Tag Archives: Warlords of Draenor

Accuracy – Warlords of Draenor

There are new things afoot in the latest Warlords of Draenor Alpha build for pet battlers.

Many abilities which used to have lower accuracies now instead have an accuracy of 100%, and the randomness is instead based on range of possible damages. The abilities which previously had high, but not 100% accuracy, like Snap, were just decreased, because the range of damages would kind of just be within the scope of RNG for just the one value. The idea is that you’ll end up doing the same amount of damage with that ability over time, but the overall experience will be more positive. Missing feels terrible even when you win.

So far, I’ve definitely found this to be the case, especially with a few specific abilities. One of my favorite battle pets to grind with is my Clockwork Gnome, but I always seem to get misses with Metal Fist when I’m trying to one-shot level 5s. Now I don’t even think about that miniscule chance to miss, because it no longer exists. If this change makes it to Live, I’m going to have to retool nearly all my guides because I frequently recommend 100% abilities for the sake of replicating results, even if another move might be a bit stronger, and now this won’t be an issue. I’ve also been Burrowing and Diving knowing that the damage component will hit for a unique change of pace. The game is more fun as a result.

The main concern I have, which remains to be seen as far as my own playtest goes, is the issue of transparency. Now, if your Anubisath Idol misses its 400 damage Crush twice in a row, it feels crappy, but you know why you’re starting over, and which move you may want to reconsider. If Crush hits on the low side of its 207-384 damage range, the reason you lost will be far less apparent.

Overall though, this change does make the game quite a bit more fun. I haven’t PVPed with it yet, though, so we’ll see whether my tune changes when other people can use their newfound accuracy against me.

First Look: Tamers of Draenor

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Once again, WoW Developer Jonathan LeCraft has been busy, and has been kind enough to share his work on twitter.

This Gilnean girl, the first Tamer we’ve seen new for Warlords of Draenor, has a very unique team. Most of her pets are nigh-unattainable by most players, the exception being the pet hailing from the Diablo 3: Reaper Of Souls expansion pack (which coincidentally launches today), the Treasure Goblin. All 3 pets on the team are references to Diablo, so perhaps this is less coincidental than it seems. The Treasure Goblin is a humanoid with a lot of Magic attacks and a few defensive moves.

Most enviable is the Mini Tyrael battle pet. Mini Tyrael is a Humanoid with entirely Humanoid moves. Considering these first two pets, it seems like an obvious conclusion that an undead pet, or a pet with a wide complement of undead moves, will be excellent to have in your pocket to beat this new tamer. The third pet on the team, Mini-Diablo, is the only magic battle pet here, and he has quite the varied moveset. It’s next to impossible to recommend a hard counter here before seeing his actual move setup as a result.

The most interesting part of this post though, is the text of LeCraft’s tweet, indicating that this particular tamer will be showing up at our brand new Garrisons! This leads me to all kinds of wild speculation about Garrisons and how they interact with pets, but considering that I have my professionalism hat on just now, I’m not going to indulge. We already knew that Garrisons were going to play some role in how pet battles shape up in Warlords, but continued confirmation of that is really nice.

something something Mini Tyraels growing out of the ground like weeds something something.

If you’d like to help Mr. LeCraft name this team, he’s open to suggestions.

Warlords of Draenor Checklist

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This is another post which is really more for me than for you. While my specific goals are obviously going to be unique to me, I’m sharing this because some will be fairly universal for a lot of battlers. And I’m posting it now because I’m not sure how long we have until Warlords, and I figure the sooner I start to prepare, the longer I have to procrastinate.

1. Get all the battle pets from LFR and Normal/Heroic raids from this expansion. The LFR ones in particular, namely the Gooey Sha-ling and Living Fluid are going to be next to impossible to snag after we move on from Mists of Pandaria. However, because of the incoming item/stat squish, it’s really hard to gauge how quickly people will be able to solo old content. I fully expect the price on, eg the Living Sandling to soar when the Dark Portal opens red, but drop when people can begin soloing Throne of Thunder. However, the price on that Gooey Sha-ling is only going to go further and further up.

2. Get all the battle pets from Timeless Isle that require spawn timers. I finally got Garnia to drop the Ruby Droplet battle pet (in a b/b breed, whomp whomp) but I still have many to collect. For now, depending on your server population, there is always a fistful of people on the Isle with some kind of rare timer, sharing their information (the addon pictured is Rare Coordinator). Once Warlords drops, those people are going to evaporate like Morning Glory Dew in Tanaris, and their shared information with them. This likely also means their AH price is going to skyrocket a bit as well. Excepted here are pets dropped from alt-spawn mobs, like the Spineclaw Crab from the Monsterous Spineclaw. Even with the stat squish those are probably going to be just as easy if not easier to churn come Warlords, though I will be trying to grind these as well in the meantime (just not quite so targeted).

3. Keep leveling! Those new raid and Timeless Isle pets are going to need to run through a lot of pet battles before they’re at cap. This is kind of low-priority though, as the level cap remains at 25 through Warlords (source). This is also a for-now goal, simply because I get the feeling this may change after beta opens and we discover the nature of Garrisons, and especially breeding… whether we need many high-level pets, many low-level pets, what the quality needs to be, etc.

