Thursday (7 Feb) - Taming the Tamers

Thursday (7 Feb) - Taming the Tamers

Some of the pet battle veil of confusion has finally lifted, like the dispersion of the mists when Pandaria was discovered. Many thanks for all the help in getting it figured out. The final bit of information to complete the puzzle was a simple one, despite the overall complexity of the process that was far from necessary.

I'm going to use the Kalimdor zone as the example, but the same process is used for each of the other major zones (Eastern Continent, Outland, Northrend, Cata, and Pandaria), all of which are obviously associated with vanilla WoW and the expansions.

When starting to do pet battles, an account wide quest appears to defeat a set of five Tamers. "Account-wide" means that the quest appears in the quest log of every character, from level 90 Fist down to the lowest level, and includes both Horde and Alliance toons. Once those five Tamers are defeated, a new quest appears to defeat the Master Tamer. When the Master Tamer is defeated, that same Master Tamer offers a new Daily quest to defeat him. At some point in that process the Tamer becomes a Grand Master Tamer. So far I had only killed and gotten the daily for two zones: Kalimdor and Eastern Continent. Once the daily is available there the account-wide quests no longer appear in the quest log. The Grand Master Tamers are always found at the same spot, though.

I was warned that the Grand Master Tamer in Outland was very tough. On Wednesday I tried twice to kill him and failed. I worked on getting my three best pets into higher levels and tried again on Thursday night. On my first try I again failed. I switched around the order on the second attempt, since my best pet, Strand Crawler, had failed miserably in his battle. On that second attempt I started with the Strand Crawler, and he managed to kill his opponent, but also died in the attempt. For the second round I brought out Spirit of Competition and his powerful dragon breath and healing. He needed it all against an inferno creature that dealt as much fire damage as Spirit. Spirit won it, with 5% health left. For round three it was up to the Fluxfire Feline. She was pitted against the monster that had killed my Strand Crawler in the first fight without hardly taking any damage, and I was very worried. The Fluxfire has to build up it's attack over three rounds before it can attack. It set off Supercharge, then took heavy damage. It added the wind-up, took even more damage, and then struck on the third pass. The attack failed, doing no damage. That was very bad. It was obvious that I wouldn't get three more passes for another shot, so I dropped Supercharge off the list and just went with wind up. After surviving two more attacks, and with under 10% health, Fluxfire launched another attack, and this time the strike hit, doing more than 1,000 points of damage and killing the opponent with one shot.

I had my first Grand Master Kill in Outland. I also earned my first max level 25 pet!

Here are the latest levels: (Wednesday/Thursday)

The Main Team
24/25 - Strand Crawler
22/24 - Spirit of Competition
20/23 - Fluxfire Feline

The Primary Backups
20/21 - 'Lil Deathwing
19/20 - Cat
18/20 - Strand Crab

Up and comers
19 - Clefthoof Runt
19 - Fledgling Nether Ray
18 - Rat
17 - Arcane Eye (this is my best "Magic" type pet, and I need to start getting that one leveled up)

My luck with earning stones has gone bad. I have not gotten a single stone since I upgraded the Ghostly Skull to rare. I have two stones for Critters, but I don't have any critters I want to upgrade. I think I'll go to Darkshore and pick up the Shimmershell Snail that Sin's team has. That one looks pretty nice, and it's a critter, so I can instantly get one to rare. Too bad they start at such a low level, though (3-6). Oh well, a grindin' we will go.

But wait! On Friday morning Fist tried her hand at pet battles around Halfhill in Pandaria. She captured a Malayan Quillrat (level 22, 1275 health, 209 damage, and 235 speed) and a Bandicoon (level 23, 1204/221/276). Both are critters. Both are green/Uncommon quality so I could upgrade both to rare if I wanted to. I wonder if those two are good enough to use my stones on?