Get rid of “legendary” buffs.
That’s it.
That’s the fix.
Pet battles are casual side content. Most players do them only for certain pets they really want or when something like a boss pet battle catches their eye while they’re doing other content, or after they pick up a random quest to go beat a trainer or a boss pet.
Making them big dumb health sponges that hit like trucks isn’t fun, or interesting, or cool, or clever. It adds nothing to the game to just crank the hp and damage numbers up on an enemy and then to give them a ridiculous buff that neuters all damage you do to them just to drag the fights out even longer.
There is no reason why this trivial side content should demand that players that want to do ANY OF IT go grind a bunch of specific broken pets so they can make cookie cutter wombo combo teams that trivialize the fights by providing a guaranteed victory.
Players should be able to actually do the content with the pets they like! They shouldn’t have to put away all of their favorite pets because they don’t fit into the extremely tedious little niche of pets that are allowed to be any good in the fights that provide any real rewards.
I can’t get over how frustrating this content has been since it debuted. Every few months I see wander across a boss and think I’ll give it a go, and immediately get slapped in the face when they have brainless, cheap buffs that make my teams worthless. I give it a few tries, get fed up, and then don’t touch pet battles for another few months.
It’s ridiculous that this is still a thing. How would it harm a single thing if players could just use a SEMI-OPTIMAL team? Why is it not enough for players to just change their lineup so that they have a type advantage? That way they could at least have a set of favorites from each type to use? Why is it always mandatory that players go and get very, very specific pets with very specific abilities?
Who asked for that? Who ever said that was a good idea? Who said, “Go ahead and take all of the choice and variety out of this casual side content all about choosing the pets that you like best out of a vast number of options”?
Why does the every single thing about pet battles clash? If you want to design pet battles to be strictly cookie cutter puzzles that you have to trial-and-error your way through (or use a guide) then you should reward the puzzle pieces to beat the next puzzle when players beat the previous steps! There should be a progression! It should not be “Go farm this, that, and some other thing for these broken pets, level them up, and then sweep the fights without effort.”
If you want the way we get pets to be to stumble upon them in the world and catch them for fun while we do other content, then make boss and rival battles the exact same. Make them things you can stumble upon and throw a team together and beat if you put any effort whatsoever into it. Every shred of time and money spent on this “content” is wasted so long as 99+% of players can’t even do it when they see it. These battles are just wasting resources in the game world while virtually everyone ignores them. That is an absurd waste of developer time.
Then you’ll be happy to hear pet battle content is on the ‘leftovers’ table, and only picked up when people have nothing else to do/they want to do ^^ This lack of consideration and attention for the only part of the game I enjoy is the reason I’m leaving.
That said, I enjoy finding uses for most of the pets in my roster. The reason I started making strategies is because I was tired of using the same handful of pets to do everything. It was boring.
However, I also had to reconcile the fact that if I wanted to use the broader range of pets, I’d have to expand my knowledge on it. If you don’t want to put the time into a ‘mini-game’ to learn the cool combos that are possible, then you need to accept you’ll be relegated to using the cheese teams.
I look fabulous in my Firelands gear. Why should I have to grind for stupid Mythic gear just to do Mythic raids?
And why should PvP players get better gear just because they have high ratings?
And talk about trivial content…why should I have to run 100’s of dungeons or old raids for transmog gear. We ought to get a goody bag every week with transmog gear.
And don’t get me started on mounts. Why should I have to travel to far flung places for an Infinitesimal chance that a mount drops?
We could make the game so much better if everything could be done by anyone at any time, right?
My whole complaint is that I don’t get to use cool combos. One of the things that tricks me into trying pet battles now and then is I get a new pet from a drop or a faction quartermaster, see some interesting abilities, and realize they might combo well with another pet I have. So I level up the new pet and try the combo and it’s only good for random wild battles. It gets absolutely destroyed by every single fight that has any kind of reward attached to it.
For example, I was just doing the Draenor fights. Most of the bosses in Tanaan have an infuriatingly stupid ability that hits your entire team for massive damage AND shields the entire enemy team with 50% damage reduction.
