Trekking with Calador

A while back I did a world quest on my druid, Daxien, that required him to shoot a bow. Believe it or not, that was the first time I’d really seen how a male night elf shoots a bow. Sure, I’ve seen lots of male night elves as both allies and enemies, but I never really watched them shoot. However, the moment I saw Daxien shoot, I fell in love with the action and decided I needed to make a male night elf hunter.

I promptly went into one of my realms and created my new night elf hunter. I’d had female night elf hunters before (now deleted) but never a male. I went with a randomized name from the game, Calador, and while he started out with white hair, I eventually changed it to green because it suited him better.

I haven’t leveled a hunter from level one in a rather long time. I have my void elf hunter Valressa, but she started at level 20. So I felt it was going to be fun relearning the hunter spec from the ground up. As I’m a bit too familiar with the night elf starter area, I decided to take Cal to Elwynn Forest and do the quests around there for a while.

As a night elf, Calador started out with a white striped tiger as his pet. I have four cats in real life, so I was quite fine with him having a cat. After a while of playing him though, I decided I’d tame a bear in Elwynn woods for a pet. I always name my hunter pets, and after taming the brown bear, I decided that the name Tiberius suited him.

If you don’t know, Tiberius is the middle name of James T. Kirk, Captain of the Enterprise. Yes, I’m a Star Trek lover as well as a Warcraft lover. I love all sorts of nerdy/geeky things actually.

As soon as I told my oldest daughter my bear’s name, she said I had to name my next pointy eared pet Nimoy, after Leonard Nimoy, the actor who portrayed Spock in the original Star Trek show and movies. I said that I would of course and went out and tamed a moonstalker to name Nimoy. It was then that I decided that for the first time ever, my hunter pet names were going to follow a theme. A Star Trek theme. A theme where no hunter of mine had gone before…

No sooner had I posted a screenshot of Calador standing with Tiberius the bear and Nimoy the moonstalker on Twitter than a fellow Warcraft player suggested I get the large crab with the knife and name him Sulu. I knew nothing about crab pets and certainly not that any had knives, but I did some research on the subject and agreed that I would. In Star Trek, Sulu is a fencer, so of course the knife made sense.

The next day I hopped on Sriset long enough to go to Suramar and kill Pinchshank, the evil death crab who drops the Crab Shank weapon/toy that all crab hunter pets can use. Pinchshank dropped the weapon and I hopped on Calador to go hunting for a crab pet.

As Sulu wears yellow in Star Trek, I looked through the crab pets on Petopia.com for one that was yellow and low enough for then level 18 Cal to tame. The crab listed as yellow was too high level for Cal, so instead I chose the bronze crab with its mix of yellow and green. Plus, Cal was already in Westfall, so it just meant a trip to the north shore to tame one.

Cal had no trouble taming the bronze crab and I promptly named it Sulu and equipped it with the Crab Shank. I’d never had a crab pet before, and I didn’t realize they were tanks! They’re very clicky when they walk but the new crab models are quite adorable so I’m happy having Sulu. There’s just something extra cool about a knife-wielding crab.

As I love taming pets on my hunters, my Star Trek theme for their names will continue on Calador. There’s plenty of names to choose from and I’m sure my animal menagerie will be quite unique as it engages on more voyages through Azeroth…