On coming back to World of Warcraft I was a bit bemused to find that one of my key pet battle addons, Pet Battle Teams, appeared to have broken again. I had run into problems with it before, when Blizz changed the name of the pets window in the game, so I checked on that. But that did not appear to be the problem. So I setup my base catching team, the Terrible Turnip, Grunty, and Deathy, and continued to catch pets in the Broken Isles while I tried to get the addon straightened out.
Grunty in Action, Turnip Face Down
Grunty and Deathy are BlizzCon rewards and are two of my favorite pets. They are unique and a bit OP and work very well for a lot of my general needs. Grunty was the first battle pet of mine that hit level 25.
I tinkered with Pet Battle Teams some more, tried uninstalling and re-installing the addon, and eventually removed all data and started from scratch.
That last bit appeared to do the trick. Somewhere along the line my team data went out of date and when I came back to the latest version of the addon. That was a shame, as I had already set up teams to handle many of the trainers and challenges in the game. The problem I have with managing my pets is that with over 600 of them in my collection, including duplicates, finding the right pet for the right battle can be a challenge on its own. I like to have some set up for specific battles and other set up for opposing different pet types, like aquatic or flying. That at least puts a few of what I am often looking for quickly to hand.
My Pet Window with the Teams Addon
Of course, I should be working on flying in WoW Legion. But if I spend all my time doing that it will start to feel like a grind, so I do a bit of that every day, the look into other things.
And with pet battles I actually have a lot of options. I have a bunch of nice pets I want to level up. I have the collections for various areas to finish. And then there is Pandaria.
Pet battles came in with the Mists of Pandaria expansion, but that was the expansion I did not play at launch. Because of that, when I did finally join in on the expansion… and it turned out to be one of my favorites… I was way behind the curve when it came to pets. I had a bunch of pets, but they were all level 1. So I wasn’t going to be challenging the master trainers in Pandaria.
So, for me, pet battles really started in earnest with Warlords of Draenor. I had to work to build up a team to unlock the menagerie in my garrison. While I have a number of negative comments about garrisons in Draenor, the menagerie was not something I would knock.
The menagerie became the cornerstone of my pet battle experience. Between that and Trainer Ashlei I was able to level up and improve my collection dramatically. As I wrote back in early 2015, my pet battle enthusiasm had been unleashed.
Now, running around the Broken Isles doing world quests, I was finding that pet battles were on the list of options. In building up teams for that I started to realize that I had a something of a collection going. Checking my stats over at Warcraft Pets, I saw I had well over 100 max level pets. So I decided I might be ready to go back to Pandaria to face some of the trainer challenges there.
I may have binged on it a bit. After a rough start I managed to get in the two beginning challenges for trainers there, racking up a number of achievements along the way.
Pandaria Pet Battle Achievements
Getting those required some research. WoW Head has posts with basic information about each fight, which is a start. It is the comments where the real meat comes in about the sorts of teams that might be successful. However, it isn’t just copy the team and go at it… mostly because I almost never have the battle pets suggested.
Literally I think all of my pet battle problems would be solved if only I had the Anubisath Idol pet, as it seems to feature heavily in successful teams. However, I don’t have him or a number of other favorites. So I looked at what had been successful to see if I can use those ideas with pets I actually have.
A team that didn’t quite work…
I got a few on the first try, but most took a couple of runs to come to victory. Eventually I ended up at my last fight.
This time I have you
Success there led me back to the quest giver. That both yielded a reward, a new pet, of course.
I went for the Earthen spirit
That also opened up daily versions of the quests in order to get the pets I didn’t choose. So I have more battles ahead of me.
In addition, I still have a lot more pets to catch. In some places just one pet awaits me, like the one I am missing in Northrend.
It only spawns when it is snowing in the zone…
In other areas I have to get there at the right time. And then there are the raiding with leashes pets. I have a couple of those, but there is a list still waiting for me, including the aforementioned Anubisath Idol. So much left to do… enough to keep me busy for a while I imagine.
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