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.

dive! dive! ahooooga! ahooooga!

did i watch too many world war 2 submarine movies when i was growing up? yeah, probably. but das boot is awesome - if you haven't seen it you really should.

anyhow.

there's been a fair amount of sloppiness in the implementation of various aspects of pet battles. (yes, safari hat, i'm looking at you.) one sloppy that's been around since beta has been the inconsistency with which blizzard puts accuracy warnings on tooltips. now, moth dust's tooltip says "This ability has a moderate chance to miss" right up front, so you know about what to expect (turns out "moderate" means "hits 80% as often as nomal"). however, dive and its sister-attacks burrow, heroic leap, launch, meteor strike, proto-strike and lift-off are also 80% accuracy attacks, but there's no mention of this on the tooltip. same with mana surge, deep breath, and probably a few i've missed. now, if you crunch the math, you find that this accuracy decrease means that these attacks will be approximately as effective as doing basic attacks - fewer big hits vs. more smaller hits. without it, they'd be overpowered. so i'm fine with it. i just wish blizzard would check the tooltips and make sure they supply the information we need.

if you're curious about accuracy effects, you can get more info from wowdb.com. be aware that currently it gives the wrong for attacks that hit 1-2 or 1-3 times instead of just once.

why i'm hanging out in tanaris a lot

well, for starters, i still need the silithid hatchling, which only come out during sandstorms. so i keep an alt parked in gadgetzan and i periodically hop over to her to check the weather. so far, no luck, or, as my grandfather used to say every morning after moving the family to southern california in the 1950s, "well, another goddam beautiful day."

another reason i can often be found in tanaris is that it is the perfect spot to grind on those "raise x pets to level 10" achievements. the locals are all level 13 which means that (a) they still operate in pairs instead of triplets, and (b) it's almost impossible for them to one-shot a level 1 pet. so i typically run with one baby out front, and at least one 25 for back-up. send the baby in first, let him take a single hit, then swap in big sister to crush the locals. if you only do one swap during the fight (ie, don't use your third pet at all), you can go from level 1 to level 6 with just five fights. getting the next four levels takes a little longer, but with a stable master in gadget for quick repairs and lots of pets not far from the city, it still doesn't take that long. just watch out for the desert spiders - their sticky web ability can snare a baby and keep you from swapping it out before it dies. best to send a level 25 in first, and then swap the baby in for a round against the second local (assuming it isn't a spider also).

so far i've used this system to finish out no favorites and rookie pet group, and i've nearly finished rookie pet crew (just 3 or 4 more to go). then comes the seventy-five pets for rookie pet mob - i suspect i may cheat some on this and trap a bunch of level 9 prairie dogs over in the south barrens for part of this...

anywho, once you've gotten a pet to level 10, if you want to continue to level him you can actually take him to pandaria. again, the odds of getting one-shot at that point are pretty low, and the xp you get for surviving is truly bodacious.

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.

let us begin at the beginning

and at the beginning, we find a movie cliche.

the first rule of pet battles is there is no wrong way to do pet battles.

the second rule of pet battles is there is no wrong way to do pet battles.

that said, nobody like flopping around haphazardly like an orc wearing too-large boxer shorts, with no idea of where to go or what to do next. so i'm planning to lay out some suggestions and recommendations i've learned, either through reading in other places or through plain old trial and multiple errors. hopefully, some of it will be of some help to somebody. since my knowledge on this new mini-game is nowhere near complete and never will be, i'd be pleased to pick up some tips from you buggers as well.

i'm also planning to put some creative writing and artwork about my pets up here. if nothing else, this will amuse me. your mileage may be your own damn problem.

now that that's all out of the way, we can move on to battles. "which pets should i put in my team?" is a reasonable question, with several aspects to the answer. today i'm gonna talk about the pet family aspect, 'cause i'm gonna talk about the other aspects when i'm not talking about this one. now, there are a total of ten pet families, but when you go out into the wilds to level and capture, you don't find anything remotely like an even distribution. instead, there are lots and lots of critters and beasts, a bunch of aquatics (usually near rivers and lakes and oceans. duh.). once you've leveled up a bit, you'll run into a fair number of flying pets. if you go into tirisfal glades and the plaguelands, you'll get a lot of undeads, which makes sense. everything else - humanoids, mechanicals, dragons, elementals, and magics - often don't appear until you've leveled up a good chunk, and either way they are pretty rare.

starting out then, you'll win battles faster if you go with pets that do beast damage (25% bonus against critters), mechanical damage (25% bonus against beasts), and flying damage (25% bonus against aquatics). the faster you kill them, the less time they have to kill you, which means you win more often. typically this means going with a beast pet, a mechanical pet, and a flying pet, but there are a lot of exceptions too. for example, a lot of critters have attacks that do beast damage, while some mechanicals have elemental- or undead-damage attacks. blizzard did it this way either to make it more interesting or to annoy the crap outta you, depending on your perspective.

so that's one factor to consider. other factors, such as quality, long-term goals, and freakin' adorableness, will be covered when i get to them.