Tag Archives: pandaria

Farmer Nishi

9/25/2014: This fight is now up to date for Warlords of Draenor. For an Elekk Carry, simply use the advice for a regular carry.

Nishi was the laughingstock of the Pandaren tamers for a good long while. Most player tamers could solo her with nearly any level 25 battle pet. Located in the heartland of Pandaria’s Valley Of The Four Winds, she made an easy target even for those level 86 alts.

However, a bug fix in 5.4 gave her claws.

The abilities her pets avoided using in order to make her such a pushover were suddenly back in full force. Luckily, like most of the other tamers, as long as you know your counters, you are good to go.

The Strider has a lot of very strong aquatic offense and a weather effect. I’ve used frogs in this slot too. Either is fairly reliable as long as you make sure to switch in that weather effect. The crab is pretty much just there for cleanup. I’ve used mechanicals in that slot, because this battle pet will be facing Nishi’s beast, but if my first pet goes down early this can make for bad times because the rest of Nishi’s pets are elementals. A Flying with Lift Off or the Anubisath Idol makes for a good anchor too.

The biggest chunk of your strategy begins immediately. Nishi’s Siren has Solar Beam, which hits very hard normally, but tacks on an extra big hit if it’s in Sunny weather. So of course the first thing Siren does is cast Sunlight. You need to change the weather, now. You have an intervening turn where Siren casts a heal on itself before it’ll explode your pet’s face off. If your first battle pet is above Siren’s speed (280) you can put in your carry pet off the bat and enough time to change the weather. However it’s important to note that if your pet is at or below 280 speed you won’t, so you’ll need to start with your first ‘real’ battle pet, and then swap in the carry pet further down the line. In this case I usually switch in the carry during Toothbreaker‘s Sons Of The Root, and make sure my carry is above level 8 or so. Either way is fine, but you just need to be aware of it before you start.

After you change the weather, beating Siren ain’t no thing. The very first thing the next pet, Toothbreaker, will do is submerge and start hitting you with Sons of the Root while he’s immune. When I use the Strider, I use these turns to do things like heal (by casting my weather again) and set up Pump. You really just have to wait a handful of turns while you take a bit of damage. Just stay calm and take your turns. Then, when he surfaces, beat him up. His offense isn’t all that strong.

Last pet, Brood of Mothallus, is a Beast with Burrow and Acidic Goo. That combo together can produce some devastating results. With the crab as long as I keep up heals and that shield I’m good to go, especially since Brood’s 3rd ability, the reflexive heal, is Undead damage. If I use an Anubisath, I use Stoneskin and Deflection to counter Burrow, and that’s all she wrote. With a Flying I use Lift Off when he Burrows and boom goes the dynamite. If I use a mechanical you know what I’m kind of running out of idioms to say I win, so let’s just say I win.

Now help me figure out how I’m going to steal this melon before Nishi sees me.

Here’s the video, recorded using the Elekk.

Courageous Yon

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Now that Nishi has received a bit of a buff, this tamer is the easiest to beat among the Pandaren tamers, as long as you know his one really easy counter. Seriously, the hardest thing about Yon is finding his cave. Just look for the gnome corpses near the top of Kota Peak in Kun-Lai Summit.

Kind of a macabre marker, but whatever works.

Now, just because this tamer is stone-cold stupid easy doesn’t mean I’m going to get all pithy or anything. I mean, I still gotta do me, right?

This isn’t the only team I use against Courageous Yon’s battle pets, but it does make for one of the faster victories. In practice, I usually just open my pet journal and pick out a couple battle pets with a shield ability. Any pet with some kind of shield ability will do. Anubisath Idol, Living Sandling, Feline Familiar, A turtle, a crab, Yu’la, whatever you’ve got. If you want to go with an Enchanted Broom with a Sandstorm that’ll work. I’ve beat him with a crab and a snail, intentionally placed off-family (Aquatic crab vs Flying Piqua; Critter snail vs Beast Bleat). Seriously, anything. Well, almost. A pet with Spiked Skin won’t work here.

Once you put up that shield, there’s only one ability to sort of look out for with Yon’s first pet Piqua, and that’s Lift-Off. It hits fairly hard, and that’s about it. It could be far worse, as Piqua will apply Shattered Defenses with Flock, and then turn and utterly destroy your pet. If you’re able to completely absorb all the ticks of Flock, Piqua won’t apply Shattered Defenses, hence the whole shielding ability thing. Spiked Skin doesn’t absorb the whole hit and so lets Shattered Defenses go up, which is why that won’t work. Yon’s third pet, Bleat, does the same kind of thing with a Stampede/Chew combo. Bleat also has a small heal, but nothing too big.

If you’re using battle pet with a burrow ability, or the Anubisath Idol with that impossibly overpowered Deflection move, try to avoid the big hit those 2 pets try to dish out because it’ll give you additional staying power. But that’s just icing. As long as you maintain that shield and just keep on keeping on you’ll beat this fight.

