Tag Archives: tamed

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I don’t talk a lot about personal stuff on the blog. It’s usually all pet battles all the time over here. But guys. I hate spiders.

No, you guys. like. I HATE spiders. HATE. haaaate.

When I did Maexxna as a healer in Vanilla, I turned my character to the wall so I didn’t have to see her. When I did her in Wrath as a hunter, luckily the rotation had grown so easy I could spam my steady shot macro and close my eyes for most of the fight. I am not even kidding, either about how much I hate spiders or how easy hunters were.

I honestly don’t even know why. I’m cool with bugs and caterpillars. Snakes and lizards, sure. Even scorpions are fine. I’ve always had some kind of garden as far back as I can remember, because my parents were hippies and liked growing their own food, so I know spiders are good for nature and all that jazz. Something about that extra set of legs maybe? The way they move? The webs? I don’t know and I’d prefer not to think it over too hard just now thankyouverymuch.

But there are a couple of reasons for me to explore their creepy little leggy crawly beady eyed oh god this sentence has to be over now. First of all, many of these guys are low-texture, and you know how that tickles my fancy. They were one of the first to be made over, into both a spindly-legged model and a fuzzier tarantula model, and now there are even more varied models to choose from. The low-texture version is also reused for Pandaria with the bizarrely pink Amethyst Spiderling and thus have spanned across expansion packs, so they kinda fill that same role as the frog.

They’re also a fairly decent pet battler across the level gamut, which tends to be rare. They get the Leech Life ability at level 5 to heal themselves, and as a result they’re a hardy choice for grinding. Unlike the Frogs, spiders can have varied movesets. For example, the crystal spider has a stun instead of the DoT poison ability.

My interest in spiders was piqued when I was dueling with Elepheagle one day. He completely wrecked my Black Claw DoT team with his spider. Rather than demand the answer, “WHYYYY” on my knees from an unanswering sky, I asked wowhead instead.

Brittle Webbing typically inhabits the same slot as the regular old web, only gives quite a bit of reflexive damage on each attack. The damage can be countered by Sandstorm (WHAT CAN’T BE COUNTERED BY SANDSTORM argh) or the Shell Shield-type abilities. I haven’t quite fought enough to recommend it whole hog, but I’m trying out a new team, pairing the spider with a pet with Wild Magic and a third, heavy-hitting tank pet (but not a direhorn… the nerf for 5.4 is pretty bad). If you find yourself coming up against DoT teams I definitely recommend trying out a spider.

…you know, as much as I *could* recommend trying out a spider. blerg.

Rabbit

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Yeah, I know. I already highlighted the frogs and now I’m going for Rabbits, which are just as low texture, though at least these ones have eyes.

The reason I have to highlight these is that they’re fairly key in a lot of both PVE and PVP strategy. They are better at turtling than Turtles. The combination of Dodge and Burrow means that, if conditions are right, your pet will only be hit a couple times after several turns of evasion. Those conditions include your rabbit being a Speed breed, or your opponent being super slow. As discussed in my Breeds post, this can make quite a bit of difference. If you have a Speed breed rabbit, it is one of the fastest pets in the game. If you have a different breed of rabbit, it is still going to be quite fast, but it’s not a lock for evasion the speed breeds are.

And now it’s time for another video, yay! This one pits my S/S rabbit Dill and my H/B rabbit Lennie against the first pet in the Thundering Pandaren Tamer fight. I continue on with the fight with Dill, just in case my acclaimed writeup on the topic wasn’t enough to help you beat him. I get it, different people learn in different ways.

The only rabbit with no available speed breed is the Elfin Rabbit. The Spring Rabbit from the Noblegarden holiday is the Speed breed by default, but you have to burn a Critter token to get them up to Rare quality. They also have, by far, the most amusing idle animation.

Beyond just rabbits, speed is incredibly valuable in PVP. If you get a very speedy pet and your opponent chooses to swap pets, you can frequently make them ‘skip’ turns while swapping. For Rabbits, this not only increases your avoidance right then, but makes you one turn closer to your next Dodge.

Sometimes in pvp, you can practically hear the frustrated shrieks through the monitor at your adorable little ball of fluff and evasion.

