Tag Archives: tamers

Vesharr

Like all of the denizens of the Spires of Arak, Vesharr’s story is a tragic one. He holds some artifacts you’ll recognize while questing through the area. A construct used by the Arakkoa for defense, now useless. A black bird used for relaying important messages, quickly and quietly. The tiny avatar of their god; a god which no longer answers them.

At least maybe you’ll bring Vesharr a little bit of entertainment. He needs it, now that his life was shattered along with his wings.

These Draenor tamers are dark, y’all.

The team:

This is a level 1 2-pet carry, so this strategy also works quite well for an Elekk Carry. The Nether Faerie is my Flying killer glass cannon of choice, but there are a couple others that will work too. The Emerald Proto-Whelp is fairly key because of that Lift-Off avoidance move, though there are a couple other dragonkin in this boat. You are going to be taking a lot of damage here, so Dragonkin are definitely preferable.

Vesharr’s 1st & 3rd battle pets are Flying with flying damage, so we’re real heavy on the Dragonkin pets. The name of the game is the blitz. The one big issue is that Vesharr’s 3rd pet is Mechanical. However, it casts this weird buff:

So that magic damage will still be a good pick. The one big thing to watch out for with that 2nd pet is Root, which just deals a lot of damage after a turn to charge up. It will be cast more frequently than the Emerald Proto can Proto-Strike to avoid it, but with that & the heals you should be able to make quick work of the first 2 pets.

The 3rd pet self-buffs on its first turn, so that’s your chance to put in your level 1 carry pet. After that, he will unleash a huge set of attacks, which is why I like to use the Nether Faerie Dragon. Life Exchange works as a great equalizer after you’ve withstood a barrage of attacks. Once Darkwing gets below half health & loses that Flying speed boost, you’ve pretty much won.

Vesharr is also a vendor, so make sure to take the last few birds they have left, trained by one of his friends who was stabbed in cold blood.

Dark, y’all.

Draenor Tamers

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A very new addition in this Warlords of Draenor beta build is a set of 6 tamers out in the world. These tamers have battle pets that are quite a bit easier than the very challenging Menagerie fights we’ve seen to this point. They give two-pet carry XP identical to the fights in Pandaria. Most of them are close to flight paths. For now, these tamers are kind of secret. They aren’t listed on the map at all, so it’s up to tamers to seek them out if they’d like to try their luck. These locations will be revealed in a later build, but for now, here are some maps to help you find them.

Frostfire Ridge Tamer: Gargra

Gargra has 3 super adorable frostwolf pup (beast family) battle pets in tow. Her location is the oddest, but if you follow the path around the back side of Grom’gar and hug the rocks on the north side her blue exclamation point should show up. Click here for my level one (or Elekk!) carry strategy for Gargra.

Gorgrond Tamer: Cymre

Cymre Brightblade, named after the illustrious Cymre Jones from Bubbles of Mischief, has an array of archaeology pets. She’s also squatting in a ruin with her archaeology gear and some really fun flavor text. With both an undead and mechanical on her team, dragonkin and elementals are good picks. Click here for my walkthrough of Cymre‘s very difficult fight.

Shadowmoon Valley Tamer: Ashlei

Found by @gloriaboboria

This team made me a little sad. Ashlei is a new tamer with a few really adorable pets, including the completely useless plushie Doodle. All the cute snugglies are on a plateau overlooking the Embari Village, but easily accessible from a cross-faction flight point. As of now it’s a pretty quick & easy fight, as long as you can get past the heartache of making a little girl very disappointed. Oh, that flavor text. Click here for my strategy for Ashlei, including a mutually-assured Elekk Carry.

Spires Of Arak Tamer: Vesharr

Found by @serrinnewow

The easiest to find once you hit the right level, Vesharr is visible on the minimap from the shared-faction flight point in Veil Terokk. He has 2 flying battle pets and a mechanical, appropriately themed for Spires of Arak. Click here for my strategy post for Vesharr, including an Elekk Carry.

