Celestial Tournament – Chen, Wrathion and Taran Zhu

7 Replies

As discussed in my previous entry on the Celestial Tournament, you have to fight a varying set of 3 tamers in order to get to the 4 Celestial bosses. One set is Chen Stormstout, Wrathion and Taran Zhu. Here’s a bit of rough strategy for this triad.

Wrathion tickled my fancy, largely because of the names of his pets.

He always starts off with Cindy, who is undead, followed by the dragonkins Alex and then Dah’da.

Generally speaking, I found Cindy the most difficult to figure out, largely because she is very fast. She starts off with 375 speed, meaning that the speed breed rabbits are on equal footing with all the other rabbits, ie not sucky, but not a total lock either. Her 3 abilities are Bite, Blistering Cold and Ice Tomb. Ironically, of the pets I had available (no bandicoons, which I think would theoretically be good) the best against Cindy were crickets. With a self-heal, cocoon (used mostly against Ice Tomb… the Blistering Cold DoTs didn’t trip it) and decent damage against Undead, the cricket usually made it well through to Alex without much issue.

Alex has Breath, Flamethrower and the healing Ancient Blessing. Dah’da has Shadowflame, Roll and the heavy damage, big stun Elemenium Bolt. The reason I’m discussing them at the same time is because both were rather summarily dispatched by my Anubisath. Deflect against Elementium Bolt was especially key. I opted for the shield rather than Sandstorm because I wanted to avoid the accuracy debuff, and the shield worked fairly well, especially against Flamethrower’s DoT. Dah’da’s Shadowflame hits fairly hard regardless, especially with the roll buff. I had to get in one last swing with a Grell once out of the three times I tried the Anubisath in the second slot, so this may be a candidate for a leveling slot. Bizarre.

Chen’s beast Tonsa is rather formidible, but I was generally able to get the critter Chirps and elemental Brewly down using just a Panther Cub.

Tonsa has Bite, Headbutt and Chew. The best mechanical for the job here seemed to be a Clockwork Rocket Bot of whatever color variation, even though the one I had at hand was only Uncommon. I used Toxic Smoke and Launch Rocket in particular. The Darkmoon Zeppelin with Block worked really well too, but I like to save that one for later.

Chirps is very interesting. He has Flank, Lullaby, which puts your current pet to sleep for 2 turns, and Locust Swarm. Locust Swarm is also a completely new ability. It’s like a cross between Swarm and Deep Breath, where you charge up a round and then the next round he deals ~700 damage across 3 hits. It’s pretty brutal, but you can kinda dodge it. However, he’ll also use Lullaby then use that next turn to charge up Locust Swarm. Luckily he has 281 speed so when I fought him, I used a panther cub to wreck him in under 3 turns. Nearly any cat with a Prowl will work here. I was even sometimes able to finish out the last pet, Brewly, but that was fairly hit or miss.

No, I mean, literally hit or miss. Brewly has a new ability called Inebriate, which decreases your accuracy by 25%, so sometimes I could wreck her no problem and sometimes she just sat back and laughed while my panther ineffectively pawed at her. I kept a strider in my pocket, and was able to finish out the fight without too much limping toward the finish. She also has the rather gross Barrel Toss and Brew Bolt, which is a relatively straightforward aquatic nuke.

To be completely up front, I wasn’t able to nail down a precise strategy for Taran Zhu. I was able to beat him, and notice some patterns, but I wasn’t yet able to replicate a win every time with a particular setup.

As you can see from the screenshot, he’s playing the part of PVP troll with 3 humanoid pandaren monks. But, only one of the monks, Yen, uses an ability player monk pets even have. It’s the stun, Blackout Kick. Yen in particular is a total jerk, also getting the critter ability Comeback, which hits hard against the Humanoid countering Undead, and Feign Death, which pulls him out just as he’s getting hit hard (and dodges any DoTs you may have up on him at the time in addition to your turn that round). Li has Triple Snap, the new heal ability Bandage, and Spin Kick, which is new, but functions very similar to Backflip, just with higher baseline damage. Bolo uses Punch, Blinding Powder, which gives you 0% chance to hit for one round, and Rampage.

