triad | BattlePetRoundup.com

Triads, triads, come and get yer triads!

Sully, the bumblingest world-class espionage agent, brings undead Socks, critter Monte and aquatic Rikki to the table. All 3 of his pets have cross-family abilities.

Socks is probably the trickiest, because while he has Infected Claw, he also has regular Claw, making him a powerhouse against the critter you probably picked to beat him. As a result, you’ll want to pick a pet in an off-family with critter offense. I had good luck with a Mei Li Sparkler with Scratch and Swarm, with Cocoon in the middle slot, and a frog using Tongue Lash and Swarm of Flies. Both are in a defending family for one of Socks’ attacks. I give the Sparkler a slight edge though, because with Cocoon, it can dodge Socks’ last attack, Unholy Ascension. Your back line will still get the debuff, but hey.

For Monte, I usually just toss in that Cat I used in the other 2 triads. Oddly, Monte has all beast attacks with Huge, Sharp Teeth!, Vicious Strength and the combo attack/evasion ability Burrow. As long as you don’t use your Prowl buffed ability while he’s underground, you should be able to all but one-shot Monte. If you don’t have a cat, another pet with strong beast offense should work just as well.

Rikki, the mongoose I’m just assuming totally beat the crap out of a family of cobras, has all beast offense. He uses Gnaw and Bloodfang, so you need to watch out for heals. He also uses Cute Face, so you should save your long cooldown big hits for when that drops off. The ideal match here would probably be a Crow or Gilnean Raven, but if you want to save yours for another fight, nearly any flier will work here. I like the Kaliri Hatchling, or the Dragonbone Hatchling, but I used the uncommon Cockatiel with no issue, too.

Hold on to your butts, because the next tamer we fight is Dr. Ion Goldbloom. His 3 pets are the flying Screamer, Beast Trike, and Magic Chaos.

He always starts off with Screamer, but Screamer won’t be killed straight away, because he uses the Feign Death ability. Both his offensive abilities are Flying, but one of those two is Lift-off, with the additional evasion component. He’ll also use Alpha Strike, and at 380 speed he’s going to be faster than your pet unless you debuff him. Because of the Flying of it all, I liked using the Emerald Whelpling with the magic abilities in the first two slots. You need a good amount of longevity with this pet. A Nether Faerie or Sprite Darter works here too, but isn’t quite as sturdy as the Emerald Whelpling.

When Screamer swaps out with Feign Death, Trike will come in, and you’ll want to swap to a mechanical. He uses all Beast offense with Bite, Adrenaline Rush and Horn Attack. Almost any mechanical works out alright, excepting pets like the Lifelike Mechanical Toad, which has nearly no Mechanical offense. Using a Son of Animus here makes the whole fight rather trivial, to the extent that I was able to pretty much duo it with the Whelpling, but again with the Celestial Tournament being about triage and choice… I like having Animus for a later fight, because he’s such a strong pet. Like I said though nearly any ‘extra’ mechanical you have kicking around works here.

Chaos can be really wonky. Neither of its 2 offensive moves are Magic, and it uses the new ability Uncertainty, which increases its crit chance by 50%, but decreases its chance to hit by 25%. His offense is the Dragonkin ability Instability, and the new Humanoid ability Logic, which is a straightforward nuke. I had an easy time with both the Nether Ray Fry (Flying), the Scourged Whelpling and the Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling, though I lean toward the Nether Ray or Scourged Whelpling, because Chaos is super fast so your Tail Sweep will hit twice.

Whenever Screamer swaps out I swap the Emerald Whelpling back in, and eventually all his pets will die. His dinosaurs had their shot, and I selected them for extinction.

The last tamer, Lorewalker Cho, uses Flying Wisdom, Magic Patience and Knowledge, a Dragon. And of course, they also use off-breed abilities.

Wisdom uses the Beast damage over time spell Rip to great effect with the debuff Wild Magic, and rounds it out with Peck. I had really good luck here using a Coilfang Stalker with Illusionary Barrier. My personal choice is probably going to be the Lesser Voidcaller, because he was fairly key in the first couple triads and we haven’t used him yet this triad, so I might as well re-use him. He’ll use his magic moves, including his own shield, Prismatic Barrier.

After Wisdom is Patience, the broom. It has a heal in Tranquility, and the magic nuke and barrier-clearing Clean-Up, with the humanoid ability Broom. So, like Chaos, we need a dragon nuker that isn’t a dragon. Since Patience is super slow, I’d recommend trying the Mechanical Dragonling, since his Breath isn’t affected by speed, but the Nether Ray and Scourged Whelp’s Tail Swipe is at a disadvantage if it goes first.

Last up is Knowledge, the dragonkin. He uses Tail Sweep, and is very slow at 244 speed, so he’s probably going to get to use both hits of that the whole time. He also has Amplify Magic and fairly crazy elemental nuke Solar Beam (especially combined with that Amplify). I had a hard time figuring out when Knowledge will use Solar Beam, which is kind of a big deal here. As a result my most foolproof strategy was to use the Anubisath and use Deflect on cooldown until he uses it, then count out every 5 rounds when it’s off cooldown and use it again then. In rounds where he didn’t cast Solar Beam, it was really easy to cream him with pretty much any humanoid.

Leveling Worksheet (italics means they’re used in a different triad, updated as strategies progress): Non-critter with Critter offense, a beast damage pet (preferably a Prowl or other combo pet), a pet with strong flying offense, Emerald Whelpling or Nether Faerie Dragon, Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling, Scourged Whelpling, a Mechanical, Lesser Voidcaller, Anubisath Idol.

