Gotta catch ’em all: the Rainbow Edition

Happy almost-Christmas! Here, have a resolution to post more for the future. Maybe it’ll stick this time.

As usual, I’ve spent lots of time playing the game and not nearly enough talking about it. Let’s try and fix that, shall we?

So I’ve been mostly raiding, and believe you me I have things to say about raiding, not all of them polite, so let’s leave those for another post.

Let’s talk about pet battles instead!

Pet battles, it seems, are one of those things you either love, or absolutely don’t get the point of. Half my guild is all “oooh, a blue squirrel!”, the other half is “uh, okay?”. I’m firmly in the “oooh, a blue squirrel” camp (although having had a blue squirrel for-bloody-ever, I’m more along the lines of “oooh, a blue Infinite Whelpling off the first one I ever saw! and a breed that doesn’t suck either!”).

Before 5.1, I did my pet battle dailies religiously, and yet had no Porcupette to show for them. After 5.1 dropped, I decided I would just buy a damned Porcupette, so I wouldn’t sadface every time I opened a daily bag and no cute porcupine inside. I half-expected it to drop out of the first daily bag after I bought it, but so far it hasn’t.

Then I went on to clear up the remaining Pandaria tamers and unlock the Spirit Tamers. Picked the Earth Spirit as a quest reward because hell no I’m not redoing that fight ever if I can help it, got the Air Spirit out of the very first time I did the daily (good, because I was torn between picking that and Earth, not because Air was hard but because Air looked lonely… guess she really wanted to come home with me), got the Water Spirit the very next day, still haven’t got the Fire Spirit but oh well. (Though since Water is such a push-over of a fight, I’ve been using him to level pets on, and I’ve gotten two more copies of the pet.)

Once I had everything unlocked, I resumed going zone by zone and catching all the wild pets. It was in Valley of the Four Winds, as I stubbornly tried to find a bandicoon of the color I liked the best, that it occurred to me that I should check what wild pets came in what colors, so if at all possible I could have a full collection.

And because I’m nothing if not helpful (or rather, because I’m going to be spending the next several months in “argh, it’s blue and a good breed but the wrong damned color” hell and pain shared is pain halved), here’s the results of my checking. I know Quintessence has been doing color challenges and I probably could’ve just used the data from her posts, but I’m stubborn.

All information gleaned from WarcraftPets. If their info is wrong, mine will be as well. Corrections will be gratefully accepted. If there are no color changers involved with a particular model and no quirks to the pets, I’m not bothering to list it (owls, for example).

Crabs

Four colors. Three of the four are available on stable pets, but the fourth can only be found on color changers. Most of these are aquatic – I’ll mark the outliers. All are wild pets unless stated otherwise.

Blue: Emperor Crab. The Spirit Crab (undead) is a unique version of this color, ghostly and semi-transparent with a blue glow.

Red: Strand Crawler (fishing dailies), Spirebound Crab, Lava Crab (elemental).

White / Grey: Shore Crawler (Goblin-only). If you don’t have a Goblin character and don’t feel like dragging one out of the starter zone just for the pet, both of the wild color changers listed for the last color also come in this one.

Beige / Teal: Shore Crab, Strand Crab. Both of these are color changers and come in all four crab colors.

Straw hats and you

Although I hit exalted with the Tillers themselves quite some time ago, I’ve still been doing the dailies – for valor points, for fun, and for reputation with the individual pandas. I’m almost done with Friends on the Farm, and today I capped my rep with Old Hillpaw and got a Straw Hat in the mail.

Being me, I promptly linked it in guild chat and commented that it really should have some sort of farming bonus or something like that on it, because it’s useless as it is… and then somebody asked a smart question:

“Is it transmoggable?”

Turns out yes, yes it is.

The hat Old Hillpaw mails you is cloth, but Gina Mudclaw sells a version of the hat for each of the four armor classes – cloth, leather, plate and mail. They look absolutely identical, and while they’re somewhat unflattering on some races (see my poor night elf above), I would wager it wouldn’t look half bad on, say, a pandaren.

Battle pet breeds

Happened onto this tool by chance while browsing the Wowhead forums. I’ve not seen anybody mention this and it can be quite useful for serious pet battlers… okay, okay, an oxymoron really, since pet battles aren’t really “serious”, let’s just say anybody who cares about getting the best pets possible.

The better quality a pet is (from poor to rare), the harder it hits and the higher its stats. This is known. However, two identical pets of the same quality can have different stat spreads, depending on their “breed”. Certain pets can only come in one breed, others have multiple – so you might have, for instance, a speedy chicken or a tanky chicken or a stabby chicken.

This is where this battle pet breeds website comes in. It shows you the stat multipliers associated with each breed and, if you input your character and server name, examines your list, tells you the breed of each of your pets, and alerts you to any duplicates (pets that have the same family and breed, and as such are functionally identical if they’re the same quality).

The information used by the website is grabbed directly from Blizzard through the Armory API, so it’s reliable.

