a farewell to tol barad

so, after collecting a crapton of rusty rifles, killing a legion of already-dead ghosts and skeletons, and putting an ice jacket on poor lost problim more times than i can count, danger mouse has done enough tol barad dailies to purchase both a rustberg gull and a fox kit. along the way she got her first exalted reputation, and leveled from 85 to almost 88. i'm thinking it's time to give her a break and let her finish leveling with some soothing pandaria scenery.

mouse being mouse, she gave the fox kit a name that accurately reflects her pleasure at having achieved this milestone.

raiding with leashes ii progress

farming the burning crusade raids for the pets has been a big honkin' time sink for me since patch 5.3 went live a few weeks ago. i've been running karazhan with a dozen different toons each week, and tempest keep and serpentshrine cavern with several. along he way i have discovered a few things. loot reaver is immune to leaching poison, which resulted in my poor level 85 rogue getting smooshed rather brutally. on the other hand, a level 90 protection warrior's second wind talent regenerates health fast enough that i was able to go afk for several minutes right in the middle of lady vashj's phase 2 with no trouble.

so, how am I doing on finding the new pets?

boss	pet for julie	pet for me
big bad wolf	x*	-
curator	x	x
terestian stranglehoof	x	x
prince malchezaar	x	x
al'ar	x	-
void reaver	x	-
high astronomer solarian	x	x
hydross the unstable	-	-
morogrim tidewalker	x	-
lady vashj	-	-

* = i just went and bought one off the auction house for julie

big bad wolf has been my nemesis in karazhan. he shows up plenty of times in the opera event, he just has yet to drop the pet for me. bastard. good news is, since he's fairly early in he tower, i'm not spending a lot of time there anymore. if it was prince i still needed pets from, and i was still having to run chess many times each week, i'd be a sad ratters.

as for the rest? they'll drop eventually. and then tito will be mine! but i do wish ssc was easier to get to, particularly when things go south and you have to run from one of those graveyards halfway across the zone....

one does not simply walk into the darkmoon faire

"concealed within his fortress, the lord of the darkmoon faire sees all. his gaze pierces cloud, shadow, earth, and flesh. You know of what I speak, gandalf: a great eye, lidless, wreathed in flame."

plus it shoots a frickin' laser beam, which never misses. wicked cool. so, thanks, jeremy feasel.

(julie was so happy that i got this this morning that she gave me not one, but two fingers!)

gotta catch some more of 'em

"gotta catch'em all" never really entered my mindset. i mean, i have a lot of pets, but there's still a bunch i don't, and i still sleep fine at night. but they are out there, waiting to at least be cataloged, whether i ultimately get to them or not.

so, here is the list of pets i don't have yet (omitting trading card game pets, collector's editions i didn' buy, promotions in china, etc) and what I would need to get them. should i choose to do so.

mulgore hatchling, ammen vale lashling, dun morogh cub, elwynn lamb, mechanopeep, shimmering wyrmling	drag my butt back up to the argent tournament and do dailies
searing scorchling	drag my butt back to the molten front, do dailies to buy the reward bag, then get lucky
clock'em	do more fights at the brawler's club
crawling claw	keep doing archeology and buying tol'vir fragments from brann bronzebottom. then get lucky
jade owl, sapphire cub, mechanical pandaren dragonling	remember that i've got characters that can craft these, and then craft them
aqua strider, azhure whelpling, crimson whelpling, darkmoon rabbit, disgusting oozeling, emerald whelpling, firefly, gundrack hatchling, hyacinth mccaw, ji-kun hatchling, lashtail hatchling, living sandling, lumpy, mojo, razzashi hatchling, snarly, son of animus, tiny shale spider, zandalari anklerender	go to the auction house and drop several metric craptons of gold
warbot	remember that i can just buy this from a vendor now, and go do it
tiny flamefly	stop forgetting do finish that quest chain in the burning steppes
darkmoon eye	continue to battle jeremy feasel every day the darkmoon faire is in town. and get extremely lucky
fox kit, rustberg gull	go back to tol barad, and grind out dailies
gold mini jouster	do that quest in mount hyjal again, and this time remember that i've already got like seven blue jousters
hopling	do that thing you gotta do in the stormstout brewery. with the magic beer or whatever it was
jubling	do that thing at the darkmoon faire. something to do with dark iron ale or somesuch
porcupette	keep doing daily npc tamer pet battles, then get lucky
qiraji guardling	summer is coming
snow panda	keep doing the fabled beasts daily. triple the odds when 5.3 lands!
spawn of g'nathus	armtwist my friends into helping me kill g'nathus
spectral porcupette	grind on dinosaurs
sumprush rodent	keep working on operation: shieldwall dailies
tiny red carp, tiny white carp	just keep fishing. just keep fishing
lil' tarecgosa	get my guild rep up in one of the raiding guilds i have an alt in, then go buy it
thundering serpent hatchling	get an alt in a way better guild
wild crimson hatchling, wild golden hatchling, wild jade hatchling	get my butt in gear and grind out all the order of the cloud serpent rep, then capture them

and she's back in the game. for now, anyway.

my wife took a sabbatical from wow to focus on school and work these past few months. the semester is winding down now, and this weekend she logged on and started leveling alts through pet battles. after enjoying herself for a few hours, though, a problem arose.

