Thoughts on the new 5.4 pets

[Luciandk]

After some lenghty working, Ive finally aquired a H/H [pet]Ruby Droplet[/pet] in trade and im seriously impressed with it.

As I thought it makes an extremely durable pet against other pets with no multihit attacks and is able to steadilly wear them down with [ability]Absorb[/ability] and [ability]Blood Drain[/ability], while popping the ocassional [ability]Bubble[/ability] to soak up a big hit.

I opted to go for H/H as the only main ability scaling with power is Absorb and it doesnt gain terribly much from higher power, whereas Bubble and Blood Drain does not scale with power at all. I could foresee this pet being good in pvp due its sheer longevity, and also being potentially useful against humanoid npcs in the Celestial Tournament. In particular I believe it should shine against the monks of Taran Zhu.


[pet]Droplet of Y'Shaarj[/pet] stands out for being the first pet comming innately with [ability]Dreadful Beath[/ability] and [ability]Acid Rain[/ability] to prop it up. Acid Rain adds about 25 bonus damage to Dreadful Breath. But I feel the pet simply isnt durable enough to channel it for long. Acid Rain works much better by buffing the aquatic move [ability]Swallow you Whole[/ability], while backed up by [ability]Curse of Doom[/ability]. An ok combo, but nothing earthshatteringly special.


[pet]Gooey Sha-ling[/pet], which unlike the purple hued Droplet of Y'shaarj is the classic black and white Sha. Its most notable feature is being the first elemental packing [ability]Call Darkness[/ability], and here in 5.4 elementals ignore negative weather effects while benefitting from positive effects. So it can take the 85% hitchance [ability]Seethe[/ability] and not having even worser accuracy with Call Darkness. The last ability is a toss up, if being a starting pet use [ability]Death and Decay[/ability], elsewise [ability]Agony[/ability] I think.


[pet]Spineclaw Crab[/pet] is strongest pet with the [ability]Rip[/ability] and [ability]Blood in the Water[/ability] combo and having a much better middle ability than the others, packing [ability]Healing Wave[/ability] to really benefit from its skyhigh power of 357. I dont really think the other ability set of the pet to be that good in comparision to the burst and healing from the former.


[pet]Jadefire Spirit[/pet] critically needs a nerf, plain and simply. By using [ability]Fade[/ability] while being the last pet remaining, you can stall forever and ever. Autoevading attacks constantly as the ability have no cooldown!



[pet]Harmonious Porcupette[/pet] is interesting as it comes with the special ability [ability]Celestial Blessing[/ability], which gives the next pet to swap in a hefty damage reduction bonus for a short while. And being more durable than [pet]Yu'la[/pet], the only other pet to have it. But beside that, the pet is fairly unasuming. But it could have use in protecting lowbie pets on some tamers to let them soak damage to get xp.

[pet]Vengeful Porcupette[/pet] bought for 100 Bloody Coins is another packing [pet]Spirit Spikes[/pet], and using [ability]Vengeance[/ability] for nasty amounts of returned damage. enemy pet pops burrow, you pop spirit spikes. Enemy pets burrows out, hits, takes damage and you pop Vengeance to give them a taste of their own medicine. Potentially buffed by the beast racial as well. Should be a solid pvp pet.

[Domie]

Vengeful Porcupette - I would have really liked it if you could get it as s/s, vengeance would be a lot more reliable and it doesnt scale with power anyways (i assume from the wording atleast), and spirit spikes lasting 2 turns instead of 1.

Spineclaw Crab - Having so much power with such a powerful ability as blood in the water, there most be someone he can beat up on, specialy with a heal as a backup. Spiny carapace could also be pretty effective against npcs that cast multi hit moves, if its a 3 hit move it will be about 700 damage.

Ruby Droplet - Sounds fairly strong, and i agree that H/H seems like the best choice, since its not really doing anything other than draging things out

[Luciandk]

Isnt the point of Vengeance that you want to hit it AFTER youve been hit with a big nasty ability? Thusly wanting to go last.

