Tag Archives: auctionable

Guardian Cub

With this little guy retiring from the Battle.net shop in just a few short weeks, I figured I’d give him a quick feature, if you’re debating whether to spend your hard-earned real life cash on him before he goes away.

I usually don’t focus on the visuals of pets too closely, but this guy has one of the cutest idle animations I’ve seen, where he paws at a gold fly that spawns near him occasionally. All his animations are adorable, but that one in particular makes me want to pet him. He’ll also fly behind you, and until Gloria’s Glorious Gliding Goodies are realized in WoD that’s a pretty unique commodity.

The Guardian Cub has a pretty standard cluster of usual flying moves: Cyclone, Wild Winds & Slicing Wind. He’s also one of a very few Flying battle pets with Magic offensive abilities, with Onyx Bite in his moveset. Nether Rays are the only others. Rounding out his moveset are the Pyrrhic Reckless Strike and the damage-boosting Beast ability Roar.

The issue with this pet is that, although his moves are solid, his stats aren’t the best. Even with that unique Magic ability, Nether Rays are more versatile, and have better available stat allocation, so this pet is hardly a must-have for battling.

The really unique thing about this pet is that, to my knowledge, he’s the only battle pet which is both available for purchase with real cash and also able to be caged in-game. People cottoned on to this scheme real quick, so the value plummeted soon after they first appeared in the shop. I bought mine ages ago for under 2000 gold. However, since the announcement that this battle pet is being retired, the gold value has skyrocketed again, and there are very few available for trade. It’s hard to say what’s going to happen to the gold value after it’s retired, but if you’re looking to legally swap some real life cash for some in-game gold this may be your ticket, even if your gratification is a wee bit delayed.

Until he’s retired, possibly as soon as June 18th, the Guardian Cub is still available for purchase here at the Battle.net store: (link removed)

edit – As of this later date, the Guardian Cub is no longer available for purchase from the battle.net store. You may still be able to find one on your local auction house.

Nether Faerie Dragon

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This incorporeal little guy has been breaking hearts since battle pets came to be.

Nether Faerie Dragons are Dragonkin battle pets which like to hang out around Dire Maul in Feralas. They can be tamed in the open air area in the world, and are not present in the Dire Maul instance. They share a moveset with the very colorful Sprite Darters, also found in Feralas, but the Sprite Darters are drops. The two share a very similar skin as well, but Nether Faerie Dragons are transparent, which can make them just a bit difficult to screenshot, thank you very much.

Much of a Nether Faerie Dragon’s utility is wrapped up in Life Exchange, which is a fun, quirky ability to use. It equalizes the health between your Faerie Dragon and its target. Initially it completely steamrolled the Beasts of Fable. If your Nether Faerie Dragon starts off at 1384 health and Dos-Ryga starts off with 1942, if your Dragon acts first, it would hit Dos for 279 (the difference of the two numbers, 558, halved, to bring both pets to equal health). But in the earlier iteration of the Beasts of Fable, where Dos-Ryga’s health pool was over 3K, with no damage cap on Life Exchange, it was truly devastating.

Now, it’s not quite so key, because of a series of nerfs. That’s alright though, because initially, my strategy for the Beasts was pretty much just frontload a couple dragons, and now it takes a bit more strategy, which pretty much always means more fun. And still, to use Life Exchange properly involves a good bit of timing and luck, because otherwise you could heal your opponent, or get killed before you can pull it off.

Beyond that, the Nether Faerie Dragon has a handful of Flying abilities (Slicing Wind and Cyclone) and a handful of Magic abilities (Arcane Blast and Moonfire), which, along with the Dragonkin family defense against Magic, makes it a really good choice to counter Flying battle pets. Sharing a slot with Life Exchange is Evanescence, a move ability similar to a rabbit’s Dodge. It can be more useful than Life Exchange, depending on your opponent, but it’s less unique.

Also, I’m kind of afraid if I make this poor thing fade away more than it already has, it may just up & disappear altogether.

