World of Warcraft: Current Year

So pet battles are really wearing on me. I hate that even with the most effective set-up against some npc fights, you can miss/have them dodge etc and it can guarantee you a loss. And I'm not even talking "super effective" teams, I'm talking synergistic/super effective teams; for example Major Payne in Icecrown as the northrend grandmaster - I use a combination of Grunty + Kun-Lai runt + whatever strikes my fancy for effective against his elemental; Grunty nails Grizzle and obliterates him so i don't have to worry about his hiberate, the runt has effective against mechanical for his stupid mecha-strider, which not only does extra damage, but also slows him down so he can't cast his bullshit extra dmg on me, then the next attack is a guaranteed stun + extra damage because the previous chills him. But, if one of those abilities miss it can turn it into a "I just rolled this guy" into "Holy fuck, really? You're going to kill me now?"

I've leveled so many different types to have the most specific, effective teams - and I cannot tell you how things like, lift off from my serpent missing near 70% of the time, but hitting 100% of the time from an npc drives me fucking crazy. I realize that especially going into the later npc fights you're going against epic/legendary pets, but jesus christ. There are abilities that say "Does a fuckton of damage, but high chance to miss" and then there's shit like that, that has no extra chance to miss (at least on tooltip) but constantly does. W...t...f.

Also, I think the pets scale too fast? Old world + TBC trainers are really good for bringing up pets from 1-20, but the northrend ones are really super sketchy for leveling your guys. They're all level 25, rare+ and some of them are fairly difficult, in such a way that even if you're using the right type of pet, if he's not max level he doesn't have the hps to survive the attacks. There are a few fights in northrend where I feel it's possible to bring in lowbies and have them get all the exp, but it's relatively annoying. Hell, even Cata is easier to level pets up with - I've been able to use ridiculously low levels if they're the correct type but try that bullshit with Payne and he destroys my ass.

Just feels bad man. I hate that it's so random really. That's the #1 thing that gets me; I hate seeing a random miss or dodge or crit for the other team and knowing that has probably just lost me the match. There's also the bugs that cause your team to skip turns, or the bugs that keep on block/dodge/unkillable buffs on the enemy team through multiple turns - Aki is absolutely famous for that. There have been a few times I've been crit, or missed but was still on track to winning, then her mongoose throws up the unkillable buff and it's there 3 rounds later. Like, christ. FU.

I know pets are just a secondary thing but man, I rage at it like it's pokemon. RAGE.

Oh, and if you're just starting the rounds, they added a bunch of new pets in 5.1 to the wild - I highly recommend them because they're all pretty fucking OP. A mechanical cat, with wind up, prowl and supercharge? At 19 it can one shot 25s. (Admittedly, I don't think it can do it to rares, but who knows.)

I stumbled upon reddit.com/r/warcraftlore and read the entire old summary of the lore that Vanilla was based on. I must say - whaaaaat the hell, there's so much potential there that they haven't built upon, and instead they keep just adding "new" things. I'd love some actual focus on the various human kingdoms - who's the rightful heir to Lordaeron now, Princess Calia? What of the human clans - why is Danath Trollbane still chilling in Honor Hold? And what about the dwarves, when will we see the Bronzebeard bros reunite?

It really feels like the focus is, as usual, on horde. I play horde on all my characters so I get to partake in it, but I wish there was some incentive to play alliance as well. Much as I really enjoy MoP, I feel like all the new lore is worse than if they had just continued to expand on the old world. It's stupid that they added so much new stuff in cataclysm, when all of it is for low leveling characters

Goofy looking pandas FTW.

Any strats on beating the 5 Leper gnomes as a warlock? I'm guessing it involves afflict or demo, but since I pretty much never play those specs, any advise would be appreciated

kitsune_sl said:

I stumbled upon reddit.com/r/warcraftlore and read the entire old summary of the lore that Vanilla was based on. I must say - whaaaaat the hell, there's so much potential there that they haven't built upon, and instead they keep just adding "new" things. I'd love some actual focus on the various human kingdoms - who's the rightful heir to Lordaeron now, Princess Calia? What of the human clans - why is Danath Trollbane still chilling in Honor Hold? And what about the dwarves, when will we see the Bronzebeard bros reunite?

Click to expand...

Sounds like you need to find a new, good fantasy series. I haven't read the lore in a long time, but I'm curious how Pandaria fits into it, outside of doing the Star Wars Ewok approach to marketing.

Didn't pandas show up in the WC3 expansion? Somebro meets Chen

Early WoW had the advantage of being Warcraft 4. But they stopped recycling the "everything is an immediate aftermath of the RTS" stuff and moved the timeline forward more in cata/mop. And not exactly in a good way: See Garrosh, the most comically stupid villain since Dr Claw from Inspector Gadget. Holy fuck, did anyone actually slog through the rep grind to see his new quests? He's fucking Benny Hill stupid. If he couldn't talk he'd be Mr Bean.

