Category Archives: pet profile

Willy

Children’s Week is coming soon (the start date is 4/29 this year), so as we get closer I’ll be doing posts on the pets you should grab first if you’re starting from zero. Some of these pets have unique movesets that make them valuable for any collector. It’s not that I don’t like Speedy a whole bunch, but for the most part, a turtle’s a turtle.

All the Childrens’ Week pets start at Uncommon quality, so you’ll need a stone to make all of them rares. However, they’re all tradeable too, so you may be able to snap up an improved one from the AH.

Aside from being a clumsy penis metaphor, Willy is the only currently attainable non-combat pet which resembles a classic d&d Beholder, which could make him useful for RPers. Even more unique, one of his idle actions among others zaps other players’ pets into oblivion with an eyebeam. If you’re in the AH or a raid with the gratingly cheerful Singing Sunflower, bring out Willy and see if he can do something about it.

But sometimes, he doesn’t feel like it. Clearly this is my kind of pet.

As mentioned earlier, Willy’s moves make him unique. He’s Magic, so he defends well against Aquatic. Magic attacks are strong against Flying, but he has a varied toolkit, dealing Critter and Undead damage as well. All this make him a fairly strong leveling pet for a newbie, especially if you run along the coasts fighting aquatics.

You get him from the OG Childrens’ Week quest from either Orphan Matron Nightingale in the Cathedral District of Stormwind or Orphan Matron Battlewail in the Drag (lower level, beneath the inscription trainers) in Orgrimmar.

Singing Sunflower

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My current aim in-game is to get rares of every tamed pet. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out in Dalaran Crater, looking for a rare Lofty Libram. As I flapped around uselessly killing dozens and dozens of rats, I noticed something odd.

I saw the towers of the Undead in the not so distant distance, and in between this pinnacle of unstable magic and the plague-happy undead, there was… a farm? What kind of wacko would try to farm there? I mean, Arathi Basin notwithstanding.

As I moved closer, I saw the traditional yellow exclamation point on my map. Current for a level 90. Alright, this is going to be good.

Alright so, let’s pick up the quest and… WHOA.

This is a takeoff on the popular tower defense app, one of my personal favorites, Plants vs Zombies. You’re in a ‘vehicle’, so even if you do this on a PVP server you’re unattackable for the duration of your quest.

I use Pitbull and Dominoes, and it screws up the buttons a bit. The display is where the abilities are located for the last leg of the quest. Mousing over each button gave me the information of the ability in the tooltip. The quests will walk you through playing the game bit by bit, what each plant in your arsenal can do, until you get to the big show with the full complement of plants.

Then, after you finish the quest line, you get a pet!

The Singing Sunflower is pretty much junk. It’s an alright support pet, but it has pretty much no offensive oomph. It’s annoying to kill if you don’t have a pet with a weather change ability, and I could see it being somewhat less junk in PVP if you’re less lazy than I am and keep track of cooldowns and swap it out a whole bunch, but UGH.

So, why bother? It’s a little ray of sunshine. It’s almost like having your own portable Sha of Happiness. Scratch that… it’s a little HORRIBLY ANNOYING Sha of Happiness. It sees any horrible place and brightens it up a little.

Every so often, the Singing Sunflower lives up to its name and randomly starts singing. In the AH. In dungeons. EVERYWHERE. The song is a short snippet from a song in Plants vs Zombies, voiced by the person who sang the PvZ song. In fact, because of the traffic to her personal site from searches she also has her own how-to guide for this pet.

The great part is, this song will get stuck in your head and stay there for days. And then, every time you pull it out again, you will repeat this. It is unstoppable! It is inexorable! It is–

♥ {◕ ◡ ◕} ♥

Magical Crawdad

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This pet is magic indeed. He has always been a vanishingly rare pet too. Why is he so rare? The answer to that question is typically always either ‘fishing’ or ‘TCG’, and in this case, it’s fishing. And whoa boy, is it fishing.

This guy went live in Burning Crusade. Like almost everything that went live in Burning Crusade, there are several steps to this process, and they’re all a massive pain.

