Tag Archives: tamer

Taralune

She is Eleanor‘s dream girl. 3 moths!

Taralune stands on the Southernmost tip of the paved ring surrounding Auchindoun in Talador with her exceptionally moth-y team. She is surrounded by white flowers and visions of the past.

Magic damagers are king against Taralune’s team. Dragons are also preferred because, with a couple exceptions, the incoming damage to your battle pets is going to be Flying damage. If you’re not using your Elekk as your carry pet, you’ll want to use a level 4-5 or higher. In the 2nd slot, I’ve also used the Emerald Proto-Drake fairly well. I use the Nether Faerie Dragon second. The Sprite Darter is basically the same pet, so that’s OK too. Swaps beyond that can get a bit dicey, since not many strong-defending dragons have a lot of frontloaded magic damage to burst down the rest of Taralune’s team.

The Elekk goes in first, because the first thing Serendipity always does is cast Counterspell, so it’s a wasted turn regardless. Counterspell is also rather indicative of this pet’s mojo. It will not sit still long enough to be hit. You need a pet with defensive moves and preferably a heal. The Emerald Whelpling isn’t so much there to defeat this pet per se as it is to out-turtle it.

The Whelpling will mostly just be here to destroy Serendipity alone, which is fine. The other 2 are less of a threat, and the Nether Faerie Dragon’s Life Exchange levels the playing field beautifully.

Grace will cast Call Lightning, but the Nether Faerie’s Moonfire swaps the weather back with a huge hit of its own. Atonement’s Nimbus and Moth Balls combo can frequently be deadly.

Once you get Grace or Atonement below 50% some cool stuff happens. First, the Flying pet bonus is nullified, and the Nether Faerie Dragon is faster than either of them. Second, the Dragonkin pet bonus kicks in, and the Nether Faerie gets a 50% boost to all damage the next attack. Both Grace and Atonement are toast before they can get a chance to do anything else.

RIP in Pepperonis.

Ashlei

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This is going to be the most intuitive, fool proof level one carry strat I’ve ever written, as well as the most tragically depressing.

The team I’m using to beat up on a defenseless draenei child is as follows:

The first battle pet on my team has a decent heal. The second pet has some good offense and, preferably, a per-hit shield ability like Stoneskin. The middle pet is our level 1 carry. That’s really all there is to it. Note that I didn’t even specify the families involved, though you’ll generally want to steer clear of Flying and (especially) Critter type battle pets.

The reason this strategy is so simplistic and so sad is because of Ashlei’s middle pet, Doodle. It is similar to the new pet obtained through tailoring, the Elekk Plushie. The Elekk Plushie is a stuffed animal. All its attacks are fueled by the power of imagination, which means all Elekk Plushies do literally zero damage, including Doodle. However, the ability Nap Time will put Doodle to sleep for one turn and typical Tamer AI swaps pets which are stunned or slept, so you’re not quite safe to put in that level one for the carry when she first pops up.

What I recommend is, after demolishing Pixiebell, taking a bit of time to heal up and refresh buffs, maybe get in a couple hits on Doodle. Then, when Tally enters you’ll be ready to go.

The only thing to watch out for with Pixiebell is Life Exchange. I don’t really bother healing a lot before Pixie uses it, but I do keep up my defensive abilities, if possible. The longer this section of the fight goes the harder Pixiebell will hit with Arcane Blast, so the quicker you can kill her the better.

Tally has Stampede and will usually follow that up with the hard-hitting ability Headbutt.

This is why it’s preferable that at least one of your battle pets have that per-hit shield. Without the Shattered Defenses buff, Headbutt hits for 500 damage or so. If Tally gets Stampede off, its Headbutt will hit for 900 or more, which means curtains for most pets.

After Tally dies, Ashlei will swap her plushie back in. At this point, as long as you have one living pet capable of doing any damage at all you win. This is also how a level 1 carry is accomplished easily: I wait until this second appearance of the plush, then swap in my level 1 for as many turns as I’d like before finishing the job.

