The Pandaren Spirit Tamers were first added to World of Warcraft as a new challenge for pet battlers in patch 5.1. Each lives in a far-flung part of Pandaria. Each is a representation of an element, and each has its own separate guide, featuring a video.
A brand new holiday pet! And this one is super cool and useful as a battler. Be still my beating heart!
Oh. Yeah, that is kind of an insensitive turn of phrase to use here.
The reason it looks like it’s waving in that screenshot is because it also does the Undead headbanging dance. When I was fooling around with it on PTR, any time we stopped moving, it started dancing with its wee little maracas. It also dances through battles when it’s not performing an action. I wasn’t lying when I said it’s cool.
So, what’s the catch? Its quest is only available for two days a year.
The Macabre Marionette is available as a part of the Day Of The Dead festival, loosely based on the Mexican holiday Día de Muertos, but previously it wasn’t a companion pet per se. It was an unlearnable item in your bags which spawned this little dude, like the very old school companion pets. It disappeared once the two-day festival was over. It looks like Blizzard changed their mind for this year, and the Marionette will be trainable as a battle pet at long last.
In order to see the spirits and obtain the Marionette, you have to go to the graveyard of the city where your racial quartermaster is. This is especially confusing for Worgen, whose leader hangs out doing nothing in Stormwind while their ‘home’ tree thinger and quartermaster is in Darnassus. Most other races are relatively straightforward. Trolls, Orcs & Goblins go to Orgrimmar, Gnomes and Dwarves go to Ironforge, etc. The graveyards in Dalaran and Shattrath allow all comers, too.
Before you leave the city for the graveyard, you should grab at least one Simple Flour and one Ice Cold Milk. The quest objective is a Bread Of The Dead, the recipe for which is obtained in the graveyard for 20s. Note that you can only cook the bread over a special blue campfire located directly near the vendor. The other catch is that in order to see the quest NPC at all, you have to use a Marigold. Marigolds are cheap, but have an extremely short duration. You can repeat the quest multiple times on the same account during the holiday, and can do it with any level character, but you cannot do quests in multiple locations (eg, going from the Worgen spirit in Darnassus to the Dalaran spirit).
It’s really not much of a hoop to jump through, but it had best not be for such a tiny window of acquisition. Though, luckily, it is tradeable, so if you repeat the quest a few times on a few characters you may be able to make a quick handful of gold in a month or two.
The pet’s revamp into a battler is very interesting. Note that it starts off Uncommon, so it’ll require a stone. It has a few old abilities–siphon life/death & decay in the second slot is a fairly common Undead MO, and Bone Bite has shown up in the past as well. It has the new Macabre Maraca, a 100% accuracy humanoid nuke, which makes me want to try pitting the Marionette against Yu’la. It has Bone Barrage, an ability similar to the critter Nut Barrage, only undead. Lastly, also very interestingly, it has Dead Man’s Party, which is similar to Flock.
The reason I find this moveset interesting is because, not only will it make it a terror against dragonkin, but it seems like Blizzard has been making pets with a moveset similar to this recently. There have always been Swarm-ers, Flock-ers and Stampede-ers, featuring Critter, Flying and Beast damage respectively, but Lil Bling was just added with a mechanical version of this ability, and now this pet for the undead version. Undead and Mechanical are rather under-represented caught pets, and this brand of move is such a good one for PVE synergy it makes me curious for the future. What new pets are coming, and what new fights are being planned for the next expansion? I’d be willing to bet some imaginary money that we see either some kind of Torrential Downpour ability like this from caught Aquatics next expansion, or maybe a Sonorous Frog Croak akin to Howl.
But, ultimately, Day Of The Dead is about remembrance. For Gilneas!
In general, this pet (along with the Ghostly Skull) seems to be the fallback for other, less attainable,0 Undeads. Don’t have an Unborn Valkyr? Use a Ghostly Skull! Don’t have a Crawling Claw? Try the Creepy Crate! While he may be second choice in a lot of battling situations, he has extremely unique animations and a seasonal questline to pursue. And, he’s one of the very, very few pets not acquired by capture which isn’t cageable, so if you want one your only option is to complete the questline during Hallow’s Eve.
Go to the AH and buy 2 Strange Dust right now, before somebody buys them all up and lists them for 500g a pop! I’ll wait. Aw, somebody already did? It, um, it might have been me. Sorry. Well, not really. Find a lowbie enchanter friend who doesn’t know any better or something and come on back.
The quest starts at the main inn in your capital city, either the one where Gamon always got creamed in Orgrimmar or the one in the Trade district in Stormwind. You’re directed to find a courier in the harbor of each city.
He’s fairly dead. Disgustingly, you’re directed to follow a trail of bright pink glowing spiders to the auctioneer who fenced the goods stolen off the courier after he was murdered.
