I got a turtle (Belly)when I was 15 or 16. Kept him as my only pet up through my 40s. he's in the stable now, but I really don't think I could ever abandon him. I'm all sentimental.

At the time it made sense to me to have a tank pet for, um, tanking. but now I have a kitty which is certainly not a tank pet but tanks just fine. the way the pet stats are set up is kinda odd.

I just wish we had one more stable space - I would love to have a dinosaur - but now the pink bird and the pig have been with me so long (and through so much frenzied leveling), I have to keep them. I don't think I could stop being sentimental over my pets, no matter how I tried!

I've always thought the turtle's shell shield skill was one of the more cool pet tricks - I first saw it on a 4 man hunter run through an instance where the turtle did a lot of tanking.

I have the same pig on my hunter :) The only good thing about the "bug" fix is that now my kitty will get some fresh air again, there really is nothing to choose between them aggro-wise now. At first I thought there was an even bigger problem with aggro; it took a while to click that the problem was with Omen. I don't know how it calculates pet aggro but it seems way off at the moment. Omen was screaming at me every few seconds, even when I changed the alert to go off at 130% instead of the usual 90%. After a few fights i realised that even though Omen reckoned I had twice the aggro of my pet, my pet was still holding the mob. Grinding with my hunter has become a lot less stressful now I've turned Omen off.

The way Omen's been explained to me - well, let me just quote Mania of Petopia, I think she has a good explanation:

"Unfortunately, Omen isn’t going to help you out here. So far as I can tell, actual threat numbers are never transmitted to the WoW client, so threat meters like Omen actually work on stock figures that have been laboriously worked out in the past with careful testing. For example, when your pet uses Growl Rank 1, Omen adds 50 threat to the pet’s bar. That 50 value comes from previous observation, but if the threat generated by Growl Rank 1 had changed, Omen won’t know it — not until someone works out the new value and Omen’s LUA is changed.

Of course, for damage and healing Omen uses actual reported numbers numbers run through a formula to turn it into threat — for instance, 1 damage = 1 threat or 1 healing = 0.5 threat. But again, those formulas also come from previous testing — if the formulas were to change, we’d have to work out how they changed and changed Omen’s code before Omen would show us the accurate threat numbers.

This is why Hortus reminded us that mods can’t really tell us what is happening with our threat right now — because the actual threat numbers are never transmitted to the client. Threat meters like Omen use numbers and formulas worked out by players through exhaustive testing in the past, so they cannot immediately and automatically adjust to changes in the game."

That made much more sense to me - and explains why Omen in the past few weeks has been so wacky for a while, and gradually gotten back to normal. Sort of.