Scourged Whelpling

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I know I’ve often waxed lyrical on my love affair with my crab Ishmael, but I may be cheating on him just a little with my Scourged Whelpling, Radley. Come on, who wouldn’t want to rub up on this?

Couldn’t you just kiss that little toothy, rotting, plague-infested… um, forget I asked.

Right now, the Scourged Whelpling might be my very favorite pet of all pets. The only thing he kinda stinks at is taming… he has mostly damage over time abilities, and his single nukes all hit really hard, so he’s reserved for straightup killing, and whoa boy does he deliver. He’s been one of my favorites for PVE stuff for a while. Radley has been featured in my Aki strat and my Burning Pandaren Spirit Tamer strat already. He’s so hardy he can decimate any wild pet he runs across, even the critters he’s vulnerable to.

PVP is where he is suddenly scintillating for me. Mostly because, yanno, I only just started to PVP. He’s key in nearly any damage over time team. He was featured in the clockwork gnome/wild golden hatchling synergy combo I started PVPing with (discussed briefly in my post about the clockwork gnome). My current team, making heavy use of Black Claw (which I’ll be discussing in a future post, really soon!) also uses the Whelpling.

Really, nearly any team which is heavy on the DoTs will benefit greatly from using him, because of his high health, undead type (which helps to beat up those damnable Kun-Lai Runts) but mostly because of his Plagued Blood ability. This ability has no cooldown and debuffs the current pet. It heals you each time you strike the pet with the debuff, for roughly 50. This means that each time a DoT ticks or turret fires or death & decay ticks, you get a heal.

This can end up being tricky to manage, since all they have to do is swap out and you have to reapply the Plagued Blood for the new pet. With a heavy swap team, or going against a force swap team, this can be a huge pain. It can also be problematic with the turret, because unlike something like a Shrine Fly‘s DoTs directly on the opponent pet, when your opponent swaps, you lose that healing until you re-apply Plagued Blood.

So, how do you find one of these elusive little guys? Honestly, this is a really tough tame, even now. Your best bet is to just park an alt the area in Icecrown where they spawn, and check every so often, especially just after a cross-realm server restart. This is one of the pets I see people saying they created a DK on one of the rp-pvp servers for less competition, too.

I know I’m kind of a jerk for spotlighting such a difficult tame, and it probably reads more like ‘haha look what I got suckaaaa.’ A Restless Shadeling is an alright substitute in some DoT teams, but is kind of a pain to tame too. Luckily, you only have to do it once, and this guy will be yours for long walks on the beach, or glamour shots in the sun.

Just dreamy.

Kun-Lai Runt

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With 5.3 coming, I figured it was a good idea to start profiling some of the better PVP pets. Max level pet PVP is going to see a lot of action very soon, so you can tame this guy to help you succeed.

The preferred breed for the Kun-Lai Runt is 4, or P/P. Right now, but getting fixed with 5.3, his stun Deep Freeze is broken in your favor. It ignores the resilience buff and stuns anyway. Even without benefit of a bug, that stun plus his humanoid ability Takedown, which hits for over 300 damage, and twice if a pet is stunned, are crazy, crazy deadly.

Before 5.2 you had to team him with a pet with a chill like Blizzard, because the runt’s Frost Shock was broken and didn’t apply a chill effect. This can still be a beneficial synergy, as you can then sub out Mangle for the low-ish damage Frost Shock and not have to worry about your opponent swapping pets in the round after you frost shock. Watch out though, because if your opponent has a Runt in their lineup as well (and they will) Blizzard also buffs theirs.

My Blizzarding pet of choice to pair with my runt, Hyde, was a Winter’s Little Helper named Jekyll (I mean, obviously). This is still also good synergy because she has her own delayed stun in the form of Ice Tomb. Double stuns to complement an awesome ability which hits twice when your opponent is stunned? I don’t think I need to spell this out here.

Another good, possibly better, choice for Blizzard synergy is the Tiny Snowman, which has an AOE attack and is elemental. This gives you protection against counters, since both Jekyll and Hyde are humanoids. Better than that, because Elementals aren’t affected by weather effects, opposing Runts won’t be able to use your own Blizzard as a chill effect against you.