That auctioneer didn’t actually take the goods though, so you’re directed to somebody else in a shady part of town, again via spider trail. The quest giver who awaits you sends you to go get stuff to make a potion to protect you from the box, because boxes are dangerous sometimes. This is where that strange dust I mentioned earlier comes in. You need to visit a vendor for some vials. If you have a mount with vendors, you can buy the vials there. You also need to head to either the Tauren area in Orgrimmar or the farm sort of near the Cataclysm portals in Stormwind to gather the quest herbs.
After creating the potion, it’s time for the showdown. Horde hop the Zeppelin to Undercity and have a confrontation in the ruins of Lordaeron. Alliance go to the Cathedral of Light, into the catacombs on the right hand side. There will be another path of purple spiders, so if you get lost backtrack to the point you last saw them and follow them. There will be an NPC there, channeling a purple looking thing while standing over a crate. If you’re on a high-pop server, you may need to wait for ‘the confrontation’. Eventually he spawns 2 voidwalkers, and as long as you get an attack in on one or the other the quest should complete.
After this, you have to make one last choice. If this is the first time you’re running through I won’t spoil it for you, because regardless of that choice, you’re then left with the Creepy Crate.
As noted above, the Crate is sort of a fallback pet. For force swaps, its health breed makes it slightly less useful than the speedy Bone Spider, and its Curse of Doom shares a slot with its Death Grip, making it a bit less deadly than the Crawling Claw on a force swap team. Its Curse of Doom hits for far less than many other pets, and with its only heal being Devour it isn’t so hot as a tank pet. Its most unique ability, BONESTORM, doesn’t help its position as a tank either. On a 3-round cooldown, you can use bon–excuse me–BONESTORM to deal 200 damage to the entire enemy team, but only by sacrificing 10% of your total health.
The other thing it shares with the Ghostly Skull is, when you acquire it, it starts off as Uncommon. Because it’s untradeable as well, you will want to save an undead upgrade stone if you intend to use him full-time.
The Crate doesn’t take this second-class citizen stuff lying down. In its jealousy and the insatiable hunger the quest warned you about, it will frequently use its Death Grip ability as a companion pet to eat other critters roaming around. When it does, each pet consumed by your crate will count toward Crittergeddon.
The Sinister Squashling was, for a long time, the iconic non-combat pet for the Hallow’s End holiday. He was exceedingly rare, and only dropped from the Horseman, which each character could only summon once per day (giving you theoretically 5 chances for disappointment in each cobbled together 5 man). He was also Bind On Pickup.
Like so many things, this has changed. The Squashling now not only drops from your daily prize bag from queuing for the Horseman, but from nearly every container associated with the holiday. As a result, if you do nearly anything during the holiday, you’re sure to collect several. They’re both cageable and Bind On Equip now too, so you might be able to AH one of your half-dozen for 5g or so during the off-season.
It shares moves with several others in the Elemental family, namely the other shrubs. No other plant has his exact moveset, because of the ability rather dangerous to most plants, Burn. It makes sense for the Squashling though. Homeboy’s got a candle! All the other abilities in his moveset are echoed across other (mostly elemental) plant-type Elemental pets. Thorns, Poison Lash and Leech Seed could find themselves at home in a DoT team, maybe. Stun Seed is akin to Geyser, but lacks a bit of the offensive firepower that makes Geyser so popular.
Plant is a very interesting ability with an offbeat mechanic. Theoretically, you could heal for nearly your entire health bar… as long as your Squashling can stay alive, active & planted for 10+ rounds. If you go up against a force swap though, you’re still swapped out and lose that healing. With 2 ‘down’ rounds for activation & deactivation plus being rooted in place like a sitting duck, it’s really more a liability than anything, especially for pvp.
What it lacks in battling, it makes up for with cute animations, including a ghoulish laugh when you click on him out in the world. Even better, he’ll root himself to the ground when you’re idle, so if you happen to be walking through a pumpkin patch, someone may not realize what’s in their midst, until it’s too late.
In the previous post we discussed the general ideas for building a team. In this post, I’m going to build a brand new team for PVP step by step.
Of course, at first we’ll begin with a little gloat about how super awesome my brand new Xufu is. So cute and bitey, awww. Xufu is a unique–well, more prestigious than unique–pet, so I really want to experiment with him in PVP. Using what we learned about synergy in the previous posts, we’ll look closely at Xufu.
There are 2 different builds we can use for Xufu, generally speaking. We can either take Feed (middle slot, top), or we can take Moonfire (middle slot, bottom) and Spirit Claws. Vengeance (last slot, top) could be fun, but is a bit dependent on your opponent. If you go up against, say, a Call Lightning team it would be a wasted ability, but if you go up against another Xufu with a prowled spirit claws it would be a really big hitter. So, it makes more sense to just go for the prowled spirit claws, I think.
