looking back on 5.1

as patch 5.2 approaches, i felt like taking a few minutes to look back on the various changes to pet battles that 5.1 introduced. some were huge improvements, some not so much.

pet journal improvements
big success, mainly because the old ui was so awful. being able to sort and filter the hundreds of pets many of us have is a huge help, and having the correct quality of non-capturable pets displayed is awesome. would be nice to have the ability to sort in ascending or descending order, but i can survive without it.

polished battle-stones
purchased with justice points, converted a pet's quality to uncommon.  never bought one, never felt the temptation to buy one. uncommons are dog meat in pvp, and the changes to how xp is divided with 25s in your team meant pets could be leveled easily even as poors. gotta give this one a thumbs down.

flawless battle-stones
giving this one a thumbs up. they aren't easy to obtain, but fight enough npc tamers or wild pets and eventually they'll drop. and being able to pick a pet to promote to rare is fun, even if you never use it in a fight.

new wild pets
kind of a mixed bag. having new pets to collect, especially ones from under-represented families like humanoid and magic, is a good. and some of the models are great fun to watch, especially the kun-lai runt and the lofty libram. but i had been expecting these pets to break up the monotony of beast/critter/aquatic while leveling,  and the new pets were all too isolated with limited spawn areas and long timers.

pets in vanilla raids
loved these. almost all were new models to pet battling, and having mini versions of raid bosses follow you around is always fun. the only raid i personally farmed was molten core (just one more week to go until i hit exalted with the hydraxian waterlords), but lots of other people hit the other raids as well. the pets were tradeable, and on the servers i play on there was a healthy supply of them on the auction house, with prices typically in the few thousand gold range. well within my budget. hoping to see blizzard add more of these to other raids in the future.

on the other hand, it's only gold

my wife started picking up some of the new pets that drop in old raids on the auction house, i believe mainly because she liked how they looked. but she ran out of cash about the time she realized she was actually getting credit towards raiding with leashes. so she gave me a shopping list of what she still needed and sent off to pick up the remaining ones. the viscidus globule was the priciest, at 17k on our server (the others were running 5-10k). a few minutes later:

she thoroughly enjoyed her mr bigglesworth, and promptly leveled him to 25. i do find the idea of an undead pet that does beast and elemental damage to be interesting, from a mechanics standpoint.

for myself, i'll be doing it the old-fashioned way (in part because i now find myself with a lot less gold than i used to have). i've resumed working on weekly molten core runs with ratshag, as he pushes towards his 50th exalted reputation, so i figure i've got decent odds of getting the pets from there along the way (picked up a harbinger of flame last week). then the missus said she'd help me farm for the rest. i know they're all theoretically soloable now, but these things always go faster with a healer, and she's good company.

the squeaky wheel gets the worm

one of the nifty features for pet battles blizzard introduced in patch 5.1 was a safari hat as a reward for completing taming the world. put it on, and your pets get a 10% xp boost, which is always nice, plus it has a dashing and distinctive look. not transmoggable, sadly, but one can't have everything.

unfortunately when the patch went live last week, they forgot to include the bit of coding that said "send a hat to everyone who already has the achievement". so people complained about being completely surrounded by no hat, and blizzard said "oops. our bad. we're sending them now." and some people got them and rejoiced. but some did not. some hatless people discovered that when they walked into an instance (old school, not lfd) the game suddenly remembered you were supposed to have a hat and *poof* you got one. but some tried this and got nothing.

the godmother has a good post that shows just how bad this omnishambles is. saturday lead content designer @mumper bragged about how sweet the hat was on twitter, only to have breanni reply "dude. still waiting for mine." if the name breanni sounds familiar, it's because she's the one that's done so much for the pet collecting community with warcraftpets.com that blizzard made a npc outta her. she's the one running the pet shop in dalaran, the one whose name is on all the in-game mails delivering pets to you. kind of a big deal. hoping this results on somebody gets called on the carpet monday morning and told "you made me look like an idiot. effing fix it now!" but we shall see.

meanwhile, i got tired of waiting for mine and submitted a ticket saturday morning. sunday, i got a response:

having customer support send these out one at a time seems rather inefficient, and while it's boa that does nothing for my characters on other servers. but, it does look rather dashing, and it should tide me over until everything gets fixed on tuesday. assuming it does.

no ion cannon for yeti

yesterday i was talking about the darkmoon tonk's high-power ion cannon. essentially it does 2.5 times the damage of a standard attack, at the price of being stunned and unable to act for the next two rounds. so under normal conditions it actually does less damage than just firing off a basic times three times. it pays off though when either it's enough damage to suddenly kill the enemy (especially if it's your opponent's last pet) or when you're close to dying and won't live long enough to get off three more attacks. under the right circumstances, it can be a game changer, and earn you the right to prance about and point and shout "in your face!" at your computer monitor. these things are important.

