I'm not generally in the guide-writing business, but the following is information I was collecting anyway, so I figured I might as well share. If you want a more general guide to WoW Pet Battle families, you can read one at Warcraft Pets or listen to one at the WoW Pet Battle Crew Podcast. Also, I tip my hat to the counter finder at Warla's Pet search, which helped remind me of a few abilities I'd forgotten, and is a good place to go if a specific NPC with cross-family abilities is giving you a hard time.
This list/commentary focuses specifically on pets that are especially suited to countering each family. Each pet family suffers increased damage from one type of attack. Each family's default attack type also deals reduced damage to one other family of pets - though this isn't a 100% guarantee of reduced damage since many pets will have some non-default abilities. Still, if you can get both of these on the same pet, you have a worst nightmare for demolishing most hapless NPC's.
Aquatic: Magic-family pets with Flying-type Attacks (clear winner)
Your winner here is the Jade Owl, crafted by jewelcrafters - which was the pet that started my work on this list. It has all the attacks from a normal flying pet, but it has the magic family type and therefore takes reduced damage from aquatic attacks. Note that this pet will be uncommon quality when learned, which means you will need to have a battle-stone if you want to upgrade its stats to rare quality.
The Enchanted Broom - which also needs a battle-stone if you want to upgrade it - also has a flying Sandstorm attack, which creates a weather effect which effectively negates DOT's (which some aquatic creatures use). I do like the Broom as a pet, but this attack is on a long enough cooldown that I don't recommend it specifically for use as a counter to aquatics.
Beast: Flying-family pets with Mechanical-type Attacks (no winner)
Sadly, there's no winner here. Mechanical attacks are very rare outside of mechanical pets. The only flying pet that has any mechanical damage is the Dragon Kite, which was from an old TCG set, but even then it's only the call lightning weather effect, which is no substitute for a real mechanical pet. On the plus side, at least your flying pets get to have reduced damage against one of the most common attack types in the game.
Critter: Humanoid-family pets with Beast-type Attacks (clear winners)
Here you have several similar wild pet options, including at a minimum the Stunted Yeti, the Flayer Youngling, and the Kun-Lai Runt. To be clear, you don't need a specialty pet to handle taming/killing of wild critters - if anything, their vulnerability to the near-ubiquitous beast damage is a huge downside to the family. That said, some of these pets can hit repeatedly and hard, so it's nice to have the option for NPC tamer battles.
Dragonkin: Undead-family pets with Humanoid-type Attacks (no winner)
The bad news is that the Undead are the smallest pet family, and - while some of them were humans in life - (almost) none of them have humanoid attacks. (The exception - the very hard to find rare Scourged Whelping has the Darkness weather effect - not a high damage item - and a very odd channeled attack that only does decent damage if paired with a different weather effect.) The mostly bad news - with a touch of silver lining - is that Dragons have a bit of a habit of breathing various forms of magic or elemental attacks - a surprising number have little to no dragonkin-type damage.
Magic is the more common variant due to the lore of Azeroth, and for magic-inclined dragons you do have the option of using a mechanical pet (strong defense against magic) with humanoid attacks - the Clockwork Gnome and the Darkmoon Tonk are two examples. Just be warned that if you do get a dragon that breathes elemental fire (as opposed to dragonkin fire) your mechanical pet is going to take a ton of damage very quickly. As long as you know precisely what you're up against - e.g. NPC pet tamers - this approach can pay off.
Elementals: Critter-family pets with Aquatic-type Attacks (arguable winner)
Technically speaking, there is a winner here - any of five snails which are critters and have a single aquatic attack. However, I'm reluctant to endorse this solution.
First off, the attack in question is a dive ability, which has a long cooldown because it's attached to a guaranteed dodge ability and may or may not have a diminished miss chance. (Josh suggests that he saw this with a similar flying ability, and I'm inclined to agree - but I can't see why just the flying version would be covered.) Second, and more to the point, critters are vulnerable to beast attacks which are both the most common pet family in the game and the most common type of cross-family attacks, because ANYTHING has some way of biting. Throw in the fact that elemental pets very commonly have healing abilities to patch themselves up while your big hit is on cooldown, and I suggest you'd be much better off just trying to burst them down with an aquatic pet.
Flying: Dragonkin-family pets with Magic-type Attacks (clear winners)
Remember how I mentioned above that dragons which do magic damage are very common for lore reasons? This works out poorly for flying pets.
