're dead! "insert doomed enemy pet name here"...lol

[Raax]

The Panda Cub got me hooked from my very first session in the game. I think he was by my side all through Vanilla and into BC.
I love that little guy!

[Gwenolyn]

It was the whelps. I decided to collect all 4 colors. I got the red pretty quick. Then I decided to go hard core and go for emerald. Only dropped in SoS off dreaming whelps that shared a spawn with adolescent ones back then. But after battling some farming bots, I got it in just a few hours. By the 4th day, I had all 4 and was hooked

I ended up farming another emerald and my husband said I was crazy!!

Anywho, definitely the whelps. And the old WCP shirt "Got Whelps?" played a part in that too!!

[Beanie]

While I had a panther cub (still havent levelled him) with me fairly constantly after I got him I didn't really collect any pets apart from a soul trader that I came across but that was only for the items he held.
The garrison got me and once I started I cant stop...

[Boyya]

I had collected pets throughout Pandaria and had quite a collection, and had even leveled just a few to 25. But then came Molten Core, I was close to the 200 mounts achieve so I ran MC for the core hound mount, after a 3 hour queue and 4 hours in MC, lo and behold, Hatespark the Tiny dropped, I felt invigorated, and have thus really been into it, I am 10 shy of 600, have over 400 rares, and over 50 maxed level, and what's really funny, my Hunter has never used the core hound mount.

[Topaz]

I started playing on 5.2 if I remember correctly, but havnt bought MoP yet. when I hit 85 the Zul'Gurub questline poped and the final reward was a Panther Cub, after getting it I realised that the "master pet trainer" had nothing to do with hunter pets. Being the collector I am and with little to do at lvl 85 I ran old raids for RwL 1 and 2 and decided to capture all the world pets, after i bought MoP I also started PvPing and realy getting into pet battles.

[Imry]

Strangely enough it was the owl pets in Darnassus that got me hooked. I remember still being a super newbie and wandering through Darnassus talking to every vendor and every NPC just to see what they had, trying to decide which foods my character would like to eat when I happened upon the Owl vendor. Of course I could only afford one and that used up pretty much all of the silver and copper I had amassed so far but it was worth it. I loved that owl.

Of course later on I discovered that there were tons more pets to be bought in city capitals, but this was when pets were items in your bags so I couldn't afford the bag space for all of them - eventually I took a hiatus from the game and came back in Wrath to the wonderful pet tab! \o/ It took off from there, I could actually hold all these pets! And there were achievements!

Of course my collection frenzy has expanded from there to include mounts, achievement points, tabards, toys, certain junk items and fireworks.

[Morlis]

Mechanical Squirrel for me. Back in Vanilla I got the schematic to drop while I was doing some quests. I had most of the materials needed, I just had to scrounge up one more of the Malachite gems, a friend had one and she gave it to me. My first pet ever and I made it myself, my second squirrel I made I gave to my friend who gave me the second malachite. I didn't even know that companion pets were part of the game till that point. I mostly expected it to run around for a minute or two then fade away till the next time you released it.

Vanilla was fun but my friends were not raiders so it became dull after a while, we went to other games. My only real regret about missing those years was the pets I missed because I wasn't online at the right moment in time. We quit before Burning Crusade launched and I came back after Wrath of the Lich King launched. I missed the 4th and 5th year anniversary pets and the Vampiric Batling. I also missed out on the account conversion free penguin because I couldn't find my original copy of WoW.

[Buruan]

Disgusting Oozeling for me.
I farmed him in Vanilla for ages, always alongside the Night Dragon Breath, which was required for Healers in Vanilla as it was on a different timer than Mana Pots (back when you could chugg as many mana pots as you felt like)

Anyway got the ooze after a looooong grind and had him out at all times, not realizing his annoying sounds (I never have WoW sound on), until someone told me

I then farmed whelps. Got all 4.

Didnt get into pet battling until the very end of MOP though.

[Jazeel]

the first pet that got me keen was whiskers the rat from when they introduced childrens week event. Owing to a lack of bag space however, i didn't collect many more pets till they added the pet journal feature and then i went into collecting mania much to the horror and amusement of guildies at the time. In my quest to get all the ones i could i bought TCG cards off ebay started buying the collectors editions and virtual passes to blizzcon etc, and of course found this site and realised i was not alone in this mania

[Iopos]

I started playing in early BC an was mostly indifferent to the pets at first...I was an engineer right from the start and when a mechanical squirrel recipe appeared for me, I made them for all my friends/guildies for free, and I got a dragonhawk hatchling for myself to be seen with, but what really got me was when I was leveling through quests in the Badlands. I was in a small group, and a Dark Whelpling dropped...then 20 minutes later a second one did, for the guy I beat on the roll off for it. From there it was goodbye bagspace(pets and mounts becoming spells would not come for some time...you should've seen my bags and bank the day before they did compared to the day after....sooooooo much more space after that, lol)

[Wycroe]

I have two pets that are very memorable, both because of how they were collected.
The first was my Panda cub....I didn't even know what WoW was, other than a game a few friends were excited about....I had very limited funds back then, but my friend and I were driving home from work...he had a copy of WoW preordered at Future Shop so we decided to stop and pick it up. I saw one collectors edition box left, picked it up, and saw that you could have a panda for a pet....I bought it, but didn't actually activate the game for about 4 months, until I had the money. I've bought every collectors edition since!
The second was the disgusting oozeling....I had been collecting pets for a while when I first learned of him, and my friends and I were farming him...when he dropped, there was to be a roll-off for him....I bribed my 3 friends with a night out at the bar, with dinner, so they would all pass. I owned him as soon as the offer hit the table, and it cost me dearly (but was well worth it)!!!

[Stella3]

It was a common rabbit for me, I thought how funny it would be to level her to 25 and see her beat monsters etc. Now she and two other pets beat other players and the toughest of pets lol.

[Kiowa]

The Parrot from Dead mines waaaaay back in vanilla