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Back in TBC, when Lightning Breath was a non-armor-mitigated, nature based attack with zero cooldown, Wind Serpents were the hotness. With 2 in points in Go for the Throat and a decent amount of crit, your trusty Wind Serpent would be chain casting that attack. Wind Serpents were very raid friendly, because for fights where you needed to pull your pet out of harm’s way, you could park the Wind Serpent by your side with LB on a macro, allowing your pet to still cast safely from range without fear of getting stomped.

In PvP they were awesome because they had a ranged attack which ignored armor. While under Bestial Wrath, my Wind Serpent was capable of delivering some monstrous crits which worked out fabulously when facing plate-wearing classes. I loved my Wind Serpent and toted him everywhere.

Now, backing up to the moment when I realized I had to have one of these elite pets…

Since we only had a handful of available stable slots in those days, with one slot always needing to be available for taming new pets to learn their abilities, a new pet decision was a big one, for me anyway. I was very specific in determining which pets I would add to my stable, and in this case, I decided I must have Arash-ethis. No other Wind Serpent would do.

Out of all the Wind Serpent models, the white one appealed to me the most. Of the white wind serpents, there were only 2 that did not have “casters stats”. For those of you going, huh..?, back then pets were not standardized and many of them had advantages and some even had disadvantages. Wind Serpents were one of the pet classes that suffered from what were known as caster stats, where the pet would have higher than normal numbers for useless pet stats such as Int and Spirit, yet have lower than normal armor, health and attack power. If you didn’t know about this and picked the wrong wind serpent, you’d have a squishy pet with miserable DPS.

Arash-ethis and Hayoc were the only 2 white wind serpents in the game with normal stats. Arash-ethis was 12 levels higher than Hayoc, making the choice of which of them to tame an easy one.

Remember when we actually had to level our pets..? Honestly, it didn’t bother me too much to have to do that, but back in vanilla it could be quite a grind. If you had to tame a new pet, the closer it was to your level the better.

Once I determined which pet I was going to add to my stable, it was off to Feralas to do some camping. I’d all but completely skipped Feralas on my trip to 60, so getting familiar with that zone was also a memorable WoW experience. It’s definitely a neat zone when you’re first experiencing it, and back in those days Rexxar and his bear used to travel the path leading to and from Desolace, which was kind of cool seeing as a young huntlet. I wasn’t much into lore back then, but I always thought, now that’s one NPC that looks like a complete badass.

Anyway…I camped Arash-ethis for a few days, but no luck. He was a pretty rare spawn who only popped a couple of times per day, but what I didn’t know is that he was bugged, and still is apparently. Arash-ethis will spawn and travel underground, so unless you have an addon like NPCScan (which didn’t even exist then) or use a targeting macro, he can pass right by you undetected. This is especially odd since they moved his patrol area to another part of the zone, just NW of where he used to spawn.

What made this a memorable moment for me was the fact that I ended up using this pet for nearly 3 years afterward. Trogdor was my signature pet during vanilla’s twilight and throughout all of TBC. We had some good times. :*)