Revising My Stance on Auction House

Gameplay Pet Battles
1

I was talking to my buddy (the one who got me started on pet battles and referred me to this forum), and he’s raised a few valid points.

Don’t get me wrong. I still don’t believe that the best pets in the game should be cageable. You can’t call buying pets at the Auction House a “playstyle.” It’s not a playstyle if you aren’t playing the game.

On the other hand, he pointed out that the Devs are the ones who made purchasing pets on the Auction House more than a convenience. It’s a necessity. RNG is simply not a fair way to reward effort when it comes to acquiring pets. He also pointed out that the fact that I’m on my fourth Anubisath Idol and I still can’t get the Mini-Mindslayer to drop is a case in point. Also, since as a Mage, at least at my level, I will never be able to kill Viscidus to get the globule.

Consequently, I can either buy the missing pets, or I can level up, and pray that a 70th level Mage can swing a staff with enough force to finally kill Viscidus once I freeze him. Or I can level up a melee and try to find him some freeze-proccing weapons. Or I can just do without.

Not that I’m going to be disappointed by not getting the globule. (Personally, I would prefer to keep my collection small and just not keep pets that I’m never going to use.) But the much more useful Mr. Bigglesworth happens to be a reward for acquiring all the pets in Raiding With Leashes, Part 1.

So, no globule, then no Mr. Bigglesworth.

I doubt the Devs are going to bother with revising the system to give us a more fair way to acquire pets, but there’s always the possibility that they can devise something more fair going forward.

And on the subject of unfairness, yesterday, I destroyed a Puddle Terror I got from my Garrison. It happens to be my fourth one, and I don’t have the slots for it. But today, I just got my first Ghastly Kid.

I will never like the Auction House as a way of acquiring pets. And the Pet Battle community is the only RPG community I’ve seen that thinks it’s perfectly fine, right and proper that those who choose to buy rewards at the AH are entitled to the same rewards as those who go out to acquire them by playing the game.

I can just imagine the hue and cry that would go up if raid gear was suddenly for sale on the AH.

My last day is the 16th. I was hoping to acquire B’aal by then. But unfortunately, even though the Wowhead Macro says I acquired the sixth pebble (I should hope so. I died five times trying to get to it.), I cannot interact with the seventh pebble. I’ve seen it. It’s in that cellar in Boralus, where the guys are playing D&D. And I’ve looked at the pictures on Wowhead, so I know I have the right pebble, but I can’t interact with it.

I’ve submitted a bug report, but I have no hopes that it will be resolved by the 16th.

That’s all. Nice meeting you all.

2

From what you write, I suspect you have the wrong pebble. I think you have skipped from the 6th to the 8th, and that’s why you can’t interact with the 8th, because you haven’t done the 7th.

The seventh pebble is on the stern of a sunken ship off the North coast of Nazmir.

Sixth pebble – Stormsong – In a cave.
Take path at /way Stormsong Valley 69.3 9.4
Entrance to cave at /way Stormsong Valley 68.33, 10.5
Seventh Pebble – Above Nazmir, in the South Seas, back of the ship, second pebble from the left. This cave is located past a fatigue area, use ![] Water Walking, ![Reins of the Azure Water Strider] Reins of the Azure Water Strider or ![Anglers Fishing Raft] Anglers Fishing Raft & ![Felslate Anchor] Felslate Anchor youtube video
/way Zandalar 54.54 7.3
Eighth Pebble – In the Maze in Boralus, in an underground basement. The pebble is behind the keg.
/way Boralus 37, 80

That seventh pebble was for me - and I think everyone else - by far the worst. It’s the only one I remember. Took me several tries. It’s out in a fatigue zone, far underwater, and you have to live long enough to get there, target the tiny pebble, and hold it for two seconds before you die.

Or maybe you acquired the 7th and can’t get to the 8th?

3

Strangely the Wowhead Guide for Baa’l differs on which pebble is which.

Baa’l - Secret Demonic Goat Battle Pet - Wowhead

It does indeed say that that maddening underwater pebble is the Sixth, as Presto noted.
Not sure why your link and mine give different numbering.

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Comparing them side by side, I see that Wowhead Guide for Baa’l doesn’t count the original pebble at Drak’thul’s Hideout, and calls the pebble at Hook Point Pebble 1.

The comment calls the Drak’thul’s Hideout Pebble 1.

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As you need to click on a pebble with Drak’thul, no idea why the Wowhead guide doesn’t consider it when they start their numbering. But does explain the confusion about which pebble you and OP are talking about, and why a macro might imply a step had been completed even if it hadn’t.

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Thousands of hardcore AH goblins would strongly disagree.

2 Likes
7

I just went to that cellar.

Like you, I could see the pebble but not interact with it.

In my case, that is not surprising, since I already completed Baa’l, but I think it means the game doesn’t believe you are on that pebble. I honestly doubt that it’s a bug; I don’t see any reports of it, other than the two posts from the person you replied to.

