Pet Battle trainers, spawns, and PVP

From the quirky mechanics to the hundreds of pets, there are a lot of questions our readers have about pet battles. Some might not be addressed in longer articles, so this week I’m doing a Q&A column!

You should be able to challenge any Pet Battle trainers in Draenor no problem. The ones before that, even Pandaria, require you to go back and do the entire Pet Battles 101 quest chain from the very beginning. Still. Seriously.

The initial quests you’ll need to complete will show up on Varzok or Audrey Burnhep as you noted. If you’re bi-factional, make sure to check them both. Before Outland, the trainers are all divided by faction for some reason, which can lead to some weird bugs down the line if you swap around factions in the middle. This still counts even if you drop the quest later. My Blood Elf was able to pick up the quest from Varzok again yesterday, and even after it was dropped, my Draenei couldn’t pick up the quest from Audrey Burnhep, so you may have some alt hopping to do. To cover all my bases, you need to have learned pet battling and have the Mists of Pandaria expansion in order to do so. In some cases, those may be restricted by race as well, and eg, dwarves sometimes have to hit up the battle trainer in Kharanos in order to begin. Barring all that? Open a ticket. If the bifactional alts thing is the issue they can probably assist you as well before you jump through all those hoops, but it might be faster to just check around yourself if you only play a couple characters.

Yes! Well, sort of. The Qiraji Guardling begins spawning on the Summer Solstice and stops spawning on the Fall Equinox… roughly. There’s no official schedule like there is for other in-game events, so I can’t tell you to log on Sunday, June 21st at 2 pm, like I can for the Midsummer Fire Festival. However, if you trudge on out to Silithus at sometime around the 21st, which coincidentally happens to be the Solstice this year, the Guardling will likely begin to make an appearance. The Snowy Owl in works similarly in winter, with spawn dates stretching from the Winter Solstice to the Spring Equinox… roughly.

Personally, I’ll probably be trying to get my Blazing Cindercrawler until the call that she’s spawning goes out across the land on Twitter, but I’m pretty lazy.

I don’t know of another tool that automates matchups like that, sorry. I do everything (relatively) manually, which I described in a long post a month or two back. I use an addon like rematch or Pet Journal Enhanced to check for pets like Critters which attack strongly against Humanoids, or use wowhead to cross-reference pets which cause weather that have Blind effects, but beyond that, nope.

If you’re having issues finding a good strategy, other than my own fabulous strategy guides, the 2 places to look are the wowhead comments and the warcraftpets forums. Both have an element of crowdsourcing, so they tend to be accurate, and hold a lot of discussion so if you’re not sure why a particular strategy works, it’ll be explained. Wowhead in particular has issues where the top-rated comment will sometimes tell you to simply use your Burning Crusade Collector’s Edition pet and Mini Tyrael, but if you keep reading you’ll probably find a team that can work for you.

Yes.

No, not really. There’s not a ton of point to duplicates, because Haunt gets real buggy if you overwrite it, but having a couple of the same pets, even a highly sought pet, doesn’t make you awful. If you’re seeking them out to kill them in the wild, then you’d be awful. And staggeringly patient.

Did you perhaps forget that the Auction House is a thing? Most of the Raiding With Leashes pets from all three iterations are relatively cheap, and some of them are pretty useful, too. In fact, for the upcoming Legendary Pets I’m recommending that you snap up a Fiendish Imp now, if you haven’t (though a Molten Corgi works too, oddly enough). The Legendary Pets apply a weird AOE damage booster to the back row of wild pets that makes those trash wilds very threatening. If you have a very fast pet with a force swap mechanic and can just remove the first pet from battle before they can act, you can avoid that entirely. The Imp is the fastest of all pets like this, but the Corgi is just eight speed points slower, so either one will work either way.

Of course, this is coming from somebody who has maybe half of the Raiding With Leashes III  pets. In my defense, the WoW Token is now also a thing, and a girl’s gotta make some coin to keep her subscription up.

I do plan on putting together a longer post on this topic, so keep an eye out. In general, building a team for PVP is more about combos than stringing together a few pets you like. In PVE you can build with just simple family counters, because you know what you’re facing, but going into PVP is a complete unknown. In PVP you’re going to have a better time if you pick an ability or two and build around that… or by researching the current meta, and designing around counters to the most popular teams. Keep in mind that your opponent is probably going to be smarter than the trainer AI. They’ll know what you’re doing if you just stack up a couple DOTs and try to move in a pet with an additive buff, like a Zandalari Kneebiter — and they’ll just swap out to a different pet.

One thing to keep in mind for pet PVP is that the matchmaking system is a simple queue. There’s no MMR, so you could be going up against the pet battling equivalent of Bajheera or cdew in your very first match. If you chain queue, you could also be facing the same opponent dozens of times. It’s important to not get discouraged if you lost a few. Your team might be viable, but it found its perfect counter. Conversely, your team might not work most of the time, but you happened to queue at the same time as the PVP equivalent of Ashlei so it looks like the most incredible team in the world. Keep at it, maybe go make a cup of tea and come back ready to try again.