Tag Archives: undead

Macabre Marionette

A brand new holiday pet! And this one is super cool and useful as a battler. Be still my beating heart!

Oh. Yeah, that is kind of an insensitive turn of phrase to use here.

The reason it looks like it’s waving in that screenshot is because it also does the Undead headbanging dance. When I was fooling around with it on PTR, any time we stopped moving, it started dancing with its wee little maracas. It also dances through battles when it’s not performing an action. I wasn’t lying when I said it’s cool.

So, what’s the catch? Its quest is only available for two days a year.

The Macabre Marionette is available as a part of the Day Of The Dead festival, loosely based on the Mexican holiday Día de Muertos, but previously it wasn’t a companion pet per se. It was an unlearnable item in your bags which spawned this little dude, like the very old school companion pets. It disappeared once the two-day festival was over. It looks like Blizzard changed their mind for this year, and the Marionette will be trainable as a battle pet at long last.

In order to see the spirits and obtain the Marionette, you have to go to the graveyard of the city where your racial quartermaster is. This is especially confusing for Worgen, whose leader hangs out doing nothing in Stormwind while their ‘home’ tree thinger and quartermaster is in Darnassus. Most other races are relatively straightforward. Trolls, Orcs & Goblins go to Orgrimmar, Gnomes and Dwarves go to Ironforge, etc. The graveyards in Dalaran and Shattrath allow all comers, too.

Before you leave the city for the graveyard, you should grab at least one Simple Flour and one Ice Cold Milk. The quest objective is a Bread Of The Dead, the recipe for which is obtained in the graveyard for 20s. Note that you can only cook the bread over a special blue campfire located directly near the vendor. The other catch is that in order to see the quest NPC at all, you have to use a Marigold. Marigolds are cheap, but have an extremely short duration. You can repeat the quest multiple times on the same account during the holiday, and can do it with any level character, but you cannot do quests in multiple locations (eg, going from the Worgen spirit in Darnassus to the Dalaran spirit).

It’s really not much of a hoop to jump through, but it had best not be for such a tiny window of acquisition. Though, luckily, it is tradeable, so if you repeat the quest a few times on a few characters you may be able to make a quick handful of gold in a month or two.

The pet’s revamp into a battler is very interesting. Note that it starts off Uncommon, so it’ll require a stone. It has a few old abilities–siphon life/death & decay in the second slot is a fairly common Undead MO, and Bone Bite has shown up in the past as well. It has the new Macabre Maraca, a 100% accuracy humanoid nuke, which makes me want to try pitting the Marionette against Yu’la. It has Bone Barrage, an ability similar to the critter Nut Barrage, only undead. Lastly, also very interestingly, it has Dead Man’s Party, which is similar to Flock.

The reason I find this moveset interesting is because, not only will it make it a terror against dragonkin, but it seems like Blizzard has been making pets with a moveset similar to this recently. There have always been Swarm-ers, Flock-ers and Stampede-ers, featuring Critter, Flying and Beast damage respectively, but Lil Bling was just added with a mechanical version of this ability, and now this pet for the undead version. Undead and Mechanical are rather under-represented caught pets, and this brand of move is such a good one for PVE synergy it makes me curious for the future. What new pets are coming, and what new fights are being planned for the next expansion? I’d be willing to bet some imaginary money that we see either some kind of Torrential Downpour ability like this from caught Aquatics next expansion, or maybe a Sonorous Frog Croak akin to Howl.

But, ultimately, Day Of The Dead is about remembrance. For Gilneas!

Or for that weird tree thing, I guess.

Creepy Crate

Leave a reply

In general, this pet (along with the Ghostly Skull) seems to be the fallback for other, less attainable,0 Undeads. Don’t have an Unborn Valkyr? Use a Ghostly Skull! Don’t have a Crawling Claw? Try the Creepy Crate! While he may be second choice in a lot of battling situations, he has extremely unique animations and a seasonal questline to pursue. And, he’s one of the very, very few pets not acquired by capture which isn’t cageable, so if you want one your only option is to complete the questline during Hallow’s Eve.

Go to the AH and buy 2 Strange Dust right now, before somebody buys them all up and lists them for 500g a pop! I’ll wait. Aw, somebody already did? It, um, it might have been me. Sorry. Well, not really. Find a lowbie enchanter friend who doesn’t know any better or something and come on back.

The quest starts at the main inn in your capital city, either the one where Gamon always got creamed in Orgrimmar or the one in the Trade district in Stormwind. You’re directed to find a courier in the harbor of each city.

He’s fairly dead. Disgustingly, you’re directed to follow a trail of bright pink glowing spiders to the auctioneer who fenced the goods stolen off the courier after he was murdered.

That auctioneer didn’t actually take the goods though, so you’re directed to somebody else in a shady part of town, again via spider trail. The quest giver who awaits you sends you to go get stuff to make a potion to protect you from the box, because boxes are dangerous sometimes. This is where that strange dust I mentioned earlier comes in. You need to visit a vendor for some vials. If you have a mount with vendors, you can buy the vials there. You also need to head to either the Tauren area in Orgrimmar or the farm sort of near the Cataclysm portals in Stormwind to gather the quest herbs.

After creating the potion, it’s time for the showdown. Horde hop the Zeppelin to Undercity and have a confrontation in the ruins of Lordaeron. Alliance go to the Cathedral of Light, into the catacombs on the right hand side. There will be another path of purple spiders, so if you get lost backtrack to the point you last saw them and follow them. There will be an NPC there, channeling a purple looking thing while standing over a crate. If you’re on a high-pop server, you may need to wait for ‘the confrontation’. Eventually he spawns 2 voidwalkers, and as long as you get an attack in on one or the other the quest should complete.

After this, you have to make one last choice. If this is the first time you’re running through I won’t spoil it for you, because regardless of that choice, you’re then left with the Creepy Crate.

As noted above, the Crate is sort of a fallback pet. For force swaps, its health breed makes it slightly less useful than the speedy Bone Spider, and its Curse of Doom shares a slot with its Death Grip, making it a bit less deadly than the Crawling Claw on a force swap team. Its Curse of Doom hits for far less than many other pets, and with its only heal being Devour it isn’t so hot as a tank pet. Its most unique ability, BONESTORM, doesn’t help its position as a tank either. On a 3-round cooldown, you can use bon–excuse me–BONESTORM to deal 200 damage to the entire enemy team, but only by sacrificing 10% of your total health.

The other thing it shares with the Ghostly Skull is, when you acquire it, it starts off as Uncommon. Because it’s untradeable as well, you will want to save an undead upgrade stone if you intend to use him full-time.

The Crate doesn’t take this second-class citizen stuff lying down. In its jealousy and the insatiable hunger the quest warned you about, it will frequently use its Death Grip ability as a companion pet to eat other critters roaming around. When it does, each pet consumed by your crate will count toward Crittergeddon.

Worth it.

Scourged Whelpling

9 Replies

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.