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Pet Battles in Warlords of Draenor

Here’s all the information you need to know as a pet battler going into the Warlords of Draenor expansion. Some things are changes to basic systems, and some are brand new challenges, but it’s all here in one spot for easy reference.

Accuracy – Many pet abilities which currently have a less than 100% accuracy rate have been changed to 100%, but now have a wide range of damages to compensate for that increase. Click here for my article discussing this sweeping change in pet battling acc uracy, as well as a couple examples.

Breeding – First announced via tweets during Blizzcon 2013 (source), breeding battle pets for different stat outcomes has since been shelved for 6.0 (source). It may still come about in a later patch or expansion. Click here to see why I think the shelving of breeding is a good thing.

Charms – Many pet challenges in Draenor, rather than awarding the customary bags, will now award pet charms. These charms are currency, traded at your Garrison’s Menagerie to either Serr’ah or Lio The Lioness (that’s me!) for a multitude of different things, including bandages, the usual rarity upgrade stones, or brand new family-specific stones which grant a pet a single level. They also offer for that same new currency the pug hats available on the Timeless Isle.

Leveling – The level cap for battle pets remains level 25 for Warlords. (source).

Menagerie – The initial focus of your pet battling in Draenor will be the Menagerie, a building in your Garrison. The details on this are numerous, including new vendors, currency, daily quests and challenges. Click here for my overview of the Menagerie from both the Horde & Alliance garrisons. I also have a list of strategies, both for unlocking and the daily menagerie challenges.

Tamers – A series of new, relatively easy tamers will be present around Draenor. I created a post with a series of maps to show you where all the new tamers live.

An Awfully Big Adventure – This challenge, designed for only the most experienced of tamers, requires 2-pet carry strategies for a number of fights across Draenor. The 3rd pet is the new, tailor-crafted Elekk Plushie. I have a work-in-progess guide for all 44 fights in your Awfully Big Adventure but be warned: these are not my typical strategies!

There are a great number of new pets to trap, drop & craft in Warlords of Draenor as well. Below is a playlist of videos I’ve made to highlight certain new pets, representative of the challenges, tames & cute faces we’re going to be seeing very soon.

Warcraft Pets Pet Of The Month

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I have to be honest with you guys. I’ve been seeing someone else. It’s a little bit serious.

I’m co-writing a monthly feature on the Warcraft Pets site called Pet Of The Month with one of their admins, Quintessence. The feature is a bit similar to my pet profiles, but I’m going much further in-depth on some points of strategy you might find really useful.

I’ll be giving you a heads up over here every month when it goes live. This month, we’re featuring the Anubisath Idol. It’s a solid pet whether you’re a newbie or a veteran. There’s also an associated forum post, so you can argue with me too, which is always nice.

This is a very occasional feature, so it won’t really affect my posting here. I mean, other than a slump at the beginning of the month because I’ve bitten off more than I can chew but what else is new. So, click the link and get battling!

Farmer Nishi

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9/25/2014: This fight is now up to date for Warlords of Draenor. For an Elekk Carry, simply use the advice for a regular carry.

Nishi was the laughingstock of the Pandaren tamers for a good long while. Most player tamers could solo her with nearly any level 25 battle pet. Located in the heartland of Pandaria’s Valley Of The Four Winds, she made an easy target even for those level 86 alts.

However, a bug fix in 5.4 gave her claws.

The abilities her pets avoided using in order to make her such a pushover were suddenly back in full force. Luckily, like most of the other tamers, as long as you know your counters, you are good to go.

The Strider has a lot of very strong aquatic offense and a weather effect. I’ve used frogs in this slot too. Either is fairly reliable as long as you make sure to switch in that weather effect. The crab is pretty much just there for cleanup. I’ve used mechanicals in that slot, because this battle pet will be facing Nishi’s beast, but if my first pet goes down early this can make for bad times because the rest of Nishi’s pets are elementals. A Flying with Lift Off or the Anubisath Idol makes for a good anchor too.