A personal sentimental favorite is the Sprite Darter Hatchling, which was the very first and only minipet I owned for a number of years. Back at launch, each individual pet you purchased was a slot in your bags you were never going to get back, but this little guy was a reward for an Alliance questline that I completed - several times in fact - back in 2005. With no way to get the pet back if you deleted him, I was definitely holding on to this guy, and now that sentimental souvenir pays off in pet battles. (This factor is also the true brilliance of adding pet battles to WoW's existing cosmetic pet system - I already had this type of emotional investment from day one.)
Humanoid: Beast-family pets with Undead-type Attacks (arguable winner)
Humans are another mixed bag. Spiders and maggots/grubs both have undead-type life-leech attacks that make them generally good pets in any case. However, neither of these attacks are big damage burst that will demolish a human as quickly as the families where I've called a clear winner. Meanwhile, humans very commonly have non-humanoid attacks, so the defensive advantage is limited. That said, your spiders at least have the advantage of being good tough all-around pets.
Magic: Mechanical-family pets with Dragonkin-type Attacks (clear winner)
As with the aquatics, there is a winner if you're willing to have a pet crafted and then find a battle-stone to upgrade it to rare quality. The Mechanical Pandaren Dragonkin has a dragon-fire breath attack, and is also a generally good pet.
Mechanical: Elementals (clear winners)
Mechanical pets are the oddball in that they are the only family who take increased damage from the same family that they deal reduced damage to - the elementals. Presumably, this is to balance out some of their other family bonuses - they are generally hard-hitting, have a great passive ability (when it works, though it sometimes won't go off for reasons that are not documented), and deal extra damage to beasts (again, the most common family in the game). In return, your day can be totally ruined by any elementals.
As an aside, a pair of fellow mechanical pets - the Pandaren Dragonkin and the Darkmoon Zeppelin - were previously a surprisingly good workaround for mechanical pets until a change in today's patch 5.2. These pets previously had a spammable single target elemental attack to go with their decoy ability, which is great for blocking the really large hits mechanical pets can deal out with their wind-up abilities. Unfortunately, the ability in question - thunderbolt - was changed into an AOE with a cooldown, and Blizzard also greatly increased the cooldown on the decoy ability, so this is no longer recommended.
Undead: Aquatic-family pets with Critter-type Attacks (clear winners)
And finally, the mortal enemy of the no-longer-mortal is apparently... frogs and toads, as their tongues count as critter attacks. I guess a rain of toads is NOT a good day for the undead of Azeroth - adding insult to injury, these amphibians can even heal up while waiting out the one turn of invulnerability that undead get after being re-killed.
Most turtles will also work with the "powerball" type attack, though really I'd like something that hits harder on my family counter pet. Finally, though they don't have the advantage of being aquatic, I do have to put in a plug for my fellow Armadillo's.
Spammers Win - Anonymous Commenting Disabled
Like Kleps, I'm seeing a substantial uptick in spam comments that are getting through Google's spam filter on the blog. Historically, the filter has been very good at its job, but recently the upper hand seems to have gone to the spammers. This is a problem because the one thing Google's spam filter has NOT been good at historically is wasting my time by sending me emails to notify me of comments that it subsequently put into the spam filter (meaning that when I spend my time to go check, the comment is already gone). I get 20 emails per day containing spam comments and until recently none of then had been getting through, but now I'm coming back a few days later and finding that 10% are - which adds up to several spam comments on every post.
I'm disappointed by this outcome because I personally am not a fan of being forced to log in to share my thoughts, and I've gotten some very insightful comments from anonymous readers over the years. Unfortunately, the signal to noise has just gotten prohibitive of late.
I'm disappointed by this outcome because I personally am not a fan of being forced to log in to share my thoughts, and I've gotten some very insightful comments from anonymous readers over the years. Unfortunately, the signal to noise has just gotten prohibitive of late.
Farewell To Pet Battle Forfeit?
Gaming has been derailed by various real life, and as a result I've been back at work on Pet Battles after a brief visit to actually playing World of Warcraft proper. I've been focusing on an incentive which will be going away in patch 5.2, possibly next week - in this case, a seemingly technical change to forfeiting pet battles.
Why Forfeit?