If you come up against the Runt in PVP, and you’re going to come up against the Runt in PVP, your best counter is to use a pet with a lot of Undead attacks and hopefully some healing over time spells (so you get heals while you’re stunned, or in the back row). A Restless Shadeling, Ghostly Skull or Giant Bone Spider are popular picks. The Scourged Whelpling is another choice I’ve seen a bit of, but I haven’t had much success with him as a counter.

In PVE he can also pack quite a punch. He’s a good pick to beat that jerk in the Dragonblight, Okrut Dragonwaste.

He’s not all killing machine, though. Sometimes, he just wants to quietly sit and contemplate the fleeting beauty of the wildflower.

As the wildflower begins to die the moment it is picked, so does he, because if he’s picked we’re going to go PVP. Nice knowing you, Hyde.

Diemetradon Hatchling

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I admittedly have a soft spot for these guys. Dinosaurs gotta stick together, amirite?

There’s a very special thing about these dinosaurs in particular that makes them heartwarming. It has nothing to do with how they fight. It’s how they spawn: almost literally.

The Elder Diemetradon mobs in the area have a chance to spawn as a ‘mother’ diemetradon. This won’t change the mob itself in any way, but after a couple minutes, it will spawn a baby diemetradon hatchling!

If you fight that diemetradon hatchling and kill it, the mommy will make a new baby diemetradon in a few minutes which is actually really screwed up if you think about it. Once the elder diemetradon mobs are spawned they won’t spontaneously become mommies, so if you’re hunting hatchlings you’ll have to put them down, preferably via a moonfire to the face.

To farm these guys for a rare, I set raid markers on the diemetradons I knew were mommies. After around 10 minutes of circling to make sure I’d marked all the momma dinos, the carnage began. Eventually, enough non-momma diemetradon respawned as moms for me to farm up a rare, hooray!

A few other animals share this unique, adorable pattern. Cheetah Cubs and Infested Bear Cubs do, and I’ve heard Tiny Twisters do too, though I haven’t tried this out myself. Flayer Younglings do too, though that’s even more disturbing as they’re humanoid type pets.

As a fighter the diemetradon is a fairly standard Beast, with a mix of critter and beast attacks. He has one of those handy two-turn abilities where, if you kill something with it you gain health, and a mix of critter and beast abilities otherwise. But the novelty of his relationship with his mom is enough to make him a fun choice to seek out for a tame.

Maybe today you should give your own mother a call. She worries, you know.

Frog

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After 8 years of World of Warcraft, there is a certain amount of nostalgia people have for the game. Now that we’ve returned from Outland, now that we’ve crushed the Lich King, now that we’ve lived through the Cataclysm and Deathwing’s fall, there are very few things which have remained constant through the years and continue on as a touchstone of what the game once was.

For some people, that constant is their character. This is not the case for me. I started off as a priest, then made my way to a badass pvp hunter, turned over a new leaf as a mage, and then rerolled as a druid, with lots of alts peppered in between. Even now Blizzard is making a concerted effort even to change these characters with upgraded models and graphics. It is definitely time for an upgrade to these graphics, but it just adds to the growing feeling of impermanence.

For some people, the constant is their guild. I’m in a guild right now which actually is several iterations removed from my very first guild in vanilla. There were so many stops, schisms and gquits the guild today is barely recognizable as the one I joined in November of 2004. There are very, very few guilds left today with a charter that old.

Even the world we knew has changed with the Cataclysm. Mankrik’s Wife has received a loving, proper burial, and the bridge in Redridge has reached its completion. NPCs have moved, rep grinds have changed, items have been removed. I still have the tea with sugar given to me by poor little Pamela Redpath. Though she remains trapped in the same long, tragic unlife as when I first visited her in early 2005, my tea with sugar has changed to sweet tea. I haven’t lived in the American South for terribly long but dude, those are not even close to the same thing.

But, there is one thing that has remained the same. One thing that binds us all, regardless of faction. One constant through the turmoil that has been our lives, in-game and out.

Low texture frogs.

Low texture frogs accompanied us to the alien landscape of Outland and frozen tundra of Northrend.

