where are they now?

so here we are about four-and-a-half months since pandaria went live and i started building my pet battle army. i was thinking about how much things have changed since those first few hours when i set out into elwynn forest, and i found myself wondering what had happened to those six pets that were my spearhead on the drive to level 25. which ones was i still sending into battle on a regular basis, and which had drifted off to the sidelines? time for a review, i think.

morbinex. fell in love with this guy and his hard-hitting wind-up back in beta, and he was still a great beastslayer as we leveled up. unfortunately, he's only an uncommon, and as i got closer to 25 the gap between him and the rares became more and more noticeable. haven't used him in months now. i'm thinking it's time to put him at the front of the line for my next mechanical battle-stone, and restore him to his former glory.

francois. as a rare beast, he was an awesome critter-killer. but i've got a number of pets now that are both great for ripping through critters and also heal themselves along the way, so he's also fallen aside. poor pantsless monkey.

mudderclucker. picked her up in westfall - she was my first captured rare. my go-to pet for fighting aquatics, but later on i acquired flyers with harder-hitting abilities like alpha strike and lift-off, so the shiny has worn off.

stoppable force. still getting some use out of this guy. his ion cannon is a great finishing move against npc tamers like farmer nishi and jeremy feasel, who always have a beast for their last pet. pull out the cannon, and it's game over.

sleepy willy. another uncommon pet, useful for smacking wild flyers when i literally had nothing else. plus, i loved the befuddled look on his face every time he got hit. poor willy got replaced by oozes, which has got to be demoralizing. he's stoned now, and has an unusual variety of attacks - maybe i should think about ways to utilize him in pvp.

cuddles. my first pet with rampage - he went through critters liek a chainsaw through butter. eventually i found that humanoids like flayer younglings and stunted yetis were even better for this job, since they have that nifty passive self-heal, and i phased out my other scorpions. cuddles is still part of the four-team voft4w farming roster, but he'll probably be pushed out once my newly-stoned kun-lai runt reaches 25.

so there it is. the original six were great - no complaints about how they performed in those wonderful, chaotic first couple of weeks. but eventually new pets came along that were more effective, and for the most part i no longer need them.

odds and ends

hats! safari hats for everybody! blizzard appears to have finally gotten the taming the world achievement working properly, and julie's and my characters all got their own hat in the mail. so that's a yay. they all also got loremaster tabards, which was a little baffling since i got that achievement over a year ago, but whatevers.

been doing a lot of leveling lately. mostly taking the various rares i've captured in pandaria and pushing them up to 25, so the top stable now has a number of bandicoons and plains monitors and marsh fiddlers. along the way i hit the pro pet crew achievement. pro pet mob will happen at some point, but not a high priority for me at the moment. at least the reward will now be a rare singing cricket - i feel for those who pushed hard to get the achievement quickly only to get an uncommon one.

was talking to tome of the ancient about pet leveling, and told her that my preferred method was to let two lowbies pick a fight with a critter in the valley of the four winds, let them each take a hit and swap them out, then send in a level 25 scorpion to rampage on the critter's ass. it gives you a boost over your base damage, in exchange for locking you into the same move for three rounds. not a great move against an opponent than has a real brain and can respond, but against wild crickets and bandicoons it's like a chainsaw vs butter.

i've picked up five flawless battle-stones in something like 400 battles now - all in pandaria. fighting low-level pets in old azeroth, the drop rate is much lower. four were the same family as the wild pet i battled, and one was a "any family" one. can confirm that you don't need to capture a pet to get the stone, and you don't need for any of the three wildlings to be rares. looks like it's simply a flat percent chance (1%? 2%?) for one to drop, and any special tricks people claim help are just the result of the human brain's ability to see patterns when there's really just noise.