4. Stones, stones, stones. I still have a lot of pets to upgrade, but more importantly I have a feeling they’re going to pull some Minfernal-styles spawning shenanigans again for this expansion. This is fine, but I’m saving a few of each stone type and a couple universals as well, just in case. I’m also continuing to do the Celestial Tournament and stocking up on tokens (so I can use them on whatever), and especially the pet XP biscuits from the Beasts of Fable daily and PVP weekly.

5. Clean out banks; organize central meta-bank alt. Those stones and biscuits and bandages and tokens need a place to go. With all this pet stuff (and all those random Timeless Isle armor drops from failed pet RNG) I really need to get on having them all in one location. Altoholic helped me track things down as a stop-gap, but now that Bind on Account means you can mail things cross-server and cross-faction I can have one meta-banker for all this garbage.

6. Finish up on the alts. One thing I found extremely beneficial to battling in Mists was having a character at cap on both factions. It happens oddly frequently that there’s something only attainable on one side or the other (eg, having 2 different pets from Enchanting during Cataclysm). From the map alone it seems like there are going to be some zones which are more easily accessible to one side or the other. While I’ve been largely bifactional this expansion, my Horde toon is on a PVP server, and I’m really over open-world PVP. The rumor is that they’re not turning on flying in Draenor until 6.1, or at least for a while after launch, so I can tell already I’m going to want my level 40 undead at cap, pronto. This also includes trade skills, as it seems like a roll of the dice which profession is getting a crafted pet this time around (probably engineering). And of course, everybody needs to have fishing, because carps.

7. Wait.

Dread Hatchling

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I usually don’t do extremely current events news, but I honestly could not wait on this. Earlier today, a battle pet was datamined, and then shortly thereafter shared out on Twitter by a dev I surely owe cookies by now, Jonathan LeCraft.

That pic shows a pet with so much power it makes me a little weak in the knees paired with a Gilnean Raven-style moveset in the top row. There’s also at least one new move, the one in the bottom right. It was suspected that this pet was the Warlords of Draenor Collector’s Edition reward pet, much like the Quilen Pup was for Mists of Pandaria. I’m here to tell you simply

Confirmed.

Well, as confirmed as it’s going to get before I pony up $60 for the latest WoW expansion CE. The battle pet model shown there is a placeholder, and just Anzu. The real model was datamined by Adriacraft, and it is really adorable. It’s a kind of a reskin of the Ji-Kun Hatchling, but in a textured blue and yellow appearance, with a lot of really lovely blue glowing effects.

The other thing I was curious about was that mysterious bottom right icon. I did some additional poking around on the PTR just to see if I could find anything.

I was glad I was sitting down. Anzu’s Blessing is like a 5-round Acidic Goo, but if your opponent dies that’s totally cool. Heck, if your pet dies that’s cool too because it’s on every pet of your team. The synergy potential here, in both PVE and PVP, is enormous.

Prepare yourselves. Warlords is Coming.

Post-Blizzcon Pet Information

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There was oddly very little information imparted at Blizzcon about pets. I’m pretty sure yak mounts were mentioned more on the livestream than my favorite niche minigame. There was one question in the Open Q&A, whether there’s going to be pet battling anytime soon for mobile devices. The response was largely positive, but in the Blizzard “Soon(tm)” vein.

Beyond that, there was one very small tidbit of information, enclosed in the official spiel about Garrisons. Apparently one of the buildings in the Garrison, the new, upgradeable player housing, will be a Pet Stable. There seems to be a few listed iterations of this, including a Barn, a regular Stable and a Pet Stable, but that’s unsurprising since part of the stated Garrisons mechanics involves upgrading your buildings. It took a bit of digging, and some begging friends at the con to maul Cory Stockton’s face (with questions) to find out exactly what this pet shed out back entails.

Firstly, it looks like it serves as a place to sort of display your fuzzy (or scaly, or gooey) friends in-game.

However, the real headline here is–hang on to your butts:

PET BREEDING. TO GET EPIC PETS.

That is WoW Forum MVP Alona, who had a discussion with Cory Stockton, a lead game dev also known as @mumper on Twitter. Of course, they both could’ve been, let’s say, enjoying the Blizzcon Spirits at that point.

Tweets are relatively unofficial, but I’d say this is good enough to confirm Pet Breeding as a function of Garrisons.

We know that this is how we get new, epic pets. Alona also contributed from this conversation that the pet level cap will not be increasing, leaving us free to level our new epic pets. What we don’t know yet is pretty much everything else. How often we can breed them. What it will do to skills. What kind of screwed up abomination skins the final product will have (I’m totally breeding a Valkyr and a Scourged Whelpling just to see what pops out). However, we also don’t know how this will affect our current pets, and if Radley gets destroyed in order to ‘merge’, forget that idea.

Alona also says that Corgis are a ways off, which I know lots of collectors (especially her) are sad about. However, I’m thrilled to say that the peacock Elepheagle and I have been hounding Mr. Stockton about is in the offing for 6.0. I do not have a better source for this than twitter hearsay, but the #arWAAARRRK and #mumperpromisedmeapeacock hashtags have been a long-running inside joke between the two of us, so I’m pretty excited for this even if it ends up as just a rumor.

There were a couple slides from the art panel which looked intriguing as possible future pets (especially this little enraged flowerperson) but at this point that’s speculation on my part. I don’t think I’ve made much of a secret of my disappointment in how little pet information came from Blizzcon, but I do think that breeding has potential to be really cool. We’ll see as we move into beta and get more first person accounts of garrisons.