There is one humanoid type you can skin: the worgen.
Oh, god…I forgot about that! Yes, I’ve seen her do it myself and can remember thinking “How embarrassing for her!”
Probably at least half of my toons are female. In part because the male models of most races are fugly and in part because I like the idea of making and playing kick-ass women who aren’t afraid to grit their teeth and laugh at death, injury and broken nails.
Grind your reputation with the race (who’s mount you want) to exalted.
(You still get full reputation from doing quests that are “grey” to you. Go to their starting areas, etc, and knock them out quick.)
Cross faction mounts aren’t possible, yet, though. 
Although there are mounts that drop from certain bosses in certain dungeons that can be used by all races and factions that pick them up (they’re BoP), including a raptor and tiger from Zul’Gurub, the warlock horse from Baron Whatisface, the bears from Zul’Aman and the achievement you get for killing all of the opposite-faction leaders. Also, the achievement you get for collecting 25 different mounts is a cross-faction drake, I believe.
I really enjoy some of the jokes. In particular (probably not word-for-word):
Human female: “My girlfriends and I trade clothes all the time. We’re all the same size!” (I love meta jokes!) and “Why does everyone assume my professions are cooking and tailoring?”
Dwarf male: “… ah, there’s me hammer!”
Tauren male: “Moo. There, are you happy now?” and “… because tauren are so good at blending in with their environment.” (another meta joke)
And I think one of the night elf female jokes is a meta-joke that attempts to somewhat balance out the issues others have pointed out: “Oh look, I’m dancing again! Well I hope you and your friends are enjoying the show!” (Oh how the sarcasm drips.)
Some of the flirts are really amusing, too.
Undead female: “I don’t need to ‘get funky’ … I’m already there!” I also like the orc male flirt where he lists the female’s “six different smiles”.
Regarding the various dances: are all of the dances actual “named” dances? The human female clearly does The Macarena (mixed with some silly, standard drunk-girl dancing) and the orc male does what I assume is “Running Man”. What’s that the human male does? The Hustle? I think I recognize some Travolta “Saturday Night Fever” moves there.
My wish list includes an option for getting credit for killing somebody that you just killed. Particularly since there are so many quest chains that amount to
“go kill a bunch of Mobs A and B.” Okay, here’s your cookie.
“Now go kill a bunch of Mobs C and D.” Okay, here’s another cookie. Ignoring the fact that you have to fight your way through all of the A and B guys to get to the C and D guys (Northern STV, Kurzen’s boys, for example).
“Now go kill their boss.” TOTALLY ignoring the fact that you have to fight your way through all of them again. Also ignoring the fact that their boss pats around and you may well have had to kill him while you were killing C and D.
I really just want to pick up that quest, pull the guy’s head, or snuffbox, or the key, or whatever, and say, “Oh, this? I already got it.”
My favorite of all the jokes is the human male one about “The Brotherhood of the Bracelet.” Long, but worth it!
I think the male human just does a generic disco dance.
The male blood elf does the Napoleon Dynamite dance, and the female does Britney Spears’ dance from (I believe) the “Toxic” video. The female tauren does the Electric Slide or one of the other country line dances, and the male dwarf does the Cossack dance. My favorite is the male undead, who does a headbanging metalhead-type dance.
No kidding. There’s exactly one human male face I can tolerate. Most of them look either “constantly angry” or simply “mouthbreather”. And I can’t stand most of the human facial hair options.
I don’t know if they’re all “named” dances, but I believe all of them have real origins. I love this video for showing many of them off.
If you watch closely, the male gnome does that dance where you pretend to spank your partner. And the male draenei do a dance from some Turkish or Indian pop group.
Tunak Tunak Tun, by Daler Mehndi. It’s gained popularity as an internet meme, so it tickled me to see it on the Draenei. Without the music it doesn’t really work well, though.
I’ll second this one. I especially hate it when I get the quest to kill some unique named monster immediately after I’ve randomly encountered and killed it. My first experience with that was Arra’chea, below TB. I happened across him, killed him, and then was handed that quest as soon as I went back up to TB. Then, of course, the !@#$% simply would not respawn, at least not where I could find him. The easiest way to fix this would be to simply make sure these named monsters with quests attached are always carrying the “proof item” (like Arra’chea’s horn) so that, like you said, you can just say, “oh, I already did that”. They’d have to make the item unsellable, of course, or provide some clue that you’ve got a quest-related item.
To add my “wish”: There are some items that monsters should always drop, at least when you’re on a quest. In particular, those quests where somebody in town wants to fix you some food recipe and they need “6 pieces of Boar Meat, 6 pieces of Stringy Buzzard Meat”, etc. It stretches my suspension of disbelief when I have to kill 47 pigs to find 6 pork chops. See, the other 41 pigs had no meat on them. They were just skin and bones and a few pieces of cheap armor. Or maybe they were tofu pigs. And those Defias guys: every damn one of them is wearing a red bandana. So why don’t I get a red bandana off of every one I kill when I’m sent out to collect their red bandanas? They should change the text of these quests to something like, “I need you to go out and grind for XP by killing pigs.”
Haven’t heard that one yet, but I just discovered the “/silly” command yesterday and haven’t played any of my male human characters since then.