Step 1 – As you can make catches from pools at any level of fishing, it is no longer necessary to grind your fishing to max and find a bunch of upgrade gear and lures and crap. You must still have a flying mount though, with the exception of some bonkers ways you can get to the location via engineering. But just, no. Flying mount.

Step 2 – Go to Terokkar Forest. Go to any water accessible only via a flying mount. Find a Highland Mixed School. Fish in it.

Step 3 – Fish in it until the pool runs out. Go find a new pool.

Step 4 – Repeat step 3 until you wear your fishing keybind to a nub.

Step 5 – Miracle of miracles, the RNG Gods smiled on you and you caught a Mr. Pinchy! I’m obviously being hyperbolic here, but not totally. At his launch during BC, Mr. Pinchy had roughly half the chance to drop from any cast in a pool as a Sea Pony does, I believe his drop rate is now increased, but that doesn’t take away that feeling of ‘OH THANK GOD FINALLY.’

Step 6 – Make sure you have at least 1 bag slot open to catch your crawdad, and use one of your wishes to Mr. Pinchy.

Step 7 – Be annoyed because he gives you a crummy level 70 buff. Be even more annoyed because now he has a 24 hour cooldown. That cooldown is internal by the way, so if you catch 2 today, you won’t run out of wishes until almost a week from today. Hooray! ish.

Step 8 – Use all 3 of your wishes. Mr. Pinchy disappears. OH FOR THE LOVE OF LITTLE GREEN APPLES.

Step 9 – repeat all that crap until you finally get a Magical Crawdad!

Why would you want him? Uh, the prestige? Filling out your stable?

A better answer would be that he makes an excellent tank. You can choose between the typical tank abilities Shell Shield & Renewing Mists, and he’s one of two pets with the very interesting heal ability Wish. The latter is very powerful, and makes him not only a good tank but an excellent support healer, since you can swap pets between when he casts it and it hits. Nearly any time I rave on about my fantastic crab you can use the flashier Crawdad instead.

So, why did I choose a crab? Look, did you even read the rest of this post? Sigh. Besides all that, the reason I go with the crab even though I have a crawdad is because I find the combo of shield + mists easier to manage (ie, I barely have to pay attention) in pve than Wish, even though Wish is a better heal, especially for higher health pets. If you want a tank pet for PVP though, consider a Crawdad.

Perky Pug

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The Perky Pug was my very first must-have pet in the battle system. He was my mage’s puppy familiar before pet battles hit, so it made sense that he, along with my old-school raiding mascot Mr. Wiggles (“let’s do this, Wiggles.”), and the novel Terrible Turnip, made up my very first battle team.

There were 2 big issues with using the pug, though. The first, largely cosmetic one, was that WoW wouldn’t let me give him his original proper name, Mr. Rochester. Even removing the honorific, Rochester just wasn’t allowed. I’m guessing because of the ‘chest’ in the middle. So, he became she. Bertha, the sublimated passionate side of the dichotomy of the nature of Victorian women. What? Oh come on, pick up a book once in a while dude.

The second issue was that Bertha, like her namesake, was both ferocious and yet impotent. All perky pugs start off as Uncommon quality. So, although she was really good at fighting pretty much anything out in the world with a choice between 2 strong self-heals and an avoidance ability, she didn’t do so hot in tamer battles once I got past the initial string of quests.

At this point I started building my second team, featuring the Clockwork Gnome, Celestial Dragon and Chuck. I didn’t give up on Bertha because she was still awesome in world battles, but I needed the extra oomph to get past the tamers. it’s smart while you’re starting off to have a stable of 5-6 varied pets & pet types anyway, because there’s always that one ‘up yours buddy’ battle where you have to all but start from scratch.

At long last I found a Critter Upgrade stone, and of course, Bertha was the very first critter on my list to upgrade. She was my first level 25 too, and now she’s very key in my strategy for beating the Thundering Pandaren trainer. Being a critter, she shakes off the stuns no problem, and then she uses her burrow ability and heal to avoid pretty much everything else. She’s still very strong for taming and a favorite to bring out while adventuring in the world.

