<<Replaced by 8 part 5.4 Guide>>

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Stencil » October 1st, 2013, 8:56 am

I'm in the camp of the guide having the best/fastest strats and definitely against any compromises done in the name of trying to reduce the different number of pets used in the guide or restricting things to easily available pets only. This is for veteran tamers; if a strat uses a pet or breed I don't currently have, then I get excited. That's a reason to go do something out of the ordinary; to go find and level up that pet today instead of just leveling another random spider or cockroach you'll never actually use because, you know, gotta collect (and level, and stone) them all. The guide should not worry about how accessible the teams are to new battlers, it should show them the teams they should aspire too as they claw their way there using stuff like the beginner guide.

If the best team uses a hard to get or unobtainable pet should it be in the guide? Absolutely. Some people actually have those and that's awesome for them. I mean how cool is it for someone with one of those pets to see that they can use it against some tamer to totally kick its ass and own it because they have that special, rare pet.

That said, when the best team for a tamer uses a pet like that, then we just need to add the next best team below it.
Rendigar wrote:I don't know about the rest of you - but finding all the various strategies in 8 to 16 pages of responses to guides and general posts and trying to decide which is better was (and is) a pain in the neck.
Well, that's what happens when a thread continues long after the originator has stopped updating it. I can only imagine that at some point you will stop updating this one and some brilliant new strategy will sit buried on page 12 instead of getting updated into the first post :)
Rendigar wrote:I think the most difficult part here would be deciding what level of risk constitutes "better RNG". In my own experience missiles miss far more often than they should and if a dive misses (1 chance in 5) then you are aborting and restarting.
I've always felt that there are many strategies whose average time does not match the reality. Its usually the best case scenario, where everything goes right. That's why there is no substitute for actual data. During 5.3 I began collecting (when I would remember) turn data for every tamer fight with the goal of getting 20 data points. If I wiped or aborted, the rounds spent on that attempt were added to the rounds of that kill to try to represent the real time investment required.

A rather extreme example, of this was the Zandalari/Chrominius strategy for Wastewalker that was advertised as a 14 round kill. I tried it out 6 times and got kills of: 15 14 14 14 21+10+8+14 19+15. So, at first it was working wonderfully, just as advertised. Then I found out just how wrong it could go if the rng went against you and wiped 3 times tyring to get kill number 5. I don't recall if the 21 could have been a smaller number if I'd been smarter about aborting earlier, but my 6 kill average for that strat was 24 rounds. At that point I decided to switch to a more reliable strat, one that would take 19 rounds on a "no bad RNG" run and in reality delivered an average of 20.35 rounds over 20 kills.

A nicer example to look at would be the data I had for the Zep/Chrominius strat for Moruk:
17 18 20+18 18 17 18 18 17 17 17 18 18 18 16 17 17 17 17 19 1+18 == 18.55

This shows one wipe on kill 3 and an abort on the last kill which (somewhere along the line) I decided I'd do whenever the first missile hit (goo basically did no damage so didn't even have to repair). Now, I know I've had more than one wipe on Moruk with that strat, they just weren't on days when I was tracking kills. Still, it shows that while not a slam dunk, the strat was pretty consistent as the data shows.


So where am I going with all this you're probably wondering. Even before the 5.3 guide was spun out of the 5.2 thread, I've felt that what we needed was not a top level post containing a guide with a single strat for each boss, but more of a menu, a compendium of strats. For each tamer, there would be a small list of possible strats with each line listing the average rounds, perhaps the number of trials used to get that average (or some other way of indicating confidence in that average) and the pets used. Fastest strats would be listed first. The user could work down the list until they saw one that whose pet requirements and also see what pets they would need if they wanted to get faster.

Right now, these would have to be links to individual posts which kind of sucks. I've seen some sites with BBCode that supported a Spoiler tag where the contents are collapsed and hidden and when clicked a quote like section appears under that line containing text. Something like that could be a very good way of letting users work through the various options. The one advantage of links to spoiler tags is that the ability of the strat writer to edit their work if changes later need to be made. Hmmm, what we really need is a spoiler type tag that can be set to point at another forum post and when clicked grabs the contents of that post and sticks it into a spoiler section when the user clicks Show and can later be collapsed and hidden if the user clicks Hide. Quintessence! You can get that added to the site right? :)

One thing we could get from that kind of approach is that the top post would be more community owned, managed by Admins. As the 5.3 thread fell out of date, it would have felt kind of wrong to ask an admin to go and make a change to Phraide's guide with such and such a revision. Because it was his guide, even if many of the strats had come from the community. With where I'd like to see things go, it would be more a person posts the new strat in the thread and an admin updates the first post with the link to it.