"why didn't you tell me there are four new untradeable pets that can only be got through fishing?"

"i dunno. i thought i mentioned them at some point."

"I gotta have them."

"you gotta?"

"i need!!!"

and she was off.

of course, fishing is a slow process, even when you aren't trying to catch really rare fish. so she did some research, and ran across the ancient pandaren fishing charm, which gives you a buff that gives you a 20% or so chance to get a bonus fish every time you catch one in a fishing pool. to get it, you have to talk to the ghostly pandaren fisherman, a friendly npc who spawns once every few hours in the valley of the four winds. (i probably read all this back at the beginning of the expansion, and then promptly forgot it.)

unlike me, julie does nothing half-assed in this game. she set up her npcscan add-on to detect the fisherman. she parked herself right at his spawn point. then she launched a second wow session, logged on to her second account, selected a character on a different server, and parked that one at the spawn point as well. then she fired up her other laptop and proceeded to do school work. after maybe an hour, the scanner alarm went off, followed immediately by a triumphant "ha-ha!". then she switched to a different character, parked it, and got back to her homework.

by the end of the day, she'd picked up fishing charms on five different characters, including one of mine (thank you, love :) ). along the way, she had a couple of conversations with other players who said they'd been looking for the fisherman for "weeks", and then flew away. moral of the story: this is a game that rewards patience.

she hasn't got any carp yet, but i expect she'll get all four before i do (i still need red and white). either that, or school will pick up again in the summer and she'll make me play her account to get them.

easy come, easy go

i've written about the high prices some pets can command, but holy freakers, this takes the cake. apparently a guy went afk for a few minutes, and when he came back his six-year-old had bought ten new pets at the auction house for him. total cost?

476,000 gold. great googly moogly.

hope the kid at least got some hard-to-find pets for dropping that small fortune, and didn't pay 13k for a darkmoon tonk (which some optimist is currently listing on my server).

is it summer yet?

back when we got our first looks at all the new pets for us to capture, it was quickly obvious that blizzard was following the same model that they had used with the oceanographer achievement for fishing. That one required you to catch winter squid (only available in winter) and raw summer bass (only available in summer). Now we had the snowy owl and the qiraji guardling. since it was well established with the fish that in azeroth "summer" and "winter" switched at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, we knew when we'd be able to get our pets and thereby our achievements and zookeeper titles. right?

ummm.... maybe not.

the snowy owls didn't show up until november 1, long after september 22. well, maybe that was because they'd been delayed as part of the expansion release. but it now looks like they disappeared after february 28. this suggests that, as far as pet collecting is concerned, winter (and, one suspects, summer) are only four months long, with a two month spring and fall in between. if this is correct, then the qiraji won't begin buzzing around may 1. sorry folks.

unless, of course, blizzard is still monkeying. wouldn't be the first time.

listening to my inner pandaren

so when i got home last night, i was one pet away from that's a lot of pet food. so with all the new pets available in 5.1, which ones did i go for? was it the ion cannon-less yeti? the book that escaped from the dalaran library? one of those cool boss drops in molten core or naxx?

not so much. i listened to my inner pandaren, and he told me "slow down".

i downloaded the patch, updated my add-ons, logged on and did the same thing i would have done if the patch hadn't landed: started the golden lotus dailies with my freshly minted 90 warlock, because she's fun to play. those new pets aren't going anywhere, and the ones in the wild will be a lot easier to find after the initial wave of collectors has moved on.

and guess what? while i was doing dailies, i ran across an eternal strider, which i hadn't even realized i didn't have. apparently it was one of those pets that had gotten left out of the original pet journal by mistake, or something. sent in my current leveling team of shianti the teldrassil sproutling and lawrence welk the rapana whelk to rough him up, threw a cage on him, and hey presto! i get the achievement and the free venus. so i got to eat my cake and have it too. thanks, inner pandaren.

five ideas for new pets

patch 5.1 is going to introduce a number of new pets that can be captured in vanilla zones or drop from bosses in vanilla (or originally created for vanilla) raids, such as molten core and naxxramas. along those same lines, i have a few ideas for pets that i'd like to see added in burning crusade content.

roflcopter. mechanical pet with several flying attacks. capturable. most often found around shattrath city before raid time.

shadier shade of aran. undead pet with magical attacks. drops in karazhan. its flame wreath attack does nothing unless your opponent tries to swap pets - then it blows up the battle.

image of image of archmage vargoth. magical pet. capturable in netherstorm. doesn't actually do anything in battle, just stands there.

gronn pup. humanoid pet with humanoid and beast attacks. drops in gruul's lair. grows larger during every combat round.

lil' reliquary of the lost. mechanical? undead? magic? elemental? yeah, i really don't know. wails a lot. drops in black temple.

