Friday Five: Five Patch 4.1 Favorite Things

It takes more than a week for me to settle into a new content patch. And in the case of the past two weeks, I’ve had not nearly enough time to dive in to what the patch has to offer. But I do have a solid five favorites to share with you today:

1. New Children’s week pets!
   In addition to this adorable spindly creature, from the Outlands orphan scavenger hunt quest chain, you can get a snail pet from the Azeroth quest chain. And allegedly, you can finally get the Northrend pet you didn’t choose the first time (I’ve not had the opportunity to actually DO that yet, so we’ll see.)
2. The triumphant return of mind sear!
   Mind sear, no longer the shadow priest’s practical joke for the damage meters. Not quite at its WotLK peak #s, but a damn fine improvement. I actually bust it out again now. And have hit 40k #s on select 5-man trash. This is highly acceptable. And awesome.
3. New cooking and fishing dailies!
   Some of them are pretty creepy, like the one wherein my druid was attacked by crawdads, thanks to some foul-smelling dwarven beauty cream. I like having a variety of new quests to choose from, and that we can do them in places other than the two cities that we’ve been hunkered down in since Deathwing singed the world.
4. More Vanity pets!
   Not one, but TWO kitties, seen here. And many more new pets to come. It’s starting to make that 125 pet goal on Candy and Anexxia not seem *quite* so crazy. Sorta. ;p
5. New 5-man content!
   ZG was one of my favorite all-time raids, and ZA was a place only my mage ever got to raid (“Please?? Please bring your mage? We really need a good cc’er…please bring your mage??”), so it’s cool to see them turned into 5-mans. I’ll be happier once this content is more easily PUGgable on all my servers. Right now, it truly depends on if you have a raid-geared healer and tank who are able to think critically about the encounters. So far, I’ve PUG’d ZG and mostly 1-shot the bosses, and had a ZA that couldn’t get past the Eagle boss. But I know it will get easier for folks eventually.

BONUS Five: Regaining the feeling that I can pick a capitol city other than Orgrimmar or Stormwind to call home.

What  have been your favorite 4.1 changes or additions?