Fishing | BattlePetRoundup.com

This pet is magic indeed. He has always been a vanishingly rare pet too. Why is he so rare? The answer to that question is typically always either ‘fishing’ or ‘TCG’, and in this case, it’s fishing. And whoa boy, is it fishing.

This guy went live in Burning Crusade. Like almost everything that went live in Burning Crusade, there are several steps to this process, and they’re all a massive pain.

Step 1 – As you can make catches from pools at any level of fishing, it is no longer necessary to grind your fishing to max and find a bunch of upgrade gear and lures and crap. You must still have a flying mount though, with the exception of some bonkers ways you can get to the location via engineering. But just, no. Flying mount.

Step 2 – Go to Terokkar Forest. Go to any water accessible only via a flying mount. Find a Highland Mixed School. Fish in it.

Step 3 – Fish in it until the pool runs out. Go find a new pool.

Step 4 – Repeat step 3 until you wear your fishing keybind to a nub.

Step 5 – Miracle of miracles, the RNG Gods smiled on you and you caught a Mr. Pinchy! I’m obviously being hyperbolic here, but not totally. At his launch during BC, Mr. Pinchy had roughly half the chance to drop from any cast in a pool as a Sea Pony does, I believe his drop rate is now increased, but that doesn’t take away that feeling of ‘OH THANK GOD FINALLY.’

Step 6 – Make sure you have at least 1 bag slot open to catch your crawdad, and use one of your wishes to Mr. Pinchy.

Step 7 – Be annoyed because he gives you a crummy level 70 buff. Be even more annoyed because now he has a 24 hour cooldown. That cooldown is internal by the way, so if you catch 2 today, you won’t run out of wishes until almost a week from today. Hooray! ish.

Step 8 – Use all 3 of your wishes. Mr. Pinchy disappears. OH FOR THE LOVE OF LITTLE GREEN APPLES.

Step 9 – repeat all that crap until you finally get a Magical Crawdad!

Why would you want him? Uh, the prestige? Filling out your stable?

A better answer would be that he makes an excellent tank. You can choose between the typical tank abilities Shell Shield & Renewing Mists, and he’s one of two pets with the very interesting heal ability Wish. The latter is very powerful, and makes him not only a good tank but an excellent support healer, since you can swap pets between when he casts it and it hits. Nearly any time I rave on about my fantastic crab you can use the flashier Crawdad instead.

So, why did I choose a crab? Look, did you even read the rest of this post? Sigh. Besides all that, the reason I go with the crab even though I have a crawdad is because I find the combo of shield + mists easier to manage (ie, I barely have to pay attention) in pve than Wish, even though Wish is a better heal, especially for higher health pets. If you want a tank pet for PVP though, consider a Crawdad.

It’s the first full week of the month, so the Darkmoon Faire is open once again. Easy profession skillups and the XP-gifting carousel are the typical draws, but Darkmoon Faire is both a pet collector’s boon and curse.

There are 12 pets obtainable only at the Faire! And look:

That’s 7 pets just sitting there waiting to be claimed. The Darkmoon Balloon doesn’t fight, but it’ll add to your unique pet total. The Darkmoon Zeppelin is particularly of interest… it makes beating the Thundering Pandaren Spirit Tamer far easier (more on that in a different post). But boo, look at all those tickets you have to earn. If you only do the Faire on one character it’ll take months just to get all of those guys.

There are 2 battleable pets only available at the Faire, too. They’re even generally lower level, so it’s easy for even novice battlers to win a Flying Darkmoon Glowfly.

The other battleable pet is only obtainable as a second to the Darkmoon Glowflies above level 5. The Crow is functionally identical to the Gilnean Raven, but is another slot in your unique battle pet arsenal. It took me nearly a half an hour of battling Glowflies and their hangers-on that my typical battle team annihilates in a couple turns just to get a crummy gray one, so if you have Flying upgrade stones to spare this may be a good pick to burn it. If you don’t fight Crows, some of the other seconds include seagulls and roaches, if you need one of those.

But the Darkmoon Faire isn’t just for low-level tamers.

For the cost of one Darkmoon Token per try, you can challenge Jeremy Feasel to a pet battle. If you win his daily quest you get a special bag of Darkmoon Pet Supplies, which has a chance to drop the Darkmoon Eye. ooooh! But no upgrade stones. boooo.

Keeping in the ‘boo’ theme, one of these 12 pets is obtainable only by fishing. And fishing. And FISHING. If you don’t have fishing, that’s fine. These waters are very low level, so with a regular old fishing pole, the crappiest lure you can buy, and a fishing trainer on the dock you’re on your way to wasting hours of your life to get this little bugger. You can also get the Sea Pony from your server’s AH. Personally, I’ve been intending to level fishing anyway, so I’ll keep fishing. And. fishiiiing. And watching TV, and drinking box wine. How else would you fish in-game?

So, that’s eleven pets accounted for. The twelfth?

This menacing location is home to a difficult boss world boss with sharp pointy teeth. If you’re able to join a raid which is able to kill the rabbit (which is a somewhat dicey proposition), in my experience it is quite likely the rabbit will be ninja looted by the group leader or otherwise fought over or ransomed. So, good luck. If you are very lucky the raid member who won it will drop the Darkmoon Rabbit on your auction house, and then you can buy it for 100,000g, give or take.

It’s Darkmoon Faire time again. Enter, if you dare, pet battler.