Best pets of 7.3

[Rosqo]

Now that the new 7.3 pets have been out for a month or so I thought it would be worth discussing the best pets of this new patch.

I would say the best pets are:

Fel-afflicted skyfin - one of the strongest if not the strongest pet to be released in this patch. Hard hitting dot in combination with a damage increase debuff and a forced swap let this pet get out a lot of damage before it's taken down. The flying racial allows it to be quicker more often than not too which is really important in the current meta.

Blazehound- another top level pet having a trap and a forced swap whilst being relatively fast at 305 speed on the s/b breed is a really strong combo. Basically any pet with traps are good but the swap just generally messes with any opponents tactics.

Infernal Pyreclaw - probably a pet that a lot of people have underrated or not played yet. Has a speed boost to get faster than the majority of other pets that can reduce damage fairly often. Cleave is useful especially once the beast racial kicks in. Then a choice between one of the hardest hitting aoe abilities in Great Sting which is literally OP ticks for around 850 without the racial and nearly 1k with (assuming 3 pets) or shell shield that has great synergy with being faster for the extra round of damage protection.

Rebellious imp - a strong pet that can do substantial damage from the backline with immolation while benefiting from its racial to heal back up. It's priority feign in portal allows the free swap that can be great in a lot of situations. I'm surprised I haven't seen this on any sunny day teams yet as there would be considerable synergy and it would make up for the low damage output of those kind of teams.

Twilight clutch sister- this pet just has the strongest burst aoe ability in the game which if combined with the dragonkin racial can hit for crazy numbers. The dodge can also be nice and it's not the slowest pet ever at 289 speed.

There are some other nice pets but I don't believe they are quite at the same level these are amalgamation of destruction, dibbler, pygmy marsuul, skyfin juvenile, tinytron and void shardling. All these pets are viable and will do well but are not quite in the same bracket as the first 5 I mentioned.

What are your thoughts? It would be cool if there's any im missing or have underrated.

[Spinning]

I'd say Twilight sister is the best. Insanely strong. I love Tinytron too though.

[Nagini]

Twilight clutch sister will make your life alot easier if not outright making the new [Draconic Destruction] pet battle achievement singlehandedly possible. Alot of the tough fights for that achievement have strats that work best if you have one of these beauties leveled up.

[Lordy]

I would definitely put the pygmy [pet]pygmy marsuul[/pet] S/S Breed right up there in the current PvP meta.

This pet absolutely shreds undead and with the combination of Crouch and Survival is very hard to deal with. One of my favourite bone serpent/wicked soul killers who can also remove MPD decoys with his flurry attack.

Even better his other slot 2 and 3 abilities are also very viable. Your opponent can never be 100% sure what you have picked unlike some of the other speed pets like rabbits who only ever use the same three moves. I won quite a few battles by choosing survival over feign death and wrong footing my opponent where they expected my pet to die or swap.

[Drlambda]

I agree with your choice of the top 5, although i'd say (like i said in discord before) that Skyfin Juvenile is stronger than you're giving credit. The other five are probably better, but it is a close sixth in that case. Not being completely awful without the racial makes me like it more than Fel-Afflicted Skyfin personally.

It's hard for me to rank them because i didn't play Blazehound enough myself, but while Rebellious Imp is "only" a solid roleplayer, Pyreclaw is a really powerful AOE pet... and then there is Clutch-Sister, and i'm honestly thinking that it's over the top and Meteor should probably be nerfed. It's not necessarily a tier 0 pet by itself, but it is an incredible sweeper. It's not hard to play and really hard to counter because even the P/S deals like 1200 damage with racial. I don't want to judge too fast, but i really think it's a pet i will hate as much as Bone Serpent and Blossoming Ancient a year from now, and that describes pretty well how strong it is in my opinion.

[Rosqo]

How do you play the juvenile skyfin effectively though? You really need to build a team around it to get the most from the forced swap and wild magic combo. Without having a dot up it’s not really an advantage to swap a pet once wild magic is up. I’m preferring the h/s as the extra health before the racial drops off is good but doubt if it can successfully go head to head against the best pets. Most of the time 273 speed is useless too with the fast meta we have.

[Drlambda]

It works in a different setting. The Fel-Afflicted pretty much is a Haunt-Imp combo rolled into one pet, and the Juvenile is more of a synergy pet with Haunt/Rebellious Imp. Juggling doesn't really work against it, and you can often just kill a backline pet with a well-timed swap while Winds and Immolate are up. But i think the main point seems to be that i value the speed quite a bit. Beating Teroclaw speed is obviously the main argument, but you're also beating every slow pet after racial, and refreshing Wild Magic an additional time has won me quite a few games.

[Shandu]

The problem with individually strong pets is they never fit into an actual PVP team. I thought having such good AOE the Infernal Pyreclaw would be perfect for a lightning storm team but it just doesn't work. I suppose it could work as just a strong backup pet where the other two have synergy but I Just see other pets as better in that role (Teroclaw for example)

[Spinning]

The problem with individually strong pets is they never fit into an actual PVP team. I thought having such good AOE the Infernal Pyreclaw would be perfect for a lightning storm team but it just doesn't work. I suppose it could work as just a strong backup pet where the other two have synergy but I Just see other pets as better in that role (Teroclaw for example)

closetozero´s aoe team is pretty bonkers

[Shandu]

The problem with individually strong pets is they never fit into an actual PVP team. I thought having such good AOE the Infernal Pyreclaw would be perfect for a lightning storm team but it just doesn't work. I suppose it could work as just a strong backup pet where the other two have synergy but I Just see other pets as better in that role (Teroclaw for example)

closetozero´s aoe team is pretty bonkers

DO you happen to have a link? How does it fare against the current FOTM darkness/clonedance teams?

