Tag Archives: mechanical

Clock Em

Ironically, I occasionally explore parts of the game which don’t involve either battle pets or my druid. In fact, sometimes I just want to get out some aggression and punch some dudes in the head. And though that’s kinda what twitter is for, there are places to get my kicks in WoW, too. You just have to know where to go.

The Brawler’s Guild is something I just recently started playing through, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. It’s oddly similar to pet battles, in that there’s a puzzle element, but it’s way less, “Death Adder Hatchling I choose you!” and more “THERE IS A CAT EATING MY FACE RUUUUN.”

One (literally) small incentive kept me going (though I ought to be careful slinging around that ‘small’ stuff while playing a gnome). When you hit rank 4 in the Brawler’s Guild, meaning you’ve done the first 12 fights successfully, you can buy a Clock Em battle pet of your own for 20-30 silver (the price varies slightly based on reputation discounts). This is the only way to obtain a Clock’em of your own, so if you want a tiny robot with enormous spiked fists of fury, better get sharpening your daggers and make your way to either the Deeprun Tram or the Brawlgar Arena. Clock’em starts off Rare and you buy up to 3 as soon as you hit rank 4, but they are uncageable and BoP, so if you want one have to fistfight your way to the top of a pile of corpses.

Clock ‘Em is unique in that he has a full complement of humanoid abilities, but is a mechanical battle pet, so he gets extra utility in the guise of the resurrection mechanical family ability. A few other mechanicals have a couple humanoid abilities, but Clock Em is all but entirely humanoid. Overtune is the one exception, and it’s used primarily to buff Clock Em’s speed, not really as a damage move. That speed buff has a lot of excellent synergy with his Kick move, which stuns if Clock Em goes first. However, Kick shares a slot with the utility move Dodge, which is frequently the better choice. Sharing a slot with Overtune is Counterstrike, which makes sense because Counterstrike has the best functionality if your pet is slower than its opponent. Rounding out his moves in the first slot is either the straightforward humanoid attack Jab, or the slightly odd Haymaker, which has a 50/50 chance to either deal damage and stun your opponent, or miss and stun the caster.

One big thing to be aware of using this battle pet, even in PVE, is cooldowns. Aside from Jab and Overtune, every ability in Clock Em’s moveset has a relatively lengthy cooldown. You need to choose carefully and use your abilities in an order so you’re not cooling your heels for a few turns. Clock Em’s Humanoid damage and Mechanical family make him relatively ideal for killing dragonkin that use a good bit of Magic damage. Unfortunately, Trixxy in Winterspring is the highest level tamer using a setup like this. He fights pretty well against most dragonkin though, as long as they’re not using Elemental damage.

Now, who do I have to garrote to get a cup of coffee in this stinking place?

Oh, don’t bother answering. I’ll figure it out. Trial and error.

Lil Bling

Leave a reply

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.

Clockwork Gnome

6 Replies

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.