Low texture frogs survived the Cataclysm. Even now low texture frogs live in our very cities.

When we landed on Pandaria’s rocky, inhospitable shores, low texture frogs were there to greet us, and low texture frogs entered the Vale of Eternal Summer before we did too.

There are currently 18 pets in-game that use the low texture frog model. Some are hard to get, like Mojo. Some aren’t tradeable or trappable, like the Jubling. The Lifelike Toad is a mechanical. They all share a moveset, so I have to also mention the Horny Toad, which has the same moves but looks like a lizard and isn’t really low texture. The tooltip reflects this too.

Low texture frogs have a unique move called Frog Kiss, which has a chance on hit to turn your victim into a frog, taking them out of action for a turn. It also increases your damage done with each hit, much like Arcane Blast, and can ramp up into a powerful nuke. Frogs also have the option for a good single-turn self heal, or a weak AOE heal with a weather component. Their abilities are rounded out with a DoT that persists through pet swaps and the no-frills aquatic ability Water Jet.

The one variant is that the Lifelike Toad replaces the DoT with the mechanical heal Repair, giving him a whole lot of healing power.

I’ve really enjoyed using them in low-level pvp. The large heal plus Frog Kiss makes them a force to be reckoned with, even up against one of those teams where they try to cheese the level gap to win. They don’t really translate well into higher-level PVP though. I’ve also been using one as a workhorse while I tame new pets and level old ones (I really like AOE heals for that).

But more than that, low texture frogs are a touchstone. Low texture frogs are a reminder of what once was. In this time of faster, smarter, brighter, prettier, low texture frogs remain as Blizzard’s embodiment of the Pandaren mantra, “slow down.” They continue to be–

OH FOR THE LOVE OF—

Cloud Serpents

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In a beautiful ceremony, today at long last, I officially became a member of the Order of the Cloud Serpent!

Why should you care? Well, first of all, thanks so much for being so supportive. It’s not like I had a wicked sweet mount I really wanted to use that I couldn’t without Cloud Serpent Flying. Because druids use mounts, ever.

Alright alright, this isn’t just a post to talk about how awesome I am. If you really closely, in the bottom right corner, you’ll be able to see why I undertook this thoroughly annoying grind.

There are 3 different colors of wild cloud serpent hatchlings, and they only appear as battle pets after you have exalted reputation with Order Of The Cloud Serpent. If you go over there otherwise, it’s just a bunch of frogs and moths. You have to repeat this rep grind for each character you’d like to fight the cloud serpents on, which should be completely shocking for those of us who have played through Pandaria up to this point.

The Golden and the Jade Hatchlings are pretty much identical in function. As discussed before in the entry about my clockwork gnome, they make good buff pets with mechanicals and pets with a lot of DoT and multi-attack spells because of their Call Lightning ability. If you’ve fought Grand Master Tamer Aki or the Burning Pandaren Spirit Tamer, you’ve seen all 6 of these guys’ abilities in action already with Stormlash and Crimson respectively.

The Crimson Hatchling is different from the previous two, but has a move set identical to the Spawn of Onyxia wild pet. Most notably the heal and huge nuke, which makes this a rather annoying pet to tame.

If you’d like to tame these, there are a couple things to watch out for. First of all, with Cloud Serpent rep, make sure to go make a few passes around Windward Isle, especially if you’re in the area around server restart time. You can net a ton of rep just from looting onyx eggs. Since we’re so deep into the expansion, there is frequently at least one spawned when I go look. I barely even needed to do dailies with a pass a day.

As mentioned above, the Crimson Hatchling in particular is kind of a pain to tame. For these guys I brought out my turnip, my tanky crab, and a level 20-ish pet to grind XP. I didn’t go higher just in case I zoned out and did foolish things, because that never happens. There must be some other reason. But if I did, hypothetically, the 20-ish pet should be able to finish out the last battle pet in the trio after a couple turns.

All the battle pets in this area share spawns, and they have that thing going on where you can only have so many pets in one area, so if you’re looking for a specific rare you should summarily dispatch the moths and frogs in the middle first, then fight the hatchlings while you’re waiting on repops.