Ideally we could crowd source average round data - a person could try out someone strat for a while, post their results and the admins could incorporate that into the top post's listing of the strat. There are multiple cans of worms to deal with around the whole average rounds to kill issue, but something like it is needed to maintain any kind of quality control of the list and keep it meaningful for people rather than just turning into a list of every possible team every person has ever used on that tamer (even if it failed 3 times out 4 and took 40 rounds to finish).

At one time I was thinking it would be cool if everybody could, on their profile, set up what their teams were for various tamers. So a user who could click on Moruk and the sight would show all the teams users had set in their profiles for Moruk ordered by how many people had that team. So, the most popular team basically is first. Of course the 2 problems with that kind of approach is that most popular does not equal the best and that you usually need additional instructions to accompany the choice of team. I'm only bringing it up, I guess, because ultimately the form we're working in, forums and guide posts, is in some ways holding us all back.

Well, that's probably enough blathering from me for now; should have gone to bed hours ago. To anyone who actually read the whole thing you have both my condolences and gratitude.

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Quintessence » October 1st, 2013, 9:42 am

Stencil wrote: I've felt that what we needed was not a top level post containing a guide with a single strat for each boss, but more of a menu, a compendium of strats. For each tamer, there would be a small list of possible strats with each line listing the average rounds, perhaps the number of trials used to get that average (or some other way of indicating confidence in that average) and the pets used. Fastest strats would be listed first. The user could work down the list until they saw one that whose pet requirements and also see what pets they would need if they wanted to get faster.
I think that's an interesting suggestion. Another possible way of doing this would be a section of the forums (or sub-section) with posts each dedicated to a specific Trainer battle. Anyone that has an idea for a team against a certain trainer would post under the appropriate thread, and the "master post" for said trainer would get an update if the community finds the team effective enough to add to the list.

Of course that would mean a lot of management of the threads, in addition to adding yet another section (or sub-section) to the forums which may make it feel too cluttered or overwhelming to someone newer to the forums. The decision on adding anything extra/new will ultimately be decided by Breanni.

So for the time being, we'll stick with the current layout of a single guide post. I think Rendigar's doing a great job so far. :)
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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Anasa » October 1st, 2013, 4:26 pm

Quintessence wrote:
Stencil wrote: I've felt that what we needed was not a top level post containing a guide with a single strat for each boss, but more of a menu, a compendium of strats. For each tamer, there would be a small list of possible strats with each line listing the average rounds, perhaps the number of trials used to get that average (or some other way of indicating confidence in that average) and the pets used. Fastest strats would be listed first. The user could work down the list until they saw one that whose pet requirements and also see what pets they would need if they wanted to get faster.
I think that's an interesting suggestion. Another possible way of doing this would be a section of the forums (or sub-section) with posts each dedicated to a specific Trainer battle. Anyone that has an idea for a team against a certain trainer would post under the appropriate thread, and the "master post" for said trainer would get an update if the community finds the team effective enough to add to the list.
FWIW, I think this is a great idea. The top of each thread could even link to the loaded-up Tamer team on Wowhead's new tool.

Edit: Either that, or maybe what we really want is a wiki.

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Arshadi » October 2nd, 2013, 9:38 am

First, a huge thank-you to Rendigar for this guide. It's laid out in such a clean and readable fashion, it's concise, and it does a great job suggesting a travel route that incorporates the Beasts of Legend. Much love and appreciation to you, and to Cabadath and Phraide, who created the foundation for this current version of the guide, for their outstanding work!

I'd very much like to see implementation of some of the suggestions for organizing battle strategy topics, and I'd also like to see suggested strategies that include/embrace use of all of the rare and hard-to-obtain pets. This board has done an excellent job of making sure that its guides utilize only pets that are pretty easily obtainable by all players. That's essential.

But I think you've almost gone too far in that direction - there are some fantastic pets and interesting strats out there that should be discussed even if they aren't available to everyone. I'd like to think we're all sufficiently mature here to be able to appreciate a good strategy even if it includes pets we may never have!