As discussed in the previous post, synergy is a huge player in PVP. So here, I’m going to be a little bit daring, and rather than keeping Moonfire on Xufu, I’m going with the ultra deadly self-heal Feed, and find another pet that applies Moonlight.
The first tool I go to to build my teams is typically Wowhead.
With their filters, I can look up things that cause weather effects for starters. As of now, there are 3 abilities which cause Moonlight. Moon Tears is one option. The only thing is, Xufu is a Beast, and so is Moon Moon, making this team especially vulnerable to mechanicals, a very popular family in PVP. That Howl synergy though, man. Hmmm. Starfall is kinda cool in the tooltip but in my experience doesn’t really do a ton of damage or healing in practice. At a much shorter cooldown that might be an option, but at this point it’s not really worth it. So, Moonfire it is.
I’m going to be sending this pet out first in nearly every situation, so I want it to be kind of hearty, to test the waters. As a result I’m going to nix the nether faerie dragon and sprite darter for now. Their dodge mitigation could be excellent, but other than that they’re made of paper. Harmonious Porcupette and both the Moonkin Hatchlings are excessively rare right now, so my getting rid of them for consideration is totally for your benefit and not at all because I don’t have any of those pets. Nope, not at all. Between the Celestial Dragon and Emerald Whelpling, I’m going to go with the Whelpling. Celestial’s Breath offense is kind of lame, and its heal is self-only. The Whelp will give us a magic Bite, which will be boosted by moonfire, too.
For the 3rd pet, we have a few options. We can use a supplemental buff pet, a defensive pet, or an offensive debuff pet. Many of the trickier debuff pets (eg, my pvp BFF, the Zandalari Raptors with Black Claw) won’t really work here, because both our chosen pets have single-move abilities, not DoTs. Since both the Whelpling and Xufu have a move buffed by Moonlight, I figure I may as well go with a 3rd.
The only non-Spirit Claws, non-Magic ability buffed by Moonlight as far as I can see is Creeping Fungus. So, now we go to the game to figure out which we’d like to use. Among the pets with that ability, I think I’ll go with the humanoid Sporeling Sprout.
The Fungal Abomination might be a better pick here, because it has an offensive self-heal, but another important part of team building is looking at your own roster and improvising. My Sprout is way higher level than the Abomination. I’m pretty sure you don’t want to sit through yet another Eye Of The Tiger montage. Also, I get that per-round Humanoid heal when the Sprout is in the back row, which can be good for a damage over time strategy.
So let’s try it!
Well. I’m not sure I’d call that entirely viable. Maybe with the higher health Abom and a bit more practice figuring out where to set which pet in rotation it would go a bit better. A big flaw here is that, while the dragon can kind of hold its own, and Xufu can definitely hold its own, the sprout is really offensively weak. I’m thinking we can make a swap and really make this combo deadly.
My first thought is going back Moon Moon for Howl. But, those initial family vulnerabilities exist and to make this combo really work I’d have to use Moon Moon’s Magic abilities. If we went up against a single mechanical (attacks strong against Beast, defends against Magic) it would probably wreck my entire team. Back to WoWhead!
There are 3 different types of abilities to consider. The Shattered Defenses buff caused by Swarm-style abilities is generally a huge liability in PVP, because you have several ‘down’ turns where you don’t deal a ton of damage, but your opponent can swap around and nuke you however they’d like during that time. It has its place (another post for another time!) but we’ll ignore those this time around. Then there are 2-round, 100% extra damage taken Howl-style debuffs and 3-round 25% extra damage taken Acidic Goo-style debuffs. In looking at Acidic Goo, I also notice Unholy Ascension. Unholy Ascension is probably the best move here because it debuffs your opponent’s entire team for 9 turns, but it bugs me to have a key point of strategy that only applies after you lose a pet entirely. But even before that, the Val’kyr is really strong offensively.
Alright, let’s try it.
At this point I’ll continue to woodshed this team, but it’s just about there, I think. It may need some additional tweaks in terms of makeup, but it’s definitely possible that I just need more practice with it.
And yes, I would call that matchup successful and the previous one less so, even though I won the first bout and had a pet left to beat with nearly full health. If my opponent hadn’t randomly passed in the first match I most certainly would’ve lost. In the second match I had a stall pet, which wasted much of my Valk’s buff, and 2 other pets that attacked strongly against my frontline offense. This is something you’ll get a better feel for as you develop more teams.
And now it’s your turn. Try taking that one pet and build a team around it. If you share your results here, I can help you work on it, too.
I know I’m not the only one out there with a mage alt.