I'm almost afraid to go further because its obvious he's going to get dominated by the Sha, and the bell thingy will just infect the rest of the Horde and wherever the info that Garrosh is the next raid came from was correct.

Still, you have to admit relief that none of the raids had anything to do with the fucking Pandas. Ancient, Old God worshipping pre-titan Sha-infested Race A and B. And now almost certainly infested Horde and Alliance as raid #2. And then Raid 3 will be the Legion invasion from the Wrathion questline.

Of course you have to wonder how the Pandas even exist. They are surrounded by enemies, have barely any warriors, and their only virtue seems to be they are (mostly) resilient to the Sha like a bunch of harry hobbits.

EDIT: Oh, right, they have the four spirits on their side for some reason. Pity, I imagine.

Orgrimmar being a raid has been around since forever so yeah, he's in 5.2 or 5.4.


Edit: 100% Chance of Grom Hellscreen's ghost and Thrall coming back at some point during the Garrosh fight.

LadyVex_sl said:

So pet battles are really wearing on me. God damn pokemon shit etc.

Click to expand...

I found that heading to Panda land at 20 is easier to level my pets than fighting Northrend trainers, you run into a lot of 3 team level 25 but poor quality. Super easy xp and dont really have to dick with all the super combo teams the trainers have.
and yes fuck that noise about my pets missing with Lift Off all the fuggan time. Damn it pisses me off

i have not dived into pet battles, but my wife has, oh my fucking god has she...

she is now at 638 out of 650 unique pets.

of which around 550 of them are rare...

the ONLY pet battler she currently has trouble with is the guy from darkmoon faire.

her current setup is umm

frog
the ghost dude from deadwind pass
and the glowy oriental dragon

all rare of course
she also has 3 or 4 of the battle stones to upgrade pets to rare.

is there a good reason to collect and level a shit ton of battle pets? besides achieves? I know you can port them around various servers to try and sell on the AH, but do they actually sell?

i fucking hate it when I encounter a blue pet, im at the 50% hp mark on it, and my pet fucking crits or something and kills the fucker.

i gotta go to deadwind pass, the ghost dude sounds cool. I like my oozeling (turns my firehawk all green and shit!!), pandaren monk, and phoenix hatchling. but yeah, way too many pets its overwhelming and I've kinda stopped caring about collecting em all, how un-Ash of me

spronk_sl said:

is there a good reason to collect and level a shit ton of battle pets? besides achieves? I know you can port them around various servers to try and sell on the AH, but do they actually sell?

i fucking hate it when I encounter a blue pet, im at the 50% hp mark on it, and my pet fucking crits or something and kills the fucker.

i gotta go to deadwind pass, the ghost dude sounds cool. I like my oozeling (turns my firehawk all green and shit!!), pandaren monk, and phoenix hatchling. but yeah, way too many pets its overwhelming and I've kinda stopped caring about collecting em all, how un-Ash of me

Click to expand...

You can't sell wild pets that you catch on the AH, for some weird reason. Right now it's mostly for achieves/collection - the pet battle thing is just an avenue for even MORE pets, and maybe some cash for the ones that you can sell. I anticipated that you'd be able to catch wild pets, level them and then decide a price based on pet rarity + specific attributes + level, but that hasn't happened.

The restless shadeling from deadwind pass is a very decent pet, until you hit pandaria. Undead do extra damage to humanoids, and take less damage from dragonkin, so you'll likely have some trainers that it's ok to use them on, but not many. Pandaria is chock full of aquatic types, and undead take extra damage from them, so I found when I hit MOP he was relegated to a more secondary spot in my line up. The sad part is that the majority of dragonkin you run into in MOP do not use specifically dragonkin abilities - Aki's dragonkin uses tail sweep (which is dragonkin type) but it's most damaging attack is Call Lightning, which is mechanical in nature, and makes all attacks do extra mechanical damage. I found it far more efficient to use a humanoid type pet against it, but the scourged whelpling is probably a much better choice (undead with humanoid attacks), or an elemental with humanoid attacks.

He's a beast for just about anything else though, since he heals for so much per hit.

Love when he casts the Mechanical Lighting, I got the Lil Xt from the card game when the lighting comes down I do the tantrum thing (Where he hit every enemy pet) and with the extra 50% dmg + the lighting I normally sweep the board using Xt.

Jx3_sl said:

Love when he casts the Mechanical Lighting, I got the Lil Xt from the card game when the lighting comes down I do the tantrum thing (Where he hit every enemy pet) and with the extra 50% dmg + the lighting I normally sweep the board using Xt.

Click to expand...

I'll have to try that; the majority of my mechanical pets have been getting no love, save the fluxfire feline and cogblade raptor, mainly because Grunty is a humanoid with ridiculous good mech abilities, and feel I am far more likely to encounter an elemental than I am undead in MOP. Admittedly, now that I have the chain quests out of the way and I'm just doing stuff for dailies, a lot of guys are getting leveled. Which is sort of funny; now that I know which teams to use against trainers the question, "What is the point?" has cropped up, except I also collect achieves. Their hooks are in deep.

