The First Thing I Did In The World Of Warcraft Legion Alpha

Demon Hunters? Whatever. Legendary weapons that evolve with players until the next expansion? Sure. Gnome Hunters? You have my attention, World of Warcraft: Legion.

I’ve never really seriously played World of Warcraft’s Hunter class. It’s odd, really. I am a solo player most of the time, and Hunters are a great solo class, but two things held me back. One was the fact that I do enjoy grouping from time to time, and the early days of Hunter pets bringing entire dungeons of creatures down on our parties (“Hey, where’d your pet go?” “Oh shit.”) made me nervous. The second was I didn’t enjoy any of the races that could be Hunters back in the day, and when they opened things up a bit later on, I wasn’t interested.

Now I am interested.

Gnome Hunters are coming to World of Warcraft, with Blizzard instituting cleverly-tamed mechanical pets to make up for the fact that Gnomes are a staple of most Hunter pet classes’ diet.

I am a huge gnome fan, not only because of their bravery during one of the big early Horde/Alliance skirmishes, where they tried to deal with a disaster in their home town (emphasis on tried) instead of distracting the other Alliance races with their problems, but also because the smaller the creature the faster they feel, and I gotta go fast.

It doesn’t get much faster than a gnome hitting Aspect of Cheetah.

Meet Bellyflop and Buns. They’re going to rule all of Azeroth one day. At least until the first big alpha test character wipe.

It’s still early days for gnome Hunters. The first weapon they get, a nifty rifle, is broken so it only fires at melee range. Only one talent spec is available at the moment (and it’s not Beast Mastery), likely due to implementation of the spec-specific epic weapons in alpha test. But right now, with my best bunny by my side, I’m loving it.

So when Legion launches next year and you wonder where my Demon Hunter coverage is, blame Blizzard for restricting gnome Hunters to the non-demon variety.

Contact the author, who once made a WoW Gnome music video, at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at @bunnyspatial