To counter, my best strategy was to use Undead pets with big DoTs, namely Curse of Agony and Curse of Doom, especially against Yen. I did try to time my Curse of Doom so that, for example, Yen wouldn’t dodge it, and it would hit Bolo on the rounds I didn’t have Blinding Powder in my face. I did alright with a Stitched Puppy and a Howl/Diseased Bite combo. The thing is, typically if Yen started off with his Critter ability, I was pretty much toast before I even got started… the Gusting Grimoire, Lofty Libram or Lesser Voidcaller might be the answer, but I didn’t have those to use.

[Update 8/29/13] – Rather than the above magic pets, I ended up making liberal use of Mr. Grubbs. His Acidic Goo plus the Scourged Whelpling’s very long DoTs and the healing on Consume made this another duo fight! You do have to be careful and count turns a bit… when I timed it properly to Burrow through stuns and debuffs he really shone. If you don’t have Mr. Grubbs, any maggot or larva will work. If you don’t have the Whelpling, try a Restless Shadeling, maybe. Death & Decay was really the workhorse in this fight, oddly enough.

The big, overarching theme to keep in mind with all these fights is that once you use a pet to fight a particular tamer, you’re pretty much not going to want to use it again until after the entire scenario is complete. There are certain pets which would do well as a family counter to say, Chen’s Tonsa, but because you’re going to want huge burst against Zao (and maybe even against Xufu, but that’s another post) you need to keep a few heavy-hitting mechanicals in your back pocket… like discussed briefly above, the Darkmoon Zep can be very useful later.

Leveling Worksheet (italics means this suggestion carries to another triad): Anubisath, an undead and a maggot, a cat with prowl, a critter with some avoids, and a mechanical (specifically a Rocket Bot if you have a stone available, or can find an upgraded one).

Lashtail Hatchling

8 Replies

With the news that we are likely getting an extra 350 pet slots to make an even thousand this upcoming PTR build, it’s rather obvious that there are a lot (a LOT!) of companions in-game. There are some we grow attached to for one reason or another. My two closest companions are my perky pug Bertha, who is SO getting a pirate hat next patch, and Mr. Wiggles, my former raiding companion. I think a lot of tamers have pets who have seen them through rough fights or are just plain freaking cute, and develop a sense of companionship with their little friend.

There are only a very few though, which you can become attached to as a function of quest design.

Meet Imoinda.

She’s one of several raptor pets which have a similar model, and are largely functionally identical. You can go get a replica of her from Breanni in Dalaran is you have 50g on you, though in a recolored black. Most of the others are attained either by searching for rare mobs or drops, or buying them off the AH. Raptors generally aren’t much special as fighters (standard bite abilities, a few speed modifiers), so these are easily overlooked. But the Lashtail Hatchling is different. Her story starts in the steamy jungles of Stranglethorn Vale.

But that’s just because I’m there. Yowza.

As Alliance, you start off with that same old yarn about Kurzen that’s been there since vanilla. Yeah yeah, jungle remedy. Make sure you do The Fate Of Kurzen at the same time for efficiency’s sake. Unlike those old yarns, this time as you complete the quest, something happens.

This quest is a pop-up auto accept. After you turn it in, you get a quest to feed her. You kill basilisks, she eats, no big. On your way back to the rebel camp, make sure to swing past the Kurzen compound and free a group of adventurers. They make their way to camp to open up a later step.

Right now you won’t have a quest per se, but if you visit this pile of skulls in the Balia’mah ruins, your raptor will find a souvenir. Aw. …ish.

When you return to camp, you hand the skull to the recently freed gnome, Osborn Obnoticus. He’s all, “ooh, look at the size of this skull! This guy must have been huge. And powerful. Let’s screw with voodoo magic and bring him back to life.” And of course, your character thinks this is a fantastic idea, because nothing bad ever happened by trusting a gnome to be skilled with black magic he’s never encountered before.

So it comes as a huge surprise that, after a super adorable fetch quest and a standard kill-guy-loot-body quest, the gnome’s magic works flawlessly. No, really! The thing is, the person whose skull you found and the gnome resurrected is none other than Bloodlord Mandokir, the raptor boss from Zul’Gurub. Whomp whomp.

He tells you that you’d better hand over your new little friend, or the gnome gets it. Even though I’m sure we’d all prefer it if the gnome gets it, your only choice is to hand over your new little friend. Bloodlord Mandokir then runs back to ZG, leaving you emptyhanded and emptyhearted.

But hope is not lost. You get a breadcrumb to the next quest hub, where the eccentric Priestess Thaalia has you collect feathers from other raptors to do some magic. You are able to see your raptor friend. She’s still alive! But Thaalia needs more powerful reagents in order to do something about it.