Emerald Whelpling

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The Saint Patrick’s Day holiday, not celebrated in WoW, has always been one of my favorites. Mostly for obvious reasons. I figured it would be fun to profile one of my favorite pets as well, even though I’m kind of breaking one of my own rules by doing so.

I’m blaming green beer.

The Emerald Whelpling is a pricey pet, with a rough average around 7000g. If you’re particularly enterprising, you can farm one up yourself. Their spawn point has moved from the Swamp of Sorrows to Feralas, from the corrupted whelplings near the portal to the Emerald Dream, but the drop rate continues to be vanishingly small.

This particular profile is mostly for seasonal flavor and sentimentality, but the Emerald Whelpling’s battling prowess can’t be denied either.

Though it doesn’t do too much in PVP, in PVE it’s a workhorse with 2 strong heals (Emerald Dream and Tranquility) to choose between, a couple of magic moves, one of which is the synergistic weather effect Moonfire and the other the straightforward Emerald Bite. She also has a Dragonkin nuke with Breath. Her moveset is rounded out with the utility shield Emerald Presence.

In a lot of situations, a far less expensive but still somewhat rare Emerald Proto-Whelp can fill a similar role. Especially in PVE the two are fairly similar. The big difference is that the Emerald Whelpling’s moveset can be swapped, so she can turn from a defensive tank with Emerald Presence into a damage-dealing phenom with Moonfire and Emerald Bite. There are many other Dragonkin battle pets available to fill the damaging role too, like the Nether Faerie Dragon which is tamed in Feralas, it’s just somewhat rare for a pet to be able to fill both roles all on its own.

Erin go Bragh, something something alcohol! WOO!

Peddlefeet

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If there is a thing out in the world that could potentially be made profitable, Goblins will be there. Even love.

Especially love. Goblins feature big in the WoW version of Valentine’s Day, the Love Is In The Air festival. All the vendors are goblins, and the premiere battle pet of the season has always been the Goblinized version of Cupid. Instead of a mischievous little cherub, we get a tiny goblin with taped-on wings, shooting arrows souped up like only a Goblin can.

He used to be extremely difficult to obtain, but now he’s available for a handful of holiday currency in every major city, Horde or Alliance. The 40 tokens you’ll need to trade with yet another Goblin to obtain the Truesilver Shafted Arrow come from a variety of places, but as long as you’re queuing up for the daily boss fight you will get enough by the end of the holiday to purchase one. If not, or if you’re busy with the IRL holiday (you dog you) Peddlefeet is cageable. He starts off as Uncommon so if you’re going the AH route it’s a good idea as always to aim for an upgraded one.

Peddlefeet is a pretty premiere dragonkiller battle pet in PVE. All his moves are humanoid, though they do run the gamut. The only straightforward attack is Bow Shot in the first slot, though Rapid Fire is a fairly straightforward AoE option. He does have a lot of utility with the stun Lovestruck, and the slight chance for stun Perfumed Arrow. Also in his moveset is his Love Potion heal, which seems designed to be annoying in PVP, but gives him extra staying power too.

He is quite suited to killing Yu’la in the Celestial Tournament, and a bit less so for ‘team’ pve dragonkin battle pets, where his stuns will earn you a swap. Humanoids in general are pretty vulnerable in PVP just now, with the prevalence of the undead Val’kyr/beast Death Adder Hatchling combo, but this guy’s final ability makes him even more so. Shot Through The Heart, though interesting, and one of the best lyrics ever, is a charged move for a big wallop, like Deep Breath. It’s really excellent for PVE, but not so much for PVP, where you’re sure to get stunned, blinded or otherwise annihilated in the intervening turn. In general he’s fun to play, but if you come up against any of a number of really common current teams it’s pretty much game over.

Though he’s not a favorite, that last ability makes it all worthwhile, nostalgia-wise.

Even though this song itself is about as Valentine-y as, well, a Goblin.

