Big Cats and Quests That Aren't

So it ended up taking me an extra four levels until my night elf hunter was able to afford her mount. I'd forgotten just how much I love nightsabers; they are so majestic. Unlike my taurens' kodos, whom I see as purely functional, I actually love watching my hunter ride along on her big new cat, especially with a smaller cat running alongside it. It's just a joy to watch. Now I only have to remember to actually mount up more often - turns out that simply throwing on Aspect of the Cheetah for 24 levels is a hard habit to shake.

As usual I'm really loving the fourties - circling between Stranglethorn Vale, Tanaris, Feralas and the Hinterlands is just good fun all around. One thing I found interesting to revisit and which I hadn't thought about in a long time were the hippogryph eggs in Feralas. It's an interesting mechanic that's kind of like a repeatable quest but not exactly.

Basically there is this gnome in Gadgetzan that has a couple of conversation options about hippogryphs in Feralas, how they are threatened by the Gordunni ogres and how she wants to preserve them by collecting their eggs. You may find yourself reading through these gossip options after another quest sends you to talk to this NPC, but she doesn't actually give you a quest for hippogryph eggs.

However, if you do find yourself in the mountains near the ogres in Feralas and you keep an eye out, you might find nests with eggs in them, and somehow you can stuff an egg that's almost as tall and twice as wide as your character into your backpack. (Though I guess the size might explain why it's labelled as unique and you can't carry more than one at a time.)

If you then return to the gnome in Tanaris, you can stick the egg into the machine next to her and it assigns the egg a quality (bad, ordinary, fine, or extraordinary). Based on the quality of the egg, she will then offer you a reward box. So like a quest really, but not using the usual language of floating exclamation marks and quest log entries.

There are a few of these in Classic (another one I can think of is the Shady Rest Inn - while there are a number of quests associated with it, there is a big "gap" in the middle where after being sent to Theramore and talking to various people there who bring it up, you need to actually find the place on your own and pick up the clues scattered around the area before being given more "proper" quests).

I do think these are pretty neat, and I quite like picking up another egg every time I'm in Feralas now. It also makes me wonder how I'd feel about playing an MMORPG where all the quests required more "discovery" like that instead of simply always being indicated by UI markers... (though chances are I'd not find it as intriguing and more tedious if it was just the default).