She sends you on another standard kill quest, and then…

oh BOY and then. You now inhabit the body of your raptor friend, and attempt a daring escape, while avoiding all the trolls. It’s like Metal Gear Solid meets a basket of kittens in a way that doesn’t use kittens as a hastily constructed disguise that shouldn’t fool anyone.

And apparently, it doesn’t.

So, what’s a worgen to do? First, talk to the guy also in the camp about what you’ve seen, then go bust into the level 85 heroic version of Zul’Gurub to crack some skulls and get your raptor back!

The Bloodlord fight is soloable for most classes now, as the Decapitate mechanic isn’t activated with just one player. I found the trash to be much more difficult than the fight. Maybe it was because Bloodlord kept my baby raptor chained up that whipped my worgen into a fury of hair and DPS.

At any rate, we were happily reunited.

And now we go on adventures together. No, really. Whenever there are dead bodies around, friendly or not, Imoinda is sure to bring me a bone to play fetch.

Clever girl.

Celestial Tournament

12 Replies

I was hyped for the Celestial Tournament before it was even fleshed out. I knew that there was no way for my excitement, which is on par with my daughter’s enthusiasm for “ice cweem CONE!” to be matched. I prepared to be disappointed because, come on.

I was wrong. Pleasantly, at times frustratingly, wrong.

The Tournament is well executed and a real challenge for advanced pet hunters. I really, really stress advanced here… the requirement for entry has been lowered to 15 level 25 pets, and honestly after playing it through, 15 seems really low. If you make it through all 7 encounters you’ll likely have a minimum of 21 dead or almost dead pets on your hands.

But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

To get to the Tournament, you can either pick up the breadcrumb quest (I believe it’s an autograb while you’re in the Vale like the previous patches) and do all that Timewalkers malarkey. You could also just fly/swim your happy little self over to the Timeless Isle off the coast of the Jade Forest to the Southeast (it’s faster for Alliance to port in to Paw’Don from Stormwind and fly straight there, ime, but because of the Horde’s portal location in Honeydew it’s roughly even).

Once you pick up your faction’s flight point and the next breadcrumb, you’ll be referred to the Tournament Grounds. As you come in on the road from the West, there’s a whole lot of non-pet related things to explore. Noodle vendors! Booze vendors! Old NPC friends from across the entirety of Pandaria! Wrathion and Anduin! Psh, this is a blog about pets, y’all need to keep up. The Pet Tournament NPCS are just to the South.

The Tournament itself pits you against 3 NPCs with full, 3-pet teams, and then you fight each of the Celestials in single combat, inside a solo scenario. The current requirement for entry has no quest prerequisite, only a threshhold of a number of pets you need to have at level 25, so if you’re stuck flailing against Major Payne but still leveling up your stable, you can participate.

The reason for this 15 pet threshhold is because you may not heal or revive your pets at any time inside the scenario. Even if you screw up and forget to heal before you enter the scenario, not that I have firsthand experience with that or anything. If you leave the instance and rejoin it, your progress is reset to the very beginning and Emperor Shaohao is right there to rub it in your apparently gender-ambiguous face.

Emperor Shaohao acts as the MC for the whole event, and lays out the rules and parameters as you go, in addition to taunting you about being a noob who had to heal her pets.

The 3 teams of trainers are varied, but you face the same ones each time you restart the scenario, so you can gradually plot out a strategy against the 3 tamers you’re facing for the week. In this first week I attempted it, I got to go against the Alliance dwarf with a penchant for pets, Sully, and his erstwhile companion Socks the Bandicoon, who had apparently been resurrected to undeath after being shot by Amber Kearnen. In terms of story and Horde Bias and all that Sully is kind of a silly cartoon character, but he’s a dwarf after my own heart, and I really enjoyed seeing that he leveled his pets (and dragged Socks’ dead body through the whole of Pandaria, apparently, creeeepyyyyy).

I also fought Lorewalker Cho, who had virtue-named pets, including presumably the broom you use to sweep up while doing chores for him.

The third NPC I faced was Dr. Ion Goldbloom, who had a flying dinosaur, a beast dinosaur and a magic pet I really want, called Chaos.