Lunar Festival Lantern

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The Lunar Festival in WoW is loosely patterned on the celebrations that occur on the Lunar New Year in many Asian countries, with most of the customs portrayed hailing from China. Notable among these for pet battlers is the Lunar Festival Lantern. Over the course of the holiday, you must visit Elders for special tokens. You can then take those tokens and use them to purchase Lunar Festival foods, the high-necked brightly colored gowns and pantsuits, fireworks, and of course, the Lunar Festival Lantern. It’s… oh, what’s that?

Yeah, there’s a slight issue here. The reason I personally have the one and not the other is that, since the advent of account-wide pets, I’ve mostly been playing Horde. Once a character has collected 50 coins, Valadar Starsong in Moonglade sells Horde players the Festival Lantern, and Alliance players the Lunar Lantern. I never really got around to collecting enough coins, involving quite a bit of laborious travel around the continents, on my Alliance character.

If you’re only looking at the movesets, the two are identical. They also share moves with the Enchanted Lantern battle pet which, true to the previous gripe, is crafted by Horde-only enchanters with 525 skill, and all 3 battle pets have identical stats as well. The Alliance enchanting pet, the Magic Lamp, has a vastly different moveset, but identical stats. Luckily, all 4 are also cageable, so if you are diehard FOR THE HORDE, and refuse to even so much as roll an Alliance DK for fast flight and easy Elder NPC visits within a couple hours, you still have some options. Also luckily for the gold makers, like all pets they are account-wide and still command a pretty penny, but especially so if you sell them cross-faction. All 4 also start off as uncommon when attained, making for a really nice payday if you have some flawless Magic upgrade stones kicking around.

These lanterns never really had a heyday as battling pets, but they do have a few tricks. They have a really cool 1-2 punch with the blinding Flash and double-hitting when blinded Light. Sharing Light’s slot is the blocking move Soul Ward. Soul Ward works really well against big single hitters, but falls flat against multi-hit opponents because it only blocks one attack. The alternate in the second slot is Illuminate, which causes the Sunny Day weather effect. The Lanterns don’t have a move which really benefits from the sun, so you may want to pair this pet with something that does.

Both first slot choices are straightforward nukes. Beam is Magic, Burn is Elemental. The former hits slightly less hard and has a slightly higher accuracy as a result. This choice is largely dependent on which pets you’re fighting. If you’re up against any Mechanical, without Burn your lantern is a sitting duck.

In the end, the benefit of this pet is more cosmetic than anything. Like the Elders, it is a peaceful memory of a time gone by.

Lil Bling

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We’re getting to a weird point in time for many WoW bloggers, and the WoW community as a whole. While most people were very excited at the Warlords of Draenor reveal at Blizzcon, there’s been a dearth of official news since. The gaps have been filled almost entirely via tweetlists (oh and by the way, breeding epic pets are out for WoD, says developer Cory Stockton in this random tweet). As a result, lots of bloggers have taken to fanciful prognostication, mostly about the nature of this or that about the expansion, including a fun Warlords of Draenor release date pool hosted by Alternative Chat. The other common current blogger pastime ties into this, namely a good amount of schmoozing devs, largely on twitter, and a fairly constant stream of questions asking them what else is coming next.

Personally, I still have pages and pages of material to blog about and several videos slated. Beyond that I’ll likely do a few a la minute PVP posts, add to my ongoing leveling saga (you guys WHY did I think this was a good idea?), and I still have a staggeringly large number of battle pets left to write about. My blog is nearing its 1 year anniversary (!) and if I had written about a pet every single day up to this point I’d still have more than half of them to profile. With so much material left, I figured I might as well combine both my ongoing pet profile series and kissing some developer or CM behind for a scrap of information or two. I’m not proud.

Lil Bling is the son of Blingtron 4000, the friendly, flashy robot who dispenses trashy romance novels, healing potions, and other miscellaneous junk in your faction’s Shrine, or outside the inn at Halfhill. Unless you’re on a PVP server, and then the Blingtron outside the inn is pretty much just a trap for sniping lowbies from the roof of the inn with your frost mage.

