this might be good to know

the other day i picked up a flawless elemental battle-stone, and chose to use it on my teldrassil sproutling, an uncommon pet i had already leveled to 25. doing this knocked her back down to level 23 - the same penalty you take when you capture a wildling. however, this did not negatively affect my progress towards pro pet mob. today i leveled her back up to 25, and this did count toward the achievement.  just fyi.

pets and those other pets

there's always been a bit of a nomenclature problem in wow. hunters and warlocks and death knuggets have "pets", and so those dogs and cats and baby dragons and blobs of corrosive ooze that follow us around need to be called something else. non-combat pets and companions are terms that blizzard has tried to get us to adopt, but non-combat pet battles sounds pretty silly, so we've all gone with pet battles. which makes them pets, just ... uh ... different than those pets.

now, if you do pet battles with a warlock or hunter or other pet class, sooner or later you bump into a problem - while you're battling, you get put into some little phased bubble so that the wolves and demons and other things wandering around the world don't bother you. however, your pet does not. should something bump into him while you're taking care of business with a bandicoon, you get kicked out of the battle and have to go finish what your pet (no, the other pet) started. which can be mildly annoying or (if, say, you're finally about to capture that scourged whelpling) justification for throwing your monitor out the window. so, try to remember to dismiss your pet (no, the other one) first, if you can.

last night i was doing a spot of pvp'ing. i haven't done much pvp yet because, even though i find it interesting, it's rather a slow process what with queue times and other players taking longer to choose a move than the computer does. but last night i wanted to test out an idea against an all-fluxfire feline team, which some people on the forums say are nearly ubiquitous in pvp. unfortunately, they were not ubiquitous last night, and i didn't get a chance to run my test. another time, perhaps. but something amusing did happen, so i'm gonna talk about that instead.

the game put me into a pvp match and selected the icky smelly swamps of the krasarang wilds for a location. as my opponent and i locked horns in an epic clash of a dead bird against a floating rock, i got a message on my screen: "you have entered combat." the hell? aren't i already in combat? then i notice one of those lizard-man dudes, standing at the edge of the phase bubble, looking really pissed. he's throwing punches and blood is spurting and white and yellow numbers are floating all around him. meanwhile, my opponent and i have moved on to a spider locked in mortal combat with a toy robot. eventually, lizard dude falls down dead. i never did see his opponent, which i assume was my voidlord.

i wonder what would have happened if my demon had lost. would the saurok have come after me? or would he have stood at the edge of the bubble, spitting on me and using harsh language?

farming the whispering pandaren spirit

one of the more annoying pets used by the npc tamers is the whispering pandaren spirit's elemental pet. this is because if you bring an aquatic pet to maximize your damage, you simultaneously make yourself vulnerable to its flying damage, which is strong against aquatics. the solution is to use a pet which does aquatic damage, but is not itself an aquatic pet. unfortunately there aren't very many of these pets - water jets not being popular with the scorpion crowd, etc.

i've been using frederick, a rare oily slimeling, and his creeping ooze attack, but this is less than ideal, since if you use it every round you overwrite the damage-over-time component. so i end up weaving it in with non-aquatic attacks. much better is an idea my wife had, that i thought i'd pass along:

turn the tables on them. if you've managed to acquire a pandaren water spirit, level it to 25 and it becomes the ultimate air spirit killer. it's elemental, so it isn't vulnerable to flying attacks, but configured with water jet, dive, and whirlpool, it can blast its opponent with a water attack every round. makes this fight hella lot easier.

the alt - f4 saga

one of the unexpected aspects of pet battling was the alt - f4 bug. if you started a pet fight and then killed your wow client, the pet you attacked would reappear in the world as if nothing had happened. this had two possible benefits. one, if you encountered a pet that you knew a friend wanted, you could start a fight and then whisper her to hustle her butt over to where you where. the pet would then be held in your fight until said friend arrived, preventing anyone else from getting it. then you alt - f4, and your friend real quick-like starts a fight with it and can capture it for herself. the second use for this was if you didn't have a turnip out and accidently killed a pet you wanted to capture. alt - f4 and you get a free do-over - pretty much the only one in the game.

this continued for a while, until one day @alexziebart, the editor-in-chief at wow insider, mentioned using it for the do-over purpose to @mumper, the lead content designer at blizzard.  mumper's response can be summed up as "wait what huh? you can do that?" and within days, there was a hotfix and wild pets no longer re-spawned when you killed your browser. this prompted much wailing on the forums, with absolute universal agreement that it was always used by everyone only to help out friends, that it was a social feature that belonged in the game, and that nobody never ever would dream of using it as a cheat to undo their own clumsiness in attempting a capture.

i has a dubious.

now along come the patch 5.2 notes. looking through them, i see the following:

fleeing a pet battle will no longer despawn the pet that was being battled, but doing so will now inflict some damage on the fleeing pet battle team.

disconnecting from a pet battle will once again respawn the pets you were fighting.

any pet that has been killed in a pet battle will now never respawn

assuming the game ends up working the way the notes say (not always a safe assumption with pet battles, i have found), here's how i interpret this: if you want to hold a pet for a friend while they're on their way over, blizzard is okay with that. in fact, they won't even force you to alt-f4 - you can just flee the battle and take a small health penalty. however, if you accidently kill a pet you wanted to capture, too feckin' bad. it's gone for good. i'm guessing that if you kill the first pet, his friends won't somehow re-span either. not sure how it'll work if you kill the second or third pet but not the first.

sounds like a reasonable approach to encourage cooperation among players while discouraging cheating. we shall see how many salute it when it goes up the flagpole.

too much of a good thing?

i think i've gotten about six more pets to level 25 since tuesday. the majority of them didn't do a blooming thing to actually accomplish this, though. they just charged in, got smacked in the nose one time, then ran away and let the big bad 25s do all the work. sometimes (like when bringing a level 3 to my daily whomping of farmer nishi) they would jump four or five levels in a single fight. heady stuff, man, i'm telling you.

now, when i look at my army, i still see a lot of rares that need leveling. loud mary and dakota boy and dogcatcher and so on. gods only know how many rare bandikoon kits and the like. but still - is it enough? we're only a few months into this expansion, and getting all my rares to level 25 now looks totally doable. shoot, getting all my pets to 25 looks doable. and then what? pvp, i suppose, but will that be able to hold my attention for a year or more, until the next expansion?

the xp rule change, combined with the safari hat bonus, has been great. i'm really loving it up. but if blizzard isn't able to come up with a lot more pet battle content in the months to come, i'm really worried that they've given us too much, too fast. and I'm getting nervous about the consequences.

blizzard, you have my permission to do this

from a blue post on the european forums, discussing patch 5.2:

"the developers are planning to let you have a chance to earn lesser charms of good fortune through pet battles. basically, if you win, you'll have a chance of receiving charms based on your pet level.

and if a player is below level 90, they'll get experience equal to defeating a yellow creature."

I'm not raiding these days, or even doing lfr, so more charms is not relevant to me. but getting xp? my army of alts would be all over that like stink on kodo droppings.

some of the colors of the rainbow

my on-again, off-again quest to determine what the limits are for naming our pets is on again. these are the results of the latest testing:

"black", "white", and "yellow" are not allowed. presumably because blizzard wants to prevent fucktwats from using racist names.

"red" and "brown" are allowed. presumably because blizzard doesn't want to prevent fucktwats using racist names enough to be completely thorough.

"green" is allowed. presumably because blizzard doesn't give a flying fuck about offending martians.