For these guys I was able to mow them down fairly quickly using the old pet family weakness thing, eg a Magic – Mechanical – Dragonkin against Goldbloom’s Flying – Beast – Magic pets. Strategies will be forthcoming I’m sure. This WoWhead post has a few of the other trainer team makeups. But in any case, when you’re done with that, Shaohao has some more words for you.

The first time I tried to play through, right now is when I realized I had a bit of a problem. There are 4 celestials. There’s a Flying, a Dragonkin and 2 Beasts. I’d kept a couple of each pet I’d gotten on the PTR via the random system. I didn’t really need, say, 3 Lil XTs clogging up my journal, so I’d been selling them so other tamers could grab their favorites off the AH. So, facing 2 beasts with one of the less populated families, most of which start off as Uncommon anyway? Just a little rough. Juuuuust a little. I think I ran through 30, 40, 50 level 25 pets in trying this scenario the first time before giving up.

The Celestials are tagged as Boss pets, which not only reduces the damage they take by half, but makes it so they can’t be dealt more than 35% of their health in any one turn. Chi-chi took one look at my roach’s Apocalypse and laughed.

At this point it’s too new for me to give out any concrete strategies, and they’re still doing tweaking on the encounters so the particulars aren’t too solid yet anyway. I will say though, that I had a lot more success when I made sure to make a *team*, rather than an unconnected jumble of 3 pets. Against Chi-chi, I used a Wild Magic azure whelp, a Disgusting Oozling with 25% damage debuff DoTs and mopped up with a heavy hitter Lunar Lantern, even though it was an Uncommon. With that team, I beat him fairly decisively. Previously I’d just grabbed 3 pets with magic damage (I think there was a Coilfang Stalker in there or something) and it didn’t go nearly as well.

For me, Xufu was the roughest to beat. Zao and his Wish was rather frustrating, but I countered that by just gradually beating him down and using a huge nuke when I knew he was relatively low. Chi-chi’s constant healing was awful, but he got a tweak so that he’s not always casting Tranquility. For Yu’la I used a lot of Backflip stuns and just beat her down best as I could.

With Xufu, he was pumping out such ridiculous damage against my Mechanicals, I decided to swap to my Flyings. I chose pets with some kind of avoidance too, because he also has a moonfire which can decimate a magic-vulnerable Flying. And that swap (especially the avoidance stuff!) did the trick.

Overall, you really need to look ahead with your pets choices. I had a lot more success overall when I saved my Mechanical pets to go after the later bosses than I did when I was burning my favorite pets first.

You have to exit the scenario to get your reward, from the same place as above.

The Celestial Coin is currency you can use to buy new pets, marked upgrade stones, and other nonsense.

You get 2 additional coins immediately, so you can buy one of the new Celestial pets the first week. After that, it’s one per week in a slow, slow grind. Personally I’m buying the deliciously bitey Xu-fu first, but hey.

I’m going to stress that you need to be ready for this to be difficult. It is (as of this writing, of course) a serious challenge. As always, keep trying and take deep breaths. And then, QUEUE UP!

Spider

6 Replies

I don’t talk a lot about personal stuff on the blog. It’s usually all pet battles all the time over here. But guys. I hate spiders.

No, you guys. like. I HATE spiders. HATE. haaaate.

When I did Maexxna as a healer in Vanilla, I turned my character to the wall so I didn’t have to see her. When I did her in Wrath as a hunter, luckily the rotation had grown so easy I could spam my steady shot macro and close my eyes for most of the fight. I am not even kidding, either about how much I hate spiders or how easy hunters were.

I honestly don’t even know why. I’m cool with bugs and caterpillars. Snakes and lizards, sure. Even scorpions are fine. I’ve always had some kind of garden as far back as I can remember, because my parents were hippies and liked growing their own food, so I know spiders are good for nature and all that jazz. Something about that extra set of legs maybe? The way they move? The webs? I don’t know and I’d prefer not to think it over too hard just now thankyouverymuch.

But there are a couple of reasons for me to explore their creepy little leggy crawly beady eyed oh god this sentence has to be over now. First of all, many of these guys are low-texture, and you know how that tickles my fancy. They were one of the first to be made over, into both a spindly-legged model and a fuzzier tarantula model, and now there are even more varied models to choose from. The low-texture version is also reused for Pandaria with the bizarrely pink Amethyst Spiderling and thus have spanned across expansion packs, so they kinda fill that same role as the frog.