As discussed in my previous entry on the Celestial Tournament, you have to fight a varying set of 3 tamers in order to get to the 4 Celestial bosses. One set is Chen Stormstout, Wrathion and Taran Zhu. Here’s a bit of rough strategy for this triad.

Wrathion tickled my fancy, largely because of the names of his pets.

He always starts off with Cindy, who is undead, followed by the dragonkins Alex and then Dah’da.

Generally speaking, I found Cindy the most difficult to figure out, largely because she is very fast. She starts off with 375 speed, meaning that the speed breed rabbits are on equal footing with all the other rabbits, ie not sucky, but not a total lock either. Her 3 abilities are Bite, Blistering Cold and Ice Tomb. Ironically, of the pets I had available (no bandicoons, which I think would theoretically be good) the best against Cindy were crickets. With a self-heal, cocoon (used mostly against Ice Tomb… the Blistering Cold DoTs didn’t trip it) and decent damage against Undead, the cricket usually made it well through to Alex without much issue.

Alex has Breath, Flamethrower and the healing Ancient Blessing. Dah’da has Shadowflame, Roll and the heavy damage, big stun Elemenium Bolt. The reason I’m discussing them at the same time is because both were rather summarily dispatched by my Anubisath. Deflect against Elementium Bolt was especially key. I opted for the shield rather than Sandstorm because I wanted to avoid the accuracy debuff, and the shield worked fairly well, especially against Flamethrower’s DoT. Dah’da’s Shadowflame hits fairly hard regardless, especially with the roll buff. I had to get in one last swing with a Grell once out of the three times I tried the Anubisath in the second slot, so this may be a candidate for a leveling slot. Bizarre.

Chen’s beast Tonsa is rather formidible, but I was generally able to get the critter Chirps and elemental Brewly down using just a Panther Cub.

Tonsa has Bite, Headbutt and Chew. The best mechanical for the job here seemed to be a Clockwork Rocket Bot of whatever color variation, even though the one I had at hand was only Uncommon. I used Toxic Smoke and Launch Rocket in particular. The Darkmoon Zeppelin with Block worked really well too, but I like to save that one for later.

Chirps is very interesting. He has Flank, Lullaby, which puts your current pet to sleep for 2 turns, and Locust Swarm. Locust Swarm is also a completely new ability. It’s like a cross between Swarm and Deep Breath, where you charge up a round and then the next round he deals ~700 damage across 3 hits. It’s pretty brutal, but you can kinda dodge it. However, he’ll also use Lullaby then use that next turn to charge up Locust Swarm. Luckily he has 281 speed so when I fought him, I used a panther cub to wreck him in under 3 turns. Nearly any cat with a Prowl will work here. I was even sometimes able to finish out the last pet, Brewly, but that was fairly hit or miss.

No, I mean, literally hit or miss. Brewly has a new ability called Inebriate, which decreases your accuracy by 25%, so sometimes I could wreck her no problem and sometimes she just sat back and laughed while my panther ineffectively pawed at her. I kept a strider in my pocket, and was able to finish out the fight without too much limping toward the finish. She also has the rather gross Barrel Toss and Brew Bolt, which is a relatively straightforward aquatic nuke.

To be completely up front, I wasn’t able to nail down a precise strategy for Taran Zhu. I was able to beat him, and notice some patterns, but I wasn’t yet able to replicate a win every time with a particular setup.

As you can see from the screenshot, he’s playing the part of PVP troll with 3 humanoid pandaren monks. But, only one of the monks, Yen, uses an ability player monk pets even have. It’s the stun, Blackout Kick. Yen in particular is a total jerk, also getting the critter ability Comeback, which hits hard against the Humanoid countering Undead, and Feign Death, which pulls him out just as he’s getting hit hard (and dodges any DoTs you may have up on him at the time in addition to your turn that round). Li has Triple Snap, the new heal ability Bandage, and Spin Kick, which is new, but functions very similar to Backflip, just with higher baseline damage. Bolo uses Punch, Blinding Powder, which gives you 0% chance to hit for one round, and Rampage.

To counter, my best strategy was to use Undead pets with big DoTs, namely Curse of Agony and Curse of Doom, especially against Yen. I did try to time my Curse of Doom so that, for example, Yen wouldn’t dodge it, and it would hit Bolo on the rounds I didn’t have Blinding Powder in my face. I did alright with a Stitched Puppy and a Howl/Diseased Bite combo. The thing is, typically if Yen started off with his Critter ability, I was pretty much toast before I even got started… the Gusting Grimoire, Lofty Libram or Lesser Voidcaller might be the answer, but I didn’t have those to use.

[Update 8/29/13] – Rather than the above magic pets, I ended up making liberal use of Mr. Grubbs. His Acidic Goo plus the Scourged Whelpling’s very long DoTs and the healing on Consume made this another duo fight! You do have to be careful and count turns a bit… when I timed it properly to Burrow through stuns and debuffs he really shone. If you don’t have Mr. Grubbs, any maggot or larva will work. If you don’t have the Whelpling, try a Restless Shadeling, maybe. Death & Decay was really the workhorse in this fight, oddly enough.

The big, overarching theme to keep in mind with all these fights is that once you use a pet to fight a particular tamer, you’re pretty much not going to want to use it again until after the entire scenario is complete. There are certain pets which would do well as a family counter to say, Chen’s Tonsa, but because you’re going to want huge burst against Zao (and maybe even against Xufu, but that’s another post) you need to keep a few heavy-hitting mechanicals in your back pocket… like discussed briefly above, the Darkmoon Zep can be very useful later.

Leveling Worksheet (italics means this suggestion carries to another triad): Anubisath, an undead and a maggot, a cat with prowl, a critter with some avoids, and a mechanical (specifically a Rocket Bot if you have a stone available, or can find an upgraded one).