I thought Dreadwalker would be a gun enemy to test my new Fel Flame pet on, since Dreadwalker is mechanical and the Fel Flame has Immolate + Scorch. I knew the Sticky Grenade that Dreadwalker has hurts and that the next pet tends to be a crab with Dive, so my second pet was a Bronze Whelpling with Lift Off, which I was able to time right to dodge Dive AND Sticky Grenade on the same turn. (Early Advantage also helped finish off Dreadwalker.)
My third pet was an Antoran Bile Scourge for lifesteal because I knew my second and third pets would be hitting the field under 50% HP due to the incredibly bad ability every Tanaan boss seems to have that nukes your entire time while effectively doubling the hp of the enemy team.
imo, I did sufficient strategy to win this fight. But whoever designed it decided that it’s not enough that you played to counter the enemy team with what you had. I didn’t use any of the handful of combos declared to be viable, and I’m not willing to go grind for hours just to get a team that can counter this one setup or cheese multiple fights, so I just don’t get to win. Not because I got outplayed, but because they lazily forced me to play with effectively 50% hp and gave the enemy team effectively double hp.
That’s not challenge. That’s not legitimate difficulty. Nobody actually believes that just cranking down the player’s numbers and cranking up the enemy’s is a good way to design difficulty or challenge in a game. Otherwise every raid boss would just be a gear check.
Edit: To be clear, I wasted an hour strategizing and trying out different teams on that stupid Dreadwalker fight, and constantly lost by razor margins. So my tactics were superior, but the ridiculously lazy cranking of hp and damage numbers kept throwing that out the window. It didn’t matter how much effort I put into it. It didn’t matter how creative I got. It didn’t matter how many unique team comps I experimented with. I didn’t have the cookie cutter handful of winning steps, so I just was forced to lose over and over and over and over again.
That’s intolerable. That’s absurd. I refuse to believe that large numbers of players absolutely clamor for deterministic boss fights that demand you follow precise steps to cheese them if you want to beat them. And then you just repeat those steps every day or week or whenever you go back to fight them again.
Pet battles, as they are now, are just Trial and Error exercises in frustration. “Suffer unfair loss after loss until you either luck into the cookie cutter strats that win this fight or go look them up, otherwise you get no rewards whatsoever!” You gain absolutely zero benefit from trying and failing. You either win, or you wasted all of your time.
This disastrously bad game design pattern is what’s killing WoW today. Too many systems are total wastes of time if you don’t go all-in and succeed at them. You don’t gain incremental benefits that can build up into something worth striving for. You just waste time that you paid for, because this is a subscription game, after all.
Who in their right mind pays to bash their head against a wall until they discover whatever cookie cutter solution allows them to win the fight 100% of the time from then on? What harm would it do to make these fights doable without cookie cutter teams or hundreds of hours of grinding to get 100+ level 25 “meta” pets?
In most cases, simply neutering the ridiculous damage and defense scaling by 50% would go a long way towards fixing them. More than half of the teams I attempts Dreadwalker with would have won had the defense buff been only 25% instead of 50%, or if the damage of that party-wide nuke had been 50% less so my backline pets didn’t come into the fight with <35% hp.
Because I made it clear I was talking about tertiary content and you rattled off a bunch of core game systems?
Slippery slope arguments don’t help anyone. Nobody said anything about those other game modes and it’s impossible to argue that making pet battles more accessible and less dependent on farming cheese teams would in any way translate to anything you listed.
If you don’t like what I said, just say so. You don’t have to try to make up reasons why you don’t like it. You’re entitled to an opinion regardless of whether it’s well supported or not.
So you just want the mindless Pokémon-type fights. Your attacks do strong damage = you win.
But if you lost, you didn’t. You didn’t bring in the proper counters/strategies for how the fights are set up.
raises hand I do.
The whole reason I enjoy pet battles a large degree more than Pokémon is because I have to strategize. It’s not just about out-leveling and hitting the rock type with a leaf type, and ta-da, win.
