Map of fel-touched battle pet locations

Patch 6.2 gives us 15 new elite battle pets to fight. Each of them has 2 fellow pets joining them and  the Fel Corruption ability which empowers those otherwise harmless looking sidekicks.

I have created a map of the location of all the new elite battle pets in 6.2 and also recorded at video to show you where they are. You can check out both of them below. As soon as the patch is live I will start working on videos of how to easily defeat all of the fel touched battle pets, so make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel if you think that would be useful. :)

Best garrison buildings for pet battlers

With Warlords of Draenor only 4 days away it is time to talk to you about the garrison and how to optimize it if you are a pet battlers.

As you know, you only get to pick 3 small buildings, 2 medium buildings and 2 larger buildings and already now I can tell you that this will cost some heartache if you like me want to get all pets available in the game.

But before we get to that let us have a look at which small buildings to pick if you are a serious pet battler.

Small Buildings
There aren't any small buildings which directly gives you new pets however I very much recommend getting the Engineering Works. If you do not have engineering on your character, picking this building will give you access to the crafted engineering pets of WoD. This means you can get your
very own Lifelike Mechanical Frostboar, Mechanical Scorpid and Mechanical Axebeak.
You will not be able to create the Blingtron 5000 with the Engineering Works, however you will be able to get it faster and as such get your hand on Sky-Bo earlier.

Other than the Engineering Works it doesn't really matter which building you pick for the small lots,
however if you are a tailor I would recommend getting the Tailoring Emporium.The reason? The Elekk Plushie.
While you will not be able to create the Elekk Plushie if you do not have tailoring, getting the Tailoring Emporium will help you get it faster if you do. It currently requires 50 Hexweave Cloth and  10 Sorcerous Earth to create and the work orders of the Tailoring Emporium will help you get there much faster.

So those are the small buildings to consider if you want to build the best pet battle garrison. Now let's move on to where the tough choices lie at the medium buildings.

Medium Buildings
You only have 2 plots for medium buildings and that is where the trouble starts, because there are 3 that grants you vanity pets.

First up is the Inn. If you create an Inn you will get access to daily dungeon quests from random people dropping by. One of these quests is given by Mylune and is called For the Birds. It requires you to go into the Everbloom dungeon and pick up a Peachick from a nest. This will get you, your own little Everbloom Peachick.

If you are horde, the second choice is the Trading Post. Getting this to level 2 will unlock access to
the Laughing Skull faction and getting revered with them will give you the option to purchase a Bone Wasp. If you are a Alliance you will not get a vanity pet option from the Sha'tari defense so you actually have the space for all the medium buildings you would want to pick as a pet battler.

The last building you want to get is the Barn. Once you get the barn to level 3(which requires you to get the master trapper achievement by placing 125 work orders) a glass of warm milk will spawn and this will teach you the Pygmy Cow.

So 3 buildings and 2 plots, hmmm. Provided your main character is horde, the smartest thing would probably be to get the Inn and the Trading post on your main and then get the stable on an alt character.

Large Buidings
You can have 2 Large Buildings and there are none that provide you with any vanity pets. However there are still some that could provide some benefits to pet battlers.

The Mage Tower gives you access to portals so you can travel to other areas of Draenor faster. In theory this would make doing tamer dailies easier so it might be a good choice to make.

The Stables are another potential choice. At level 2 you no longer get dazed when riding mounts in Draenor and at level 3 you get a 20% increase in mount speed while in Draenor. Both things should help you get around to daily tamers and if you get the building leveled fast enough, it could also be helpful when doing the 500 pet battles needed to get the Menagerie to level 3.

Others
Other than these there is of course the Pet Menagerie which is a no brainer both because it has it's own slot that doesn't compete with any other building and because at level 3 the Pet Battle daily (opened up by the quest Pets vs Pest) starts grating a Big Bag of Pet Supplies, which has a chance to contain on of 7 different vanity pets: Albino Chimaeraling, Firewing, Ghastly Kid, Puddle Terror, Sun Sproutling, Sunfire Kaliri and Weebomination.

So what are you waiting for? Go build that Garrison and let me know which buildings you ended up choosing.

New Vanity Pets from Pet Battles

The easiest way to get a lot of new vanity pets from WoD is probably going to be getting them from Pet Battles. Most of the other new battle pets will require achievements or questing to be done, but as soon as you have access to all the zones you should be fine to get all all those that are trapped in pet battles.

There are currently 26 new pets from battles and if you want to prepare so you know which zones they are located in you can check this list.
The pets with a * next to them are available in multiple zones. 

Gorgrond  Amberbarb Wasp                                                      Axebeak Hatchling Junglebeak Mudback Calf Parched Lizard Twilight Wasp* Wood Wasp Frostfire Ridge Frostfur Rat Frostshell Pincher Icespine Hatchling Ironclaw Scuttler Twilight Wasp* Shadowmoon Valley Moonshell Crab Mossbite Skitterer Royal Moth* Waterfly* Zangar Crawler

Spires of Arak Bloodsting Wasp  Golden Dawnfeather Mud Jumper* Swamplighter Firefly Thicket Skitterer Talador Brilliant Bloodfeather Flat-Tooth Calf Kelp Scuttler Mud Jumper* Royal Moth* Shadow Sporebat Waterfly* Nagrand Leatherhide Runt Mud Jumper*

Have fun catching them all! :) 

Do you remember your first vanity pet?

