Tag Archives: pet battles

Warlords of Draenor Checklist

This is another post which is really more for me than for you. While my specific goals are obviously going to be unique to me, I’m sharing this because some will be fairly universal for a lot of battlers. And I’m posting it now because I’m not sure how long we have until Warlords, and I figure the sooner I start to prepare, the longer I have to procrastinate.

1. Get all the battle pets from LFR and Normal/Heroic raids from this expansion. The LFR ones in particular, namely the Gooey Sha-ling and Living Fluid are going to be next to impossible to snag after we move on from Mists of Pandaria. However, because of the incoming item/stat squish, it’s really hard to gauge how quickly people will be able to solo old content. I fully expect the price on, eg the Living Sandling to soar when the Dark Portal opens red, but drop when people can begin soloing Throne of Thunder. However, the price on that Gooey Sha-ling is only going to go further and further up.

2. Get all the battle pets from Timeless Isle that require spawn timers. I finally got Garnia to drop the Ruby Droplet battle pet (in a b/b breed, whomp whomp) but I still have many to collect. For now, depending on your server population, there is always a fistful of people on the Isle with some kind of rare timer, sharing their information (the addon pictured is Rare Coordinator). Once Warlords drops, those people are going to evaporate like Morning Glory Dew in Tanaris, and their shared information with them. This likely also means their AH price is going to skyrocket a bit as well. Excepted here are pets dropped from alt-spawn mobs, like the Spineclaw Crab from the Monsterous Spineclaw. Even with the stat squish those are probably going to be just as easy if not easier to churn come Warlords, though I will be trying to grind these as well in the meantime (just not quite so targeted).

3. Keep leveling! Those new raid and Timeless Isle pets are going to need to run through a lot of pet battles before they’re at cap. This is kind of low-priority though, as the level cap remains at 25 through Warlords (source). This is also a for-now goal, simply because I get the feeling this may change after beta opens and we discover the nature of Garrisons, and especially breeding… whether we need many high-level pets, many low-level pets, what the quality needs to be, etc.

4. Stones, stones, stones. I still have a lot of pets to upgrade, but more importantly I have a feeling they’re going to pull some Minfernal-styles spawning shenanigans again for this expansion. This is fine, but I’m saving a few of each stone type and a couple universals as well, just in case. I’m also continuing to do the Celestial Tournament and stocking up on tokens (so I can use them on whatever), and especially the pet XP biscuits from the Beasts of Fable daily and PVP weekly.

5. Clean out banks; organize central meta-bank alt. Those stones and biscuits and bandages and tokens need a place to go. With all this pet stuff (and all those random Timeless Isle armor drops from failed pet RNG) I really need to get on having them all in one location. Altoholic helped me track things down as a stop-gap, but now that Bind on Account means you can mail things cross-server and cross-faction I can have one meta-banker for all this garbage.

6. Finish up on the alts. One thing I found extremely beneficial to battling in Mists was having a character at cap on both factions. It happens oddly frequently that there’s something only attainable on one side or the other (eg, having 2 different pets from Enchanting during Cataclysm). From the map alone it seems like there are going to be some zones which are more easily accessible to one side or the other. While I’ve been largely bifactional this expansion, my Horde toon is on a PVP server, and I’m really over open-world PVP. The rumor is that they’re not turning on flying in Draenor until 6.1, or at least for a while after launch, so I can tell already I’m going to want my level 40 undead at cap, pronto. This also includes trade skills, as it seems like a roll of the dice which profession is getting a crafted pet this time around (probably engineering). And of course, everybody needs to have fishing, because carps.

7. Wait.

The Curious Case of the Elemental Family Ability

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Most battle pet family abilities and their implications in a fight are pretty easy to figure out by reading the mouseover tooltip in your pet journal. Most of them are relatively straightforward. Well, the Undead one is a little goofy in practice.

Your undead battle pet will resurrect for its immortal turn immediately after being killed. If you’re using a slow pet killed in the first half of a round, your pet will resurrect and carry out the action you’d queued before this round. You then get a sort-of ‘extra’ round resurrected.

But, this elemental racial.

It seems straightforward enough, but then you start figuring in all the different weather effects and exactly what the nature of ‘negative’ is, and it gets kind of complicated. The confusion I had with this ability was cleared up by WoW Dev Jonathan LeCraft on Twitter:

I guess. Mostly? Um.