the darkmoon tonk isn't the only pet with this ability, but it's the only one that is both "rare" quality and fairly easy to obtain. the tranquil mechanical yeti also has an ion cannon, but it's only 'uncommon". the azure whelpling and lil' tarecgosa both have the magical equivalent surge of power, but the one is an extremely rare drop (or costs approximately one metric crapton of gold on the auction house), and the other requires you to be in a guild that's completed the legendary staff questline in firelands (which mine ain't. edit: well, that ain't really true, 'cause I've got at least two alts in guilds that have, as has been pointed out to me. but still, it's a hard pet to get for a lot of folks.). finally, the orphan's week reward legs also has surge of power, but he's also only an uncommon. so that's a bummer.

but we're getting new pets today, with the arrival of 5.1! and when i was reviewing this preview page over at wowhead news, i saw that just like his mechanical cousin, the stunted yeti of feralas would be packing an ion cannon. booya! a capturable pet packing the biggest nuke in the game? farm that bitch 'til you find a rare, baby! now, okay, i realize that the idea of a primitive woodlands ape packing space age weaponry is a little far-fetched (although, you gotta admit, it would make the show "finding bigfoot" a lot more exciting). but who cares if it makes sense? this! is! pet battles!

if only i had some poor shmuck i could kick into a pit of oblivion. woulda made that last bit a lot more dramatic. oh well.

sadly, it is not to be. checking the entry for stunted yeti on wowhead's ptr site this morning, i saw a perfectly sensible set of humanoid and beast abilities. no ion cannon, no light saber, no buck rogers. i has a disappointed.

i figure blizzard initially copied the tranquil mechanical yeti abilities as a place holder, and that got datamined. then they went back and made it what they really wanted. or maybe wowhead just made a mistake. or something. doesn't really matter. but if i get the right stone to upgrade legs to a rare, i'm gonna use it. and some poor bugger's gonna get a heckuva surprise one day.

five ideas for new pets

patch 5.1 is going to introduce a number of new pets that can be captured in vanilla zones or drop from bosses in vanilla (or originally created for vanilla) raids, such as molten core and naxxramas. along those same lines, i have a few ideas for pets that i'd like to see added in burning crusade content.

roflcopter. mechanical pet with several flying attacks. capturable. most often found around shattrath city before raid time.

shadier shade of aran. undead pet with magical attacks. drops in karazhan. its flame wreath attack does nothing unless your opponent tries to swap pets - then it blows up the battle.

image of image of archmage vargoth. magical pet. capturable in netherstorm. doesn't actually do anything in battle, just stands there.

gronn pup. humanoid pet with humanoid and beast attacks. drops in gruul's lair. grows larger during every combat round.

lil' reliquary of the lost. mechanical? undead? magic? elemental? yeah, i really don't know. wails a lot. drops in black temple.

flawless battle-stones

these consumables will be appearing in patch 5.1, and can be used to upgrade any pet to rare quality (there will also be a polished battle-stone which upgrades pets to uncommon, but meh). according to the patch notes,

"players will have a very small chance to obtain a general purpose flawless battle-stone after winning a match against wild pets; defeating higher level opponents increases the chances of obtaining a stone. these valuable items are not soulbound, and can be sold on the auction house."

interesting.

there will also be pet family-specific versions: flawless elemental battle-stone, flawless mechanical battle-stone, etc. these stones can only be used to upgrade a pet of that particular family, are soulbound, and are won not by fighting local pets but rather will show up in the sack of pet supplies you get from defeating the npc pet tamers.

different, but also interesting.

so, how should we respond to the introduction of these stones when 5.1 goes live? the answer is, of course, however the hell you want. take a team of low-level but high-performance pets out on the road to farm the locals for stones to sell on the auction house? go for it. try to hit every pet trainer daily, every day? go for it. pretty much the same as before, and sometimes say "oh look, a stone"? go for it. there is no wrong way to play.

me, i'm not that excited about the stones, because i already have more rares than i know what to do with. there are a few pets that i like enough that i'd be willing to spend a non-soulbound stone on to upgrade (depending on how the prices settle out, i might even buy the stones). the upgrade priority queue will be sleepy willy, personal world destroyer, creepy crate, sinister squashling,  mechanical squirrel, and the enchanted broom (unless i change my mind). after these, i'll probably give away any unbound stones i get to family and friends. i've found my interest in hitting the dailies kind of comes and goes, depending on what else i have going on, and that will probably stay the same. any stones i get from these will probably be applied after careful deliberation of at least three or four seconds.

any pets you folks are particularly excited about being able to give the rarification treatment to?