[Gráinne]

closetozero´s aoe team is pretty bonkers

DO you happen to have a link? How does it fare against the current FOTM darkness/clonedance teams?

I think he means this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMV3nT2iyp8

I haven't tried it myself, but the video does include a win against 3BS.

[Shandu]

closetozero´s aoe team is pretty bonkers

DO you happen to have a link? How does it fare against the current FOTM darkness/clonedance teams?

I think he means this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMV3nT2iyp8

I haven't tried it myself, but the video does include a win against 3BS.

Eh, he only won because the BS player played terribly. Heartbroken basically means you get one shot by any elemental so you might not even get an attack off after due to the pet being so slow. It does a lot of aoe damage but you can be burst down before you kill all their team.

[Rosqo]

A few weird statements on here.

The infernal pyreclaw wouldn’t work on a lightning team particularly well as it’s great sting is most effective against a whole team of pets which you impact putting call lighting up, you then lose out on the swap and as the pyraclaw is a beast pet you buff the strongest damage against it.

Individually strong pets fit on and make several strong teams. Alpine foxling, emperor crab, fiendish imp, Bone serpent, darkness birds, jademist dancer, rabbits, vengeful porcupettes, spirit crab, ghastly kid and trap users are just a fraction of the strong pets that fit easily onto teams.

Don’t beat up on Closetozero because he defeated a triple bs team. Ofc they would play badly anyone who plays triple bs is a new or bad player who can’t win any other way. Ofc the best way to beat an aoe team is to burst it down but if your team lacks burst your probably going to lose.

[Drlambda]

Yeah, my opponent would've won with one less swap. I'm also pretty sure by now that Lil' XT is the weak spot of the team and could be replaced with another powerful aoe pet.

I used Pyreclaw more over the last few weeks because Rosqo insisted that it was really powerful, and yes, by now i'd also say it's really awesome in softening up your opponent while simply dominating some pets. You'll be much more successful if you use it as an opener (even if you swap it out to heal it somehow) rather than a puzzle piece for a synergy team.

And i have to agree with Brawler here - the sentence "individually strong pets never fit into actual PVP teams" is obviously wrong. Some of them have natural synergies, while others are just powerful "brawlers" without much synergy going on. Building a team around a heavy hitter is obviously completely different from using a synergy pet, but both are viable teambuilding strategies.

[Shandu]

The problem with individually strong pets is they never fit into an actual PVP team.

I'm sorry, but this statement makes absolutely zero sense to me.

Perhaps a course on the English language would help? It's fairly clear.

Lets see if we can make this ELI5 for you. One good thing doesn't make the whole thing is necesarilly good?

Even simpler, right, right....a teroclaw is a possibly overpowered pet, but having it on a team with two level 1 pets wouldn't mean it's a good team? Maybe I shouldn't have said "never" because obviously some do but that is generally as a sweep pet like teroclaw...pyreclaw is not teroclaw.

Just because a pet is strong, doesn't mean you can shove it into any tram and have the team be viable, there needs to be some synergy, even if it just means all of the pets do insanely high AOE damage and you can burst the enemy team down before you lose all 3 pets. Honestly man, I am not sure how I can make this any clearer to you sorry.

You're right in that you don't always need synergy, but you will most likely lose to teams which *do* have synergy. Synergy *can* just be 'all these pets do insanely high individual/aoe damage and will not die before all the enemy dies' type teams like 3xBS. I've never lost to teams like this however, I've faced the strong AOE teams with pyreclaw in, BS/teroclaw teams etc and none of them have really been much of a challenge.

[Shandu]

And i have to agree with Brawler here - the sentence "individually strong pets never fit into actual PVP teams" is obviously wrong. Some of them have natural synergies, while others are just powerful "brawlers" without much synergy going on. Building a team around a heavy hitter is obviously completely different from using a synergy pet, but both are viable teambuilding strategies.

Obviously it will fit into a team if it has synergy, kind of the opposite of what I meant - I meant that just because it's a strong pet on its own doesn't mean it will be that viable in the pvp queue if you just slam it into a random team.

People are talking as if pyreclaw is teroclaw hatchling levels of OPness - the reason teroclaw works in so many teams with little to no synergy is because it is able to sweep, the pyreclaw just does some aoe damage and then...dies. Having it in a team with two other strong AOE pets *counts as synergy*, however I doubt you will burst the whole enemy team down before you just get killed. I've watched closetozero play with the AOE team and...yeahhh kind of proves my point, either plays against terrible people and gets free wins or just gets blown out before he can do enough AOE damage to wipe the team, really not a hard team to counter at all even though pyreclaw and the twilight are both super *individually strong* pets (which is what I meant about just because a pet is strong on its own doesn't mean it is going to dominate in PVP where you need a team)