This is also one of the easier pets to obtain. Right now, it ranks #2 on Guildox on the list of most popular pets. Most people get it almost by mistake. You run LFD, and then after you’ve grouped with 100 people found through LFD, you get an achievement and a pug in the mail. Unfortunately you’re only allowed 1 pug per account, so you can’t have a Bertha and a St. John Rivers and a Grace Poole. Oh come on, it’s classic literature. God. The achievement only counts random people, so if you queue with your tank buddy that run only counts as 3/100.

The only pet which shares the pug’s moveset is the MoP CE pet, the Lucky Quilen Cub. That pet also starts out rare, so if you have one and don’t necessarily want the cutest pet ever, you may want to go with the Cub instead.

But uh, if you should decide to go with the pug, you may want to set aside the cash you’d spend on a CE. Just in case you need your carpets steamed, or something. Just sayin.

Fel Flame

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I figured that since I already wrote up posts on two members of my core team, Ishmael and Prufrock, it was time to highlight Dante as well.

The Fel Flame is a glass cannon at its best. He has 1 strong nuke, 2 strong nukes with DoTs (one of which is a Dragon spell, so you can kill both mechanicals and magic battle pets really easily), a weather effect with a DoT which doesn’t affect him because he’s an elemental, a self-buff DoT which persists even if you send him to the back row (making him a very strong partner with a pet Plagued Blood, like the Restless Shadeling). And lastly, he has Conflagrate, one of the stronger nukes in the pet battle game even though it was nerfed significantly in 5.2. Even though he is generally weak against critters, he still finds time to menace them in his spare time.

I use Dante against pets (especially mechanicals) that I need to burn down ASAP, like Jeremy Feasel‘s tonk or Major Payne‘s mechabird. I typically equip him with flame breath, immolate and conflagrate. I use one of the two DoTs to make the victim burn, and then use Conflagrate immediately (depending on the other pet’s mitigation abilities, like Burrow). Conflagrate is on a 4 turn cooldown, so the sooner I use it the better the chances I’ll be able to use it again.

The trade-off is that his glass cannon has an emphasis on the glass. Dante is as fragile as my parents’ hopes I’d make something of myself. You need to make use of his explosive DPS with the expectation that he’s not long for this world, or else team him with pets that make use of AOE heals, with a bunch of swapping in between.

Fel Flame is a catch from a wild pet battle in Shadowmoon Valley. As such, there’s not a ton of leveling you need to do before he’s a killing machine, which is good, because it’s kind of a pain to level elementals.

There’s some debate over how to incite them to spawn which isn’t surprising, since they are supposed to be kind of rare. I can say fairly confidently that the current rumor that you must have completed the Shadowmoon Valley quest line Cipher Of Damnation is false. Here’s Liopleurodon’s quest count in the zone so you can see where I’m coming from here.

So, not wanting to invest the 45+ minutes to do that quest line, I killed the elementals in the area. After 10-15 minutes, a couple of the wild Fel Flames spawned, ready to battle. I haven’t done this enough to say for certain that this isn’t just coincidence and I showed up at the right time, but what else are you going to do while you wait, crochet a poncho?

Terrible Turnip

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The Terrible Turnip is frankly, kind of terrible. How could a reanimated root vegetable be any good at murdering a bunny anyway? They EAT root vegetables. There’s an entire zone in Pandaria devoted to how bunnies eat vegetables, and that’s where you get him, so how could he possibly be a good choice for battling?

He’s an Elemental type, with mostly Elemental type attacks. This means that he defends poorly against Aquatic, of which there are many in the world, and his attacks do poorly against critters, of which there are many in the world. He defends really well and attacks very hard against mechanicals though, which aren’t much of anywhere.

So, why even bother writing about this baddie, Liopleurodon? Well, hold your horses and I’ll explain.

Weakening Blow. It brings any pet to 1 HP, and will not go any lower, like the screenshot says. This makes for quick, stress-free taming of wild pets of any level, and as of now Terrible Turnips are the only pets that have it. Need to find that rare Black Sheep? Use Weakening Blow once, and now you can tame it. You can use him on minfernals without worrying that you’ll kill him, too. For higher level pets, you can also use his sunlight ability early on. This increases the max HP of all the pets, so the point where you can use your trap comes much sooner.