The biggest chunk of your strategy begins immediately. Nishi’s Siren has Solar Beam, which hits very hard normally, but tacks on an extra big hit if it’s in Sunny weather. So of course the first thing Siren does is cast Sunlight. You need to change the weather, now. You have an intervening turn where Siren casts a heal on itself before it’ll explode your pet’s face off. If your first battle pet is above Siren’s speed (280) you can put in your carry pet off the bat and enough time to change the weather. However it’s important to note that if your pet is at or below 280 speed you won’t, so you’ll need to start with your first ‘real’ battle pet, and then swap in the carry pet further down the line. In this case I usually switch in the carry during Toothbreaker‘s Sons Of The Root, and make sure my carry is above level 8 or so. Either way is fine, but you just need to be aware of it before you start.

After you change the weather, beating Siren ain’t no thing. The very first thing the next pet, Toothbreaker, will do is submerge and start hitting you with Sons of the Root while he’s immune. When I use the Strider, I use these turns to do things like heal (by casting my weather again) and set up Pump. You really just have to wait a handful of turns while you take a bit of damage. Just stay calm and take your turns. Then, when he surfaces, beat him up. His offense isn’t all that strong.

Last pet, Brood of Mothallus, is a Beast with Burrow and Acidic Goo. That combo together can produce some devastating results. With the crab as long as I keep up heals and that shield I’m good to go, especially since Brood’s 3rd ability, the reflexive heal, is Undead damage. If I use an Anubisath, I use Stoneskin and Deflection to counter Burrow, and that’s all she wrote. With a Flying I use Lift Off when he Burrows and boom goes the dynamite. If I use a mechanical you know what I’m kind of running out of idioms to say I win, so let’s just say I win.

Now help me figure out how I’m going to steal this melon before Nishi sees me.

Here’s the video, recorded using the Elekk.

Wastewalker Shu

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Update for 6.0: This strategy still works really well. If you’re going on an Awfully Big Adventure with your Elekk Plushie, this strategy will work well for that too. Just swap in your Elekk where you ordinarily would any other battle pet to be leveled.

—–

It’s a new year, and my resolution is to stop slacking and write guides for all the tamers in Pandaria, as well as the Beasts of Fable, the latter of which I haven’t even revisited since they were radically buffed in patch 5.3. Of course this means I’m going to get the guide for Wastewalker Shu finished and then give up after two weeks and eat a lot of ice cream, as that’s how my New Years’ resolutions typically roll.

Wastewalker Shu is a little tricky. The moves you use to beat his pets are somewhat counterintuitive, based on the strategies we’ve used up to this point. But then, what do you expect from a Pandaren who’d just set up shop in the middle of the Dread Wastes right next to Klaxxi-Vess, and then randomly decided to take up pet battling? A whole lot of logical decision making?

The team is going to be pretty familiar if you’ve wandered around this blog before:

The Gilnean Raven can be subbed for many other Flying battle pets to great effect, and in this case can be subbed out for the Crow. It’s debatable whether the Raven or a pet with Lift-Off like the Dragonbone Hatchling is a better choice, but the Raven tends to make for a faster fight. The Crab is there, as usual, because Shell Shield helps a lot for this fight, and others with similar abilities will work here too, like the Anubisath Idol, Feline Familiar, etc. The carry pet is mid-teens because of some potentially nasty AOE.

First up is Shu’s crab, Crusher. The reason I favor the Raven is because Crusher has a heal in his moveset. The reason the Dragonbone Hatchling is also an excellent choice is because Crusher also has whirlpool, which can be a pain for the Raven. It’s also worth noting that the Raven uses Peck in its moveset, and not the usual Alpha Strike. Crusher’s main attack move is Surge, so after his first couple rounds, your pet isn’t going first for the purposes of Alpha Strike’s additional hit.

Second is Pounder, who is the oddball. He immediately leads with Sandstorm.

A weather effect, oh no! *THIS* is why we brought that Raven really, right? To change the weather? We always change the weather! Nope, after a quick Rupture, poor Pallas usually goes up to birdie heaven. If Pallas dies before that Rupture, we’ll swap to the Crab as a soak, then switch to the carry pet for a turn before putting the Crab in til the end. Pounder’s main nuke, Quake, is an AOE that hits for roughly 300 in the front row, 150 in the back, for 3 rounds. Add Sandstorm’s shield effect and that Quake hits for diddly bupkis.

Sandstorm’s duration is only 5 turns now though, so if you opt to choose a pet with Sandstorm over a self-shield, you may be able to go even lower with your carry pet. The sandstorm shield is also one reason why I opted for Snap instead of Surge.

