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.

Celestial musings

   So, my last post was a bit of a rant, hopefully it didn’t quite make into the category of rage.  Today I’ll try for something a little more light hearted, so the topic will be pets.  You may have gathered that pet battles are an aspect of the game I enjoy.  One of my earliest memories of the game was discovering an NPC somewhere in Dun Morogh sold a snowshoe rabbit pet.  I simply had to have this pet.  This pet is still in game and costs 20 silver.  Back in the day, the days of Vanilla WoW, this rabbit went for something like 5 or 10 gold, a veritable fortune a level 10 character, and I had to grind mobs to get enough money to but the thing.  This was my very first pet and is what launched my interest in vanity pets.  The pet that was the most memorable in acquiring was without a doubt the disgusting oozeling.  I spent hours a day for weeks farming him.

    Fast forward to now.  I currently have 426 unique pets.  49 of them are max level.  I have most, but not all of the pet achievements in the game, minus the PvP ones.  This is the week I will make a bona fide try at the tournament.  I have already made a few forays, and have figured out how to down Shademaster Kiryn and Wrathion.  I would like to at least make it through the tamers and try taking on the legendary beasts this week.  I have been hard at work scouring the interwebz for suggested pets and leveling pets I think will work.

    Hands down Wowhead has what I thing is the easiest to follow and most comprehensive guide for the tournament.   I have most of the recommended pets, but still need to level three of four to follow this guide verbatim.  Despite my love for minipets and pet battles, leveling is a bit of a chore and a grind. 

   I have worked out my own strategy for Little Tommy Newcomer, although I am quite sure others have figured out the same tactic.  I use Chrominus, Darkmoon Zeppelin, and Son of Animus.  I understand this might be difficult for some as the Son of Animus is pretty rare and hard to come by.  I open with Chrominus, who has the first move against Lil’ Oondasta.  I use howl, which debuffs Lil’ Oondasta so he takes double damage for two rounds.  Oondasta counters with a frill blast, which does massive damage and does a force swap on your pets.  Your highest health pet is the one that is swapped to the front line, in my case this is the zeppelin.  Round two, I use the Zeppelin to call in a bombing run and round three I use the rocket attack.  At this point, my zeppelin has just a sliver of health remaining.  On round four I use decoy, and then just pummel Lil’ Oondasta with rockets until he finally takes out the zeppelin.  Once the Zeppelin is gone, I bring out Son of Animus and use interrupting jolt, touch of animus, and batter; in that order.  So far this has worked 100% of the time for me.

   The Timeless Isle rares have stubbornly refused to drop anything at all for me.  It may be I will be stuck buying most of these critters off the auction house.

   The update of the moment is, I beat the tournament!  It did take me a few tries and some tinkering around with stuff.  Winning was all the more memorable because my team lost to Xu-Fu.  Although my pet pool for level 25s is not deep, I did some serious thinking.  Xu-Fu was the last battle I had to win, and I really did not want to start from the beginning.  I decided to try the Pandaren Water Spirit+Chrominus trick, a one I have used on many of the Pandaren legendaries.  For those who may be new, the strategy involves starting a fight with the water spirit and casting geyser on the first turn and whirlpool on the second.  On the third turn you switch to Chrominus and cast howl, the howl causes its target to take double damage for two rounds.  This results in both the geyser and whirlpool hitting for double damage.  This wasn’t quite enough to kill Xu-Fu, so on round four I cast surge of power and this was enough.  I used my winnings to buy the mini Xu-Fu pet and leveled him to 16 the same night.

    One thing I have noticed in the forums is that a large amount of players are complaining about the celestial tournament.  It’s too hard many claim.  It sucks, it is entirely based on RNG other say.  I side with those who say rubbish to this.  I consider the tournament the end-game for pet battles.  End-game is not supposed to be easy.  Sure pet battles were originally made to be light hearted, and for the most part they are, but the tournament is something a little different, a little special.  As for the RNG crowd, well there is randomness in everything in WoW, from specific battles in raids, to what gear drops when successful in these battles.  Sure there is RNG involved in the tournament, but I certainly don’t think it’s to the point of being a show stopper.  There is a lot of work in leveling the needed pets for the tourney and some work trying and perfecting each teams strategy, but to me it’s all worth it.  I have an achievement that’s hard to get and was earned, and I have a pet that relatively few have.  Things that are easily obtained, things that are common, are generally not treasured. 

    As a note, this week’s trainers in the tourney were Ion Goldbloom, Loremaster Cho and Sully.  For me, this is what I consider to be the easiest line up.  It will be interesting to see what next week brings.

   In closing, this has been a nice opening to the week.  I admit last week I was kind of down.  Along with the tournament victory, I cleared Gates of Retribution and snagged a level 528 mace for my DPS set.  The night before I was able to pick up the 540 tanking trinket from Rook in a flex raid.  I can only hope the positive momentum continues.  Other things I did in the last few days, completed the master of the ways quest and grabbed the cooking school bell, and made a Pandaren Treasure Noodle cart.

    Not sure what to do with myself now, just like I’m not sure what I’ll be writing about in the next installment.  I am sure something will come to me.

    Until then.

   Peace.