I have spent hours upon hours on these fights to come up with the perfect (or as close to perfect) strategies as I can manage. Currently, I have 1,654 strategies on Xu-Fu’s. I don’t expect everyone to enjoy them to the extent I do, but if people want to do the harder fights, like Tanaan, you have to put in the time. It’s just like every other content in the game, If you don’t enjoy doing that/you aren’t willing to try something more than brute-forcing, then look up a guide.
It’s just like I don’t walk into mythic dungeons and complain it’s too hard if I’m not willing to use my interrupt abilities or not stand in fire.
Do I think some aspects of grinding are incredibly stupid in this game? 100%. I don’t think there needs to be a ‘punishment’ aspect to pet battles. Like having tamers up 24/7 shouldn’t negate players being able to use them as a good avenue for leveling. Having the whelp daycare rewards be utterly pitiful isn’t good. Having the PvP weekly reward be 1 purple stone is downright insulting. Like, there’s a lot of things to fix to make pet battles better, especially pvp, but the difficulty isn’t the problem. Except SLs, because THOSE fights are utterly disgusting and were NEVER tuned despite feedback.
I hafta admit I hate the Dreadwalker fight, and yeah, it’s brutal. But it’s all part of keeping pet battles challenging, the fun of a challenge being a big reason people play MMORPGs.
You might want to pay more attention to which breeds of pets you’re using, with those “razor margins”, using S/S versions of your two backline pets means you’re using the ones with the least health, and possibly don’t need to be as fast as possible. Your H/H Fel Flame was max health but depending on how you use it, a faster or stronger version might be preferable.
I know it’s frustrating but lot more fun that way.
I agree with you about this bit. I never rated the Boss buff, and the Fel Devastation mechanic in Tanaan is that on steroids. Probably the worst pet battle design in all the expansions. If you are bashing your head in against Tanaan, I’d recommend moving on to Legion or BfA, or even Dragonflight, to have a fairer shot at working out the battles on your own.
And if that was your only problem, then we could leave it there.
But you simply have the wrong idea here
You simply have the wrong idea here. You’re not alone. People post strategies, and when they do, they usually use the pets that they can be sure most people have, and that have minimal breed dependencies. Because people who just use strats they read … well, if the strat uses a pet they don’t have, they’ll complain, and if they can get something wrong, they will, and if they can slot a wrong breed, they will. And some of them will not recognize their own mistake, and be quite nasty about it.
I have defeated every battle since Legion - World Quest, Family, and Dungeon - without looking up anyone’s strat, except for … well, three cases that I remember, but there could be a few others. And I have predominantly used my own preferred battlers, including several that have completely fallen off the general radar since the halcyon days of Mists.
So you don’t NEED these “very, very specific pets”. But everyone - including me! - will tell you to get them, because those are the pets people prefer to use in strats, and that just makes everything easier. And that leaves you, and many others, with the impression that you do need them. That misunderstanding is not your fault.
But to make your own way through, you do need a strong roster, and you need to learn the pets and know how to use them. You have 592 Unique pets, of which 45 are at Level 25, and two of those are Green and Grey. (P.S. If I got the wrong account to look up, I apologise. Your armoury was not available from the forum link. However, my argument doesn’t change even if you have a bigger roster.)
While I believe it’s possible to complete all the battles, except Family, with 30-50 pets, that would require those pets to be chosen very carefully to cover all types of mechanics. With a less selective roster, you could need 100 or 150. Bleed’n’Stampede is a key mechanic in pet battles, for example, especially in Boss-type encounters, and there are many pets that provide it in different ways, but you have none of them at Level 25 yet.
The designers could have made the game a simple Rock-Paper-Scissors model, so that you could do everything with your dozen favorite pets, but they didn’t. Personally, I’m glad of that. Roster development and learning is also an important part of the game.
(Now, if they would just add some random, non-bottable, non-scriptable battles, that we had to work out each day on our own, I’d be even gladder )
If you are attempting to do Pet Battling without being a Pet Collector it is going to be a rough time overall–there’s no mincing about with that.