I do wonder how much effort board mods would have to put into keeping strategy threads really clean, though. Boards already require so much work. But if strat threads get cluttered with general comments/complaints they pretty quickly become much less useful.

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Faelar » October 3rd, 2013, 6:09 am

Must say this guide has been wonderful for me in just switching to the pets I need on the fly and just getting it over with, so for that you have my thanks! One thing I would love to see would be a Master's level guide. That means any and all pets are open for use to see how fast you could down the trainers. I'd even love to see 1 pet strats for levelling 2 pets at once. I know I can do at least 3 of the fights with one pet but the Thundering Spirit takes forever with that method.

I'm all about shaving as much time as I can and I want to try to get it down to 60 mins flat on all of the trainers (not counting fable pets in this) so I can take as full advantage of pet food.

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Re: Guide to tamer daily pet battles/BoF quests (5.4) Vetera

Post by Stencil » October 3rd, 2013, 6:43 am

Rendigar wrote:You know what? I don't recall ever testing with the Spawn of Onyxia for that fight and 95% definitely beats 90%. I'll have to make that change back again.
Actually, these days I use the Pandaren Water Spirit itself to close out the fight. A strong bird should easily handle the first two. When I get to the Spirit, I just: swap to carry pet > swap to spirit > whirlpool > dive > water jet til dead. It times correctly to let me dodge his Geyser > Whirlpool attack. As an elemental the Spirit gets hit harder by Aquatic attacks, but Tiptoe is dying so fast now that he's an Aquatic type that my Spirit doesn't take many hits. /shrug

Rendigar wrote:I really need to hammer this out again because IIRC using the alternative was better because if you get hit with a Sunlight + 2 un-buffed Solar Beams and one of them crits you can lose your Strider. Using the posted strat makes it take 1 turn longer but is immune to that issue (and I like to avoid RNG as much as I can). However, if either strategy misses with a Pump release you're likely in deep trouble.
Ohhhhhhhh .... *now* I get it. Yeah, I've been killing Siren right before he could Solar Beam me a second time; if either my Pump or Water Jet misses, then I'm (burnt) toast. The two rounds I spent starting with the carry pet and then swapping it out mean that if I had started with the Strider and missed on the first Pump I'd have the room needed to try it again. So, you're probably right to start it out that way. Carry on :)

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Stencil » October 3rd, 2013, 6:48 am

Faelar wrote:I'd even love to see 1 pet strats for levelling 2 pets at once.
When two pets get XP they each get half of what they would have if they were the only pet. So after two battles, getting XP for just pet A and then just pet B gets you to the same place as getting XP for A and B together twice. And since one carry pet strats are faster and more reliable, you're better off doing that.

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Re: Guide to tamer daily pet battles/BoF quests (5.4) Vetera

Post by Stencil » October 3rd, 2013, 7:02 am

Foolishfool wrote:Chi-Chi seems ideal against the water (flowing) spirit rather than other flying pets. The 3rd pet isn't really needed but I'd probably just bring a Crocodile of some description for a fast/safe finish. Chi-Chi is also very good against Wastewalker Shu.
Tried Chi-Chi and he was very good against the Flowing Spirit. Its right up there with the Wildhammer Gryphon as best choice for that tamer.

Didn't like using him against Wastewalker Shu. I kept getting annoyed that damage taken was dropping my speed down to where Alpha Strike strated doing less damage. So began wasting turns on Tranquility and avoiding the Rupture ... it was faster versus Crusher than the Red Cricket, but felt slower versus Pounder ...

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Rendigar » October 3rd, 2013, 12:37 pm

Nytemarerulez wrote:- New one can be started that called Veteran - now this guild will use most of the rule from advance with a few changes.

1) only pets no longer obtainable by any means (vampire bat) is off limits for top team (as in the best team can't list it - however it can be in an alt team for that tamer)

2) if you use a rare pet (tcg, promos, CE, etc..) you must list an alt team - this team can just be the ones from advance.

this solves a few things A - it makes the guide much clearer on what is expected, B allows those with pet store pets, CE and so on to use those pets to kick butt and what they need to do with it.
If there is someone out there who has all the pets and can test any posted strat they are more than welcome to tackle that particular project. :) I see nothing at all wrong in having an "ultimate" guide to beating any of the masters in the least amount of time - but I'm sorry I will not put my name on something I cannot at least test myself.