You should finish Pounder with your pet at full (or nearly full) health, at which point Mutilator comes out.

My crab is slower, especially after Mutilator starts in with Powerball, and I didn’t choose Surge for my crab so Mutilator’s Counterstrike won’t proc its extra damage. Because my crab has shell shield, I’ll absorb the reflexive damage from his Spiked Skin too. Just keep wailing away at him while you keep up your defensive abilities, and he’ll be toast in no time. If you’re having trouble the first time around, sub in a single-hitting beefy mechanical here (the clockwork gnome’s alternate moveset–NOT the one with turret–is a good pick) and you should be golden.

I’d end with a witty one liner but I really need to get out of here. Jeez Louise I hate bugs.

The video guide:

The Curious Case of the Elemental Family Ability

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Most battle pet family abilities and their implications in a fight are pretty easy to figure out by reading the mouseover tooltip in your pet journal. Most of them are relatively straightforward. Well, the Undead one is a little goofy in practice.

Your undead battle pet will resurrect for its immortal turn immediately after being killed. If you’re using a slow pet killed in the first half of a round, your pet will resurrect and carry out the action you’d queued before this round. You then get a sort-of ‘extra’ round resurrected.

But, this elemental racial.

It seems straightforward enough, but then you start figuring in all the different weather effects and exactly what the nature of ‘negative’ is, and it gets kind of complicated. The confusion I had with this ability was cleared up by WoW Dev Jonathan LeCraft on Twitter:

I guess. Mostly? Um.

So, with that arose this post. I’m going weather effect by weather effect and laying it all out on the table. This is as much for me as it is for you.

To be clear, the application ability of weather will still hit, barring accuracy issues or blocks, so eg, your elemental will take the ~450 damage from Call Darkness when Darkness is applied.

Sunny Day

Elemental Pet: health greatly increased, and heals for more.
Opponent Pet: health greatly increased, and heals for more.

This matters for percentage-based attacks, and if you or your opponent can heal you can close that gap. You’ll all lose that additional health if the Sunlight lapses though. There really isn’t a negative effect here so elemental battle pets don’t gain an edge in Sunlight.

Moonlight

Elemental: receives additional healing, magic abilities hit harder.
Opponent: receives additional healing, magic abilities hit harder.

Moonlight is a really good example to illustrate the concept. Although magic abilities hitting harder could be considered a ‘negative effect’ (the Sunflower takes additional damage), this isn’t applied on the elemental’s end. It adds a multiplier to the magic abilities of the elemental’s opponent, making this a case where the ‘negative effect’ still applies. In other words, it’s not that the magic hits the elemental harder, it’s that the non-elemental’s magic hits its target harder.

Arcane Winds

Elemental: Cannot be stunned or rooted.
Opponent: Cannot be stunned or rooted.

Arcane Storm is pretty straightforward, as stuns and roots are (generally!) detrimental. This weather effect is an excellent counter to the spider PVP team comps I’ve been seeing pretty often recently.

Sandstorm

Elemental:
Opponent: Takes (X) less damage per hit, accuracy reduced by 10%.

{EDIT} – I was incorrect here, as pointed out by Skarn in the comments. The elemental does not currently gain the damage shield effect, which appears to be a bug (twitter link: https://twitter.com/TheCrafticus/status/419169945335775232). I will be updating this section to reflect this info after more thorough playtesting. I certainly take blame, but will deflect a bit of that blame into boxed wine.

This is another of those strange cases. You’d think that the elemental’s damage would blast right through the Sandstorm. The damage shield is considered as a personal effect like though, so instead the opponent just soaks up that positive effect for itself like the Stoneskin effect. The accuracy blast still makes this a decent bit of weather to use as an elemental, as long as your elemental isn’t trying to stack DoTs on another battle pet or whatever.

Scorched Earth

Elemental:
Opponent: Takes (X) damage at the end of the round; Burning (for abilities like Conflagrate).

In this case, the weather effect is entirely nullified by the elemental. This makes for an excellent choice to avoid certain combos. You go, Sunflower.

Cleansing Rain

Elemental: Aquatic abilities deal more damage, harmful DoTs last one round fewer.
Opponent: Aquatic abilities deal more damage, harmful DoTs last one round fewer.