If I’m not playing Frost, with my gigantic sonorous bff Blubs by my side, I feel like I’m missing something. A mage needs a familiar. My mage’s typical chosen familiar is a little offbeat, but if you’ve been hanging around this blog for awhile you’ll probably guess that it’s my Perky Pug. But dogs aren’t the iconic companion of a mage. At the point I rolled my mage, cats were the property of Donni Anthania in Elwynn Forest, and my blood elf is far too fabulous to go paying cross-faction prices. Then, another option arose.
If you play a mage, you will want to add the Feline Familiar battle pet to your arsenal. If you don’t, you should probably start. You’ll still want to add this pet to your arsenal in any case, because it is a fantastic battler, with a unique range of abilities.
It’s one of 3 Beast pets with Magic abilities in Onyx Bite, making it nice against Flying pets but super vulnerable to Mechanicals.
It also has Stoneskin, making it a strong defensive choice as well. Prowl almost always makes for an excellent combo. Also, oddly, this pet uses Call Darkness, which is coming into vogue as a heal breaker. If you choose that move though, you need to be careful to time it and your Devour ability, depending on which moveset you use. It rounds out its moveset with Pounce, which is good offense but really contingent on your opponent.
This battle pet is only available during Hallow’s End, which is starting up on October 18th for North America realms. You purchase it with Tricky Treats, the Hallow’s End-only edible candy currency. You can get those from the treat buckets scattered in the inns across Azeroth (with associated achievements for grabbing them all), or various daily quests as well. I really enjoyed the one where you ride over Stormwind and plant stinkbombs everywhere.
This cat is one of the few companion pets to follow you while you’re on a flying mount. This seems a little goofy, because it’s a cat and all. What it lacks in wings, it makes up for on a teeny tiny flying broom.
So, now you have a few slots and probably a few pets. This is where team building and synergy come in. Yes, I know I sound like I stepped straight out of Office Space in the previous sentence.
The general idea of team building is that there are certain abilities and certain pet types which work together really well. If you can find pets that go well together, you’re frequently far better off than just picking 3 pets at random. A really good example of this is the Howl Bomb team previously discussed on the blog. Each specific member of the team brings something to buff each other, or an ability which benefits greatly from the buffs of the others, and then you annihilate your opponent.
There are a few basic guidelines that almost always apply, all the way up & down the gamut of battling.
1. You almost always want to use pets from different families.
2. Buffs, Debuffs & Weather Effects = Good.
The first is easiest to explain. In both PVE and PVP, most teams you face will have more than one family in its makeup. A family is a subset of pets with common defensive strengths and weaknesses. For example, all Undead pets defend weakly against Critter attacks.
However, if you were to make up a team with a couple rabbits and a squirrel, all critters, and fought a snake and a couple scorpions in the wild, you would have a really hard time winning the fight, because the wild Beasts would eat your Critters alive. If you added a turtle you’d be better off, and a clockwork gnome in your 3rd slot would even things out nicely.
Occasionally in PVP you may get lucky, and your team with a fel flame, water waveling and lil rags will come up against lil bling, a clockwork gnome and a tranquil mechanical yeti, but best believe the next opponent you face will be packing aquatics.
The second point is easy to explain, but as you delve deeper it gets into additional impenetrable Office Space-style jargon. It starts out with the same idea as say, Curse of Elements. If you’re a mage and have a choice between bringing along a warlock friend with CoE or a dps warrior friend with the Sunder debuff, you’d probably bring the warlock, because sunder does nothing for you, and warlocks pretty much exist to give mages buffs. It’s similar with pet battles. If you have an Eternal Strider with Cleansing Rain, you’d be far better off bringing, say, a Curious Oracle Hatchling with Dreadful Breath than a Spider which has no bonus to give to the strider’s abilities and vice versa. That’s synergy.
For lowbie wild fights, the family part is the most important. In the wild, there are usually lots of critters and beasts, and a smattering of aquatics and flyings. For the most part, if you join a wild pet battle, the seconds will be one of those 4 families. There are a few exceptions (winterspring & the plaguelands, for instance) but if your team features a pet which attacks strong against 3 of those 4, you’ll be in good shape. Namely, you’ll want something with beast, mechanical, flying or magic attacks. Some pets have attacks outside their family, so keep that in mind when you make your selections.
If you’re going to level up organically (ie, not through a cascade method), you’re going to want at least 2 teams of pets, so you can swap things around and not visit the stable master every other battle. Keep in mind, you can supplement with caught pets if your current choices fall flat. When I first leveled up, my team included a Terrible Turnip I eventually had to ditch, because he did less against both beasts and critters, so my other 2 pets were pretty much dragging him along. And if you do make a poor choice, you can swap out on the fly without a ton of consequence.
At this point, go level your chosen pets up to level 3 or so. Next post is team building for your very first tamer battle.
BattlePetRoundup.com 