1/20/13

Farmer Nishi


This probably isn't new news to anyone who's been battling Pandarian pet tamers for a while, but... Farmer Nishi is amazing for leveling up your low-/mid-level pets.  You can take two low-level pets up against her; they just need enough health to survive up to about four castings of Sunlight.


Farmer Nishi has two elemental pets that mostly heal and have weak damage options: the Singing Sunflower, set up with Photosynthesis, Inspiring Song, and Sunlight, and the Terrible Turnip, set up with Leech Seed, Inspiring Song, and Sons of the Root (yep, she's cheating on her skill set ups).  Her worm is a beast set up with Consume, Acidic Goo, and Burrow.  I think he's supposed to be a silkworm, but his skill set is more like Mr. Grubbs.


The key to making this fight easy, I think, is an aquatic pet with a) a moderately strong, often available damage spell (the sunflower is going to heal ~200 hit points a round) and b) a self-heal, because you're going to need to keep it alive through all three of Nishi's pets.  As you can see in the screenshot, I'm using Jubs, a Jungle Darter.  Most frogs and toads have this same skill set.  Other aquatic pets, or pets with aquatic abilities, may work just as well; aquatic is strong versus elemental, and the extra damage helps with the sunflower's healing.

Whatever pet you're using for killing things, you want to start with your low level pets, doing one ability with them before swapping them out to make sure they get credit for the battle.  Neither the sunflower nor the turnip is likely to kill them, as long as they have about 500 hit points, and the worm will always go last.

Nishi will open with either the sunflower or the turnip, but usually the sunflower.  If you get the turnip first, that's great; just kill it straight through.  If you get the sunflower first and you're using a frog, you want to use Frog Kiss on it until you get it frogged; Nishi will then swap it out for the turnip.  You're doing this because her worm has a very good chance of killing your pet if you take it on without the extra hit points from Sunlight.

The sunflower will open with Sunlight, then do nothing but heal itself until Sunlight is down to two on its counter, then cast it again.  The turnip generally starts with Sons of the Root, which should give you an opportunity to heal yourself once before you can actually damage it.  Sons of the Root is an eight round cooldown, so if you don't miss, you'll probably only see it once.  It usually follows with Leech Seed, which is a four round cooldown, and then Inspiring Song, a three round cooldown.  This means you will have rounds where the turnip does nothing.

If you've managed to get the sunflower second, either through chance or Frog Kiss, once the turnip is dead, you can kill the sunflower.  At this point, if you're  using the frog, you do not want to use Frog Kiss, since you're going to want to use it heavily on the worm, and you don't want to risk swapping the sunflower and the worm back and forth, because the sunflower will heal them both like mad.  If Sunlight is going to run out soon, it may be worth passing to keep the sunflower alive long enough to cast it again; you want it for at least two or three rounds on the worm, if not longer.

The worm tends to open with Acidic Goo, then will Burrow and alternate Consume and Acidic Goo until Burrow is back up.  If Burrow connects, it hits hard, easily 500 to 800 points, depending if it crits.  Luckily it does miss often enough that it's not a guaranteed game-over.  Spamming Frog Kiss and using Healing Wave on cooldown usually keeps a frog alive if it's got a couple rounds of Sunlight for extra hit points.

Depending how low level your pets were to start, you're usually looking at two to three levels when the battle's over.

If you don't have an aquatic pet with a heal yet, there are frogs, turtles, and water striders throughout Pandaria, which will start at level 22 or 23 depending where you catch them.  Any of those should take you just a few tamer battles to max out, and they're plentiful if you want to farm for a rare one if you haven't got an aquatic stone.

1/14/13

Pandalock update


My mage has upgraded her warlock cosplay.

1/13/13

I may have a problem


Here I am, camping for a Minfernal.  I spent at least eight hours in Felwood Saturday, broken up between flying around Shatter Scar Vale killing Tainted Rats, Tainted Cockroaches, Tainted Moths, and occasionally Tainted Oozes (because, let's face it, Disgusting Oozeling is spelled G-O-L-D) and flying around the zone as a whole wiping out battle pets to, theoretically, free up some to spawn elsewhere.

Saturday went badly, since, well, I didn't even see a spawn.  I did finish off my fifty rare captures (and have two to three each of the tainted pets and the toads rare).