This is another case where the positive effect is applied at the opponents’ level. Aquatic abilities don’t hit harder on the elemental, they hit harder from the opponent.

Blizzard

Elemental:
Opponent: Chilled

This weather effect is used exclusively for synergy purposes. An Elemental is an excellent c-c-c-c-combo breaker here.

Darkness

Elemental:
Opponent: Blinded, heals reduced, accuracy reduced.

Seriously, Sunflower, I could do with you being slightly less smug in this screenshot. It’s like you don’t even care that you’re completely screwing things up for everyone else.

Mudslide

Elemental:
Opponent: Rooted for 3 rounds when swapped to the front row.

This one pops up only very infrequently, and never, thus far, in the PVE game, but it’s good to know that you can avoid it altogether by using your elemental.

Lightning Storm

Elemental: Deals 10% additional Mechanical damage, takes (X) additional damage per hit.
Opponent: Deals 10% additional Mechanical damage, takes (X) additional damage per hit.

This is the effect that I found the oddest. In light of that tweet at the top of the post, it makes a bit more sense, but I’d assume that an elemental wouldn’t take the extra damage on each hit from lightning. Unfortunately, it does. If mechanical pets didn’t measure up against elementals like undeads against a paladin, this would be an excellent use of weather to defeat an elemental. The DoTs and other strategies can still make good on it, but not so much with mechanicals.

Hopefully this post helped shed some additional light on the weirdness that is the Elemental family ability. Using a family’s ability to the utmost can really help your pet battling strategies be their absolute best. I started drinking around Moonlight so I don’t really know what’s going on but this was super fun so let’s do it again sometime.

Anubisath Idol

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Let’s talk about this OP jerk.

I’m sorry, was that overly prejudicial and just a tiny bit bitter? The reason, as a dedicated pet battle blogger, I kind of hate this pet is because its moveset gives it a bunch of utility unparalleled in nearly any other pet. If I write a walkthrough somebody frequently chimes in with, ‘I just use the Idol.’ Well, unless it’s an encounter better served by using the Pandaren Water Spirit which–don’t even get me started.

If you’ve read through the archives here and are familiar with the blog a bit, you’ll know that my style of guide is somewhat wordy. I usually describe a fight, my tactics, and make suggestions of types of moves across a number of pets to counter a tamer’s strategy. My aim is that you’ll be able to find a solution to a tamer’s puzzle with what you have in your stable already, even if you need to level it a bit. As such, you’ll frequently see phrases like, “a damage shield” or “avoidance move” or “a pet with some kind of weather.” The reason I engaged in that bit of baldfaced bias earlier is because this pet? This pet has all three of those.

The Anubisath Idol has Stoneskin (damage shield), it has Sandstorm (weather, and ersatz damage shield to boot), and it has Deflection (avoid). There really isn’t another pet with this kind of utility. A snail may come close, but the function of the more difficult to time Dive makes it so that you’re still somewhat vulnerable to certain counters and definitely to most DoTs, while Deflection is a straightup dodge everything move. Also, the Humanoid Anubisath has very few weakness in the current tamer battles while Critters generally get eaten alive on the regular. As a result, the Anubisath Idol can stand in on nearly any of the Pandaria tamer battles without blinking an eye. I’ve seen a few walkthroughs floating around claiming that you can carry a pet on all of the Pandaria tamers with him and one other battle pet.

His one Achilles heel is that his offensive accuracy is a bit low. His highest accuracy offensive move, Crush, is a base 80% hit chance. If you happen to choose Sandstorm, its accuracy hit means this plummets further to 70%. His other main offensive move Demolish shares that slot, and hits ludicrously hard but has an extremely low base 50% chance to hit, making it generally a poor choice prone to RNG woes. To round out the moveset, also RNG-heavy, is Rupture, with a 25% chance to stun. This shares a slot with Deflection, generally making Rupture not worth it.

His model is a fun, unique one, straight out of AQ40, which is where he drops. You can also buy him off your friendly neighborhood AH, but he tends to be on the pricier side because he is so invaluable as a fighter. He is also a part of the Raiding With Leashes achievement, making him one of many necessary to obtain in order to get Mr. Bigglesworth. Bigglesworth has a lot of good utility himself, with some avoids and a stun or two, but it’s not the near-universal utility the Anubisath has.

