Petshop's Comments

In my opinion, this is one of the best battle pets available. As many others have said, it's great for leveling lower pets. It's also able to solo most of the NPC tamers that can be challenged daily - including some of the Pandarian ones, such as the Whispering spirit. Personally, it's a core member of my group of battle pets, rarely exchanged for anything else because of its usefulness.

This little guy is awesome for battles. Between stuns, damage mitigation, and an automatic heal you don't have to waste turns on, he's easily able to take on groups of creatures two or three levels above him. As long as he's not fighting something that deals Undead-type damage, he's a serious beast, well worth leveling for  a permanent place on your regular teams.

My friend and I had different 'holes' in our Raiding with Leashes achievement. We each crated the pets the other was missing, swapped them, learned them, got the achievement, re-crated the borrowed pets, swapped them back, re-learned our original pets.

 

Achievement earned and zombie kitty obtained, without having to rush for drops or spend hundreds (or thousands) of gold!

In my search for a Rare, I found the easiest thing to do was to travel up and down all three arms of the river on a character with water-walking (for me, a hunter with a water skimmer as a pet), killing off any non-combat toads and frogs I saw, and battling the ones I could for experience.

 

Be careful of level though -- I had a level 4 solo on one bank, then directly across the stream on the opposite bank was a level 6 that came with another level 6 as backup.

At the moment, at the release of 5.1, this pet seems to have been entirely replaced by Eternal Striders on the Silvermoon server. Hopefully the spawns will even out soon; for now, it looks like it's time to grind battles and hope one shows up as backup.

The phasing problem on this pet is a major pain. I've tried both a character that's done all the quests, and one that hasn't done any. No luck on either, despite, as others have said, seeing a good dozen or so when flying on a taxi. I'm almost tempted to take one of my 'rushed to 80' characters to do the quests to find a phase somewhere in the middle, in hopes that'd help. So frustrating that such a unique-looking pet is so very difficult to get.

This is another companion pet that comes out with a random skin whenever it's summoned, whether in or out of pet battles.

There's one spot where a Hopling can spawn and be unreachable. My friend and I spent several minutes trying to find a way to get to it; he even tried using the priest grip to pull it closer. No go, so will have to try again on another run. Here's a screenshot to show you what I mean:

 

http://i.imgur.com/d4Fwb.jpg

 

(Don't mind my size -- tried using the World Enlarger, in hopes that a smaller figure will be able to get into the space. That didn't help either. /sadface)

Also found mine today in the early morning -- around 7:30 AM server time. Yesterday, I went by a few minutes after 10:00 AM, and there were none to be found even though I was the only player around, so apparently that's too late. Not sure what the minimum time is.

This is officially my favorite pet, ever. I've noticed two interesting things about her, though. 1) The part about her being slightly larger isn't just filler text - she IS a little bigger than the other raptor hatchlings, from what I've seen. 2) She doesn't just pull bones off enemy mobs. When I was standing next to a party member's corpse, little Petshop'aka ran over, and brought me a bone from him. I guess she thought I needed something to remember him by.