There are three main reasons why you would forfeit a pet battle, in roughly increasing order of why they would not be considered desirable behavior:
Better Design As Intended?
As with most places where players are acting in ways the developer did not intend, some responsibility for the situation can be blamed on the game design. The NPC battle teams are tough - often higher quality than anything the player can obtain - and having to allow them a free hit on your group can be the cause of failure.
As to grinding for wild pets, well, here's where there is good and bad. Pets come in qualities - grey, white, green and blue - and, for those who really care about how those stats are distributed, in specific breeds as well. Setting aside the question of breeds, personally I won't spend time leveling anything that isn't blue quality, and you're going to be battling many copies of each pet to meet this goal - some estimates run around a 1 in 12 chance of encountering a rare pet, and some of these pets are somewhat hard to find in the first place.
If you know there is no way the pets you're fighting are the pets you want, and there's a good chance that someone else is going to come along and grab the other spawns while you spend the time on the fight, all of your incentives are in favor of throwing in the towel. (Ironically, world pet spawns are about as heavily contested as non-instanced content gets in a game that doesn't come anywhere near this level of competition for anything else in the open world.)
The changes may not solve the whole problem. In an additional tweak, any pets that people do run away from will respawn in the world so that others can try their luck. Thus, more considerate tamers can leave poor-quality pets in the world for those who just want to catch a copy of a pet they never intend to use, just to fill out their journals. In principle, though, this could open the door to forfeiting, quickly healing your pets from all the forfeiting, and re-engaging the same pet at full health.
In any case, I can definitely see why the way the system was designed led to the epidemic of forfeiting. Until the patch closes the door for good I'll be hard at work filling out as many slots in my journal as possible with the coveted rare pets (especially for any creatures I actually plan to use in combat).
Why Forfeit?
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| Pet Battle Auto Forfeit, my personal choice amongst add-ons for this purpose |
- Your pets were obviously and catastrophically inappropriate for the battle. This is moderately understandable, as it is an account-wide system, so you can enter a level 25 pet battle zone and forget that you had your level 6 pets on your active roster.
- To get an advantage over NPC tamers. NPC's cannot alter their rosters - indeed, you are free and encouraged to catch and level pets to counter their teams - but they often have some variability in which pet they start. If they go out of the order you expected, you can either continue knowing your counters won't be ideal, sacrifice a turn and allow your foe a free hit on your incoming pet as you swap in the correct pet, or just forfeit.
- Because the wild pet/group you attacked does not contain anything you wish to tame. You might still want to kill the pets to farm them for exp, but this will take time you could be spending looking for other pets to tame. This being World of Warcraft, with its sometimes notoriously open scripting system, players have naturally coded UI add-ons to automate the process of determining whether the enemy team contains anything worth capturing.
Better Design As Intended?
As with most places where players are acting in ways the developer did not intend, some responsibility for the situation can be blamed on the game design. The NPC battle teams are tough - often higher quality than anything the player can obtain - and having to allow them a free hit on your group can be the cause of failure.
As to grinding for wild pets, well, here's where there is good and bad. Pets come in qualities - grey, white, green and blue - and, for those who really care about how those stats are distributed, in specific breeds as well. Setting aside the question of breeds, personally I won't spend time leveling anything that isn't blue quality, and you're going to be battling many copies of each pet to meet this goal - some estimates run around a 1 in 12 chance of encountering a rare pet, and some of these pets are somewhat hard to find in the first place.
If you know there is no way the pets you're fighting are the pets you want, and there's a good chance that someone else is going to come along and grab the other spawns while you spend the time on the fight, all of your incentives are in favor of throwing in the towel. (Ironically, world pet spawns are about as heavily contested as non-instanced content gets in a game that doesn't come anywhere near this level of competition for anything else in the open world.)
The changes may not solve the whole problem. In an additional tweak, any pets that people do run away from will respawn in the world so that others can try their luck. Thus, more considerate tamers can leave poor-quality pets in the world for those who just want to catch a copy of a pet they never intend to use, just to fill out their journals. In principle, though, this could open the door to forfeiting, quickly healing your pets from all the forfeiting, and re-engaging the same pet at full health.
In any case, I can definitely see why the way the system was designed led to the epidemic of forfeiting. Until the patch closes the door for good I'll be hard at work filling out as many slots in my journal as possible with the coveted rare pets (especially for any creatures I actually plan to use in combat).
