Monthly Archives: July 2013

Okrut Dragonwaste

This guy is one of the hardest tamers you’ll come across as you level, for a variety of reasons. It seems kind of silly but I’m breaking him down before some of the later guys, because he’s such a big stumbling block for so many players.

Here’s the team:

I went with the Hopling because of the single-round stun. You may want to use something like a Flayer Youngling, the Anubisath, or another humanoid. I wouldn’t recommend the Kun-Lai Runt, because he’s at his best with stuns, and stuns are generally a bad idea in PVE (the NPC usually switches out a stunned pet, so you don’t get the benefit). For the second pet, I have my speedy rabbit Dill as usual. All these pets are fairly slow though, so even my H/B rabbit is faster than the second two pets. Almost any critter will work here, but the mitigation on the rabbits is really nice, as always. If this is your first time fighting him, go with a humanoid and 2 critters, hopefully with a dodge, burrow, a heal, etc. Some kind of avoidance and longevity, basically.

The first pet, Drogar, is a violet-reskinned green proto drake. He has a Flying mitigation move, Flamethrower, and a self-heal. I go with the humanoid here to kill him as quickly as possible, hopefully before he can heal too much.

This is the tricky part. The rest of the dragons on his team are undead, so a humanoid is not so helpful. However, the next pet uses elemental damage, so it’s not like he’s just going to flop over. I use the Hopling until he dies, then swap to the rabbit, which deals extra damage against undead.

At first we’re going to just attack, until Sleet casts Ice Tomb. Then, we’ll wait a turn and use Dodge or Burrow, or whatever avoidance ability your critter has.

This is mostly because it’s a big hit and not so much because we have to avoid the stun, but if you want to use a pet without the critter family stunbreaker that’s a consideration too. Being undead he’ll resurrect for a turn, but you should be able to dispatch him fairly easily.

The last pet is Rot, a Scourged Whelpling, with a ground AOE attack, plagued blood for a small heal per hit dealt, and Shadowflame, which does middling damage. It’s a particle-effecty good time.

Just keep on hitting him and dodging where necessary. This is the easiest part of the fight, but don’t get too cocky. Use your avoids against Shadowflame when possible and burn him down. He’s also undead, so make sure you have enough health or pets to get past that one last round.

This may take a few tries, but just take deep breaths and keep going.

For your Awfully Big Adventure with your Elekk Plushie, I’d recommend the Anubisath Idol & Rabbit combo.

More 5.4 PTR Shenanigans

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On the PTR you’re randomly awarded level 25 pets as you churn battles. I started getting them after I had a level 6+ pet, and I’d already beaten the little girl in Redridge. The next time I logged on, boom, 25s. Beyond that I’m not too sure, but this was on a copy of my Live toon. No intact achievements or pets, but I was able to pick up the Tamer quests all the way down, even though I hadn’t technically been able to beat them yet. It’s a little weird. If you’re trying to see for yourself, just buy a cat and start cascading your way on up.

Anyway. As of last post I’d been awarded Niuzao and Yu’lon, but it was pretty clear that they were still being worked on, as their moves were all identical, and they were scaled to be ridiculously huge. Now, all 4 have unique, individual moves, and the pets themselves are much smaller.

First, we’ll look at Yu’la, Broodling of Yulon, who is the pet I’m suddenly most excited for.

The Celestial Blessing ability looks to be a soft counter for Force Swap. I’m not sure about her other abilities in terms of actual PVP viability though… she seems very one note, but what a note.

Zao, Calfling of Niuzao looks like a lot of fun to play.

As noted in the video, in addition to being relentlessly cool, Zao also has a bunch of really useful abilities. He has Wish, which automatically makes him an excellent pick in PVP or PVE. You could cast Wish, and then back it up with your Niuzao’s Charge and reduce a lot of the risk from your down time. He honestly seems a little overpowered right now, but this is PTR after all, so we’ll see how things shake out. We still don’t have even the slightest idea of how these pets will be earned, so his OP-ness might be a reflection of how hard he is to get. We’ll see.

I still don’t have either of the last 2 pets, so I can’t show them in action, but they also have new & improved ability movesets.

Chi-Chi shares a name with the worst Mexican franchise I’ve ever eaten at. The pet looks to be far less terrible, with a mix of bird-style abilities. He has an elemental variation on the typical flying Quill. He gets a regular old Alpha Strike, and Wild Winds on the Flying side. He has Feign Death and Tranquility, and an ability like the the Anubisath Idol’s Deflection.

I’m not sure where he’s going to fit in just yet. The defensive stuff is intriguing, but this seems to be a really odd, scattershot set of abilities to me just now.

Xu-fu, Cub of Xuen, looks like he’s going to be a tiny ball of teeth and biting teeth with teeth and blue fur. It looks like there are 2 ways you can go with him. Either you can pair the new Spirit Claws, which hits relatively hard but has low accuracy, with Moonfire (yes, the cat can moonfire. you know, somehow), which increases Spirit Claws’ accuracy to 100%. Or, you can pick the not quite so hard hitting Bite, and pair that with the Absorb-like Feed, which heals you for your damage done.

The third slot features either Prowl, which may give the first choice a big edge, or Vengeance, which is very new, and hits your opponent for the last damage you took. This may be a good pick as a counter pet to those buffed hard hitters like, oh, I don’t know, the upcoming Zao!

Can you tell I’m really, really excited for the tournament to get here already?

edit – of course, right after publishing this post, I got both xufu and chichi.

Flowing Pandaren Spirit Tamer

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Update for 6.0: This strategy still works really well as a two-pet leveling strategy. If you’re here for an Awfully Big Adventure with your Elekk Plushie, this works perfectly well for that, too.