I'd be doing the community a disservice if I did. It's bad enough I used one of Stencil's strategies and didn't quite get it exactly right (though it worked my way, every time I tested it) - I can live with him correcting me (he was right to do so!) and I have done it every way he listed, too. But just quoting something and saying "It should work cuz he says so" isn't going to happen. And your alternate strat using the Imp works, too, I just felt the cauterize version works better.

Oh, and I should admit I have NOT tested Stencil's Major Payne strat with a lesser rabbit, but I *did* trust that he's tested it sufficiently to be able to say my comment on the rabbit breed was incorrect. He's the most thorough tester I've seen posting here, and I was willing to chance that. :D

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Grizz083 » October 3rd, 2013, 5:34 pm

Major Payne Team 1
3: Cogblade Raptor [5-S/S] (2,1,1)
vs Grizzle
- Immolation > Cauterize > switch to carry pet > switch to Cogblade Raptor
- Exposed Wounds > Batter until Grizzle dies
vs Beakmaster X-225
- Exposed Wounds > Batter until Beakmaster dies
vs Bloom
- Exposed Wounds > Screech > Batter > Screech until Cogblade Raptor dies
- Switch to Corefire Imp > Immolation > (cauterize if needed) > chain cast Rush
- Use Cauterize when needed, right after Entangling Roots gives a big heal, but safer is better - use it!
I wanted to say what I assumed to be a typo on the Cogblade Raptors skill set, 2,2,1 would include Screech.
BoF Flight 1
Silky Moth [11-S/B] (1,1,1)
Crow [5-S/S] (1,2,2) (Call Darkness + Nocturnal Strike hit No-No hard)
This fight is a little varied due to No-No’s somewhat random use of Dive and Beaver Dam, so you should react to his abilities as shown in the table below:
No-No’s condition - - Your Action
on the surface + no Beaver Dam - - Moth Dust/Alpha Strike/Slicing Wind/Call Darkness > Nocturnal Strike
Also for the Silky Moth 1,1,2 would include Moth Dust.

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Rendigar » October 3rd, 2013, 6:32 pm

Grizz083 wrote:I wanted to say what I assumed to be a typo on the Cogblade Raptors skill set, 2,2,1 would include Screech.Also for the Silky Moth 1,1,2 would include Moth Dust.
Thanks, Grizz, just goes to show how easy it is for simple mistakes to slip in. At least I got the ability names correct, even if I can't count to 2. :D I'll fix those immediately and not wait for Saturday's changes. I am trying to keep it down to no more than 1 update a week if I can. Mostly so I don't burn myself out completely (because every new team change requires at least 10 test runs, and I like to do more over multiple days if I can, just to spread out the work).

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Grizz083 » October 3rd, 2013, 6:39 pm

My pleasure Sir, I appreciate all your hard work very much.

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Stencil » October 4th, 2013, 12:06 pm

Rendigar wrote:Oh, and I should admit I have NOT tested Stencil's Major Payne strat with a lesser rabbit, but I *did* trust that he's tested it sufficiently to be able to say my comment on the rabbit breed was incorrect.
Well, if there's one thing I'm exhaustively familiar with its the use of rabbits against Major Payne. For quite a while, my Major Payne team was an S/S Grasslands Cottontail and an S/B Tolai Hare. The Grasslands Cottontail actually managed to solo the entire Major Payne team a few times.
Rendigar wrote:I'd be doing the community a disservice if I did. It's bad enough I used one of Stencil's strategies and didn't quite get it exactly right (though it worked my way, every time I tested it) - I can live with him correcting me (he was right to do so!) and I have done it every way he listed, too. But just quoting something and saying "It should work cuz he says so" isn't going to happen.
And you were right to push back on the Whispering Spirit with respect to reliability when slept. When I submitted it, I didn't include, and hadn't really done, the work to prove its reliability. Maybe that should be The Work and part of what we'll do with this conversation is come up with rules and guidelines for The Work that is required for any new strat to be considered for inclusion. Then when someone posts a strat and there's no data for us to evaluate for speed or reliability we can point them to the appropriate place and say "read this and do The Work, then we'll talk about your strat."

