How is it different from the other one?
Classic WoW is the game as it existed back in 2006, before any expansions were released. So all the changes from the last 14 years are gone. Way too many to list here, but a few that are particularly interesting to you as a hunter:
Most important, you have to feed your pets to keep them happy. An unhappy pet will do less damage, and if they get real unhappy they will abandon you. When you first tame a pet they will be very unhappy so you need to feed them a lot. Over time, their loyalty to you will increase and you will need to feed them less often. As they level up, you will need to feed them higher level foods to get the same happiness increase. Different pets eat different kinds of food - some only eat foods like fruit that are less available - so before taming a pet you need to research the kinds of food that pet will eat & have plenty on hand before taming.
Taming a pet that can eat fish is very convenient.
Pets don’t automatically level as you level, they have their own XP bar. They only gain XP when they are lower level than you, so a lot of the time your pet will be 1 level behind. If you tame a pet that is much lower level than you, there’s no catch up mechanism, you just have to grind their XP up to your level. And they only gain XP from killing mobs that you can get XP from, they don’t get any for quest turnins or gray mobs. So if you want a particular pet appearance that is only available on low level pets, it’s best to think about that while you’re low level too, otherwise it will take a lot of work to get that pet caught up to your level.
Pet’s don’t automatically come with all their abilities. When you tame a pet in the wild, it will have one or maybe two abilities, but the rest you will learn either from Pet Trainers (located near hunter class trainers) or from taming other pets & learning what they know. Also, abilities don’t automatically level up - if your pet is able to use a higher level ability, you have to learn it & teach it to them. If it’s not one of the Pet Trainer abilities, then you have to put your pet in the stable, go out & tame a pet that knows the higher level version, then go fight mobs using that pet until you learn the new version (there will be a message in your chat log when that happens), then get your pet out of the stable & teach it to them.
And speaking of the stable, you only get a few stable slots, and after the first one they get expensive. So you’re not going to have a bunch of pets, only one or two (remember, you need to keep an open stable slot to put your pet in when it comes time to upgrade its abilities). And you can only have one summonable pet - to swap pets you have to go to a Stable Master.
Your pet has a pool of training points that you spend to teach them abilities. The size of the point pool is based on pet loyalty & pet level. You won’t have enough points to train them in everything, so you’ll have to budget.
You won’t get your first pet until level 10, when you get a quest chain from the hunter trainer to learn the pet taming ability.
As for your hunter, you’ll have to buy ammo. One of your bag slots will be used for a quiver or ammo bag (depending on whether you have a gun or a bow) which will give you a haste buff if I’m remembering correctly. As you level up you’ll be able to buy better ammo that does more DPS.
Some other miscellanous differences off the top of my head: Talent trees are vastly different. The Cataclysm expansion made major changes to the 1-60 zones, so the quests & even the terrain can be very different in many places from what you’ll see in modern WoW. Gold is much less available & you spend most of what you get on class abilities. In fact it’s not uncommon to have to pick & choose which abilities you learn as you’re leveling because you won’t have enough gold to buy them all (remember you’re buying abilities for both you & your pet, along with buying ammo). You don’t get to train riding until level 40, and there are no flying mounts. There are fewer race/class combinations available; paladins are alliance only & shaman are horde only.
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Classic is free if you are subbed to retail…might as well level to 20ish and see how you like it. I started classic at launch in August and quit at level 35, but I played vanilla at launch in 2004. There is an entire forum dedicated to classic.
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thanks to you both !! 