The novelty of beating up pets with a turnip made him one of the very first pets I tried to level. It was so difficult to keep him alive to get XP, and because of the critters & aquatics I faced very frequently in the world he couldn’t really do anything. I ended up swapping him out for Chuck around level 8. This is pretty much why I’m writing this post. Lots of tamers talk up how incredible Turnips are, and they really are, but if you’re just starting out he is a rather poor choice. Don’t mistake useful for powerful! I ended up making him my 9th level 25 pet.

To get this incredible utility, you have 2 options. One, you could use Farmer Yoon’s/your farm and finally make friends with the RNG. You can get him as a rare drop when you dig up a fully grown crop. Or, you can make your way to the AH and buy him off someone else who got lucky and doesn’t know how incredibly useful this pet is.

Clockwork Gnome

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Look at this majestic little gnome. So pensive. So brooding.

My clockwork gnome Prufrock was one of the very first pets I chose to level, and I chose well. He is still one of the first pets I choose for world battles. Being mechanical, he’s very strong against beasts. I use him when I need to take down three of the harder battles in the game right now: Major Payne, Aki, and Jeremy Feasel are all mowed down summarily by his turret.

The turret is one of the strongest moves I’ve come across thus far. It deals 3 bursts of 50+ damage for 4 rounds, on a 2 round cooldown, so you can occasionally get out 2 at once, and it persists through the death of the gnome. There are 2 counters to this. One is a removal-type ability, like Tidal Wave. Prufrock is rather weak against the Flowing Pandaren Spirit as a result. The other is a shield-type ability. Of these, Spiked Skin is especially deadly. Not only will it negate your turret, but you’ll take the damage intended for your victim. Brittle Webbing acts similarly, so watch out if you’re fighting spiders.

Being mechanical, he also has Failsafe, so you can get off an extra round or two of abilities with him. You can use his strong, 2-round heal ability Repair through Failsafe, too.

My personal favorite though, is how he interacts with his Wild Golden Hatchling buddy, WasteLand. I typically only use WasteLand’s Call Lightning ability and then swap immediately back to Prufrock. Call Lightning increases the amount of damage done by mechanical abilities, and adds an additional hit to every shot of Prufrock’s turrets. I started doing this after Prufrock chewed through most of Aki’s team like it ain’t no thang, thanks to Stormlash using this ability.

So, how do you find your own version of this dapper little middle-aged fatalist robot? Archaeology. Sigh, I know. He’s a rare combine from Dwarven digs, making him kind of a hassle to farm. But just look at that little face. He’s tradeable though, so if you have a couple thou to drop on your friendly local AH, he can be yours without all that hassle.

Emperor Crab

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Most tamers have a battle pet or two they favor, whether for sentimental or cosmetic reasons or because they’re good at fighting. This particular pet has been my workhorse since I tamed him, and is definitely one of my favorites.

Aw, just look at those ickle beady little eye stalks.

The emperor crab is very similar to many other crabs. If you’re just starting out, the crab sold by Matty to goblin players has the same moves, though starts off at uncommon quality and will need to be upgraded with a battle stone. The strand crawler also has the same moves and is obtainable without battling at all via fishing, and starts rare. Both of those may be available in your Auction House. Shore Crabs are around Westfall at level 3-5 too, among other places, so those are a good pick for a novice.

The reason my little buddy Ishmael is my go-to pet for nearly any situation is because he combines a very strong defensive ability, shell shield, with either a moderate self-only heal or my choice, a heal over time over 3 turns, which persists through pet swaps. For the third slot, he has either a beast or an aquatic damage ability, making him able to kill any elemental or critter silly enough to cross his path. He can survive almost anything PVE throws at him. I did have to ditch him for a couple of the later tamers though, since a couple of them of them use a lot of Flying abilities. He also tends to do poorly against pets with a lot of burst, but can really clean up in PVP these days. He’s my personal choice to counter those annoying Valk teams.

If you want your own Ishmael, you can tame Emperor Crabs in the Briny Muck in the Dread Wastes, either by battling Emperor Crabs, or you can get one as a second to Rapana Whelks. Unfortunately, you cannot tame any of the ones plaguing Ka’roz.