Do you remember which of your many vanity pets was the very first you got? I was trying to figure that out today and I realized that I couldn't recall it.
Unfortunately I expect that not even Blizzard can track the exact truth, since creation dates probably got wiped when the pet journal was introduced, but I thought that perhaps looking at the list would jug my memory, so I opened the pet journal to give it a go.

First I unticked all pet gained through pet battling. Having played since 2005 I was certain that my first pet would not be amongst those. I also unticked Blizzard store pets and pets gained from the trading card game as I didn't start getting pets from those until the summer of 2008.

This left me with quite a long list still. Scanning through it I narrowed it down to 3 pets.

The mechanical chicken is the one I think is most likely.
You get it from the quest An OOX of Your Own which opens up after you have done the escort quest for 3 mechanical chickens in 3 different zones. 
I am pretty sure I did this on my very first character, which means I should have gotten this pet at some point during 2005. 

The question is whether I completed the quest chain before or after May 2005 because if it was after, that leaves room for my guess number 2.

Speedy is one out of 4 different pets you can get from the original Children's week quest line. 
The other choices are Mr. Wiggles, Scooter the Snail and Whiskers. I am 100% certain that I chose Speedy as my number one, I vividly remember having a hard time picking between him and Mr. Wiggles and ending up with him as my choice. I don't remember if this happened in 2005 or if it wasn't until 2006 that I realized this quest line was available. Looking through the list though I have discovered that I am still to pick up Whiskers and that I have 2 Speedy's which is a bit silly, but at least I know which reward to pick next year! 

The Winter Reindeer along with the Tiny Snowman and Father Winter's Helper is another good guess. The pets were introduced to Winter Veil in 2005 and you could get them from opening the presents under the tree. 
I know that I have done this every year since the beginning so the question is just whether or not I received one of the 2 above pets before getting either of these 3 Winter Veil ones. 
Sadly I can't remember, but all of these 3 pets required a snowball to summon back before they were put into the pet journal, so even if one of them were my first pet, it hasn't seen much use as snowballs were rare except for during the holiday. 

Given that my first character was an Undead, it would actually have made a lot of sense if my first vanity pet had been the Undercity Cockroach. But it wasn't. In fact I didn't get any cockroach until I wanted to test out the Apocalypse ability when fighting Dos-Ryga. 
Why you ask? Well I think they are ugly and disgusting, even in pixel form, but the main reason back in the early days of WoW was that even 50 silver was quite a big deal. Remember this was back when a slow mount cost 40G and the fast one 600G. Not many people could afford the latter, but I got mine the moment I turned 60. One of the reasons I could afford that was because I didn't spend money on anything that wasn't absolutely necessary and that is how I know for a fact that my first vanity pet must have been from a quest or an event.
So this is my guesses for my first vanity pet. Do you remember which one was your first?

Which Battle Pet are you?

Have you ever considered which vanity pet in World of Warcraft you resemble most?

Take this quick quiz to find out!


Did you get the result you expected? If not which vanity pet would you like to be if you could pick any of the 500+ currently ingame?

What will happen to Pet Battles in Warlords of Draenor?

As expected, there were not much said about pet battles at Blizzcon, but in the "ask about everything" panel someone asked the question that us pet battlers have been wondering. How will Pet Battling work in Warlords of Draenor. Will there be more levels to grind for all of our pets? And will we finally get a legendary quality?

The answers given were brief and not very detailed, but hopefully they mean that pet battles will continue to be exciting in WoD.
Cory Stockton said that they were not looking to increase the levels for battle pets and that makes me super happy. I don't know about you guys, but I have a ton of level 25 and the thought of having to level them to 30 does not sound like fun. So yay for not raising the level cap!

Instead of increasing the level cap, the developers are looking at expanding the collection aspect. This to me sounds like there will be a ton of new wild, quest reward and dropped pets in Draenor. They also want to add more trainers which will hopefully give us some new challenges.

The most interesting thing though was that in the new player made garrisons, it will be an option to have a Pet Stable. It didn't sound like they had really finalized the purpose of this building, but Cory did mention a unique trainer and epic pet battles so it could end up being really exciting.

All in all it sounds like pet battles haven't been forgotten for Warlords of Draenor, but unfortunately it doesn't sound like it is a big priority either. I would have loved to hear something more and for the devs to show us some unique and creative ideas of where to take pet battles, but hopefully we will see something once they start polishing the new expansion.

Lets say I am semi excited about the future of pet battles. What about you? 

Pet battle challenge of the month - November 2013

The challenge of November is all about themed pet battle teams.
Pet battling is not all about winning, it is about winning while looking cool and nothing says cool like an awesome themed oet battle team.

This month I challenge you to put together a pet battling team that has a clear theme to it.
It can be a theme based on the names you have given your pets, it can be a team that only uses a particular familie of pets or it can be another thematic focus.
The most important thing is that the theme is clear to the opponent.

Prizes
As last month there will be two different prizes one for people on the EU servers and one for people on all the other servers.
For the EU servers you can choose between a green level 25 Azure Crane Chick or a level 1 Phoenix Hawk Hatchling.
If you are not on the EU servers you can win a Medal of Honor Steam Key.

How it works
Create an awesome looking themed pet battle team, then test it out in battle. Make sure it can at least win once in a while. In the comment section below describe your team and the theme. If possible link to a screenshot of the team in action although this is not required to enter the competition.

How do I win?
The competition ends at midnight CEST on the 31st of October and once it has ended I will pick a random submission.

Once the competition is over the winning team will be announced here and provided I have access to the pets used in the winning team I will also make a video showcasing the team in action. If you enter the competition, please make sure you check back here so we can arrange handing over the price.