Playing agian, any opinions on best PvE and PvP healers atm?

Disc in PvE, Shaman/Pally in PvP. Druids are good too but the extra 15% healing nerf hurt them more than the rest.

spronk_sl said:

i fucking hate it when I encounter a blue pet, im at the 50% hp mark on it, and my pet fucking crits or something and kills the fucker.

Click to expand...

Get a Terrible Turnip pet, either from your farm or the AH (they are down to 250g buyout right now on my server). His main ability, Weakening Blow will never reduce an opponents hp below 1. He's my capture bro for life.

LadyVex_sl said:

But, if one of those abilities miss it can turn it into a "I just rolled this guy" into "Holy fuck, really? You're going to kill me now?"

Click to expand...

I understand that they need to have some element of RNG so the battles don't just turn into a giant spreadsheet, but it really seems they tuned the chance to miss too high. Yesterday doing the earth spirit daily I killed his first two pets and got the earth spirit down to ~500 hp before he kills my second pet. Swap in my full health crawdad and proceed to miss him 3 times in a row and he kills me, I was mad bro. Not to mention abilities like the Darkmoon Zeppelin's bomb that have a chance to miss when you apply it, then another chance to miss when it actually lands 3 turns later. Sometimes I feel like they pulled a Michael Bolton and misplaced a decimal point somewhere.

Jx3_sl said:

I found that heading to Panda land at 20 is easier to level my pets than fighting Northrend trainers, you run into a lot of 3 team level 25 but poor quality. Super easy xp and dont really have to dick with all the super combo teams the trainers have.
and yes fuck that noise about my pets missing with Lift Off all the fuggan time. Damn it pisses me off

Click to expand...

Best place I've found to level is around the BMAH, all the packs there are 3x critter and easy. If you have a Baneling (from the sc2 preorder) he chews through them easily and can suicide at the end so your lowbie pet mooches all the exp. Speaking of mooching exp, they put a hotfix in yesterday making it so level 25s don't soak exp anymore (alive or dead). They say that it requires a restart to take effect though so we probably won't see the change until Tuesday. It will be nice not having to suicide your 25s every battle anymore.

Yea, there were some nice changes.

The only thing that frustrates me was the blue post along with it; saying we have all these crazy endgame pet battles we can level pets up in. Have they done the pet battles? TBC is easy beans, Cata is pretty easy too, but Northrends tend to be beastly because of the actual pets, and MOP's endgame ones are ridiculous. I can't imagine bringing a lower level in some of those fights.

I also don't understand why all the Northrend pets are 25 already? It seems like the pet battles scale far too quickly; with two more expansions past WOTLK, taking on rare quality level 25 pets seems fairly rough.

The not mooching exp thing is nice though, though I am jealous you have a Baneling already. I pre-ordered SC2 on Amazon, so obviously have to wait till March to reap the rewards. ; ;

LadyVex_sl said:

Yea, there were some nice changes.

The only thing that frustrates me was the blue post along with it; saying we have all these crazy endgame pet battles we can level pets up in. Have they done the pet battles? TBC is easy beans, Cata is pretty easy too, but Northrends tend to be beastly because of the actual pets, and MOP's endgame ones are ridiculous. I can't imagine bringing a lower level in some of those fights.

I also don't understand why all the Northrend pets are 25 already? It seems like the pet battles scale far too quickly; with two more expansions past WOTLK, taking on rare quality level 25 pets seems fairly rough.

The not mooching exp thing is nice though, though I am jealous you have a Baneling already. I pre-ordered SC2 on Amazon, so obviously have to wait till March to reap the rewards. ; ;

Click to expand...

I only take a lower level pet into a few of the dailies right now, there's some that I usually beat with two pets but I like having a full team of 25s for when I get dodge-raped by the RNG. Some are really easy (like any crab or crawdad can solo the trainer in four winds) and some like the final Icecrown guy need a large amount of luck to beat with only 2 pets and a lowbie. I'd strongly suggest the PetBattleTeams mod to anyone not using it yet, it's really nice and hassle free if you plan on doing the dailies. It saves your teams and skill setups and you can just click on the next team to switch while you're travelling between trainers.

re: Baneling, he's nice for now but after the hotfix goes live there's going to be much better pets for PLing with. I'm thinking Chrominius with his attack that's strong against critters and heals him when he slays one. Along with his active heal he can go a long time without needing to see a stable master. Or any beast with ravage (same thing basically, diemetradon hatchling has it). I dunno we'll see.

edit: also, for anyone wanting to farm the pet upgrade stones, I've found that doing the dailies that award the Sack of Pet Supplies is by far the best way. Usually get 1-2 stones a day from them (or some days 0-3) as opposed to like 1 in 1000 chance from trash battles. Here's the list copied from WoWhead, can knock them all out in about an hour if you have your teams setup and a way to travel quickly between them.