pet quality

all pets have three statistics: health, power, and speed. health obviously is how much damage it can take before it dies, power is how hard it hits or how well it heals, and speed determines who goes first in a given round. having higher value stats means a pet is more likely to defeat its opponent, and winning is good, so that's why we give a darn. several factors go into determining a pet's stats, most of which i'm not gonna talk about a lot today. species is one - turtles tend to have more health, birds tend to have more speed, and so on. pet level is another - every time a pet levels up, its stats go up. there is some variation amoung individuals of the same species (nancy the scorpion might have a little more power than doug the scorpion, but less health, for example). and then there's the thing i wanna talk about today: quality. sometimes, crazy dave the tundra penguin is just plain a better fighter than mad mortimer the tundra penguin.

world of warcraft has always a quality system for gear: rare/blue is better than uncommon/green, and so on. pets received a similar design. all else being equal, a rare fire beetle has higher stats than an uncommon fire beetle, which has higher stats then a common, which has higher stats than a poor. (currently, player-owned cannot be higher than rare, but some of the master pet tamer npcs have epic or even legendary pets.) at level 1, the difference between a poor and a rare isn't very noticeable, but as pets level up these differences grow and grow until a level 25 rare can easily smash a level 25 poor.

so, how do you know what the quality of your pets is? once you've captured a pet, the game will tell you what it is in the pet journal, but the only way to know before you decide to start flinging traps is to look at its stat values and make a guess. there are however a number of add-ons which can tell you what the quality of a pet your fighting is. i personally like battlepetcount, which also tells you if you already own a pet of that type, and what its level and quality are, but there are plenty of others. it looks like patch 5.1, which will be landing before too long, will report the quality of pets you are battling as part of the standard interface, which will a nice improvement.

pets that you've acquired through any other method than capturing them in the wild (quest rewards, drops, purchased, etc.) are slightly different. for one thing, they are never poor or common. for another, the default game interface currently gives no information at all as to whether they are uncommon or rare, even when they are in your journal. add-ons will tell you, or you can look them up on warcraftpets.com. or, if you're a lazy-arsed git like me, you can fall back on some rules of thumb. if it came from a real-money transaction, the darkmoon fair, the molten fron, the guild vendor, or a low probability drop, it's probably a rare. if it was a quest reward, crafted by a player, or bought at the argent tournament, it's an uncommon. i think that covers most of them.

should you farm wild pets until you get a rare, and throw away the rest? hell if i know - it depends on what you want to do. if your goal is to pvp or fight the master pet tamers, then yeah, maybe, if its a hard to get species, like humanoid or dragonkin. harder to justify for a critter, since you'll get like a bajillion rare critters in pandaria without trying. if your goal is to have a cool looking baby ape or minfernal to follow you around while you do tillers dailies, then no, probably not worth it. howver, my position on this and every other aspect of pet battling is that there is no wrong way to do it.

happy capturing!

update: anonymous points out that the red cricket, awarded from becoming best friends with the tiller sho, is not automatically uncommon or rare, but instead is apparently given a random quality like captured pets, and can therefore be poor or common. a little digging shows that the sapphire cub, created by jewelcrafters, also has a random quality. i'm inclined to suspect that these are bugs rather than what blizzard intended, but there's no official word as to why these are different. lotta folks pissed about getting shafted with a crappy cricket, though.

one milestone at a time

i've had an alt parked in what used to be the alterac mountains (and is now just 'that part of the hillsbrad foothills full of snow and ogres and yeti') for a while now, looking for the elusive snowshoe hare. which is completely different than the snowshoe rabbit. even though they are identical. one you buy from a dwarf kid, the other you freeze your troll toes off, standing in the snow for weeks.

anyway. a few nights ago, i got all excited when two popped up on my minimap detector. i figured i'd catch one, then put out a realid message that i was looking at one in case anyone wanted to party up and crz in and catch it. (you know, i've never actually done that, so while i think that would work, i'm not 100% sure.) and then it all went wrong. first, i added a lowbie pet to my team so that i could damage him without killing him in one shot. but the pet i added (level 10 lil' deathwing) was still too high, and its first attack knocked the hare down to about 45%. uh oh. nothing to do at that point but hit it again, and of course that killed it. so I hurry up and kill its partner (a rat or something) and swap in a level 6 pet. and step forward to boldly to battle with the other hare, only it's not there anymore. crapdoodle.

last night though, when i did my daily check-in on the alt, there was a hare on the minimap. woot! more carefully this time, i swap a level 6 pet into the team and into battle we go. a minute or so later, we've got us a snowshoe hare. i checked the achievement list for what else i need. twilight fiendling it says, so we drake up and head for the highlands. flew around for a bit, and there one was. huzzah! and sure enough, that was all i needed for eastern kingdoms safari. i wasn't sure, given what a hot mess that achievement is - there are six pets it shows me as still missing, four of which are actually sold by vendors (three dragonhawks and the cockatiel), as well as the crimson moth and wharf rat (which weren't in the pet journal when i caught them early in the expansion).

moral of the story, then, is be patient. some pets are pretty hard to find, and have really long respawn timers, but they do exist. use wowhead or the resource of your choice, figure out where they span, and park an alt there. check in every now and then to take a quick look. no sign of them, then move on to something else. sooner or later, you'll get lucky. and i'll be telling myself this as i hunt for the never-seen-by-human-eyes minfernal....