I knew it. Hunters have nothing to worry about, come the expansion. Karlik of Proudmoore (EU) dropped us this screenshot of a new pet he found wandering around Outland-- it's called "Bug," but looks pretty "alien-y" (yes, that's a technical term). Click on the pic to see the full shot.

And if you think it looks cool, wait until you hear the stats on it. The words are in German, but as you can probably tell just from context, you're looking at a hunter pet that breaks 6k in armor, and has 124 dps. And that's untrained (that's what "Rebellisch" means), so it only goes up from there. That ain't no plainstrider, let me tell you.

Now, of course in the expansion everything will be bigger, better, and faster, so while this pet currently matches up to, say, a blue-geared endgame druid, it won't seem quite so sweet after we've had a long look at all the new stat levels. Then again, this is one of the first pets you can get in Outland (Karlik's shot shows he's still at 60, and he trained it), so things only get better from here. I'm still standing by my skepticism on those leaked pet abilities (although I wouldn't put it past Blizzard to give something like this Bug a mana drain of some kind), but I also think that in terms of new pets and their strengths, hunters are going to get some really, really nice love when the Dark Portal opens.

[ Thanks, Karlik! ]

Update: A few people in the comments (thanks, guys!) have pointed out that Petopia says this "Bug" may be, in fact, just that-- a bug, not meant to be tamed. Only one type of the "spore bat" can be tamed, and it can't even currently learn Growl. A shame, but just like all things BC, we'll have to see what happens.

Tags: bug, burningcrusade, expansion, hunter, outland, pet

Filed under: Hunter, Items, Expansions