A Day in the Life...

So this is part a vignette, and part a pet battle guide. I decided to kind of keep a journal of what I was doing around Azeroth in a 24 hour period, starting with getting home from work around 5pm the other night. If you couldn't guess, most of what I did was pet battles, many of them failed attempts at the Celestial Tournament.

Right off, I do my timeless daily, namely kill twenty rares. I am creature of habit with this one, I almost always start my sessions of doing this. I then pet battle good ol' Little Tommy Newcomer. Since I was right there, I headed on into the tournament. This week's line-up for trainers was Taran Zhu, Chem Stormstout, and Wrathion. These trainers are decidedly harder than last week's roster. Taran Zhu alone made the tournament a very painful experience.

So let's talk about Taran Zhu. His team consists of three Pandaren Monks (humanoids) and he always opens with Yen, whose ability of note is a blackout kick, a stun. This is countered by opening with a critter, as they are immune to stuns. As I have mentioned I follow Wowhead's guide, which makes this very recommendation, and furthermore recommends a snail as the critter of choice. This part of their guide is fine. The guide also has you using a blighthawk and a fossilized hatchling as undead pets. There are two problems here. First is the blighthawk's main nuke, infected claw, only has an 85% hit chance, which in the world of pet battles means it will frequently miss, especially when you need it not to. On top of that one of the other monks has the power to periodically blind your pet for a turn. The second problem is that the fossilized hatchling is delicate, and the whole point of having him in the fight is to bonestorm. I have never gotten off more than one bonestorm with him.

After perusing some forums, I decided to apply a slightly different strategy. I open with the snail, and instead of using a blighthawk I use a Creepy Crate, which also has the bonestorm ability. I also make use of the crate's curse of doom. This is still a difficult fight, but using the revised strategy it is doable. Any week Taran is up, I plan on tackling him first, so if things go south I haven't wasted too much time.

This is the chronicle part. In order for me to use the revised strategy, I had to go farm for a snail, since I only had one, and a later fight also recommends snails (more on that later). Then of course, after farming for just the right snail, I had to level him, which I did.

The next part of the tournament that proved to be a pain was Chi-Chi. I am not sure how I got him last week, but this week was a nightmare. As I started examining other strategies, I realized that Wowhead's strategy was off. Their strategy calls for using an unborn valkyr to lead, followed by two nordrasil wisps, preferably s-breed ones. So far, so good. Unfortunately they have Chi-Chi's rotation wrong. They properly list turn three as when he goes ethereal and becomes immune to all attacks. They then improperly advise that he again goes ethereal on turn six, when in fact he does not do this until turn seven. The long version is that Chi-Chi goes ethereal on turns 3,7,11,15,19,23,27,31... . You don't need to be a mathematician to see the pattern here, and yes one of my fight's with this jackass went for thirty rounds.

The next problem is that in theory the wisps should evade most Chi-Chi's attacks, since he spends so much time with a reduced chance to hit from the wisp's flash ability. In reality, Blizzard either cheats, or the particular Chi-Chi I am fighting has uncanny accuracy. Wisps are rather delicate and can't take a whole lot of punishment. Back to the forums for a revised strategy. I find two. One advised using three snails and another recommends using a voodoo figurine, a critter with stampede and something else. Time to go grab and level more pets.

I level two more snails as well as a voodoo figurine. For some reason, I also farm a rare arcane eye and level it as well. I ultimately go with a hybrid strategy. I still open with the valkyr as before, and use snails for the other two pets. This works surprisingly well. The strategy has to be executed in a very specific way, the Valkyr is used exactly as recommended by Wowhead (Turn1:Curse of Doom Turns 2 and 3:shadow shock Turn4: unholy ascension). Both snails use acidic goo, ooze touch and dive. The acidic goo debuff needs 100% uptime on Chi-Chi. On ethereal rounds, use dive, otherwise use ooze touch.

I am finally able to beat the tournament for a week, making this the second week I am victorious. With all the farming and leveling I did, I acquired a flawless stone+ a critter stone 9both being held in reserve), and a mechanical stone (used on a tranquil yeti).

During all this frenetic pet activity, I took time out for a farming run with my guild to the Isle of Giants. We spend about two hours there, and I came away with 511 dino bones, a duplicate Zandalari pet and a primal egg. We called it good around 11pm my time, at which point I was about ready to pass out.

Before heading to bed, I remembered it was the last day the darkmoon fair was in town and so of course, I had to take a trip there to pet battle. I have been using a Wild Crimson Hatchling, a Celestial Dragon and a Son of Animus. I have had decent success with this team. So far no success in getting the darkmoon eye to drop, but maybe next month.

So there you have it, a chronicle of one of Kassandra's nights in Azeroth. I intentionally left out a few misadventures in LFR, as this is a whole different animal. Some day when I am feeling particularly mean-spirited, I might rave for a bit about LFR.

Peace.