So today I made a death knight on a low population PVP server, figuring I'd see how their Felwood camping was.  I got it about halfway through the death knight starter zone, and then my husband wanted to run Ahn'Qiraj on an alt, so I went along to help kill Twins.  I logged back over, and, since I had logged out in Felwood, as soon as he invited me, it popped me into his server's CRZ mix of Felwood.

I don't really know what server I actually popped out on, since CRZ is anything but obvious, but I joked to him that I would be right there... as soon as I did a flyover of oh my God there's one spawned.  Eight hours on Saturday, an hour and a half invested in a (green cow) death knight, and the bane of rare campers everywhere, CRZ, gets me a Minfernal spawn.


He's common quality, but I really don't care.  A Qiraji Guardling in March and I'll be a Zookeeper.

11/29/12

Raiding!

We've been hacking away at the Stone Guard for a while, killing them the first time two lockouts ago, and again last night (this time with chains up!).  Feng will fall soon - probably this week or next.

I've been raiding as Beast Mastery since 5.0 went in, but with 5.1's last minute buff to Aspect of the Hawk and the change to allow Steady and Cobra Shots to be cast on the run, I went back to Marksman last night.  The change is good!  I'm posting decent numbers (for me) and finally not feeling like a deadweight.

I'm switching back and forth between Spirit Bond and Iron Hawk for soloing/raiding, as well as between Barrage and Glaive Toss.  I shouldn't love Barrage as much as I do, given how much it tries to get me killed, but let's face it:  40 yard range, hits everything in front of me?  It just makes some of the dailies go so much faster.  On the other hand, I don't dare bring it into an instance, because I don't know what it's going to pull.  (Also, randomly accidentally killing critters that may or may not be capturable battle pets... ;_;)

I'm not sure if I'm going to push to finish reputations first, to hit 150 mounts, or if I'm going to hit up the old raids for the battle pets contained therein, but so far 5.1 has been good for me.

PS: cloth heirloom panda is creepy:


Those eyes!

10/27/12

Battle Pet Theme Teams


My initial pet battle team was formed a bit haphazardly; I had played around with it on the beta (for about three days exclusively), and from that I knew that mechanicals were strong against beasts, beasts against critters, and for most of my early fights, the third pet was going to suck if it was something else.  So my initial team looks like:
There wasn't really any rhyme or reason other than that Mr. Grubbs is my favorite pet; Bolts seemed good as an engineer, and the random third pet is strong vs. aquatics, and I keep running into Toads.

Beta Team
But, as I've been assembling themed stables for Stampede (Aesop for Dusk, undead for my Forsaken, August Celestials when my Pandaren is higher level... and I'm not sure yet what for the other two), I've also been thinking about some themed secondary and tertiary pet battle teams, preferably ones that don't use two of the same pet.

I can't do all of these (I'm missing a handful), but I can do most:

Aesop again:
  • Jade Crane Chick
  • Fox Kit
  • Gilnean Raven
Watership Down:
  • Spirit of Summer (Frith)
  • Rabbit (El-ahrairah or Thlayli)
  • Sea Gull (Keehar)
Valley of the Four Winds:
  • Black Lamb
  • Chicken
  • Feral Vermling
August Celestials:
  • Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling
  • Jade Crane Chick
  • Winterspring Cub
Obscure Star Trek:
  • Shimmershell Snail
  • Bombay Cat
  • Fishy
Jungle Book:
  • Panther Cub (Bagheera)
  • Dun Morogh Cub (Baloo)
  • Emerald Boa (Kaa)
Rudolph/Island of Misfit Toys 1
  • Winter Reindeer (Rudolph)
  • Tranquil Mechanical Yeti (The Abominable Snowman)
  • Father Winter's Helper (Hermey the Misfit Elf)
Rudolph/Island of Misfit Toys 2
  • Pint-Sized Pink Pachyderm (Spotted Elephant)
  • Guardian Cub (King Moonracer)
  • Tiny Snowman (Sam the Snowman)

10/1/12

Cataclysmic Ladies

There are a handful of female NPCs I enjoyed questing with or around during Cataclysm; some of them will fade into the background now that we've moved on to the Mists of Pandaria, but I'm hoping we get to see some of them again.  (Especially Lorna, because Lorna is cool.)

