Jurassic Park Wait I Mean

Pet Powerleveling And You

I’ve made reference in the past to powerleveling strategy. I’m making this post to outline exactly what that is, because it’s a handy skill to have. This technique is commonly known as a Carry.

Our victim for this post will be Grand Master Tamer Trixxy.

Aw, don’t look so sad, Trixxy.

This strategy is applicable for pretty much any tamer or even for wild pet battles. The lineup will vary, and a lot for some of the later tamers in Pandaria, which need specific combinations in order for this to work. But for right now, I’m going with this lineup:

Stella the Celestial Dragon is a good pick for this basic fight because of her group heal, and because she matches the whole blue vibe Trixxy’s got going. Ishmael is just there in case I get into bigtime trouble, and is also blue. These choices don’t really matter, as nearly any team of 2 level 25 battle pets will be able to dispatch Trixxy fairly handily. And I chose the unnamed Tonk because I just bought him at the Faire like 5 minutes ago. Yes, really. That tonk really screws the whole color trend though. For shame, tonk.

Basically, Blizzard made it so that level 25 battle pets don’t soak any XP. As long as your pet to be carried survives through 1 round of pummelling in the front row, you can send it to the back row, and as long as there aren’t any aoe abilities to wreck its face your carried pet will get as much XP as if it miraculously killed all 3 of the other pets by itself. All you need is 2 level 25 pets who can kill the other pets without a third. This also works for higher pets.

This can get very sketchy in the later battles, but with Trixxy once you have any level 25, even an off-breed, you’ll be able to solo her. And then you wear a handy Safari Hat, your level 1 pet will gain

1898XP and 8 levels. In one fight. Yeah.

Even if your pet isn’t level 1, as long as it’s more than 2 or 3 levels lower than Trixxy’s level 19s, you’ll gain boatloads of XP without much effort at all. This may be more valuable than the contents of the bag you get from doing her daily. I make a point of doing her, Lydia Accoste in Deadwind Pass, Bloodknight Antari in Shadowmoon Valley and Farmer Nishi in Valley Of The Four Winds every day for just this reason. I do others too but these 4 are sure things with nearly any level 25 pet, and very quick fights. They also grant far more XP than if I were to battle a wild pet of the same level… Farmer Nishi is especially notable, since she’s worth a whopping 2-4000 XP depending on the level of your pet, though you may need to go slightly higher level than 1 for your soak pet, since one of her pets will use an AOE on occasion.

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.

Jeremy Feasel

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Update for 6.0: This strategy still works really well for a two-pet carry strategy. To complete this leg of the quest An Awfully Big Adventure, this same strategy can be employed, though it may be a good idea to try & absorb a few more of Fezwick’s hits with your Elekk Plushie to ensure a victory.

—–

Jeremy Feasel at the Darkmoon Faire is a difficult fight to be sure. But how can someone so cordial be so annoying?

Look, he’s even waving. How nice of him. Well, his annoying nature is in no small part because of his damnable monkey Fezwick.

Annoying little Beast. His mechanical tonk, Honky-Tonk can be problematic too, but the tonk doesn’t wear a hat like he’s people. The third in his team, a magical darkmoon eye named Judgement, is the reason we come to the Faire to demolish some pets… the eye is only obtainable from the bag Feasel gives as a daily reward for beating him, and that’s really the only thing in those bags worth obtaining. But, you know, thanks for the grooming kit, Jeremy.

This is the lineup I typically use:

Eagle-eyed observers will note that this is virtually identical to the Major Payne lineup. Well, that’s because it’s the same screenshot and I’m reusing it. For Jeremy though, I usually lead off with my Fel Flame. Dante can typically lay out the first two pets Payne sends at him, as long as he leads with his most damaging DoT (Dragonkin for the Eye and Elemental for the Tonk) and the immediately uses Conflagrate.

Conflagrate typically eats up at least half of Judgement’s health pool and more than that for the elemental-vulnerable Honky-Tonk as long as they’re burning while I use it (hence, dotting up first). Because it’s 2 hits, it doesn’t trigger the magic pet type bonus, where they can’t be dealt more than 40% of their health in one hit, either. After that, I do the less effective DoT, then continue using the strong one until the pet dies. By then, conflag is usually off cooldowns and can be used again once I make sure the new pet is burning.

Feasel will always lead with these 2 pets and then use Fezwick as the anchor. Usually, Dante can take out both these pets on his own no problem, but if he dies before the second one is down, my clockwork gnome Prufrock can step in to finish things off before he has to take on Fezwick.

Prufrock’s mechanical attacks are strong against Fezwick. The real enemy with Fezwick is RNG. If you get stunned a lot, you may be screwed, which is why I keep Ishmael as my strong defense anchor. Sometimes all I can muster with Prufrock is a turret before Fezwick uses a combo of his quicker speed, stuns (which can break the gnome’s Repair ability) and high damage strikes to burn him down. As a result, if you’d like to use this strategy to powerlevel I’d definitely recommend you use something a bit higher level with a bit of defensive power, or just be prepared to burn some tokens.

Elite Pet Battles

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Maybe I should say, quote-unquote ‘elite’ pet battles. I was very excited for this feature, but as I noted, couldn’t find much information about the nitty-gritty of the battles. So, with a 45 minute queue behind me and a graphics card that could not be less happy with me, I set off!

I picked up the quest Beasts of Fable from Sara Finkleswitch as I logged on.