[Warbeauty]

Skunky Alement has a super cute theme over all. Found this pet to not stand out as mega battler, but it definitely doesn't suck.
I just lvl'd mine to 25, and over all it's in the upper median of balanced pets. Healthy amount of health (1546) and P/S is 273. It's moves hit decently overall.

Brew Bolt is Aquatic which is nice against other elemental pets and doesn't take as long as Barrel Toss does. Explosive Brew and Inebriate i'm 50/50 on. I really think this pet has some potentially great team/situational moves. It's a bit awkward that Skunky Brew does Beast dmg, but it hits decently as a one shot big dmg kinda deal.

[Moritsume]

Glad I saw this topic, the PetBreed addon I use only listed h/b and h/s as the two breeds. Now I see that their are 5! @_@ I myself got a h/s but now I'm going to either try and trade/sell/rebuy a h/h for sure

[Ligre]

here in 5.4 elementals ignore negative weather effects while benefitting from positive effects

That IS what Blizzard promised us, but still hasn't delivered on the "benefitting from positive" part. Oh, and Tiny Twisters still get ganked by their own Lightning Storm...also incorrect according to advertised changes.

[Luciandk]

Hrm, casting Darkness with my gooey sha-ling I dont seem to get extra miss rate listed.

[Domie]

Isnt the point of Vengeance that you want to hit it AFTER youve been hit with a big nasty ability? Thusly wanting to go last.

But if you go first, i assume you will use the attack you got hit with last turn, and then you are 100% sure what you are hitting with, so if you got crit with a normal attack you would probaly use it, or you got hit with a low % hit attack like demolish or haymaker. I havnt tried it out so maybe it doesnt work from the turn before?

[Yellowlab]

I have yet to try it, but I thought the new Death Adder looked like it would be pretty good in pvp. Especially the H/H version.

I really want to try out the Ruby Droplet. And I thought that the Gooey Sha-ling looked pretty strong as well.

[Luciandk]

I have yet to try it, but I thought the new Death Adder looked like it would be pretty good in pvp. Especially the H/H version.

I really want to try out the Ruby Droplet. And I thought that the Gooey Sha-ling looked pretty strong as well.

Been looking at the Death Adder and it seems to be it really wants to be speedy. Look at [ability]Blinding Poison[/ability]. Hit an opponent with it before they get their turn and you null their attack, AND on the turn after! And it only have a 3round cd, unlike the 4 of dodge.

Think of it as a reverse [ability]dodge[/ability]. Instead of evading their attacks, you force their attacks to miss. And having the benefit of buffing your [ability]Puncture Wound[/ability] as well.

[Yellowlab]

I have yet to try it, but I thought the new Death Adder looked like it would be pretty good in pvp. Especially the H/H version.

I really want to try out the Ruby Droplet. And I thought that the Gooey Sha-ling looked pretty strong as well.

Been looking at the Death Adder and it seems to be it really wants to be speedy. Look at [ability]Blinding Poison[/ability]. Hit an opponent with it before they get their turn and you null their attack, AND on the turn after! And it only have a 3round cd, unlike the 4 of dodge.

Think of it as a reverse [ability]dodge[/ability]. Instead of evading their attacks, you force their attacks to miss. And having the benefit of buffing your [ability]Puncture Wound[/ability] as well.

That is a very good point. I was just worried about the extremely low HP that an S/S breed offers (1319).

[Luciandk]

Low hp matters less when you can evade or mitigate damage. [ability]Crouch[/ability] also becomes a lot better when speedy.

Im thinking perhaps [ability]Vicious Fang[/ability], Crouch and Blinding Poison. Should be quite durable.

[Ligre]

Hrm, casting Darkness with my gooey sha-ling I dont seem to get extra miss rate listed.

