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.

balancing time vs reward

one complaint frequently aired on the official pet battle forum is that it takes far too long to do all the pet battle dailies. which, well, is true. it does take a long time. which is why i don't do them all.

here's what i've been doing, most days. i start with the thundering pandaren spirit, conveniently (if you're horde) located in the hills above the shrine of two moons. if you bring a fast rabbit as your first pet, this fight is fairly easy and you can let a baby go in as your second pet to get the xp. then it's down into the vale of eternal blossoms for aki the chosen. send in a baby pet first, then a crab with shell shield and healz to clear out her first two pets. pretty much any bird can finish off her last one.

next i cross the mountains into the valley of the four winds. maybe pause for a few minutes to harvest golden lotus on the farm, or motes of spirited away, or whatever i planted yesterday. across the fields to farmer nishi, who is easy like a sunday morning. pretty much any strategy works worth her - i go with a water strider to take out her elementals (swapping in a baby pet to take a hit when toothbreaker does his night of the living turnips move), and finish it off with my darkmoon tonk's ion cannon of badassity.

finally, it's knock beasts of fable book ii time. these guys give lousy xp, so i don't bother trying to level baby pets of them. conveniently located in the valley are mostly harmless yi (easily downed by team yeti) and greyhoof (call lightning and let slip the ion cannons of war). just across the border in the krasarang wilds is skit-skit-skittererer xi'a (all darkness and nocturnal strike spam). and then i'm done.

so how'd i make out? 20 valor points, three big fat lumps of xp for baby pets, four shots at flawless battle-stones, a shot at an earth spirit pet, and a shot at a panda pet. all in under twenty minutes. feels good to me.

beasts of fable in 5.3

when the "elite" pets were introduced in patch 5.2, they were pretty much a joke. i slapped together three beast-damage pets for killing the elite critters, three mechanical pets for the beasts, and three flyers for the aquatics. almost no thought at all, and the beasts of fable were on farm. yawn. the only hard part was the time required to travel to all ten.

yesterday, patch 5.3 made some changes. instead of one quest to kill all ten, there are now three quests, each of which gives the same reward as the original. so you can choose how much time to invest versus how much reward. yay on that.

but the pets themselves were also changed. they have only half as much health, but all incoming damage is cut in half. (their power may also have been increased a bit, but i'm not sure and it's hard to check). for many of the pets this has no net effect - still takes the same amount of damage to kill them. for those that can heal themselves, however, the impact is huge, since the amount of healing was not halved. killing these guys - nitun and dos-ryaga - is now a lo harder. not surprisingly, the official pet battle forum erupted with cries of "it's impossible!" and "gg blizz" and "that's it i'm gonna cancel my account."

but of course, it isn't impossible, as the second wave of posters on the forum pointed out. you just need to make sure your teams are prepared for what they'll be facing. for dos-ryaga it turned out i was already set - i've always sent in my crow first and opened with call darkness (followed by nocturnal strike), and that messed up his healing enough that i didn't notice the difference. nitun, though, he gave me fits for a while. other than trouble the kun-lai runt, my team wasn't damaging him enough to overcome the healing he got when he killed them. so i ultimately brought in the duck of death and my brilliant kaliri - both flyers so his beast attacks were weakened. beast damage, speed bonuses, and predatory strike to finish him off. i'm sure there's more ways to skin this raccoon (the post that said the undead racial bonus negates his healing ability has me intrigued) and i'll try at least a few more of them. what's important to remember is, these battles are puzzles. if your first plan doesn' work, take a step back and try something different. enough thinking and patience, and you'll find a solution.

pandaren spirit tamer

patch 5.1 extends the "defeat the pet tamers" questline with a new quest, pandaren spirit tamer. you are required to defeat four new tamers, each an elemental spirit with three legendary-quality pets. the pets were mostly elemental (each tamer had a miniature version of itself), critter, and dragonkin, with some variations. you get the quest from the pet battle trainer in either the horde or alliance pandaria capital, and the tamers themselves are located in the vale (earth), jade forest (air), dread wastes (water), and townlong steppes (fire).

i started off with stoppable force (darkmoon tonk), francois (darkmoon monkey), and wild eyes ramona (softshell snapling). stoppable force was configured for dragonslayer mode, with charge selected for its first spell slot. the thundering (ie earth) tamer is reported to cause a lot of people trouble, but i got it down on the first try. the air tamer gave me more trouble, because its elemental pet had two flying attacks which chopped up my turtle something fierce. so i switched her out for frederick the oily slimeling, configured him to use creeping ooze for elemental wastage, and rocked it out. then i proceeded to one-shot the two remaining tamers.

now, to be honest, when i say i "one-shot" them, what i reall mean is this. i start a fight and see what pets it has. then i run away. i adjust my pet team composition, and start another fight. when i see that its lead-off pet isn't the one my lead-off pet is strong against, i run away. repeat until i get the match-up i want. then i one-shot the fight.

after defeating the fourth tamer, i hearthed home and turned in the quest back where i started. the trainer gave me a choice of four pets, each a mini version of the spirits i had just defeated. being a destro warlock, ellspeth of course picked the fire one. cute little rascal, ain't he?

once you've completed the quest, your allowed to go back later and each tamer will have a daily quest for you to defeat them. the reward bag has a chance to contain another mini-spirit, so collecting all four is doable. unfortunately right now the dailies are buggy, and aren't showing up for a lot of people. hopefully this will be fixed before long.

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.

flawless battle-stones

these consumables will be appearing in patch 5.1, and can be used to upgrade any pet to rare quality (there will also be a polished battle-stone which upgrades pets to uncommon, but meh). according to the patch notes,

"players will have a very small chance to obtain a general purpose flawless battle-stone after winning a match against wild pets; defeating higher level opponents increases the chances of obtaining a stone. these valuable items are not soulbound, and can be sold on the auction house."

interesting.

there will also be pet family-specific versions: flawless elemental battle-stone, flawless mechanical battle-stone, etc. these stones can only be used to upgrade a pet of that particular family, are soulbound, and are won not by fighting local pets but rather will show up in the sack of pet supplies you get from defeating the npc pet tamers.

different, but also interesting.

so, how should we respond to the introduction of these stones when 5.1 goes live? the answer is, of course, however the hell you want. take a team of low-level but high-performance pets out on the road to farm the locals for stones to sell on the auction house? go for it. try to hit every pet trainer daily, every day? go for it. pretty much the same as before, and sometimes say "oh look, a stone"? go for it. there is no wrong way to play.

me, i'm not that excited about the stones, because i already have more rares than i know what to do with. there are a few pets that i like enough that i'd be willing to spend a non-soulbound stone on to upgrade (depending on how the prices settle out, i might even buy the stones). the upgrade priority queue will be sleepy willy, personal world destroyer, creepy crate, sinister squashling,  mechanical squirrel, and the enchanted broom (unless i change my mind). after these, i'll probably give away any unbound stones i get to family and friends. i've found my interest in hitting the dailies kind of comes and goes, depending on what else i have going on, and that will probably stay the same. any stones i get from these will probably be applied after careful deliberation of at least three or four seconds.

any pets you folks are particularly excited about being able to give the rarification treatment to?