The ladies:

Lorna Crowley - We first meet Lorna during the initial battle for Gilneas, when she saves your nascent Gilnean from death at the hands of a worgen.  We see her consistently through the zone, assisting in or leading efforts to combat the ravaging worgens, helping flee the flooding from the Cataclysm, and fighting the invading Forsaken armies.  (I have to say - one of the things that impressed me when I first played through Gilneas in the beta was that there is a distinct moment in the starting quests when the Cataclysm happens.)  Lorna is often seen toting what is one of the prettiest gun models in the game.  Eventually she trades in her rose for armor, and when we last see her (for now, I'm sure), she's going back into Gilneas with her father to continue the resistance against the Forsaken.

Matoclaw - Matoclaw is basically the organizer who makes sure the rivets are ordered and arrive on time to make the invasion of the Firelands happen, on schedule.  Her quests all basically revolve around making sure the supplies and people get where they're supposed to be and do what they're supposed to do.  I think of her kind of as the Pepper Potts of Firelands:  Malfurion and Hamuul are calling the shots, but she makes it all work.

Fiona - Fiona drives a caravan around the Eastern Plaguelands, ferrying members of the Horde and Alliance and the Argent Dawn alike.  She takes the responsibility for her charges very seriously, and when push comes to shove, she carries a sweet-looking rifle (same model as Lorna's, actually - must be a Gilnean make) to take care of trouble.

Zaela, Garona, and Lady Cozwynn - Zaela starts out in Twilight Highlands as an opposition leader amongst the Dragonmaw, and you help her become their Warlord.  Garona is much older than Cataclysm in terms of lore, but you meet her in the Twilight Highlands and help her fight Cho'gall and his cultists there.  Lady Cozwynn helps coordinate the assault on the Twilight cultists in the Highlands.  Taken together, though, these three ladies are your support for taking on Skullcrusher the Mountain.  (The Alliance are stuck with three guys.  Much less awesome.)  When the three were assembled together, I had a FFX-2 flashback.

Offspec

I'm a marksman hunter, yeah?  I have been for what, 7.5 years now?

And since the 5.0 patch, I've been doing raids and dungeons as beast mastery.  *shudder*

The results were pretty marked: an 8-10k increase in DPS on Zon'ozz probably says a lot at just how bad I am at marksman sometimes, especially when I'm macroless as BM and have been running with a cast sequence macro on MM.

It also suggests that maybe it's time for me to try running without the macro as MM and see how that goes, as well.  I really like Aimed Shot and Chimera Shot, and I miss them - especially Chimera Shot - in the BM spec.  I could get a self-heal through talents, but it's not the same - it's really just one more thing to cram onto my bars somewhere.  Sure, there's a trap pull-out now, but that's not particularly handy for keybinds.

On the BM front, I've picked up one of the gorgeous green cranes (Lucius) and a black goat (Aurelius - there is a pun there, but it's not really explainable outside my marriage).  They're not exotic pets, but they're pets.  I have four exotics at the moment - Skoll, a devilsaur, a worm (named Larry, because he just seemed like a Larry), and the cat from Hyjal that I'm probably going to dump because I really don't care about it and it's taking up space.  I kinda just tamed it because it was there while I was getting tokens to try for a scorchling.  The devilsaur is pretty, but he may get axed, as well.

In other news:  I spent the first... day and a half? of Mists doing pet battles to get to 250 pets.  Then I finally went off to leveling.  I'm up to 88, and I've discovered that Stampede will just make extra copies of pets if your 5 active slots aren't full.  (Good to know if you want to keep an empty slot to tame something pretty.)

Professions have been much less painful to skill up, other than the Spirit of Harmony requirements for damn near everything I actually want to make.  The engineering pet takes two - two - when you can make the inscription pets for some paper and ink.  I've gotten inscription, engineering, and alchemy maxed, and enchanting and blacksmithing are close.  Jewelcrafting is also close and is currently restricted mostly by my lack of blue gems to bump it up the rest of the way.  I'm not appreciating the inability to mine for gems without a rare-spawn pickaxe.  Cooking is maxed!  Well, the Way of the Oven is maxed.  Working on the others.  Overall, the guild just needs fishing and archaeology to get its heirloom pants.  I've been working some on fishing - it's at ~555 - but got distracted by clearing out the map in Krasarang.  I've caught one rare fish so far, but I'm still a Stranger to Nat Pagle. :(

Despite having played in beta, I'm still impressed by the size of the map and the sheer quantity of stuff to do crammed into it in Mists - the minigames add interesting layers, and the farm makes me want to get all my toons into Valley of the Four Winds.  I need either scallions or leeks for my next recipe. >.<