Look, I already said I’m not proud.

Once he’s crafted, the Blingtron 4000 can be dropped every 4 hours by an engineer. If you’re not an engineer, you’re at the mercy of someone who is. At this point in the expansion, the crafting cost isn’t terribly steep (I did have to use my farm to gather the Spirits of Harmony I needed quickly) so it’s a good option for an alt. For patch 5.4, Blingtron had a few new things added to his loot table of trash, including a Blingtron Brawler’s Guild fight and the new pet Lil Bling.

Lil Bling’s moveset is quite unique and worth looking at. As touched on briefly in the Macabre Marionette post, he is the first Mechanical with the Shattered Defenses debuff with Inflation. Inflation is equally suited to pair with both abilities in the third slot, Launch Rocket and Make It Rain. Make It Rain will win out on fights with a damage cap, like the Celestials, or if you have an extra proc like Call Lightning, but Launch Rocket paired with this buff will all but completely wreck nearly any normal pet.

The other choice in the first slot, SMACKTHAT.EXE, works well with on-hit synergy, but doesn’t provide it. The benefit to that skill over Inflation is you’re not locked in for multiple rounds. Rounding it all out in the middle slot is either the damage dampening Extra Plating, or the mixed bag Blingtron Gift Package, which has a 50/50 shot to either hit really hard or heal. The former choice obviously offers far more control vs the RNG-heavy latter, but I generally find the latter more fun. You can just see the person on the other side of the keyboard wondering what the heck was THAT?!

I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of Lil Bling in strategies that arise during Warlords. As I mentioned, he is the first mechanical battle pet with the Shattered Defenses debuff, so it stands to reason (or maybe to beg the question) that we may be seeing some big, beefy Beasts we need a tiny robot to beat down in the not so distant future.

I would strongly recommend getting one soon, both because of that and because once WoD hits it’s very likely non-engineers won’t be seeing much of this glittery little guy anymore. In addition to the low drop chance from Blingtron’s daily gift, this pet is also tradable, so you may want to just try the auction house. He’s dropped as Uncommon from the box, so if you’re low on Mechanical stones you may want to keep your eyes peeled for the upgraded version.

The dev connection, as alluded to in the preamble, is that Lil Bling is the self-proclaimed son and is shown in the current twitter header of WoW senior game designer Jonathan LeCraft (follow him on twitter at @TheCrafticus). There are many items through the World of Warcraft bearing his name, like the elusive Old Crafty. This includes the pet Crafty, which was live on the 5.4 PTR for a short time, and then unceremoniously axed.

One more pet down, some 600 to go. And now I need to take a shower.

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?

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.

Macabre Marionette

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A brand new holiday pet! And this one is super cool and useful as a battler. Be still my beating heart!

Oh. Yeah, that is kind of an insensitive turn of phrase to use here.

The reason it looks like it’s waving in that screenshot is because it also does the Undead headbanging dance. When I was fooling around with it on PTR, any time we stopped moving, it started dancing with its wee little maracas. It also dances through battles when it’s not performing an action. I wasn’t lying when I said it’s cool.

So, what’s the catch? Its quest is only available for two days a year.

The Macabre Marionette is available as a part of the Day Of The Dead festival, loosely based on the Mexican holiday Día de Muertos, but previously it wasn’t a companion pet per se. It was an unlearnable item in your bags which spawned this little dude, like the very old school companion pets. It disappeared once the two-day festival was over. It looks like Blizzard changed their mind for this year, and the Marionette will be trainable as a battle pet at long last.

In order to see the spirits and obtain the Marionette, you have to go to the graveyard of the city where your racial quartermaster is. This is especially confusing for Worgen, whose leader hangs out doing nothing in Stormwind while their ‘home’ tree thinger and quartermaster is in Darnassus. Most other races are relatively straightforward. Trolls, Orcs & Goblins go to Orgrimmar, Gnomes and Dwarves go to Ironforge, etc. The graveyards in Dalaran and Shattrath allow all comers, too.

