Instead of just posting my observations about the Warlords of Draenor Alpha to twitter, I’m also going to post things here in a less transitory format. The first few are bound to be larger, as I uncover various quality of life improvements that nobody but me cares about.

Firstly, my much-awaited Peacock is a reward from a pet-related achievement. The achievement itself is Not Yet Implemented, so it’s hard to tell what’s what. I’d hypothesize that it’s either the Tame achievement or Beat Tamers achievement.

Also, the good old ‘you have no pets on PTR’ deal is alive & quite well, so here’s a quick plug for my Cascade guide, because mercifully it’ll only take me a few hours to get to 25s. Until then, the new quest log format makes it easy to see your account-wide quests, and separate them out from any active quests you may have as well.

If you right click a wild battle pet’s nameplate, it brings up the option to see it in your spellbook. A small thing, but a cool quality of life enhancement.

There don’t seem to be many new pets available at the moment. Many of the new ones seem to be via engineering–the Boar, Scorpid and Toucan. The one I found the most interesting though, is the Albino Chimaeraling. Other than not being tiresome to type at all, it’s apparently found in Eggs in Shadowmoon Valley. This is a feature I’m really excited about, but don’t know a ton about just yet. Shadowmoon Valley isn’t open yet, so I’ll be sure to investigate when it is.

Move the heck over, Clockwork Gnome. With laser beams shooting from its eyes and a turret, I may have a new BFF.

The very first wild pet I found in Draenor was a lvl 1 Sea Gull in my Horde Garrison. I’m really curious about this, and will report back when I have higher level pets. This seems an excellent place for a menagerie.

A very interesting bit about that level 1 Sea Gull. It looks like that’s intentional, and they’re supposed to scale with your pets’ levels, at least for now. If the scaling tech doesn’t pan out, the wild pets in the garrison will just be level 25.