the night is dark and full of terrors

lately, for my weekly 10 pvp wins, i've been running this team. it's built around the combination of call darkness, which blinds all pets (except elementals), and nocturnal strike, which never misses if the target is blinded. while i don't keep a full win-loss record, this team clearly does better than any other i've tried lately - i'd estimate i win about 70-80% of the time with it, which ain't bad.

assuming my opponent cooperates, my preferred strategy is to use the whelpling to grind down my opponent's pets with plagued blood and tail sweep. big health pool and a low speed so tail sweep almost always gets its bonus damage. when he finally does go down, i use the bonus attack from the undead racial to call darkness. then i send in the birds. speed, speed-based bonus damage, nocturnal strikes, and more call darkness result in an orgy of damage. usually enough.

works well against: direhorns, the current flavor of the month. their beast damage is weak against flyers. also very effective against teams with a lot of healing.

works poorly against: elementals, since they aren't affected by darkness. teams using arcane storm and other magic attacks can be problematic as well.

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.