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!

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.