Guys, I’d tell you to go nab this pet ASAP but really, this guy’s utility is so good that he’s kinda putting me out of a job here. So if you love me and want to keep reading, please make like Nancy Reagan and say no to this teeny juggernaut.

…Please?

Pet Battles 101 – A Beginner Guide

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This is the list of posts I’ve made for beginners to WoW pet battles. This guide is very much a work in progress.

Starting Out – The brass tacks of pet battles. This post covers where to buy the skill, how to access your pets, how to heal your pets, and how to engage in your very first fight.

Team Building Overview – A look at how to start building a decent team for general use, including some tips on synergy.

Team Building For Tamers – A more thorough overview of how to construct a team to fight a Tamer. Includes tips for your very first tamer pet battle.

Team Building For PVP – A more thorough overview of my personal method for selecting a team to engage in battle pet PVP. Includes a few videos.

Breeds – An explanation of breeds in pet battles. What a breed is, and what it can mean for your pets. Not to be confused with pet breeding, which is a new feature reportedly coming in Warlords of Draenor.

Five Good Pets (and one lousy one) – A quick list of 5 pets you may find useful throughout your battling journey.

Cascading (a battle pet leveling technique) – An extreme shortcut for those wanting to get their first level 25 battle pet as quickly as possible.

Rotten Little Helper

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The Tickle Me Elmo of pet battles for the 2013 Winter Veil holiday season is the Rotten Little Helper.

You know, if Tickle Me Elmo had a board with a nail in it.

He has a chance to drop from the Stolen Present from the You’re A Mean One (Alliance Version) daily. The daily is available for all your characters level 80 or above, starting today through Winter’s Veil. The Rotten Helper can also come from the Gaily Wrapped Present under the Winter Veil tree in either Orgrimmar or Ironforge, starting December 25th through the end of the holiday.

He’s a very unique little cantankerous snowflake. He’s a humanoid with mechanical abilities, a distinction only shared with the Anubisath Idol’s RNG-heavy Demolish and the Curious Wolvar Pup’s Snap Trap. The Helper’s mechanical abilities are the Minefield-esque Booby Trapped Presents and Greench’s Gift. Greench’s Gift is rather interesting, as a relatively high-accuracy ability with a 5 turn cooldown.

Most of the rest of the abilities he has are borrowed from Winter’s Little Helper, namely the synergistic Call Blizzard and Ice Lance combo, and the utility stun Ice Tomb. Rounding the moveset out is his single Humanoid ability, the straightforward Club.

Like the Winter’s Little Helper, he may make for a good team with a Kun Lai Runt for PVP, but he’ll also be geared toward stomping Beasts with critter offense in PVE.

Abilities aside, he’s also pretty charming because of his general sunny demeanor. His on-click interaction are the annoyed male gnome NPC dialogue when you click on them too many times in a row.

Another year, another chance to get coal in your stocking.

Hyuna Of The Shrines

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6.0 Update: This strategy is still fully functional for level 1 carries against Hyuna. It’s also now functional for an Elekk Carry as a step in the achievement An Awfully Big Adventure.

Depending on your journey through Pandaria, this is either one of the most idyllic pet battles around, or one of the most depressing, making it an absolute must to complete before we continue on to unbroken Draenor.

Well, some of the ‘must do’ status is also because you can carry a level 1 pet here, but that’s so much less poetic.

The Feline Familiar is, as addressed on the blog before, a very unique battle pet. I like using mine here because of the magic damage against Hyuna’s first battle pet Skyshaper, a Flyer. As long as you use a pet with Stoneskin or something like it (even Sandstorm) you’re good to go. I really like using my Emerald Whelpling with Emerald Presence here, and that may be a better choice, but it’s a bit less attainable than the Feline so I chose to highlight the latter. I’ve even used my Emperor Crab in this carry strategy successfully, even though he takes extra damage from everything Skyshaper dishes out. I’d recommend staying away from the aquatics in general though.

The Gilnean Raven can be swapped with many different flying pets too, but the anti-healing effect of Darkness combined with the Raven’s strong offense makes her my #1 pick here. Lastly, the placement of the pets is important, as we’ll be sending in that level 1 Marionette late in the match.