I think I saw somebody doing that one. I also got a chuckle when I discovered my druid can still dance in animal form. I like the cat dance.
The absolute pinnacle of this are the hunting quests in the Barrens. I can really believe that there’s an ecological disaster in the making what with all the beakless plainstriders and hoofless zhevras. At least all the raptors have heads and all the savannah prowlers have claws when you actually have those quests.
And the livers and snouts in Westfall are bad, too. God knows how many boars I go through looking for the damn livers.
God, yes. Westfall is horrid for this. Westfall Stew and Goretusk Liver Pie have you hunting for four different ingredients, all of which have utterly horrible drop rates. I refuse to do those quests any more, as they steal a little bit of my soul each time.
On the other hand, the Moongraze Stag cooking quest at Azure Watch on Azuremyst Island is fantastic, because the tenderloins are a 100% drop rate. In addition, the recipe stays orange and yellow for a long time, so even once you do the quest it’s dead easy to raise your cooking skill as a Draenei early on. Azuremyst and Bloodmyst in general are extremely well-designed and don’t piss me off nearly as much as the classic starting areas do.
The male orc dance is straight out of MC Hammer’s video, “Can’t Touch This”.
HAMMATIME!
Shirt & tabards. They have no specs, so you can pick 'em for looks.
I want to skin taurens! They should drop a special leather that can be used for making some special PVP gear. “Look at me, tauren warrior! I’m wearing pants made from your brother!”
Of course, then my tauren death knight would want to make a hat out of a gnome…
I agree wholeheartedly. I can do productive stuff on a bus, train, plane, taxi, or ferry boat in the real world. Why can’t I make bandages or renew my buffs sitting passively on the back of a gryphon?
Of course, I can foresee trouble when I start a cooking fire on his head…
That, unfortunately, doesn’t get much better. At level 71, I was killing poachers. Look. I just fought that dude. He had two ears. I could see them. Why did I only get one ear from him? Did Mike Tyson run up and bite one off when I wasn’t looking?
That’s the best dance in the whole game–the only one I actually use. Although there’s a quest in Borean Tundra where you have to wear a murlock disguise. When you do it, do not forget to type /dance.
Ah, the raptors. Yes, they all have heads. It’s just that when you get that “Stolen Silver” quest, the raptors head for the hills or step into a portal to another dimension or something, because suddenly you can only find one at a time, and once you’ve killed it it doesn’t respawn for something like 20 minutes.
And get this: one of the ingredients you have to fetch for the Westfall Stew is okra, obtained from killing Harvest Golems. Then when Mrs. Saldean hands over the recipe … there is no okra in the recipe! I suppose this is because, while you can obtain the other three ingredients elsewhere in the world, you can only get the okra in Westfall and they didn’t want to force you to run back there every time you wanted to make the stew. But in that case, why bother with the okra for the quest?
Worst of all was Redridge Goulash. You have to obtain something like 8 pieces of Condor Meat. There is exactly one condor that spawns within spitting distance of Lakeshire. It rarely drops its meat. It takes forever to respawn.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Blizzard didn’t intend for people to run right out and try to complete those cooking quests in one go. I think they’re more of a “kill these beasties if you happen to spot them while you’re doing other quests” thing. Problem with that is that you’ve got the items taking up space in your bags for a long time.
Actually, with “Stolen Silver” you end up wishing the raptors would disappear. The silver is in a box on the ground in the little canyon where the raptors breed, down near the Alliance keep on the south shore of the Barrens. You aren’t even required to kill raptors for that quest, though you have to to get to the box.
There’s other quests where they make you collect far more ingredients than is really necessary for the item they’ll give back to you. Although it’s not a cooking quest, the one that comes immediately to mind is the Yeti Fur Cloak quest in Hillsbrad/Alterac, where the guy wants you to collect like 8 Yeti pelts to make a single cloak. The Yetis are all twice as big as me, and I’m a frickin’ Draenei, you don’t need ONE whole pelt!
I’ve decided that in these cases, the extra stuff is payment. Mrs. Saldean wants the okra for other things, and the cloak maker wants a stock of pelts. I always did find it a little odd what NPCs would give you for doing nothing that directly benefits them.
In the time you spend waiting for it to respawn you can run across the bridge, turn left (IIRC), and find dozens of them.
If I run into a situation like that now, I look up the quest at thottbot.com – there are usually a few people who have given the precise location of the highest concentration of whatever you have to kill.
Many of the answers give coordinates, so you’ll either have to take a ruler to your screen or get a mod (I use TitanPanel) that displays coordinates.
The way I rationalize things like this (and the lack of Goretusk Livers and all the other ridiculously low and inconsistent drop rates) to keep me from going insane is by figuring that I’m hitting the mob so hard and so many times with my sword that I accidentally cut an ear in half/sliced through the liver/otherwise ruined whatever item I was supposed to be gathering. I think this problem could easily be solved by the addition of the word “Perfect” or “Unblemished” in the item description. “Unblemished Goretusk Liver,” “Perfect Murloc Head,” etc. It’s not that everything you kill doesn’t have the item–it’s just that most of them are unsuitable for the questgiver’s needs.
Yeah, it’s a lame justification. But it does work.