So, with that arose this post. I’m going weather effect by weather effect and laying it all out on the table. This is as much for me as it is for you.

To be clear, the application ability of weather will still hit, barring accuracy issues or blocks, so eg, your elemental will take the ~450 damage from Call Darkness when Darkness is applied.

Sunny Day

Elemental Pet: health greatly increased, and heals for more.
Opponent Pet: health greatly increased, and heals for more.

This matters for percentage-based attacks, and if you or your opponent can heal you can close that gap. You’ll all lose that additional health if the Sunlight lapses though. There really isn’t a negative effect here so elemental battle pets don’t gain an edge in Sunlight.

Moonlight

Elemental: receives additional healing, magic abilities hit harder.
Opponent: receives additional healing, magic abilities hit harder.

Moonlight is a really good example to illustrate the concept. Although magic abilities hitting harder could be considered a ‘negative effect’ (the Sunflower takes additional damage), this isn’t applied on the elemental’s end. It adds a multiplier to the magic abilities of the elemental’s opponent, making this a case where the ‘negative effect’ still applies. In other words, it’s not that the magic hits the elemental harder, it’s that the non-elemental’s magic hits its target harder.

Arcane Winds

Elemental: Cannot be stunned or rooted.
Opponent: Cannot be stunned or rooted.

Arcane Storm is pretty straightforward, as stuns and roots are (generally!) detrimental. This weather effect is an excellent counter to the spider PVP team comps I’ve been seeing pretty often recently.

Sandstorm

Elemental:
Opponent: Takes (X) less damage per hit, accuracy reduced by 10%.

{EDIT} – I was incorrect here, as pointed out by Skarn in the comments. The elemental does not currently gain the damage shield effect, which appears to be a bug (twitter link: https://twitter.com/TheCrafticus/status/419169945335775232). I will be updating this section to reflect this info after more thorough playtesting. I certainly take blame, but will deflect a bit of that blame into boxed wine.

This is another of those strange cases. You’d think that the elemental’s damage would blast right through the Sandstorm. The damage shield is considered as a personal effect like though, so instead the opponent just soaks up that positive effect for itself like the Stoneskin effect. The accuracy blast still makes this a decent bit of weather to use as an elemental, as long as your elemental isn’t trying to stack DoTs on another battle pet or whatever.

Scorched Earth

Elemental:
Opponent: Takes (X) damage at the end of the round; Burning (for abilities like Conflagrate).

In this case, the weather effect is entirely nullified by the elemental. This makes for an excellent choice to avoid certain combos. You go, Sunflower.

Cleansing Rain

Elemental: Aquatic abilities deal more damage, harmful DoTs last one round fewer.
Opponent: Aquatic abilities deal more damage, harmful DoTs last one round fewer.

This is another case where the positive effect is applied at the opponents’ level. Aquatic abilities don’t hit harder on the elemental, they hit harder from the opponent.

Blizzard

Elemental:
Opponent: Chilled

This weather effect is used exclusively for synergy purposes. An Elemental is an excellent c-c-c-c-combo breaker here.

Darkness

Elemental:
Opponent: Blinded, heals reduced, accuracy reduced.

Seriously, Sunflower, I could do with you being slightly less smug in this screenshot. It’s like you don’t even care that you’re completely screwing things up for everyone else.

Mudslide

Elemental:
Opponent: Rooted for 3 rounds when swapped to the front row.

This one pops up only very infrequently, and never, thus far, in the PVE game, but it’s good to know that you can avoid it altogether by using your elemental.

Lightning Storm

Elemental: Deals 10% additional Mechanical damage, takes (X) additional damage per hit.
Opponent: Deals 10% additional Mechanical damage, takes (X) additional damage per hit.

This is the effect that I found the oddest. In light of that tweet at the top of the post, it makes a bit more sense, but I’d assume that an elemental wouldn’t take the extra damage on each hit from lightning. Unfortunately, it does. If mechanical pets didn’t measure up against elementals like undeads against a paladin, this would be an excellent use of weather to defeat an elemental. The DoTs and other strategies can still make good on it, but not so much with mechanicals.

Hopefully this post helped shed some additional light on the weirdness that is the Elemental family ability. Using a family’s ability to the utmost can really help your pet battling strategies be their absolute best. I started drinking around Moonlight so I don’t really know what’s going on but this was super fun so let’s do it again sometime.