The reason for the shield ability is clear fairly quickly. All of Skyshaper’s abilities are small hits, and it’s also packing DoTs. As long as you keep that shield up you’ll make it through no problem.

Fangor is a fairly standard snake, and you should make it through at least half of his life with your first pet. He’ll Burrow early on though. If you’re having trouble and just want the bag, I’d recommend a mechanical here, with a but. You’ll be able to summarily mow down this snake with say, a Clockwork Gnome, but the fight really starts once you get to Dor the Wall so you need to choose your moves carefully.

Dor has a big heal and uses a Shell Shield of his own. The very first time I did this fight, I blasted through the first two pets in under 10 turns, but the entire fight lasted over 150. I was using my usual anchor, the Emperor Crab, with his own heals and Shell Shield.

The heal is why the Gilnean Raven, with its Call Darkness heal counter, shines here. Because of the shield, you’ll want to stay away from multi-hits, like Moth Balls, in favor of large ones, like Moth Dust.

Dor’s 3rd ability, his only offensive one, is Headbutt, which is where that level 1 carry comes in. Headbutt is on a 4-round cooldown, so once he performs it the first time, you have 3 rounds to swap in that level 1 pet with no risk. With a Safari hat, he’ll be level 11 after you win.

Hopefully in far fewer than 150 rounds.

Skywisp Moth

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Recently, I’ve launched onto an impromptu project, working out a way to do the Celestial Tournament with only tamed battle pets. It’s rather hit or miss thus far. This little moth, added in 5.4, is fairly instrumental in my strategy for that.

Don’t let its cute, glowing particle effect fool you. It has a very unique combination of abilities which turns him into a veritable beast killer.

Taming one is a bit of a challenge. In order to get to the spawns, you have to be able to access the Timeless Isle. I’d also suggest going on a character with a bit of offensive firepower and some kind of slowfall or a Goblin Glider. A mage is really excellent.

In order to access these guys you’ll need to hitch a ride on an albatross.

It’s not a very, let’s say, pleasant proposition for your character, especially since those albatrosses like to take their sweet time sauntering their feathery behinds around, but doing so is fairly key for accessing several different things on the Isle. Once I get past the areas with a lot of player foot traffic I usually try to get the albatross down so that just a couple of hits will kill it, because if you overshoot your target it’s quite the pain in the behind. You may need to do this several times to get the breed or rarity you’d like too.

The reason for the slowfall is that there are only 2 ways down. Either hitch another long, circuitous ride with another albatross, or jump.

The reward is worth it. This is one of the best pets to kill Beasts, bar none. Aside from the largely unattainable Dragon Kite ($80 USD or so on ebay at the time of this post) this is the only Flying pet with a mechanical ability, making it both offensively and defensively strong against beasts. This guy is particularly suited to go up against Xufu because his Cocoon Strike ability can be timed to intercept either Xufu’s Feed or the enormous first hit of Moonlight. Many moths have Cocoon, but lack the offensive firepower to beat Xufu down before his next Feed. Call Lightning is a game changer.

For Xufu and this tamed-pets-only project specifically I’m pairing him up with the very few mechanical tames that are out there. So very, very few tames. A fast Cogblade Raptor with Exposed Wounds and Batter in particular makes for a really nice combo. Were I not limited to only tames I’d also strongly suggest the Clockwork Gnome, a long-time favorite here at the Roundup to pair with Call Lightning.

If you’re using the Call Lightning ability I highly recommend using the Moth’s multi-hit Slicing Wind over Reckless Strike. Call Lightning shares a slot with Moth Dust, which has a chance to stun. It’s a decent ability, and it’s also key in many strategies which use other moths, making this particular moth kind of a 2-for-1 battle pet.

A fun ability which isn’t quite as functional in the situation I’m planning for here is Counterspell. Because it doesn’t ‘silence’ the ability along the lines of Nevermore, or even put it on cooldown, Xufu will just Moonfire or Feed on his next turn. Sometimes this delay is excellent strategy but here it’s far better to just absorb it.

Beyond the battle mechanics, for me personally this little guy will be an excellent companion as I make my way into Warlords of Draenor. With the ban on flight until 6.1, he will be an excellent reminder of the times I took to the sky and flew among the stars.