Yon’s second pet, Lapin, follows a similar pattern. Though his Flurry won’t apply an additional debuff, it’s all small hits which can be mostly absorbed by a battle pet with a damage shield. He also uses the large hit Burrow, which should be dodged if possible. And that’s pretty much that.

With a bit of thinking ahead, I’m frequently able to solo this battle, so it’s possible to carry more than one pet. The Anubisath Idol is suited well to this, but the Emerald Whelpling is a good pick for this too. The thing is, if you carry 2 battle pets you split the earned XP between them. Instead of just one battle pet getting ~4K XP with 2 level 25 ringers (depending on the level of the carry), you’ll have two battle pets getting ~2K XP each. To me, it’s far more worth it to just carry the one instead of doing two, but I’m putting the information out there just in case you’d like to rebel against the machine or whatever it is you whippersnappers are doing these days.

For the video walkthrough, I did something a little different. Rather than use the team I picked for the guide on the blog, I went to a part of the Dread Wastes I knew was crawling with snails and crabs, tamed 3 of them, and then went to beat up Yon. I didn’t use a carry pet for the video, just to give myself an extra buffer. This is just to show you that you don’t need any special pets for this, and for real, all you need is shield abilities and you’re good to go.

Because this doesn’t show the carry, I’m going to add that it’s best to just put your carry in first thing, and use a lvl 5+ battle pet.

Wastewalker Shu

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Update for 6.0: This strategy still works really well. If you’re going on an Awfully Big Adventure with your Elekk Plushie, this strategy will work well for that too. Just swap in your Elekk where you ordinarily would any other battle pet to be leveled.

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It’s a new year, and my resolution is to stop slacking and write guides for all the tamers in Pandaria, as well as the Beasts of Fable, the latter of which I haven’t even revisited since they were radically buffed in patch 5.3. Of course this means I’m going to get the guide for Wastewalker Shu finished and then give up after two weeks and eat a lot of ice cream, as that’s how my New Years’ resolutions typically roll.

Wastewalker Shu is a little tricky. The moves you use to beat his pets are somewhat counterintuitive, based on the strategies we’ve used up to this point. But then, what do you expect from a Pandaren who’d just set up shop in the middle of the Dread Wastes right next to Klaxxi-Vess, and then randomly decided to take up pet battling? A whole lot of logical decision making?

The team is going to be pretty familiar if you’ve wandered around this blog before:

The Gilnean Raven can be subbed for many other Flying battle pets to great effect, and in this case can be subbed out for the Crow. It’s debatable whether the Raven or a pet with Lift-Off like the Dragonbone Hatchling is a better choice, but the Raven tends to make for a faster fight. The Crab is there, as usual, because Shell Shield helps a lot for this fight, and others with similar abilities will work here too, like the Anubisath Idol, Feline Familiar, etc. The carry pet is mid-teens because of some potentially nasty AOE.

First up is Shu’s crab, Crusher. The reason I favor the Raven is because Crusher has a heal in his moveset. The reason the Dragonbone Hatchling is also an excellent choice is because Crusher also has whirlpool, which can be a pain for the Raven. It’s also worth noting that the Raven uses Peck in its moveset, and not the usual Alpha Strike. Crusher’s main attack move is Surge, so after his first couple rounds, your pet isn’t going first for the purposes of Alpha Strike’s additional hit.

Second is Pounder, who is the oddball. He immediately leads with Sandstorm.

A weather effect, oh no! *THIS* is why we brought that Raven really, right? To change the weather? We always change the weather! Nope, after a quick Rupture, poor Pallas usually goes up to birdie heaven. If Pallas dies before that Rupture, we’ll swap to the Crab as a soak, then switch to the carry pet for a turn before putting the Crab in til the end. Pounder’s main nuke, Quake, is an AOE that hits for roughly 300 in the front row, 150 in the back, for 3 rounds. Add Sandstorm’s shield effect and that Quake hits for diddly bupkis.

Sandstorm’s duration is only 5 turns now though, so if you opt to choose a pet with Sandstorm over a self-shield, you may be able to go even lower with your carry pet. The sandstorm shield is also one reason why I opted for Snap instead of Surge.

You should finish Pounder with your pet at full (or nearly full) health, at which point Mutilator comes out.

My crab is slower, especially after Mutilator starts in with Powerball, and I didn’t choose Surge for my crab so Mutilator’s Counterstrike won’t proc its extra damage. Because my crab has shell shield, I’ll absorb the reflexive damage from his Spiked Skin too. Just keep wailing away at him while you keep up your defensive abilities, and he’ll be toast in no time. If you’re having trouble the first time around, sub in a single-hitting beefy mechanical here (the clockwork gnome’s alternate moveset–NOT the one with turret–is a good pick) and you should be golden.