They’re also a fairly decent pet battler across the level gamut, which tends to be rare. They get the Leech Life ability at level 5 to heal themselves, and as a result they’re a hardy choice for grinding. Unlike the Frogs, spiders can have varied movesets. For example, the crystal spider has a stun instead of the DoT poison ability.

My interest in spiders was piqued when I was dueling with Elepheagle one day. He completely wrecked my Black Claw DoT team with his spider. Rather than demand the answer, “WHYYYY” on my knees from an unanswering sky, I asked wowhead instead.

Brittle Webbing typically inhabits the same slot as the regular old web, only gives quite a bit of reflexive damage on each attack. The damage can be countered by Sandstorm (WHAT CAN’T BE COUNTERED BY SANDSTORM argh) or the Shell Shield-type abilities. I haven’t quite fought enough to recommend it whole hog, but I’m trying out a new team, pairing the spider with a pet with Wild Magic and a third, heavy-hitting tank pet (but not a direhorn… the nerf for 5.4 is pretty bad). If you find yourself coming up against DoT teams I definitely recommend trying out a spider.

…you know, as much as I *could* recommend trying out a spider. blerg.

Okrut Dragonwaste

1 Reply

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

6 Replies

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

4 Replies

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

4 Replies

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.

Pet PVP 101

13 Replies

Not to get all behind the scenes-y on you, but I look at my wordpress analytics stuff on occasion to see what people are looking for help with. Though really I ought to write more about Unknown Search.

So, so helpful. Right now, the thing I keep seeing searches for, and twitter questions about, is pet pvp. It runs the gamut from queries about advanced tactics to just the simple, almost desperate, “pet pvp help”. Though I have been mentioning how fun it is for a month or two now, I haven’t really written much to ease somebody into PVP. Since I just got a relatively glowing plug from that one guy on Eviscerated who does pet battles on this week’s (NSFW) podcast, coupled with ongoing PVP queries from my analytics, I figured it was time to do a beginner’s guide to pvp.

Let me preface with a reassurance that there’s nothing to be afraid of. At worst, you’re going to be out 10 minutes with nothing to show for it.

Let’s be real. We’ve all spent more time than that sitting in far-flung nowheres while we’ve waited on rare tames. Lots and LOTS more time than that. Let’s also say this right now: you are going to lose. Like, a LOT a lot, to begin. I still lose a third to a quarter of the matches I fight, which is an alright win percentage from what I understand. The thing is though, the more you do it, the more you learn, the better you get, the more you win.

My experience is that you should pick 2, maybe 3 teams and use them until you know them in your sleep. This can be a flavor of the month team, like a force swap or a Kun-Lai Runt team, or build one on your own with one of your favorites. I’d recommend starting off with at least one team you know can be successful rather than try to build all your own, but if it doesn’t feel fun to play to you, try a different one. You can’t force a playstyle you hate to feel fun.

I’d recommend listening to the WoW Pet Battle Crew podcast or occasionally Res from the Eviscerated podcast for ideas here (though I need to stress for my younger readers that this is an adult podcast), or this thread on the official forums for ideas on a team you might enjoy. Or, you know, read my site too, or whatever.

That said, unfortunately for my analytics, there is no best pet pvp team. There are good ones to be sure, even overpowered ones, but nearly all of them can be countered once you get a bit more experience. The funny bit is, as you PVP more, you’ll see these team comps constantly, so you’ll know exactly what’s coming as soon as you enter into the match, and you’ll learn how to play your team to beat them.

One of the more overpowered pets, the 3 baby Direhorns, are all mowed down really quickly by my gnome, moreso if I combo it with a debuff. In my experience, buffs and debuffs play a much larger role in PVP than PVE. Though you got a taste of them in first doing so in the Aki fight, players are far more savvy at combining big damage abilities with vulnerability debuffs than NPCs. In general, speed plays an enormous role in PVP, and thus so do speed debuffs, but there are a myriad to watch out for… if you have a debuff up, pay attention to what comes next!

You don’t have an actual physical location when you pet PVP, so you don’t have to worry about the other kind of PVP. Also, your opponent is a placeholder graphic (why I can’t say) so you’re not actually fighting some jerk priest who managed to nab tier 3.