Now, what breed a certain pet is might or might not make a difference (I have a blue Minfernal, and I don’t know what breed it is, I’ve not looked, but it was hard enough to track down that even if it’s the absolute worst breed I don’t care), but knowing is better than not knowing, no? And it might make a difference when choosing whether or not to level a rare pet for battling with.

Bloody hell this fight

I’ll start posting more content than just “lookit, we killed this” soon, I promise, but…

Heroic Spirit Kings down! Realm first as usual by now – the only other guild who had a Heroic Gara’jal kill before this reset (and therefore had enough wipes on this to have a shot at killing it) isn’t raiding tomorrow, and chose to kill it normal mode and clear the rest of the instance about one hour before we got our kill. World 88th kill overall according to WoWProgress, and 51st 10-man, which puts us at world 81st overall and 42nd 10-man. Not bad at all.

Extremely chaotic fight and took quite some perfecting of the strategy, including continuous wiping pretty much on the pull, Method-style, when we got saddled with a less-than-ideal order (the order on our kill, for the record, was Qiang – Subetai – Meng – Zian). It didn’t help that we lost a DPS to a guild-hop (to a worse guild…) mid-progression, but hey, clearly didn’t need him anyway.

Loot was Steelskin, Qiang’s Impervious Shield (which makes me the current best-geared warrior on the server) and Girdle of Delirious Visions (which went for offspec, but hey, better than a disenchant).

Elegon next! From the handful of pulls we did tonight before raid end he doesn’t seem too hard, so we might even kill it before reset – we’ll see.

Die, you stupid troll, die

Gara’jal heroic down.

Oh. My. God.

So proud of everybody in our guild, you have no idea. This fight is such a tight DPS race, especially in 10-man. Likely to get much, much easier with gear, but right now we don’t have the gear… so it was very, very, very tight. How tight? That yell he’s doing in the screenshot is his berserk mechanic, a spell that instantly wipes the raid. He started casting it and fell over a half second later.

Dropped Sollerets of Spirit Splitting (yay!) and Circuit of the Frail Soul.

Realm first! And according to WoWProgress right now, world 30th 10-man, 60th overall. Unsurprisingly, we’ve gone from being the underdog guild nobody really cared about to the guild everybody’s itching to join.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeee. *bounces*

First HM kills

Stone Guard HM realm first (dropping tiles is fun!), Feng the Accursed HM realm second because he’s a bag of dicks mainly because of RNG. Still realm first 10-man, though. Stone Guard dropped Stonefang Chestguard (which went for offspec because our hunter was out of the raid having dinner) and Claws of Amethyst; Feng coughed up Bracers of Six Oxen (yay!) and Imperial Ghostbinder’s Robes.

Dealing with Gara’jal now. Definitely enjoying this tier far, far more than I ever enjoyed Dragon Soul so far. The fights are incredibly interesting and involved even for tanks.

And down it goes

There we go. Realm first! Loot was Grips of Terra Cotta (went for offspec) and Magnetized Leggings; some people also got an item off their extra roll, but by that point I wasn’t paying attention.

All throughout Cataclysm I said I wanted fights that were more interesting to tank, and oh boy did I get my wish. This was extremely fun, but also amazingly tense (and ugh my camera getting jammed into a wall cost me an extra Opportunistic Strike, since I ate a stomp). I literally did nothing but stare at the boss I was tanking to avoid the attacks (successfully – got 5 Opportunistic Strikes in a row at one point) and rotate cooldowns, to the point that the first time I looked at the health of the boss was when I saw my Execute button light up. I am so very glad I wasn’t raid leading.

I am so incredibly proud of our guild, you have no idea.

My God, it’s full of stars

Realm third, world… I dunno, WoWProgress is being slow in updating, since everybody is killing all the things.

This actually took some effort – best food on our casters, DPS flasks, potions and food on tanks, healers helping DPS in the spark phases and so on. Can’t wait to see this fight on heroic – I’d wager we’re going to see class-stacking of the Spine HM variety.

We even got the Straight Six achievement out of it. Loot was fun – Bottle of Infinite Stars and Light of the Cosmos, plus one of our priests got Torch of the Celestial Spark out of an Elder Charm of Good Fortune. Not a bad haul, although I really wanted the pretty tanking axe from him… ahh well, more kills in our future.

One boss left!

Four Kings dethroned

(Loot: Mindshard Drape and Shoulderguards of the Unflanked. Did I mention I bought ilvl476 epic shoulders for 50k off the AH? Yeah. Welcome to the life of a progression raider, where every upgrade matters and you can buy something only to replace it a week later.)

And just for the record, Elegon trash can go die in a fire.

And speaking of Gara’jal…

Was easier than expected, although we did slam face-first into the berserk timer on an almost-kill due to being overly cautious and using three healers rather than two. Ahh well. Next!

(Loot: Bonded Soul Bracers, which I got for my barely-used, dailies-only DPS kit since we had no other plate user in the raid, and Spaulders of the Divided Mind.)