Many of us were already collectors when Pet Battles dropped in Pandaria and still did not have the “right” pets for some of the fights out there–dang elementals. As players got more level 25 pets, including so called “meta” pets, the developers had to make the fights harder to keep engagement up–at the end of the day player engagment and log in time is what keeps the servers running, it’s a sad truth.
Minimalizing and trivializing pet battles will not make them any more fun, just easier. If you are not willing to build up a stable then content like Pet Battle Dungeons and the Celestial Tournament will be out of your grasp.
As others have mentioned things like Breed and rarity very much matter in the fights against trainers and WQs.
Your collection and combat skills are too poor, you should strengthen yourself instead of complaining here. In fact, Fel Flame/Bronze Whelp/Antoran Bilescourge can defeat Dreadwalkers. With just two Tail Sweeps kill dying Dreadwalker, then slowing down the turn with Crystal Prison is a better choice, you don’t need Early Advantage at all. The weak of Antoran Bilescourge is the reason for occasional failures.
I don’t think my (strong) stampede or poison damage should win vs an enemy with a flat damage reduction buff up that reduces periodic damage to 0. And I don’t think just spamming (strong) 400+ damage attacks should be enough to beat a legendary boss battle. But I do think strats that require 2+ abilities synergizing well to exploit an enemy’s vulnerability while your team’s weaknesses are covered should generally win.
That is, if all of the enemies attacks are (weak) against my team, and my team combos weather effects and a damage taken debuff with a (strong) nuke, I do think that should usually be sufficient to win, provided the weak abilities the boss is using aren’t counters to my own combos or something.
If the boss dives when my big nuke comes out and it whiffs, that’s on me. If the boss uses a self-damaging ability to use up a debuff that amplifies the next amount of damage taken and I don’t get to use it for my big hit, that’s a deserved loss as well.
But if the boss just spams damage while I line up 3 or 4 abilities and the boss has the “can’t lose more than 30% hp to one attack” buff and I now have to draw the fight out long enough to use that combo repeatedly, or plan for my first pet to die and make sure my second pet has its own powerful combo to finish the boss off, that feels cheap to me.
As I said, I did if you tune the special boss-only AoE nuke that doubles the enemy team’s hp just slightly lower. Fight after fight after fight, I got the last enemy below 400 hp before losing. If the only reason I lost is because of a unique legendary ability that players don’t get to have, and I lose by such a slim margin that I would have easily won had it not been for that gimmicky special ability, I consider that to be a win that was stolen by a bad game mechanic.
Then you should agree with me, because my entire complaint was that strategy didn’t matter. All that matters is that you have one of the pets that gets to steamroll the most bosses and rivals.
Then the content should be gated to facilitate that. I shouldn’t be getting quests thrown at me to fight enemies I have no chance of beating because I need to… checks notes go back to Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor and grind pet battles until I somehow know when to move on to Outland? Rinse and repeat until Tanaan?
To be clear, are you saying that it’s not enough to have 40 level 25 pets from all over the game world? That I should go back to the oldest content and grind pets until I can beat all the rivals and bosses sequentially in the orders they were added to the game?
It took me a while to catch onto that, especially since, iirc, pet breeds are hidden from the player without an addon. I think I finally caught on during WoD or Legion. That said, because I mostly collect pets by grabbing the ones I like aesthetically when I see them, I only have a handful of pets that have deliberately optimal breeds.
Because grinding spawns all day hoping for a rare with the breed you want is time-consuming, and getting things like battle stones that would let you catch lower quality pets and upgrade them tends to require you to already have teams that can win the fights that reward those, which aren’t made super clear. I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head how to raise any of the common or poor quality pets in my collection to rare quality right now. I feel like it has changed two or three times since pet battles released? I may be wrong, though.
I did end up trying to optimize breeds on the Dreadwalker fight, though. I went for fast pets on the backline because I found that H/H pets still died in 1 or 2 hits at that point, so it seemed more useful to me to be able to use a defensive ability, heal, or CC first.
