Raid | BattlePetRoundup.com

I have a toddler, so I hear this question like eighty thousand times a day. But one day, I started thinking about it in terms of pet battles.

Up until now, I’ve been pretty much assuming that you’re here because you’re a Tamer in some capacity, whether you’re just looking for your first basic tips, or looking for help with end-game PVE. I know that there are many World of Warcraft players out there who could not give less of a damn about my beloved battles though, no matter how hard the Singing Sunflower tries to hypnotize them into it.

Even if you’re not all that into the whole pets thing of it all, I’d like to hopefully supply Why You (yes you) non-Tamer, should try out the minigame.

I’ll skip the two most common arguments I see: Pets Are Cute! They Give You Achievements! If you thought pets were cute enough to be worth collecting you’d already be doing it. If you’re an achievement hunter at all, you know they give you achievements. They have their own tab in the achievements window.

So, duh. And yeah, that was me skipping them. Ahem. Moving on.

The most notable reason to start pet battling is probably lesser charms. You have a chance to get Lesser Charms from virtually any pet fight as long as you’re level capped. I’ve gotten from 2-6 at the end of any particular battle. This means even if you’re just in queue for LFR or whatever, and you pull out the cat you just bought from Donni Anthania to kill rats in Stormwind, you could get several lesser charms in the meantime. I got 3 of them from the very first pet battle I did on the 5.3 PTR. Yeah, you could just do dailies to get these instead. But look, if I ever see Anji Autumnlight again it’ll be too soon.

I still need to accumulate Lessers to trade for Mogu Runes so I can repeatedly get a second shot at a Ji-Kun Hatchling or whatever. I’m sure there are other uses for the Runes as well, like gear or something. Psh. The chance to get a charm increases based on the level of the pets you fight, but you get them regardless of whether you fight them with all like level pets or with level 25 ringers. When I was doing the Beasts of Fable battles, I averaged 20 per day just from doing that, which means there are 20 meaningless tasks you have to do for these bozos.

Even if you’re not max level, now that pet battles grant XP, that’s a good reason to start battling. As I noted in this post, the XP starts off kind of crappy at low pet levels. I don’t know about you though, I’d rather level an entire team from scratch again than go through Hyjal or Vashj’ir again. Especially Hyjal. But ESPECIALLY Vashjir.

I don’t know about you, but I just started twitching a little. As noted above too, you can queue for LFD and pet battle instead of questing for an extra XP boost in between.

The last reason I’m going to mention is financial. There is a lot of coin to be made buying and selling rarer pets in general. The thing is, if you level up those pets your margin suddenly drastically increases.

It takes literally an hour to level a pet like that from 1-25 if you have a few trainers left up in Pandaria for the day, but even if not it doesn’t take terribly long. It’s also more effort so you’re less likely to get into undercut wars with other players. Most of that hour is travel time too, so combine that with a gathering profession and you’re really in business.

You can also get upgrade stones, which will make you a ton of coin if you trade in pets like the Argent Tourney or Childrens’ Week uncommons. Even just the BOE stones (which are admittedly exceedingly rare) can go for upwards of 5K a pop.

I really hope I convinced you to give pet battling a shot. Even if you weren’t convinced, at least I’m comforted by the fact that I don’t have to do Vashjir again. So, win win, right?

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.