trade skill | BattlePetRoundup.com

The Lunar Festival in WoW is loosely patterned on the celebrations that occur on the Lunar New Year in many Asian countries, with most of the customs portrayed hailing from China. Notable among these for pet battlers is the Lunar Festival Lantern. Over the course of the holiday, you must visit Elders for special tokens. You can then take those tokens and use them to purchase Lunar Festival foods, the high-necked brightly colored gowns and pantsuits, fireworks, and of course, the Lunar Festival Lantern. It’s… oh, what’s that?

Yeah, there’s a slight issue here. The reason I personally have the one and not the other is that, since the advent of account-wide pets, I’ve mostly been playing Horde. Once a character has collected 50 coins, Valadar Starsong in Moonglade sells Horde players the Festival Lantern, and Alliance players the Lunar Lantern. I never really got around to collecting enough coins, involving quite a bit of laborious travel around the continents, on my Alliance character.

If you’re only looking at the movesets, the two are identical. They also share moves with the Enchanted Lantern battle pet which, true to the previous gripe, is crafted by Horde-only enchanters with 525 skill, and all 3 battle pets have identical stats as well. The Alliance enchanting pet, the Magic Lamp, has a vastly different moveset, but identical stats. Luckily, all 4 are also cageable, so if you are diehard FOR THE HORDE, and refuse to even so much as roll an Alliance DK for fast flight and easy Elder NPC visits within a couple hours, you still have some options. Also luckily for the gold makers, like all pets they are account-wide and still command a pretty penny, but especially so if you sell them cross-faction. All 4 also start off as uncommon when attained, making for a really nice payday if you have some flawless Magic upgrade stones kicking around.

These lanterns never really had a heyday as battling pets, but they do have a few tricks. They have a really cool 1-2 punch with the blinding Flash and double-hitting when blinded Light. Sharing Light’s slot is the blocking move Soul Ward. Soul Ward works really well against big single hitters, but falls flat against multi-hit opponents because it only blocks one attack. The alternate in the second slot is Illuminate, which causes the Sunny Day weather effect. The Lanterns don’t have a move which really benefits from the sun, so you may want to pair this pet with something that does.

Both first slot choices are straightforward nukes. Beam is Magic, Burn is Elemental. The former hits slightly less hard and has a slightly higher accuracy as a result. This choice is largely dependent on which pets you’re fighting. If you’re up against any Mechanical, without Burn your lantern is a sitting duck.

In the end, the benefit of this pet is more cosmetic than anything. Like the Elders, it is a peaceful memory of a time gone by.

We’re getting to a weird point in time for many WoW bloggers, and the WoW community as a whole. While most people were very excited at the Warlords of Draenor reveal at Blizzcon, there’s been a dearth of official news since. The gaps have been filled almost entirely via tweetlists (oh and by the way, breeding epic pets are out for WoD, says developer Cory Stockton in this random tweet). As a result, lots of bloggers have taken to fanciful prognostication, mostly about the nature of this or that about the expansion, including a fun Warlords of Draenor release date pool hosted by Alternative Chat. The other common current blogger pastime ties into this, namely a good amount of schmoozing devs, largely on twitter, and a fairly constant stream of questions asking them what else is coming next.

Personally, I still have pages and pages of material to blog about and several videos slated. Beyond that I’ll likely do a few a la minute PVP posts, add to my ongoing leveling saga (you guys WHY did I think this was a good idea?), and I still have a staggeringly large number of battle pets left to write about. My blog is nearing its 1 year anniversary (!) and if I had written about a pet every single day up to this point I’d still have more than half of them to profile. With so much material left, I figured I might as well combine both my ongoing pet profile series and kissing some developer or CM behind for a scrap of information or two. I’m not proud.

Lil Bling is the son of Blingtron 4000, the friendly, flashy robot who dispenses trashy romance novels, healing potions, and other miscellaneous junk in your faction’s Shrine, or outside the inn at Halfhill. Unless you’re on a PVP server, and then the Blingtron outside the inn is pretty much just a trap for sniping lowbies from the roof of the inn with your frost mage.

Look, I already said I’m not proud.

Once he’s crafted, the Blingtron 4000 can be dropped every 4 hours by an engineer. If you’re not an engineer, you’re at the mercy of someone who is. At this point in the expansion, the crafting cost isn’t terribly steep (I did have to use my farm to gather the Spirits of Harmony I needed quickly) so it’s a good option for an alt. For patch 5.4, Blingtron had a few new things added to his loot table of trash, including a Blingtron Brawler’s Guild fight and the new pet Lil Bling.

Lil Bling’s moveset is quite unique and worth looking at. As touched on briefly in the Macabre Marionette post, he is the first Mechanical with the Shattered Defenses debuff with Inflation. Inflation is equally suited to pair with both abilities in the third slot, Launch Rocket and Make It Rain. Make It Rain will win out on fights with a damage cap, like the Celestials, or if you have an extra proc like Call Lightning, but Launch Rocket paired with this buff will all but completely wreck nearly any normal pet.

The other choice in the first slot, SMACKTHAT.EXE, works well with on-hit synergy, but doesn’t provide it. The benefit to that skill over Inflation is you’re not locked in for multiple rounds. Rounding it all out in the middle slot is either the damage dampening Extra Plating, or the mixed bag Blingtron Gift Package, which has a 50/50 shot to either hit really hard or heal. The former choice obviously offers far more control vs the RNG-heavy latter, but I generally find the latter more fun. You can just see the person on the other side of the keyboard wondering what the heck was THAT?!

I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of Lil Bling in strategies that arise during Warlords. As I mentioned, he is the first mechanical battle pet with the Shattered Defenses debuff, so it stands to reason (or maybe to beg the question) that we may be seeing some big, beefy Beasts we need a tiny robot to beat down in the not so distant future.

I would strongly recommend getting one soon, both because of that and because once WoD hits it’s very likely non-engineers won’t be seeing much of this glittery little guy anymore. In addition to the low drop chance from Blingtron’s daily gift, this pet is also tradable, so you may want to just try the auction house. He’s dropped as Uncommon from the box, so if you’re low on Mechanical stones you may want to keep your eyes peeled for the upgraded version.

The dev connection, as alluded to in the preamble, is that Lil Bling is the self-proclaimed son and is shown in the current twitter header of WoW senior game designer Jonathan LeCraft (follow him on twitter at @TheCrafticus). There are many items through the World of Warcraft bearing his name, like the elusive Old Crafty. This includes the pet Crafty, which was live on the 5.4 PTR for a short time, and then unceremoniously axed.