Mixed Early Thoughts On Pandaria
When my initial impressions of WoW's Pandaria expansion were primarily negative, I made a conscious decision to hold judgement - and not post on the blog - while I tried to figure out why.
I knew some portion of the issue was a disruption to my routine - after spending the overwhelming majority of my time in WoW during the last two years either running random dungeon groups or working on pet battles, suddenly the five new levels stood in between me and what I was used to doing for probably the first time in my MMO career. Some portion was the learning curve associated with yet another major overhaul to the game's class system. Some portion was that the story simply needed time to ramp up.
I'm glad I took the time. Having cleared the Jade Forest, and hit level 87 in the process, I have found truth in both the mitigating factors but also potentially some degree of disappointment with the expansion itself.
Changing the time-to-kill
Over the years, I've found that I'm notoriously bad at predicting what class I am going to like in a new MMO. Many things that sound good on paper turn out to be not so fun in practice. The one indicator that works most of the time is the time it takes to solo an individual mob - a seemingly highly technical thing to look at but a major impact on my personal playstyle.
When individual mobs die very quickly, I would rather play a ranged character so that I'm not spending all of my time chasing after my next target. (This was a particular problem for SWTOR melee because your NPC companion switches targets automatically, while I'm still trying to figure out what direction to run in.) When mobs take comparatively long to beat down, I often prefer to play a melee character, as they are better suited to being in melee range and spend less time and effort kiting mobs around in an attempt to avoid damage.
WoW has historically been a game that tended very strongly towards short mob life expectancy - in Wrath in particular, solo mobs could take no more than 2-4 hits and live a total of 10 seconds each - really short compared to soloing in any other MMO. As such, it makes sense that I tried melee and ended up sticking with a mage. With Cataclysm - and now especially Pandaria - it seems that they have made a conscious effort to slow combat down. Health pools for both players and mobs are larger. The mage has been given the tools to deal with this - all three mage specs can now have a snare on their primary nuke spell and access to previously spec-specific defensive abilities.
Still, it's a big difference in feel, and this threw me for a real loop when trying to get back into leveling content. In any other game, I would probably just switch over to one of my several melee alts (85 Warrior, 70 Pally, 45 Rogue, and instant Death Knight on the server of my choice), but with so many years behind this particular character as my main in WoW, that's a bit of a tough sell just because the class design winds are blowing in a different direction this year.
Atmosphere of Pandaria
Assuming you don't hate the stylized graphics on principle, WoW has been getting prettier with every expansion. Cataclysm's approach of tacking on a few new areas to fill in gaps within the old world map made the expansion in some ways disjointed, but they did a very good job of making each zone feel like WoW's take on a specific environment (desert, undersea, etc). With a new, thematically consistent continent, Blizzard has tackled one consistent theme - China - and done so with some of their best results to date.
On the downside, the story definitely took a while to grow on me. One Pandaren in Warcraft III was cool, and the idea of an expansion of them sounded cool, but the reality of an entire continent of bears talking in Chinese-accented English going on about the serenity - and comic appetite - of their people may be overusing the gimmick after all.
Meanwhile, the story has inadvertently driven home how absurd WoW's current faction setup really is. The majority of the expansion's content, as with past years, pits players against common foes, often on behalf of neutral NPC factions. There is a strong effort to push individual storylines for the Horde and Alliance, but this only drives home how these are NPC factions that players are forced to live with.
Players have no more influence over the actions of "their" side of the conflict than they do over the numerous groups of NPC's. It is immediately obvious from the narrative that enlisting the local population to fight a war on a land where negative emotions can take physical form with catastrophic results is not a good idea. However, your NPC's are no less hapless than any of the others in avoiding this outcome, and for this we divide the playerbase permanently in half, only to once again be sent off to kill common enemies once the storyline is complete. At this point, the game would be better served leaving the two sides in place and having player characters be a third faction who can hang out with whichever group of NPC's they prefer for story purposes.
Moving Onwards
With the preliminaries resolved - the initial zone, two of the five levels, and yes, incidentally, taming pretty much every battle pet that moves on the continent so that's no longer competing with PVE questing for my attention - it'll be interesting to see how the experience shapes up. The thing that's odd about my Pandaria experience is that I'm clearly not tired of the sandbox PVE experience - that's what's competing for my time in numerous other games. It's possible that in another month, I'll be back to my routine of hitting the dungeon queue and doing whatever else strikes my fancy while I wait for the group to form. Or perhaps I need to face reality and switch to a melee character.