Well, done and done. I was only in Tanaan to get the Predator and of the Jungle titles and I only stopped to fight pet bosses for a change of pace now and then. All I’ve got left there is grinding claws from the Blackfangs, so I’ll probably not bother with any of the bosses in the zone again.
The same thing happened in Pandaria. I completed all of the other content long before I had the Pandaren Elemental Spirits I wanted, so I just never got all of them because it didn’t feel like the suffering was worth it.
Losing to a grub because it had a -50% damage taken buff drove me nuts.
I’m familiar with this phenomenon. It’s in every game mode Blizzard designs.
This prior knowledge is why I keep trying to throw my own unique teams at these fights instead of looking up guides. And the fact that I can burn through 20+ of my favorite pets, many of them with resistance to the enemy team’s damage or dealing super effective damage towards the enemy team, just because of the “Legendary” buffs on bosses is what makes me think you need cookie cutter teams.
I’m not up on what all the strats are called, but I thought that’s what the Black Claw + Hunting Party combo on my Zandalari Anklerender was.
And I feel like that goes with my original complaint: “I don’t have one of these mandatory combos so I need to go grind more to make sure I have every gimmick if I want to beat the enemies that actually provide rewards for beating them.”
If I don’t go look it up, I won’t know what Bleed’n’Stampede is. So I won’t know what to go farm and level. Repeat this for every other such strategy as well. I’m facing either hours of trial and error and hours of grinding, or I’m just looking at hours of grinding whatever some guide tells me to.
The thing that gets me is it seems like 90+% of the pets are just useless at the most rewarding level of pet battle content. I can’t just go explore and farm up pets and spend hours leveling them all, not to mention figuring out the best breeds and trying to upgrade them.
I could potentially spend days collecting dozens of new pets and getting them to 25 only for them to be useless in virtually every fight I actually want to do. The pets and team comps that can do the fights with the rewards I want seem to have very specific counters that can take ages to discover if you don’t resort to using guides.
Like Gráinne pointed out, I’ve got nearly 600 pets, and 40-45 of them at level 25. A lot of them are pets I like in particular, outside of their battle potential. If I can get a legendary enemy down to <300 hp consistently using unique synergies, and the only reason I’m losing is because the enemy gets a big hp boost and free damage reduction, that doesn’t feel good to me. That doesn’t feel like a challenge. I feel like I did figure out how to win and Blizzard just said, “nope, you have to not only win, but win while doing half damage and having your biggest attacks nerfed by one-shot protection.”
Imo, I’d love to see an approach like Dragonriding races: Multiple options for each big fight. A normal mode without the free buffs on the boss, a challenge mode with the buff and more rewards, and maybe some fun challenge modes, like fighting the boss while the weather is permanently set to one that benefits and synergizes with the boss, or the boss triggers a free ability every turn or two.
I’d be fine settling for not beating the challenge modes and thus not getting the most rewards or the loftiest titles. Because, like I said, I just like doing these fights for a change of pace. Because I can’t beat most of them with my roster, I often just go do something else or log out for a while instead of wasting my time losing to a legendary buff or ability and getting nothing to show for it, even if the boss won at <100 hp.
If this requires hours of grinding, I’ll stand my ground.
I might go give this a try. I think the first part you mentioned is close to what my first attempt was, and the last enemy was <150 hp when I lost. I think I changed strategies to the one I listed because I felt like the way I lost that first round was deterministic enough that I wouldn’t be able to squeeze ~150 more damage in on subsequent attempts.
Pet Supply vendors like Lysindra in Valdrakken sell Marked Flawless Battle-Stones that will upgrade any quality of pet to Rare. Cost is 15 Polished Pet Charms. These stones are also fairly common drops from Pet WQ dailies in Dragonflight and Shadowlands.
Well, that’s a good sign! I love Xu-Fu’s, and in general I love people sharing their strategies, but I do see that it leads to degenerate gameplay, with people just using strats they copied, and even automating them so that they never learn anything while using them. It’s always nice to see someone trying to engage with the game itself!
