Tiny Terrors

I've only just this weekend started looking at the Tanaan Jungle pet battles. I have some reservations about pet battling, but primarily it was just because I had other priorities, like the reputations and the shipyard. But I've long since cleared those up and the PvP pet battle event reminded me that I should take a look at them.

My doubts were confirmed when a guildie, who is a really experienced pet battler, said you can basically use one team of pets to defeat all of the new battles. It's less that one team can do so that is the problem, more that there are few alternatives that work. The encounters are made difficult by introducing abilities outside the base ruleset (like Elite and now Fel Corruption) that have the unfortunate side effect of rendering most pet teams incapable of defeating them, even if they counter the pet types. So pet battling to me just becomes an exercise in research - I don't enjoy it enough to self-impose a "no Google" rule. With an addon like Rematch or PetBattle Teams I don't even need to remember what works.

So I've done the circuit twice and it already feels like a grind. I started off thinking that if I could do these 15 battles daily, it would only take 4-5 months to get the Draenor Pet Brawler achievement/monument (laughs). But without flight, it takes at least 90 minutes to go around, making it unlikely I will complete the circuit every day.

The reward for defeating each pet is Fel-Touched Pet Supplies - the tooltip explains it. I opened all 15 at once and noted the contents:

• about 100 gold
• 13 Battle Pet Bandages
• 23 Pet Charms
• 2 Fel-Touched Battle-Training Stones

There are 4 pets to be earned randomly from the bags, and I suspect once I have got them all, I will stop doing the pet battles - the other rewards are not worth the time. The bandages in particular just seem to stack up, because the garrison menagerie bonus makes Revive Battle Pets a 4 minute cooldown, so by the time you defeat a pet and run to the next one, it is available to use again. The bandages may be useful once flight is available, however.

I don't know what could be done to keep these pet battles difficult, but require a more varied pet collection to defeat. But doing so would provide a lot of motivation to collect and level some of my other pets. It seems a shame that I have 533 unique pets in my collection but only need a handful for battling.

By the way, I used my Ultimate Battle-Training Stone from the weekend bonus event to level a Zandalari Anklerender, which happens to be a member of one of the Tanaan capable teams.