Monday, March 16, 2015

Warcraft Garrison Pet Battles : Two Pet Strategy for Elekks and Others

Trying to find a good strategy for some of the Garrison pet battles can be frustrating, particularly when you're just starting out and you only have a few pets leveled to 25. If you're trying to work on two-pet strategies so that you can level your pets to complete the Awfully Big Adventure quest with the Elekk, you may find yourself yelling at the screen and pounding on the mouse as that frail little garrison visitor suddenly demolishes your whole team in three blows.

There've been some changes recently, and now most garrison pet battles award only a trivial amount of experience.  However, the tokens you win each day allow you to upgrade several pets, so it's a pretty reasonable tradeoff.

There are differences in individual pets' health, speed, and power-to-hit.  This and the "random number gods" make every pet battle different.  These two pet strategies allow you to field a third pet (I suggest something level 15 and above) to take care of those cases where two pets just aren't going to take down the garrison challenge.

Let's start with some terms:

All pets have two rows of 3 actions that you can pick from.  When web pages talk about pets, they will usually add the setup that they have for that particular battle -- in this case, arcane blast is the first thing you can choose and it's on the second row, as is life exchange.  Moonfire, the third action we want for this pet is on the top row.

So if I'm telling you to use this pet and this setup, I would say "Sprite Darter Hatchling (2,2,1)"  If I'm giving you a specific pet strategy, I will use the slot number instead. So, if I want your Sprite Darter Hatchling (2,2,1) to first do Moonfire, then Life Exchange, then Arcane blast, I would say "strategy: 3,2,1"

NOT ALL PETS ARE CREATED EQUAL.  If you look at your Sprite Darter, you may see that your health or speed is different.  That means your attack effectiveness will be different than mine.  You can either go hunt the specific pet type that you need or use some alternatives -- where I know alternatives, I'll list them.

Got it?  Okay, here, starting from the Quintessence of Light, are the pet strategies I use.  These are two pet strategies, so you can put whatever you like in the third slot.



 Quintessence of Light
* Sprite Darter Hatchling (2,2,1)
*Nether Faerie Dragon (2,2,1)
*ANY
*Strategy: 3,1,2,1,1,1 rinse, lather, repeat

Blingtron 4999b and friends 
* Singing Sunflower (1,2,1) (slow but reliable fight)
* Nether Faerie Dragon (2,2,1) moonfire, life exchange
*ANY
* Strategy: start with sunlight, keep up photosynthesis
ALTERNATE: Ruby Droplet(2,2,2) or Blossoming Ancient for first pet  OR Mechanical Frostboar(2,2,1)plus Ikky (1,1,1)  Black claw and flock them to death.

 Stitches JR.

 WARNING:  THIS FIGHT IS VERY RANDOM-NUMBER-GODS (RNG) DEPENDENT - If your pet does less than 500 damage to him, he will ignore that damage.
* Nether Faerie Dragon (2,2,1)
* Water strider/ mirror strider/etc strider (2,2,2)
* Any water with "pump"
* Strategy:  Nether Faerie Dragon (2), swap, Strider (2,3,3) bring out NFD, rinse, repeat
ALTERNATE: Nether Faerie Dragon(2,2,1), Mini Mindslayer,(2,1,2) Zao, calfling of Nunzao (2,2,2) STRATEGY: (3,2,) swap (3.2.1) swap (3)

Hanos-Fatos-Manos
* Mechanical Pandaren Dragon (1,1,2)
* Winter's Little Helper (2,1,2)
* any third with 800 health (swap in and out when Manos comes in)
Strategy:  (3,2,1,1,1(etc)) Winter's helper (2,1,3,1 etc) -- she really takes them down fast.

Squirt - one of the few garrison battles where you can level a pet!
*Scourged Whelpling (2,2,1)
*macabre marionette(2,2,2)
*any third with 800 health.  Swap when Puzzle (3rd pet) enters and immediately swap back to Marionette.
*Strategy:  Whelpling - spam 3,2,1,1,1 until whelpling dies.  Bring out Marionette, spam 3, 1,1,3. 

Rukus
* Lil' Bling
* Darkmoon Zeppelin
* any mechanical over 700 health