I’ve been able to solo this fight fairly handily with both my usual standby Emperor Crab and the Moonshell Crab I tamed on the eastern coast of Shadowmoon Valley. Many typically recommended utility pets like the Anubisath Idol or the Emerald Proto-Whelp do well here, too. The real challenge is crushing a little kid’s dream.

I hope you’re proud of yourself, monster.

Christoph Von Feasel

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Everybody (yee-eah)
Rock Your Body (yee-ah)
Feasel’s Back, alright!

Oh my god, he’s back again. Warlords of Draenor is adding an additional Feasel, and this one is far more insufferable than his relation directly to the left.

Gross.

Like Jeremy, Christoph Von Feasel is located in the Darkmoon Faire, and will fight you in exchange for one of their Darkmoon-branded tokens. Or, at least, his battle pets will fight yours. Here’s the team I used:

Feasel’s first pet, Syd, is a Magic pet with a lot of Aquatic offense. There isn’t a good Magic pet to defend against Syd’s onslaught with enough firepower to beat Syd, so I opted for the Emerald Proto-Whelp. It combines both heals and an avoid with a decent Dragonkin offense. Syd uses Whirlpool on every cooldown now, so I find both heals and avoid to be rather key. The Spawn of Onyxia or Wild Jade Hatchling moveset dragons are a good pick here too.

As said before, Syd will use Whirlpool on every cooldown, so it’s important to use your avoid and your heal when necessary. He will also cast a full-block on hit bubble, so you just need the longevity to burn him down.

Feasel’s next 2 pets are both beasts, but their abilities make each unique. The reason I went with the Tonk is simple: Lock-On. Because of the Direhorn’s incredibly annoying shield, many normal abilities are fully blocked by it, so you can’t just pick whatever mechanicals willy-nilly. Lock-On is an activated ability which hits extremely hard after being primed, so I use those down turns to begin Lock-On and cast a couple of his other abilities, then blast Mr Pointy’s face off in full when his shield wears. There are a few other pets with this ability, or similar ones. Launch Rocket is fairly similar. I also like having Minefield available to make a big dent in the next pet without a ton of effort on my part, but that’s just gravy.

I’m not sure about other battlers, but Mr. Pointy was by far the source of the most cursing on my part.

Christoph’s 3rd pet, Otto the Cow, has a combination of hard-hitting abilities and Feed, which means you want to blitz him down and quick.

Lil Bling, my favorite battle pet of the expansion apparently, is up to the task. Make It Rain and Inflation go together like peanut butter, chocolate, and dessert wine. He also has Extra Plating for extra longevity, which I typically use so that I’m ‘safe’ through the Inflation turns.

After you beat Feasel The Fireworksier, you get a new Darkmoon pet bag. Mine contained the same old standard battle pet & Darkmoon gunk as that other Feasel’s. The new pet Syd The Squid also has a chance to drop, much like the Darkmoon Eye.

But, Christoph Von Feasel isn’t all bad. He may have just given me a new motto:

Seeker Zusshi

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This last tamer in Pandaria is a unique one, and not just because he’s the only Jinyu tamer. He’s also quite useful for carries, because of one really specific trick & combo. I’ll also give you tips on beating him with other teams, but you can carry a level one on this fight with a specific team. Here it is:

The Anubisath Idol is fairly indispensable here because of his Sandstorm/Deflection combo. To carry a level 1 Sandstorm is really key, but if you’re going for level 10 or higher carries, or just beating the encounter the first time around, most pets with a decent heal will work pretty well in the first slot. My trusty crab Ishmael is of course a good pick, but I’ve also used frogs and my Perky Pug Bertha for this too. The carry pet is in the middle slot, and the anchor is a Flying battle pet, preferably with some kind of avoidance move. Moths with Cocoon and fliers with Lift-Off work really well, but another option is to go glass cannon, with something like a Gilnean Raven.

First up is Diamond, and he’s the reason we’re packing the Anubisath. He uses Howling Blast, which does an AOE on all your pets as long as your front battle pet is Chilled. This is why Sandstorm is key if you’re trying to carry a level 1 battle pet. Occasionally my back row will take 10-20 damage if there’s an elemental-weak Mechanical, but other than that Sandstorm will block all damage from that AoE. After you’ve sorted that, Diamond just needs to be burned down.