Talador Tamer: Taralune

Found by @patf0rd

Taralune is on a platform surrounded by flowers, near Auchindoun. Her team is 3 moths, so as long as you have the battle pets to counter a moth you’re pretty well set. Click here for my strategy post for Taralune, which is a 2-pet Elekk Carry, also suitable for leveling pets.

Nagrand Tamer: Tarr

Found by Quintessence (@perksnpeeves)

Tarr is in a building toward the back of the Ring Of Blood. His pets are a few of the more recent Murky iterations. They actually have pretty decent synergy among them, but a handful of Undead battle pets will still make quick work of them. Click here for my strategy to defeat Tarr The Terrible. This is a 2-pet leveling strategy that also works well for our Awfully Big Adventure.

Pandaria Tamer Roundup

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.

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.

Tommy Newcomer

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I thought all my walkthroughs on the Timeless Isle were complete. I kicked back with a well-earned chocolate chip cookie and waited for the patch. I was excited to get my mini Xuen, run around in the Shrine of Seven Stars for a while showing it off, and make a small fortune on new glyphs. Then, I see this jerk.

Look at that smug little face. I’m guessing that the trigger to seeing his daily is something along the lines of defeating Aki, but I’m really not sure. I’d heard occasional discussion about him during PTR, but never saw that he had anything for me, so I kind of ignored him. I’m kicking myself over this now, trust.

Tommy Newcomer only has one pet. So we should totally take pity on him, right?

WRONG.

Lil Oondasta is the pet equivalent of, well, boss Oondasta. With a very strong AOE and a force swap, she is a brutal fight. Luckily, she’s only one mob, and you can heal and re-try as many times as you need to get her down. For 500 Timeless Coins and 20g. Ugh.

Here’s the team I ended up using:

Oondasta has 3 abilities, and her 2 most deadly are Magic: Frill Blast (force swap) and Spiritfire Beam (the AoE). She backs that up with Crush, which is a big hit in itself. Because of the humanoid nature of Crush, trying to use my Golden Hatchling in concert with the Clockwork Gnome was met with a hearty ‘lol u mad’ from Oondasta.

The reason I like the Zeppelin and the Mechanical Dragonling should be fairly obvious. Decoy is an amazing ability this fight, and I want to abuse it as much as possible. I definitely screwed up a bit on the Dragonling’s moveset though… Frill Blast will always swap in the Zeppelin for me, because of the higher health, so unless I manually swap for a Fly By, I’m not going to use it to buff others, and the Dragonling doesn’t really have other moves to buff itself. Though there’s not a ton of damage we have to do, the breath ability will probably make for a cleaner fight.

The reason I go with the Tonk is that, because of the force swap if I use Ion Cannon off the bat, Oondasta will then immediately swap him to the back row for the recharge turn and the vast majority of the cooldown I have before I can cast it again. If I return to the front row on my pre-res turn, I can also get in a Shock and Awe for a hopeful-maybe stun. Oondasta is slower than all my pets and only has single hits, so once she kills my mechanicals the first time, they’re guaranteed at least one extra hit. As long as they don’t die in the back row, anyway.

I really liked using two Decoys. I don’t think that both are entirely necessary, especially given the relatively paltry firepower on the Dragonling. Explode as a mechanic is a really excellent tool for single fights, so I would definitely recommend using at least one of these pets.

The Tonk is a little more debatable. You can definitely try subbing in either the Menagerie Custodian or the Tranquil Mechanical Yeti, both of which use Ion Cannon. They’re a bit less sturdy, but it’s still an option. If you go with the Yeti, you may want to opt for Thunderstorm instead, and pair it with a Clockwork Gnome’s turret. In general, as long as you have a good amount of mechanical offense and aren’t caught off-guard by the force swap, you’re going to be in good shape.

A final note: I don’t like writing strategies with pets which are prohibitively expensive or difficult to get without at least offering a solid alternative (eg, Emerald Proto-Drake can be substituted for the Emerald Whelpling in most settings). With that in mind, the Son of Animus, specifically Interrupting Jolt, really shines this fight in place of the Tonk. I want to stress that this investment isn’t necessary, but I can generally keep that last pet alive entirely (well, minus an AoE or two) if I use Animus here.