Regardless, my path forward in WoW is murky in a way that it hasn't been for years.
I knew some portion of the issue was a disruption to my routine - after spending the overwhelming majority of my time in WoW during the last two years either running random dungeon groups or working on pet battles, suddenly the five new levels stood in between me and what I was used to doing for probably the first time in my MMO career. Some portion was the learning curve associated with yet another major overhaul to the game's class system. Some portion was that the story simply needed time to ramp up.
I'm glad I took the time. Having cleared the Jade Forest, and hit level 87 in the process, I have found truth in both the mitigating factors but also potentially some degree of disappointment with the expansion itself.
Changing the time-to-kill
Over the years, I've found that I'm notoriously bad at predicting what class I am going to like in a new MMO. Many things that sound good on paper turn out to be not so fun in practice. The one indicator that works most of the time is the time it takes to solo an individual mob - a seemingly highly technical thing to look at but a major impact on my personal playstyle.
When individual mobs die very quickly, I would rather play a ranged character so that I'm not spending all of my time chasing after my next target. (This was a particular problem for SWTOR melee because your NPC companion switches targets automatically, while I'm still trying to figure out what direction to run in.) When mobs take comparatively long to beat down, I often prefer to play a melee character, as they are better suited to being in melee range and spend less time and effort kiting mobs around in an attempt to avoid damage.
WoW has historically been a game that tended very strongly towards short mob life expectancy - in Wrath in particular, solo mobs could take no more than 2-4 hits and live a total of 10 seconds each - really short compared to soloing in any other MMO. As such, it makes sense that I tried melee and ended up sticking with a mage. With Cataclysm - and now especially Pandaria - it seems that they have made a conscious effort to slow combat down. Health pools for both players and mobs are larger. The mage has been given the tools to deal with this - all three mage specs can now have a snare on their primary nuke spell and access to previously spec-specific defensive abilities.
 |
| POM, Ice Barrier, and Living Bomb, now all on one spec |
Atmosphere of Pandaria
Assuming you don't hate the stylized graphics on principle, WoW has been getting prettier with every expansion. Cataclysm's approach of tacking on a few new areas to fill in gaps within the old world map made the expansion in some ways disjointed, but they did a very good job of making each zone feel like WoW's take on a specific environment (desert, undersea, etc). With a new, thematically consistent continent, Blizzard has tackled one consistent theme - China - and done so with some of their best results to date.
On the downside, the story definitely took a while to grow on me. One Pandaren in Warcraft III was cool, and the idea of an expansion of them sounded cool, but the reality of an entire continent of bears talking in Chinese-accented English going on about the serenity - and comic appetite - of their people may be overusing the gimmick after all.
Meanwhile, the story has inadvertently driven home how absurd WoW's current faction setup really is. The majority of the expansion's content, as with past years, pits players against common foes, often on behalf of neutral NPC factions. There is a strong effort to push individual storylines for the Horde and Alliance, but this only drives home how these are NPC factions that players are forced to live with.
Players have no more influence over the actions of "their" side of the conflict than they do over the numerous groups of NPC's. It is immediately obvious from the narrative that enlisting the local population to fight a war on a land where negative emotions can take physical form with catastrophic results is not a good idea. However, your NPC's are no less hapless than any of the others in avoiding this outcome, and for this we divide the playerbase permanently in half, only to once again be sent off to kill common enemies once the storyline is complete. At this point, the game would be better served leaving the two sides in place and having player characters be a third faction who can hang out with whichever group of NPC's they prefer for story purposes.
Moving Onwards
With the preliminaries resolved - the initial zone, two of the five levels, and yes, incidentally, taming pretty much every battle pet that moves on the continent so that's no longer competing with PVE questing for my attention - it'll be interesting to see how the experience shapes up. The thing that's odd about my Pandaria experience is that I'm clearly not tired of the sandbox PVE experience - that's what's competing for my time in numerous other games. It's possible that in another month, I'll be back to my routine of hitting the dungeon queue and doing whatever else strikes my fancy while I wait for the group to form. Or perhaps I need to face reality and switch to a melee character.
Regardless, my path forward in WoW is murky in a way that it hasn't been for years.
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| At least there are Chinese dragons to collect? |
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