Mollus is a Rapana Whelk with the Acidic Goo/Dive combo we’ve seen before, and Absorb. The thing here is that Absorb’s reflexive heal will make the battle drag on a bit while Dive makes for big damage, which is why I highly recommended either a pet with a heal or a big dodge in this slot. To be clear, because of the mechanics of Dive, an ability with a similar mechanic will only result in your battle pet taking damage. Avoid that Dive when you can and get those hits in otherwise and you’ll dispatch Mollus handily.

Skimmer always leads off with the same combo, and this is why you can carry a level 1 pet. He’ll self-heal and apply weather, then use Soothe, and then charge his Pump before releasing it on his fourth turn. Because Pump is the only offense he has, and he dawdles before actually unleashing it, this makes his offense both easy to counter and easy to use for a level 1 carry. I usually swap my leveling pet in as soon as Mollus dies, regardless of whether my first pet is healthy, active, whatever, to take advantage of this first downtime, because after the first go around it gets a bit less predictable with the various ability cooldowns. From there, just try to avoid Pump when you can and burn Skimmer down.

It has been quite a journey, through all the daily Tamer pet battles in Pandaria, so it’s fitting we end in the ever-glowing twilight of the Townlong Steppes. From here, it’s almost possible to forget that we, the players, in our travels through Pandaria, ruined Hyuna’s view, that we had a hand in polluting Moruk’s water, and that the vegetables surrounding Nishi will no longer grow enough to feed the Heartland so all the farmers will starve.

Just don’t tell Zusshi he’s one of a handful of Jinyu left. It’s extremely likely that all his friends & family are dead.

Um, to Draenor?

(edit) – This strategy works perfectly well as an Elekk Carry for your Awfully Big Adventure too.

Farmer Nishi

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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

6 Replies

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.

Okrut Dragonwaste

1 Reply

This guy is one of the hardest tamers you’ll come across as you level, for a variety of reasons. It seems kind of silly but I’m breaking him down before some of the later guys, because he’s such a big stumbling block for so many players.

Here’s the team:

I went with the Hopling because of the single-round stun. You may want to use something like a Flayer Youngling, the Anubisath, or another humanoid. I wouldn’t recommend the Kun-Lai Runt, because he’s at his best with stuns, and stuns are generally a bad idea in PVE (the NPC usually switches out a stunned pet, so you don’t get the benefit). For the second pet, I have my speedy rabbit Dill as usual. All these pets are fairly slow though, so even my H/B rabbit is faster than the second two pets. Almost any critter will work here, but the mitigation on the rabbits is really nice, as always. If this is your first time fighting him, go with a humanoid and 2 critters, hopefully with a dodge, burrow, a heal, etc. Some kind of avoidance and longevity, basically.

The first pet, Drogar, is a violet-reskinned green proto drake. He has a Flying mitigation move, Flamethrower, and a self-heal. I go with the humanoid here to kill him as quickly as possible, hopefully before he can heal too much.

This is the tricky part. The rest of the dragons on his team are undead, so a humanoid is not so helpful. However, the next pet uses elemental damage, so it’s not like he’s just going to flop over. I use the Hopling until he dies, then swap to the rabbit, which deals extra damage against undead.

At first we’re going to just attack, until Sleet casts Ice Tomb. Then, we’ll wait a turn and use Dodge or Burrow, or whatever avoidance ability your critter has.

This is mostly because it’s a big hit and not so much because we have to avoid the stun, but if you want to use a pet without the critter family stunbreaker that’s a consideration too. Being undead he’ll resurrect for a turn, but you should be able to dispatch him fairly easily.

The last pet is Rot, a Scourged Whelpling, with a ground AOE attack, plagued blood for a small heal per hit dealt, and Shadowflame, which does middling damage. It’s a particle-effecty good time.

Just keep on hitting him and dodging where necessary. This is the easiest part of the fight, but don’t get too cocky. Use your avoids against Shadowflame when possible and burn him down. He’s also undead, so make sure you have enough health or pets to get past that one last round.