hasn't been the best of weeks

we had a death in the family last week - not unexpected, but it was still sad. then we had to get everyone to the middle of  upstate new york for the funeral, including various travel arrangements, getting the dogs to the vet, and buying a whole lotta winter clothes (you tend not to own parkas when you live in texas....). but there were good moments mixed in with the sad and hectic. including:

1) got to meet my stepson's lovely girlfriend

2) the hearse did not get stuck in the mud

3) this happened

when minigames collide

so there i am, cheerfully slaughtering wild pets in the vale and pretty much minding my own business, when somebody's surveying tool pops up right in the middle of my battle.

really, archeology? how would you like it if just as you are unearthing the lost tomb of sub-emperor dave the mostly great, loud mary and muckbreath starting rampaging through your pottery shards?

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.

looking back on 5.1

as patch 5.2 approaches, i felt like taking a few minutes to look back on the various changes to pet battles that 5.1 introduced. some were huge improvements, some not so much.

pet journal improvements
big success, mainly because the old ui was so awful. being able to sort and filter the hundreds of pets many of us have is a huge help, and having the correct quality of non-capturable pets displayed is awesome. would be nice to have the ability to sort in ascending or descending order, but i can survive without it.

polished battle-stones
purchased with justice points, converted a pet's quality to uncommon.  never bought one, never felt the temptation to buy one. uncommons are dog meat in pvp, and the changes to how xp is divided with 25s in your team meant pets could be leveled easily even as poors. gotta give this one a thumbs down.

flawless battle-stones
giving this one a thumbs up. they aren't easy to obtain, but fight enough npc tamers or wild pets and eventually they'll drop. and being able to pick a pet to promote to rare is fun, even if you never use it in a fight.

new wild pets
kind of a mixed bag. having new pets to collect, especially ones from under-represented families like humanoid and magic, is a good. and some of the models are great fun to watch, especially the kun-lai runt and the lofty libram. but i had been expecting these pets to break up the monotony of beast/critter/aquatic while leveling,  and the new pets were all too isolated with limited spawn areas and long timers.

pets in vanilla raids
loved these. almost all were new models to pet battling, and having mini versions of raid bosses follow you around is always fun. the only raid i personally farmed was molten core (just one more week to go until i hit exalted with the hydraxian waterlords), but lots of other people hit the other raids as well. the pets were tradeable, and on the servers i play on there was a healthy supply of them on the auction house, with prices typically in the few thousand gold range. well within my budget. hoping to see blizzard add more of these to other raids in the future.

not so tranquil anymore

my "tranquil" mechanical yeti is now stoned and carrying an ion cannon.

probably best you avoid eye contact.

by fire be purged, sucker

getting into pvp pet battles has been on my list of things to do pretty much since the beginning, but i've never managed to bring myself to do more than dabble. "i'll get serious about it after i finish leveling" i tell myself. well, last week i replied "dude, you've got all the leveling achievements. doesn't that kinda qualify?" to which i did not have a good answer.

a little digging around on the official pet battle forums suggested that a "triple conflagration team" was a good team. the idea is, every pet has at least one attack that causes your enemy to burn - flame breath, scorched earth, flamethrower - and conflagrate, which hits hard, and then hits hard a second time if your opponent is burning. two fire elementals up front: lil' ragnaros and either a searing scorchling (which i don't have - farming for one by doing more molten front dailies currently has zero appeal), a pandaren fire spirit, a spirit of summer, or a fel flame (this is what i went with). backing them up, ready to pounce should your opponent pull out an a aquatic (which do bonus damage against elementals), is a silver dragonhawk hatchling with frog-killing quills active. why silver, as opposed to any of the other colors? because of reasons which i'll talk about later.

so here they are - the pet battle equivalent of a fire mage. no defense, no healing, just lots and lots of kill him before he can kill you. 

so how'd they do? pretty damn well, i thought. over the weekend i picked up eighteen wins, and lost maybe ten or so. couple of the losses came because i derped - hitting conflagrate when the target wasn't already burning, for example - so hopefully that will get better with time. it's not perfect (no team can be) and it's weak against teams sporting undead and critters. teams with multiple aquatics or weather changing abilities can also be problematic. but those teams of triple fff's that are so op that blizz is nerfing them in 5.2? yeah, we ran into one of them. it was delicious.

all-in-all, a successful run. i do think i need to put together some more teams, and rotate them, even if the others aren't as good. the pool of people you battle against tends to be very small, and i'm pretty sure that after winning five in a row, at least one of my opponents figured out what i was up to and put up a team specially designed to beat triple-conflag and ended my streak. (if you hadn't noticed, the game gives the illusion of more opponents by replacing your opponent's avatar with a random one. if you watch the pet names though, you can figure out when it repeats.) so, more teams, different strategies, and hopefully more victories.

that's the plan.

why a silver dragonhawk? speed. most pets have different "breeds" - combinations of power, health, and speed. one breed of silver dragonhawk puts all its eggs in the speed basket and gets  whopping 357 speed, pretty much guaranteeing that it'll go first against anything other than a flying pet (which have a 50% speed bonus). since quills get an extra attack if you go first, i wanted to guarantee that i'd have an edge. i had to buy about a dozen dragonhawks from the vendor before i got one with the right breed (and then level it and find a dragonkin battle-stone). worth the sacrifice in power and health? i think so, but i can't be sure that it isn't simply confirmation bias diddling with my brain. next dragonkin stone i get, maybe i'll put it on a slower, harder-hitting dragonhawk and see how it performs.

why i'll be sticking with pet battles in 5.2

well, there's actually a lot of reasons, starting with "i'm still having lots of fun doing them." but this blue post regarding 5.2 caught my eye:

the developers don't want fresh 90s to skip previous content and jump into the newest, so you'll still need 480 item level, but all the changes introduced to previous content will definitely help catch up quicker (lower prices, higher drop chance...)

source

this is a major change recent expansions, where a freshly-leveled alt could immediately be handed enough gear from the main to jump into the newest 5-mans and be raid ready in a matter of hours. in 5.2, every alt which dings 90 will still need to do dailies to unlock valor point vendors, and then have to farm valor through some combination of old dailies, old scenarios, and old heroics, just to reach the point where they can enter the new lfr. whereupon they can began grinding more rep and more valor so they can replace the epics they just worked their digital butts of to buy.

no want. the shiny is gone.


currently, when a pet reaches level 25, it's as good as it will get (assuming it's a rare). the pets I level today are just as ready for action as the ones that dinged two weeks into the expansion.

i really hope blizzard has the sense to keep it this way.