Of course you don't...the negative effects are being ignored. The problem is the positive effects are as well...and Lightning Storm damage is going off on Elementals as well. Totally the opposite of that which we were promised.

[Poofah]

The problem is the positive effects are as well...and Lightning Storm damage is going off on Elementals as well. Totally the opposite of that which we were promised.

Yep, this is very sad. For example Living Sandling: although he doesn't get the -10% accuracy, he also doesn't get the benefit of the shield. This is definitely counter to the change they described in the patch notes. So hopefully it gets addressed.

Low hp matters less when you can evade or mitigate damage. [ability]Crouch[/ability] also becomes a lot better when speedy.

Im thinking perhaps [ability]Vicious Fang[/ability], Crouch and Blinding Poison. Should be quite durable.

Speedy Death Adder Hatchling is brutal, and the best part is he has multiple good movesets. Vicious Fang/Crouch and Poison Fang/Puncture Wound are both excellent. And whereas you can swap out of Blinding Poison, that still costs 2 turns if the snake is faster, and it only has a 3 round cd. Unless you're healing/buffing on those Blinded turns, you're getting skipped 2 turns out of 4. The only trouble is that beasts are public enemy number 1 due to Direhorns, so mechs are quite common.

[Luciandk]

Already spotted the first call for nerfs on [pet]Xu-Fu[/pet] on american forums. So sad if people even cant deal with the kitty. Evasion or force swap to waste his prowl-feed combo, or bringing mechs to trash him

Darkness should be useful against the kitty to reduce his healing and flyers takes less damage from beasts.

[Moritsume]

Yeah Xu-Fu in pvp shouldn't be hard but people will always complain. They even have a Flying pet on the island with Call Lightning. Skywisp Moth with Slicing Wind, Cocoon OR Counterspell and Call Lightning. Let Xu-Fu deal with that

[Poofah]

I agree there's lots of ways to counter him and it's too early for nerfs. But it's also rather restrictive if you have to play avoidance and/or swaps in your team. The punishment for failing to avoid Prowl+Feed is pretty huge. The issue isn't really whether he's unbeatable, but how much the threat of Xu'Fu controls what people play. If everyone has to play specific counters because this guy is out there, then he's warping the metagame.

This is going to be hard to gauge though, because people are already playing a lot of mechs because they were strong in 5.3--all beasts are going to suffer because of Direhorn's legacy, basically. Swaps were also very popular and Gate/Sweep are still extremely strong (and then of course there's the natural combo of Minefield+swap, which obliterates beasts).

So it's going to take some time to shake out. Several of the 5.4 pets are crazy powerful; Elementals are unexpectedly still hamstrung because their passive didn't get fixed as documented; Haunt got 'fixed' in a bizarre way that makes it stupidly strong; Fade went live without a cooldown so it's completely degenerate. It's impossible to predict what (if anything) Bliz is going to do about these issues in the near term. In the meantime I'd expect PvP to be pretty wild.

[Luciandk]

I would think the P/S breed of the [pet]Skywisp[/pet] moth to be ideal, or?

[Quintessence]

I would think the P/S breed of the [pet]Skywisp[/pet] moth to be ideal, or?

I hope so, since I went out of my way to get a P/S. I was considering H/S for a little bit so my moth had more health to withstand Xu-Fu's absurdly large hits/crits, but I don't know pet breeds all that well so I went with the standard desirable stat for moths (power).

[Luciandk]

Dont have it yet, but ive been considering [pet]Blackfuse Bombling[/pet], what breed that would be great for it. P/P stands out, as it peaks at 341 power and comming with the [ability]Armageddon[/ability] move for massive aoe damage. It is a base 20 attack and would yield about 350 damage to every opposing pet, which should make it an excellent lead pet.

Edit: Tested out [pet]Ruby Droplet[/pet] in pvp and its as good as I thought it would be. Stalling and eroding enemies down. Just watch out for them multihit attacks with your bubble!