Cata - Appearance-Buffed Pets (Hotfixed)
While the exact origin of the original discovery is difficult to pin down, the method of obtaining Appearance-Buffed Pets was a way to obtain any tameable hunter pet with its wild mob's buffs still intact.
First posted to the Petopia forums in Dec 2010 by Acherontia, this method involved casting Tame Beast on a wild mob while spamming the macro:
If done correctly, the macro would pseudo-abandon the pet right at the end, and hunter would see their tame disappear, but then be told they had an active summon when trying to pull out another pet. A quick relog later, and the pet would be able to be summoned with its buffs cleanly intact.
Most pets would lose these auras if they or their owner died while they were active, making a distinction between 'fragile' buffed pets, and 'permanent' buffed pets. Permanent pets could die and be resurrected without affecting their aura - these included the Armored Battleboar, The Lone Hunter, Angered Arakkoa Protector, and the Oil-stained Wolves/Fledgelings.
In fact, these 'permanent' pets had been previously been discovered to be tameable with buffs through another player killing the wild mob at the exact moment of the tame, which eventually led to the creation of the macro to ease the difficulty of the timing involved.
A semi-complete list of all possible pets during this time can be found listed here.
This method lasted quite a while compared to most hotfixes, with Blizzard only taking action once, reportedly, high-end players had found a Silithid pet with a permanent group-wide 20% haste aura they were bringing to Deathwing kills. As such, Blizzard hotfixed the macro, but left the already-tamed pets alone, with a warning that those found with pets with damage-increasing auras would face punitive action on their account.
Due to the incredible ease of the method and availability of these pets, coupled with the lengthy gap between discovery and hotfix, these are some of the most common glitch pets - while also being the rarest to be seen in the wild.
Due to the 'buffed' nature of their glitchiness, several issues have been reported with the pets. In addition to Party Sync, Arena, Rated BG's, and Timewalking all wipe buffs upon instance entry, leading to many players accidentally forfeiting their pet's buffs. In addition, there have been reports of random encounters with Thunder Lizards and even Yogg-Saron's boss fight wiping buffed pets, so many players only bring these pets out to show off in cities, not to use in combat.
While Blizzard's hotfix stopped the macro from working as desired and turned pets friendly once a tame occurred to stop split-second killing, there would be another method that arose in MoP that saw the return of these pets once more...