Before you leave the city for the graveyard, you should grab at least one Simple Flour and one Ice Cold Milk. The quest objective is a Bread Of The Dead, the recipe for which is obtained in the graveyard for 20s. Note that you can only cook the bread over a special blue campfire located directly near the vendor. The other catch is that in order to see the quest NPC at all, you have to use a Marigold. Marigolds are cheap, but have an extremely short duration. You can repeat the quest multiple times on the same account during the holiday, and can do it with any level character, but you cannot do quests in multiple locations (eg, going from the Worgen spirit in Darnassus to the Dalaran spirit).

It’s really not much of a hoop to jump through, but it had best not be for such a tiny window of acquisition. Though, luckily, it is tradeable, so if you repeat the quest a few times on a few characters you may be able to make a quick handful of gold in a month or two.

The pet’s revamp into a battler is very interesting. Note that it starts off Uncommon, so it’ll require a stone. It has a few old abilities–siphon life/death & decay in the second slot is a fairly common Undead MO, and Bone Bite has shown up in the past as well. It has the new Macabre Maraca, a 100% accuracy humanoid nuke, which makes me want to try pitting the Marionette against Yu’la. It has Bone Barrage, an ability similar to the critter Nut Barrage, only undead. Lastly, also very interestingly, it has Dead Man’s Party, which is similar to Flock.

The reason I find this moveset interesting is because, not only will it make it a terror against dragonkin, but it seems like Blizzard has been making pets with a moveset similar to this recently. There have always been Swarm-ers, Flock-ers and Stampede-ers, featuring Critter, Flying and Beast damage respectively, but Lil Bling was just added with a mechanical version of this ability, and now this pet for the undead version. Undead and Mechanical are rather under-represented caught pets, and this brand of move is such a good one for PVE synergy it makes me curious for the future. What new pets are coming, and what new fights are being planned for the next expansion? I’d be willing to bet some imaginary money that we see either some kind of Torrential Downpour ability like this from caught Aquatics next expansion, or maybe a Sonorous Frog Croak akin to Howl.

But, ultimately, Day Of The Dead is about remembrance. For Gilneas!

Or for that weird tree thing, I guess.

Feline Familiar

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I know I’m not the only one out there with a mage alt.

If I’m not playing Frost, with my gigantic sonorous bff Blubs by my side, I feel like I’m missing something. A mage needs a familiar. My mage’s typical chosen familiar is a little offbeat, but if you’ve been hanging around this blog for awhile you’ll probably guess that it’s my Perky Pug. But dogs aren’t the iconic companion of a mage. At the point I rolled my mage, cats were the property of Donni Anthania in Elwynn Forest, and my blood elf is far too fabulous to go paying cross-faction prices. Then, another option arose.

If you play a mage, you will want to add the Feline Familiar battle pet to your arsenal. If you don’t, you should probably start. You’ll still want to add this pet to your arsenal in any case, because it is a fantastic battler, with a unique range of abilities.

It’s one of 3 Beast pets with Magic abilities in Onyx Bite, making it nice against Flying pets but super vulnerable to Mechanicals.

It also has Stoneskin, making it a strong defensive choice as well. Prowl almost always makes for an excellent combo. Also, oddly, this pet uses Call Darkness, which is coming into vogue as a heal breaker. If you choose that move though, you need to be careful to time it and your Devour ability, depending on which moveset you use. It rounds out its moveset with Pounce, which is good offense but really contingent on your opponent.

This battle pet is only available during Hallow’s End, which is starting up on October 18th for North America realms. You purchase it with Tricky Treats, the Hallow’s End-only edible candy currency. You can get those from the treat buckets scattered in the inns across Azeroth (with associated achievements for grabbing them all), or various daily quests as well. I really enjoyed the one where you ride over Stormwind and plant stinkbombs everywhere.

This cat is one of the few companion pets to follow you while you’re on a flying mount. This seems a little goofy, because it’s a cat and all. What it lacks in wings, it makes up for on a teeny tiny flying broom.