From what I understand, this quest opens up alongside the Pandaren Spirit Tamers after you beat Aki.

This round of battles, it is one legendary pet vs your entire group. You can screw around with making up the perfect lineup if you’d like. There’s an excellent, very thorough post on WoWInsider you can use as a guide, in addition to all the locations. The thing is, it isn’t needed. At all. I was able to solo almost all these pets with one pet. Here’s my lineup:

The first thing you probably noticed was an unnamed level 23 resilient roach. He’s just there for insurance. I cast Apocalypse, then immediately send him to the back row. If my other pets don’t manage to kill the fabled beast in 15 turns, I win anyway. This goes through dive, and none of the Beasts are beetles or roaches, so you just… win. I chose the level 23 because it was the highest one I had at the time. Insurance is also why I have my trusty non-critter tank crab Ishmael in the lineup. He’s basically there as a meat shield just in case my nether faerie dragon Spenser doesn’t get the job done.

So, what makes this dragon so OP? In a word (well, 2) Life Exchange.

Basically, the Elite pets are supposed to be 3 pets in one. And that’s the thing, they’re in *one*, meaning they have a huge health pool. Life Exchange as it’s coded now ignores the HP cap of the dragon, which means it looks like this:

I chose the Nether Faerie Dragon as the vehicle for this, but it honestly doesn’t matter which pet with this ability you pick. With one fell swoop, you will deal at least half of any of these fabled pets’ health.

I expect both these strategies to get fixed somehow, because at this point it is too easy. Though, you do have to kill a whopping 10 beasts at all ends of Pandaria to finish the quest for your reward, the red panda.

You should note that when you turn it in you can re-do it immediately as a daily if you’d like. The bag reward has a chance to contain a non-red red panda, and apparently has a much higher drop rate on upgrade stones, so it’s worth redoing. Also, as seen in the below screenshot, you have a really decent chance of getting Lesser Charms with each fight you do. Because people might run low on those, I guess.

One additional thing to add. Remember that level 23 resilient roach? Well, he’s not getting much XP out of the deal, even with my Safari Hat on.

So, this isn’t really a good time to try powerleveling your level 1 undercity roach.

It’s Patch Day, Patch Day, Gotta Get Down On Patch Day

Darkmoon Faire

Major Payne

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This guy, right here. UGH.

Look at that mustache. What is he, an old-timey strongman hipster?

He was the second fight I had to sort of ‘gear up’ for, and is one of the few for which I don’t yet have a 2-pet powerlevel strategy. However, out of sheer spite, because I hate his STUPID FACE and want as many people as possible to fart in it, here are some strategies I’ve used to beat him.

His 3 pets are the mechanical Beakmaster, beast Grizzle, and elemental Bloom. The elemental is always last in his lineup, but whether Grizzle or Beakmaster goes first can vary. There are two ways you can go about beating him. The first is to pick pets which defend against his pet’s attacks, like this:

Flying defends against beastly Grizzle, elemental defends against mechanical Beakmaster, and critter defends against elemental Bloom. In my experience this is a slightly less reliable setup. In particular, my Nether Ray Icarus has trouble burning down Grizzle quickly enough. Grizzle deals a lot of damage, and also has a really big multi-round heal ability so he can be very difficult to counter. Fel Flame Dante really shines as a glass cannon here, and can pick up some slack. Between her heal and burrow ability to counter Bloom’s multi-round abilities, Perky Pug Bertha had no trouble holding her own.

There are 2 real issues with this strat. Against his pet lineup you need to burn down his pets very quickly, and picking based on defense doesn’t really help that cause. The other is that abilities within pet families can vary pretty widely. This strat gets a lot less doable if you replace the Fel Flame with an elemental with off-class abilities, like the Ashstone Core, for instance.

The other strategy is one I call the glass cannon: Pick pets which have abilities that are strong against beast, mechanical and elemental.

The point of this strategy is to kill them before they kill you. My Clockwork Gnome typically kills Grizzle before he’s any trouble, and then it’s smooth sailing through the rest. A Fluxfire Feline might be a better pick here, because of their burst DPS, but I haven’t found a mechanical upgrade stone or a rare yet so I can’t personally vouch for that. You’ll notice that Dante shows up again to pummel Beakmaster… he is particularly suited for this battle. A Phoenix Hatchling or Dark Phoenix Hatchling are also good choices. My beloved little crab is very hearty, so he’s usually my pick when I need to deal aquatic damage.

A combination of these strategies would have first up against Grizzle a pet in the Flying family with mechanical abilities. I haven’t found any of these thus far. As implied above, the elemental family is both a strong attacker and defender against mechanical pets, so many elemental pets are excellent choices. For Bloom, a critter with some Aquatic abilities would be a good alternative. Namely, a snail or the Rapana Whelk. The dive ability is a good counter to Bloom’s roots too.

Good luck, and please make this jerk eat dirt. For me.

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.

Hello

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Hey, I’m Liopleurodon.

I am a Worgen Druid. I do quite a few dailies and some… wait what? Am I a magical Liopleurodon? What does that even mean? Anyway, I also really enjoy pet battles.

I have a stable full of sometimes fun, sometimes ferocious, sometimes completely useless battle pets. However, I haven’t found a ton of blogs discussing how those adorable little pixels rip each other new ones the best, so here is my attempt. Granted, this post is all about me, but I promise I’ll write more about pets sooner or later, for swears. And… FINE. ALRIGHT. I AM A MAGICAL LIOPLEURODON.