Very unlike PVE, your setup before you queue up doesn’t matter, as you and your opponent both get to choose your first pet after you zone in. This gives you about 30 seconds to look at their team and decide what you want to do. For my teams, I almost always pick a tank pet to lead off, like the Scourged Whelpling, the Crawdad or a Direhorn (though the Direhorn makes a good closer, too). I can take a move or two to figure out what the other team’s gimmick is going to be.

shown: gimmicks.

Swapping your pets in PVP is far more beneficial than it is in PVE. You only very rarely ‘lose’ a turn the same way as you always do in PVE. In fact, your decisions in which pet to play in what order can seriously affect your chances to win. In my Black Claw team, I almost always let my Kneebiter die first, because both my Gnome and Whelpling have failsafes after they die, but I try to make sure to leave the Whelp for last if there’s a pet with heavy elemental damage, because it’ll chew the gnome to bits. Reverse that for critter damage and the Whelpling. Having an Undead pet for your second to last pet is a really excellent idea, because if you win the match on your resurrect round, with no pets left, the fight ends in a draw. In that case, I do forfeit.

People have very different ideas on etiquette here. Personally, with the one exception I mentioned above, I like to play out every match as hard-fought as I can, to see what the other pets can do, to see what their weaknesses are. Some people think this is rude, and think you should forfeit as soon as you ‘know’ you’ve lost. We’re learning, and they can just forfeit if they don’t like it. Besides, you never know what you might be able to pull off at the very end.

If you (yes *you*) would like to, you can contact me on twitter or add my battletag Liopleurodon#1882 to duel for some practice. Or, if you feel I’m a know-nothing noobie noob and want to smash my pets and make me cry IRL, I’ll duel you too. Believe it or not, after you get into pet PVP is fun even when you’re losing.

You just get better stuff when you’re winning and paying attention to your analytics Kardashian baby Amanda Bynes (I think this is how it works).

Qiraji Guardling

2 Replies

They increased the drop rate in a hotfix yesterday, so I got one this morning.

But between the behavior of others and the general drama and rolling back and forth through whine-tinged vacillation associated with this one last lousy pet, it doesn’t feel like the culmination of a nearly year-long grind, like the capping accomplishment of pet battling it should be. I expected to unveil this with a flourish, to let you see what my effort of nearly a year has won me, but I find that I don’t care so much, anymore.

This isn’t an informative post so much as a traditional musing, navel-gazing blogger-style post, so you may want to skip it.

I’ve often said that the Pet Battle game is like the entire game in miniature. The PVP/PVE divide in particular is kind of amusing to me. The thing is, through this, while there have been some trolls (eg, Triple Turkey, round wait trolling) and the cries to buff or nerf as usual, the pet battle community has been almost entirely helpful and encouraging. I’ve tried to foster the same, because this makes it a fun and fantastic place to be.

I’ve been blogging solely about pet battles since February. Right now, roughly 70% of my time in game is spent battling or running around like an idiot taking screenshots (25% is doing archaeology to get a crawling claw, 5% is standing around looking at how bad my transmog is). And even so, looking at my rankings at WarcraftPets or WoWProgress, I’m barely in the top 50 of my server right now, let alone my entire CRZ group. If one guardling was awarded every 6 hours to the person ranked at the top who hadn’t yet received one, to the people who arguably did the work to “deserve” it more, I would still have weeks to go.

On top of that stat, I gained the 2nd-to-last achievement for this in December of last year, 7 months ago. Of course people are going to be upset that, on the day this goes live, these pets are exceedingly rare. They came here to get a pet, and having to leave empty-handed sucks whether it’s a Guardling or a Minfernal or a Snow Cub. That suckiness is added to a unique pet with a unique moveset and this ultimate-style achievement, and of course people are disappointed. It sucks whether it’s a pet, a playstation or if they just ran out of your favorite kind of doughnut at your local doughnut place. It’s human nature to be disappointed by this. And it’s OK to say, “I am disappointed this pet is so rare,” or even, “I wish this spawned more rapidly,” without being instantly pointed to as a whiny baby boohoo crier or having some deep-seeded personality flaw.

I have a hardcore raiding past and I have a few elitist jerk tendencies I’ve tried to quash. Oh hey did you just say you wanted to see a screenshot of me on the Time-Lost Protodrake I nabbed in November of 2008 for my birthday after getting server first hunter and dwarf, using my Obsidian Slayer title?