It is about good freaking time I wrote this, but I’ve been putting it off.

This Spirit Tamer uses a gimmick I’ve seen parroted a few times in PVP. It combines huge damage with stuns, but it’s relatively quite easy to counter if you know what’s coming.

Here’s the lineup I use:

There are a few other ways you can go. The Tamer’s first pet is aquatic, so I use my dragonbone hatchling Legree to counter. I would definitely recommend something that does a lot of Flying damage with some kind of avoidance, namely Lift-Off. A moth with Cocoon also works, but not *quite* as well. My speedy rabbit Dill is there for the dodge/burrow combo. We’ll get into why in a bit, because I use it a little bit differently here. I’d recommend keeping with a critter, because the last guy is elemental, and you definitely want at least a Burrow or Dodge or something. A Core Hound Pup might be an alright choice if you have one. I initially did this fight with my Perky Pug, so just the one avoid can work, too. The pet to be leveled is fairly high level and not Mechanical because there is a lot of AoE flying around.

The first pet is an aquatic fish named Marley. He has Dive, Whirlpool, which pops up a lot on Emperor Crabs in PVP, plus Pump, which makes all those abilities hit harder when it’s active and then gets unleashed for big damage.

Whirlpool is particularly devastating in PVP, because it restricts swapping, but here it’s just a lot of damage. He’ll also pair this with Dive, so that if you don’t avoid it somehow, it’s a huge amount of damage all at once. We’ll use Liftoff the turn before it blows up to avoid it, easy peasy. I prefer a bird with Lift Off to Cocoon, because Cocoon will only avoid one hit so you’ll take lots of damage from Whirlpool or Dive (because as a flyer you’re going to be faster), but my experience is that a moth can rip through here fairly easily regardless.

Next up is the critter Tiptoe. He has an AoE with Tidal Wave, a straightforward nuke, and a heal. You want to kill him ASAP because of the AoE. I just keep attacking/avoiding with my Flying pet until it dies, and then swap to my rabbit. Tiptoe doesn’t have a lot of burst damage, but if he heals a lot you’ll find yourself with a dead back row.

(NOTE – As of 5.4, Tiptoe the strider is now properly classed as an Aquatic battle pet. However, I still use the strategy as performed, and really, we’re a bit better off because the Flying pet we used for Marley continues to have strong attacks.)

Kill him ASAP. I use Burrow to try to get big damage, but other than that, don’t worry about defense with your main pet. You’d just be wasting the turns you have until his heal comes off cooldown.

And now, Ladies and Gents, the gimmick.

The Flowing Pandaren Spirit casts whirlpool like the fish, but pairs it with Geyser for enormous damage, at the end of a round no less. Luckily, with your rabbit, you can just use your Dodge or Burrow abilities to avoid it.

I don’t use the typical rabbit ‘pattern’, because after the first set where both Whirlpool and Geyser hits at once, the two abilities are out of sync. I use Dodge to counter one and Burrow to counter the other. If the pet you chose is working off just one avoidance ability, avoid the geyser. You should make it past the first one no problem as they’re sort of synced up, and you’ll likely make it past the second series at the very least.

I’ve been seeing the geyser/whirlpool combo in PVP a few times recently. The only pet with this combo is the mini Flowing Pandaren Spirit, so if you see that coming, you know what you’re in for, but you can try using whirlpool or geyser with Dive for another decent combo.

In the end, you’ll be able to beat this spirit rather handily, even if he doesn’t make for a good choice to level lowbie pets.

The reason I was waiting on giving him his own walkthrough is because of the central conflict of Mists of Pandaria. It makes me deeply sad to think of this Spirit Tamer, being here for time immemorial, training his pets and enjoying the natural beauty of southern Krasarang Wilds. Long before Garrosh took to destroying the beauty of the Vale, he also ruined the serenity and beauty of this Tamer’s far-flung locale.

We’ll get him little guy, though it’s cold comfort now.

I also made a quick & dirty video of this fight if you’d like to watch for more help.

Rabbit

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Yeah, I know. I already highlighted the frogs and now I’m going for Rabbits, which are just as low texture, though at least these ones have eyes.

The reason I have to highlight these is that they’re fairly key in a lot of both PVE and PVP strategy. They are better at turtling than Turtles. The combination of Dodge and Burrow means that, if conditions are right, your pet will only be hit a couple times after several turns of evasion. Those conditions include your rabbit being a Speed breed, or your opponent being super slow. As discussed in my Breeds post, this can make quite a bit of difference. If you have a Speed breed rabbit, it is one of the fastest pets in the game. If you have a different breed of rabbit, it is still going to be quite fast, but it’s not a lock for evasion the speed breeds are.

And now it’s time for another video, yay! This one pits my S/S rabbit Dill and my H/B rabbit Lennie against the first pet in the Thundering Pandaren Tamer fight. I continue on with the fight with Dill, just in case my acclaimed writeup on the topic wasn’t enough to help you beat him. I get it, different people learn in different ways.

The only rabbit with no available speed breed is the Elfin Rabbit. The Spring Rabbit from the Noblegarden holiday is the Speed breed by default, but you have to burn a Critter token to get them up to Rare quality. They also have, by far, the most amusing idle animation.

Beyond just rabbits, speed is incredibly valuable in PVP. If you get a very speedy pet and your opponent chooses to swap pets, you can frequently make them ‘skip’ turns while swapping. For Rabbits, this not only increases your avoidance right then, but makes you one turn closer to your next Dodge.

Sometimes in pvp, you can practically hear the frustrated shrieks through the monitor at your adorable little ball of fluff and evasion.