This is a phase. It’s a phase that we all, or nearly all, pass through. When we are new, we don’t know many pets, and we aren’t familiar with the patterns. And we have a handful of pets that we have found reliable while levelling and starting. And we are familiar with those movesets, and have learned how to use them. Maybe throw in a couple others that we like because of their looks and animations, and that is our small set of favourite pets. For me, I relied a lot on Spawn of Onyxia, Murkalot, Anodized Robo Cub, Rabid Nut Varmint 5000. They didn’t do everything, but they formed the core. Then, when I reached Pandaria, I found out about Anubisath Idol, Stitched Pup, Chrominius, the Undead Squirrels, and a few others, and as I learned how to use them, my set of reliables expanded to include those.
I learned about these new pets mostly from seeing them in other people’s strats. I started to notice the patterns.
Now there are about 1700 pets in total. Half or more will be completely null for battling - that is, whatever A can do, there exists a pet B that can do exactly the same thing better. So cal it 800 pets that you have to learn.
It does get easier once you recognise the mechanics. Take Bleed’n’Stampede, for example, which is a very versatile one. And I did overlook your Zandalari Raptor, so my apologies for that. This mechanic comes in many forms. It may be applied with one pet for the Bleed and one for the Stampede. A pet with Haunt can apply the Bleed, and switch with no loss of round to a pet that can apply the Stampede. Or an Undead pet like Boneshard can apply a DoT as a Bleed with the assurance that it can die applying it for maximum effectiveness. A personal favorite is Sen’jin Fetish, which can do a bunch of damage and lay down DoTs before casting Rot on its Undead round to set up the Stampede. The Unborn Val’Kyr is especially useful for this because it can first apply the delayed nuke Curse of Doom folowed by Haunt, and then both damages are amplified by the Shattered Defenses of the Stampede.
A few other pets commonly used for the Stampede are Ikky, Foulfeather, Blighted Squirrel, Infected Squirrel, Lil’ Bling, Macabre Marionette, Chitterspine Skitterling, Hogs, Squirky, and the Zandalari raptors.
So this one mechanic, can be implemented in a single pet, or across two pets, and there are many, many combinations to choose from, depending on the importance of maximising damage, and the family damage type needed, and the importance of taking weak damage from the opposing pet.
The devs could have designed the game such that, if you had any one of the Bleed pets, and any one of the Stampede oets, you could use just those for all situations. But they didn’t, and I’m glad they didn’t, because it keeps the game expanding.
So we all start off with three, or a dozen, favorites, but as we collect more and learn more, we expand with the game into more mechanics and more choices for them.
It really isn’t 90%. It might be as high as 60%, but I don’t think so. And for that 50%+, it’s not that the pet is useless in itself; just that there is an equally good or better choice. That still leaves 800 or so “useful” pets by that definition.
First of all, “days”? Really? We are WoW players! We laugh at “weeks” and “months”! Mere “days” are entirely beneath our notice!
It does seem that way to you now, as it did to me when I started. But it was by using other people’s guides that I learned the techniques that now allow me to see what pets will likely work in what battles.
I’m still learning. DragonsAfterDark, for example, could conduct a masterclass on the use of the Winter’s Little Helper, a pet I had written off as cute but not very effective. Mutanis and NoGulpFrog come up with some almost unbearably ingenious uses of pets on Xu-Fu’s.
As you noted, it’s typical Blizzard. They put out the abilities and talents. In the main game, the theorycrafters spreadsheet and sim and test them, and produce guides that the rest of us use. At least, we take them as a basis, even if we later do our own thing. Similarly here, strat-setters make strats that we can all use and learn from. You have the attitude of a theorycrafter or strat-setter, and could likely become one, if you decide to put the effort in.
You are at a stage where it should start becoming a lot easier for you to level and Rarify pets. Mostly these days that’s about Squirt and the Legion repeatable tamers. If you decide to develop your roster, and learn more, that will give you the launch-pad,
From your reply, it can be seen that you have invested a lot of time in researching pet battles. Therefore, you should realize that some pets are just fragile vases and not suitable for combat. Perhaps some strategies will use them, but it is definitely not in Tanan jungle. Forcing them to face powerful enemies is not appropriate.