Its not always fun or quick to do the work ... that's why we all like to just post our crap and let the thread owner deal with it :) But that's the problem, we should try to separate the work load of updating and maintaining the top post collection from the work of vetting strats that are candidates for that post and maintaining quality control. It seems to me that the person who should get stuck doing the grunt work of qualifying the strat is the person who posted it.

Here's a rough, first draft at describing The Work:

The Work is collecting data from a number (10? 20?) of trials for how many rounds it took to beat the tamer. Most people won't want to wait 20 days before posting, so they'll have to simulate kills and forfeit late in the fight once the matter is decided. That's easy to do with a strat that ends on a big move like Surge of Power or Explode. Simply pass that round and if you weren't killed before you would have been able to cast, then that would be a kill.

Other fights, where the last turn can't be identified as cleanly due to risk of accidentally killing the last pet and beating the tamer, thus ending your ability to run test trials for the rest of the day, you'd just need to pick a threshold condition beyond which you abort (hopefully past any major sources of rng or risk) and include that information when posting your strat.

Turns spent on attempts that wiped or were aborted *must* be included, preferably in a way that reveals their existence, something like: 14 14 7+7+14 14 8+13 14 == 17.5.

Not all aborts require you to bandage afterwards, though. Whether we want to require reporting of that in the data (so, 1+15 means you aborted and started again immediately whereas 7b+14 would mean that you had to heal your pets first) is up for discussion as well as whether we would want to levy any penalties for aborts/wipes/bandaging since you could argue that 2+19 is slower than 21.

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Anasa » October 4th, 2013, 7:02 pm

Stencil wrote:Here's a rough, first draft at describing The Work:

The Work is collecting data from a number (10? 20?) of trials for how many rounds it took to beat the tamer. Most people won't want to wait 20 days before posting, so they'll have to simulate kills and forfeit late in the fight once the matter is decided. That's easy to do with a strat that ends on a big move like Surge of Power or Explode. Simply pass that round and if you weren't killed before you would have been able to cast, then that would be a kill.

Other fights, where the last turn can't be identified as cleanly due to risk of accidentally killing the last pet and beating the tamer, thus ending your ability to run test trials for the rest of the day, you'd just need to pick a threshold condition beyond which you abort (hopefully past any major sources of rng or risk) and include that information when posting your strat.

Turns spent on attempts that wiped or were aborted *must* be included, preferably in a way that reveals their existence, something like: 14 14 7+7+14 14 8+13 14 == 17.5.

Not all aborts require you to bandage afterwards, though. Whether we want to require reporting of that in the data (so, 1+15 means you aborted and started again immediately whereas 7b+14 would mean that you had to heal your pets first) is up for discussion as well as whether we would want to levy any penalties for aborts/wipes/bandaging since you could argue that 2+19 is slower than 21.
I like it. I shall do The Work before suggesting teams for this guide.

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Undeadreaper » October 5th, 2013, 10:15 am

If you make an edit to the OP can you mention the changes? For example:
10/5/13 Edit: Seeker Zusshi strat updated.

I think it would be very helpful for people trying to keep their strats updated without having to reread the entire thing every time. Thank you.

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Rendigar » October 5th, 2013, 11:46 am

Undeadreaper wrote:If you make an edit to the OP can you mention the changes? For example:
10/5/13 Edit: Seeker Zusshi strat updated.
I think it would be very helpful for people trying to keep their strats updated without having to reread the entire thing every time. Thank you.
Actually the 2nd post is where I've been doing exactly that. I don't want all the "edit" lines cluttering up the actual guide, though, so I put them in the 2nd one. However it is not displaying the last edit date, so I can change it to show the date of the change for those who don't come here frequently. I also tend to put up a new post as well, so people will see there is something new in the thread.

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October 5th Updates delayed.

Post by Rendigar » October 5th, 2013, 12:56 pm

I cannot post the updated changes as the website times out / throws me to a page not found error when I try to post it. It might just be there is too much going on, or it might be that there are too many codes in the document (in which case I will need to break it into 2 pieces). Going to give it a rest for a couple of hours so I can stop banging head on keyboard and then will try again. Sorry for the delay.

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Re: 5.4 Guide to Master Tamer (levelling) + Beasts of Fable

Post by Grothia » October 5th, 2013, 2:45 pm

Ive noticed no one has ever brought up the fact that a jade owl works very well against the 3 aquatic legendaries. Ive been using him for a long time and can usually take one of those legendaries out or come very close.

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