As such, I’m not going to lie you guys, the spawn rate on this pet has really brought out some of the worst in me. I’ve talked civilly with some of my fellow campers, most of them from some other server, commiserating about how crappy this whole thing is. But internally, and maybe out loud at my screen a little bit, I’ve been saying, GET OUT OF HERE YOU NOOOOOB most times a random person catches one. I am torn between saying, ‘that’s a hard one to get, congrats’ to the person who says, ‘yay, now I just need to get the Minfernal!’ or ‘haha, now I’m just waiting until winter for an owl now!’ and allowing myself to become one with fury, to open wide the first of my seven maws of death, let loose the swarm of locusts and sing the ancient song of destruction.

But the side of myself Mr. Rogers would be proud of has won out, in my case. Congrats, grats, good luck getting that Whelpling you rapscallion, grats, etc, whatever. “When you wait / you can play, sing / or imagine anything,” so I was using the time to draft a few posts out in longhand (I don’t dare tab out) and seething privately. It’s pretty much the opposite of the haggard, hard-won victory this achievement should be. It definitely wasn’t fun by any definition. Other tamers have been… not so kind, between hurling insults, killing pets to ensure their rarity (or whatever), flagging for PVP and standing on spawns, and just general jerkface behavior.

This outlandishly awful behavior, plus the newly hotfixed buff to the spawn rate of the Guardlings, makes things seem problematic. There is a lot of speculation that Blizzard somehow caved to this behavior, to the whining, to the jerkiness the pet battling community has suddenly devolved to. I doubt this, just on the fact that they did it via a hotfix instead of waiting for maintenance. At least, I hope this isn’t the case, because I like my little community the way it is and if Blizzard begins granting wishes like some kind of big blue genie it’s going to get even worse. They typically don’t have a habit of doing so unless something is really egregiously awful to do, like the A Mask For All Occasions achievement, which used to be required for the Long Strange Trip meta-achievement. Removal of that achievement from the meta didn’t lead to societal anarchy (beyond the typical anarchy, of course), and I doubt this really will, either.

Happily, with the buff, the community’s willingness to be considerate seems to have righted itself, and my experience is that people are generally being more helpful around the spawns. But we’ve been shown what the dark side of pet collecting is, and it continues in that mirroring of the full game… we’re just as vulnerable to elitism over who should be allowed to get the good stuff, whether it’s ilvls or a last dumb pet, as raiders are. Unlike ilvls, if some other (less-worthy by who knows what internalized metric) player tames a specific pet spawn, that means I cannot tame it, so there is then an active incentive to troll, grief and otherwise wreck another player’s day… regardless of whether it might make Blizzard change their mind WRT rarity.

I know that I personally have done a sort of penance, hanging around and cheering people on. Besides which, this whole blog is kind of dedicated to helping people with pet battles, so I’ll be building my karma back up with helpfulness accordingly. I still feel guilty about it, and if you’re on my cross-realm I apologize for my thinking you were a noobface jerkwad who SHOULDN’T BE THERE GRAWWWRG.

For the record, I’d advocate that nearly all rare spawns should be made less rare, not just this one, and not even necessarily just the pets. In pet battling the effort expended in collecting them all, and especially when you throw in rare quality (ie, blue) pets, is enough to make any pet feel special. For me, one of my hardest won pets is still my rare quality, crappy breed Grasslands Cottontail. I still break out my Perky Pug Bertha both for battling and as a companion, and she is literally the most common pet in the game. There are rare pets in battling that feel far less rare than some which are regarded as common anyway. An Unborn Val’kyr? Ho hum. Like every 3rd team uses a Val’kyr now. They’re OP but everyone uses them the same way so when I see one it’s kind of a snooze. But if somebody comes at me with an Elder Python or a Moth, I sit up and take notice.

Beyond all the sturm und drang of this whole mess, the Qiraji Guardling is a fairly solid pet. It uses a combination of humanoid and flying attacks which is unique to this pet, unlike its Winter counterpart the Snowy Owl, which is identical to the other owls, Miniwing and the Brilliant Kaliri. The Guardling has the AOE ability Whirlwind, which doesn’t play too well with the very strong PVP ability Sandstorm. There’s also the Pyrrhic strong hitter Reckless Strike, and a stunner Blackout Kick. It looks to be strong both for PVE and PVP, so now that the spawn rate is buffed, make sure you go grab one ASAP, before the summer is out.

I’m not going to say whether I would’ve written that last sentence if the spawn rate wasn’t buffed (hint: ashamedly, I wouldn’t).