I think the ever-changing pet charm thing was what was getting me. And I’ve missed the world quests over the years because a lot of the time I stumble across a battle and want to try it as a change of pace, it’s because I’m leveling an alt and can’t always see WQs.
My new gripe is
Not being able to catch more than one pet in a wild battle, and then the game throwing multiple rares that you don’t have yet at you at the same time after dozens of fights without any rares showing up
Not being able to keep pets you catch if you lose the fight, especially if you lost because the game stalled you for 3 turns against a 1-hp pet that kept escaping the trap
This is all of my favorites. I like them to match my characters in aesthetic, lore, etc. When I get used to a pet’s patterns and combos and can no longer strategize or change them on the fly because I’ve found their optimal setups, that’s when I stop wanting to use them. If I can’t build custom teams, and I have to keep using a team I already know in and out, I’m just going to get bored of it and want to use it less.
This is why I emphasized so much that I want to be able to approach each fight in the game and reliably come up with new teams on the spot to beat them rather than switching to an established solution.
Examining weaknesses and selecting abilities and coming up with a lineup with good synergy is the game mode for me. The actual battles are just the test to see if I did the fun part correctly or if I need to go back to the drawing board.
I’ll keep expanding my roster and trying new strategies, but for now it still feels like the game mode is less about creativity and more about figuring out or looking up the best pets, comps, and precise orders of attack to guarantee a win.
Yeah. My thing was always accidentally killing the pet I wanted to capture, but flaking out on trap misses is a bummer too.
Now I use Grumpy, for its Howl + Superbark - guaranteed capture range, guaranteed no-kill, and two very tanky pets with shields and heals - Emerald Proto-Whelp, Emperor Crab, one of the Anubisaths - that can survive anything any number of wild pets can throw at them.
This was a comment about Tremblor having 10k effective HP and being a perfect example of what I was talking about originally, plus the guides saying to go grind Unborn Valkyrs, which I’ve never had any luck at.
Then I noticed a detail that I think was omitted from the world quest text, and obfuscated by the fact that when you click a boss battle it starts the battle, so you can’t click it then hover over the buff on it and see that it can be depowered if you beat the Slyvern pets nearby.
I was getting a Legendary Tremblor down to <1k with 3 pets before noticing that, so I beat it with just 2 pets after knocking it down to a Rare. I like that the battle had a meta element that added extra fights to make the final fight more doable, and the fact that beating the boss awarded it as a pet.
I just wish it had been more clearly communicated. I didn’t see any indication initially that I should go beat the Slyverns. In fact, I don’t think they had loaded onto my screen by the time I started the first fight, and from then on I had my back to them because Tremblor is on a ledge. I don’t think the buff telling me to beat the Slyverns was visible during the fight, either.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen such a twist on pet battles so it threw me.
I’ve still been stubbornly avoiding Xu-Fu’s because I’d like to figure the fights out myself as much as possible. Random forums and comment sections are in between doing it without help and using Xu-Fu’s in my mind, and that’s where I saw Valk mentioned in like 80% of the strats.
Bless you for this. I had no idea they had changed it.
Fair enough. I understand that, and I admire the sentiment.
But you won’t figure everything out yourself. Nobody does. We all learn from each other.
Oh yeah. Pick yourself up both a B/B and a H/H while you’re there. Usually, either breed will do for Valk strats, but sometimes one or the other is more comfortable.
Not sure what I’m missing but have spent past 2 hours circling through the 3 supposed spawn points in Griz Hills and haven’t seen a Val’kyr once. Haven’t seen any competition either. Even tried doing some crittercide on any unfortunates near spawn points but hasn’t helped.
I’ve had a couple of B/Bs for years and your posts inspired me to go for an H/H too, but so far zero luck. Any suggestions ?
)
I love Xu-Fu’s, and in general I love people sharing their strategies, but I do see that it leads to degenerate gameplay, with people just using strats they copied, and even automating them so that they never learn anything while using them. 
It’s always nice to see someone trying to engage with the game itself!