Check your macro again. Check your memory. I still feel you have skipped something or forgotten something.

8

Sounds as though some uncertainty about having successfully gotten that underwater pebble. Understandable as it depends on which macro you’re using, from which Wowhead articles.

I think, with my poor understanding of macros, that this would be looking at the right quest and should return “True” for having gotten that underwater pebble. Otherwise very likely that step hasn’t been completed.

/run print(C_QuestLog.IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(52815))

No guarantees, I’m not certain I’m using the right quest number, but worth a try.

9

Your first reply was correct. You are so immensely helpful. The Pet Battler Community should be thankful for you every day. Yes, many people have been very helpful, but you were my MVP. If I had a pet you wanted, I’d give it to you. (I doubt I do, but you can look.)

But in any case, you were right. The numbering system on the WoWhead guide was off by one. They guide called the first Nazmir pebble, pebble #6, but the macro on the page labels it as #7. (Someone made a comment about this on WoWhead, so I saw that I didn’t actually have the sunken ship.)

So I went back out (and this was my third time trying to reach it before I died), and I went right to it. I guess third time’s a charm. Or I had so much practice finding that sunken ship, I found it easily.

At the risk of giving away the ending, I just now finished it. I have Baa’l.

All I can say is, if any of you guys did this before flying was finally unlocked in BfA, you guys either have the patience of saints or you’re masochists.

Kidding aside, I did not like this quest. And while it might have been nice to do this as a Death Knight, so I can ride my mount on water, being a Mage definitely helped.

I could cut down the distance I had to swim in fatigue areas by Blinking (I used Feast of Fishes to turn myself into a fish, which gave me (supposedly) 225% swim speed. Plus my Blinks.)

I bought five of those Feasts (thankfully, one seller made a bunch and only required about 50 gold for each) and I failed so many times, I used them all up. During the last pebble, I tried just flying out there, then swimming to the underwater cave. Ugh! I swim slowly. I barely made it inside the cave to the spot where the last pebble is before fatigue killed me.

Second time, I got the idea to use another Feast of Fishes, like I did for Nazmir, and while I made it with time to spare, I couldn’t find the pebble and I died again.

So, I pulled up the video on YouTube again, and just studied the final image where he was next to the pebble, trying to burn the image in my mind. “Okay, I see a small rock that is resting on the floor of the cave, and it has a sharp corner where the top edge and corner actually points to the pebble’s location. Got it!”

If this helps anyone, this is the video I used, And the 3:01 mark is the image I used.

It worked! I swam into the cave, and right to the spot and found the pebble. I even had time to hearth out of there.

I died so many times, with my corpse lost all the way out in the fatigue area. I probably spent over 1000 gold fixing my armor, because I had to take the Spirit Healer rezz!

Once that was done, I had to hearth to my Garrison, and flew to Frostfire Ridge. (There’s only one spot to land for Alliance in FF. Thankfully, Baal was very close to it.

I loaded up Grumpy to capture Baal. And for back-up, I used Emerald Proto-Whelp and Darkmoon Tonk.

So, I took out Uuna as I approached Baal (once I realized I wasn’t going to start burning up for stepping on the lava), and she didn’t seem to do anything. Then, once I got close, she finally zapped him. Then she urged me to attack with my battle pets, so I did.

Okay, Baal has no backup pets. That’s good. Unfortunately, he hits pretty hard and he forced a swap on Grumpy between Howl and Superbark, so I had to use Bark to bring him down.

But my cage didn’t light up. I thought I was supposed to capture him, but no. Just kill him. And here I was, terrified of killing him, using Grumpy to avoid this. “Do I have to start over again if I kill him?”

So much of this quest made me so nervous.

But as quests go, I didn’t like this one. Some of it was all right. I didn’t mind the cave, for instance, where I got one-shotted by the giant horseshoe crab thingie. It sees invis, but I just hugged the wall while invis to get the pebble.

But there’s just a mean-spiritedness in the planning of this quest. There’s the fact that these things are pebbles, and a few times they matched the coloration of the floor. So, it’s a matter of scrolling around with your mouse until you see the mouse pointer become an interactive cogwheel.

Or you have to stay in the water, while you try to look under the pile of seaweed to find the stupid pebble.

I don’t mind challenging. It can be fun to fight a mob, for instance, who keeps me moving so much that it’s hard for me to find the time to cast a more hard-hitting spell.

It’s just the way the Devs seem to like to torment the players with geography that bugs me. I remember thinking that a lot of this would be more annoying than it already is if I couldn’t fly to do this. Like climbing up to the caves and stuff. I mean, there were moments when I was trying to get to my corpse (my spirit cannot fly in BfA) and I gave up and took the spirit rezz because I couldn’t find the way back to my corpse.

I feel certain I would have given up on this if I couldn’t fly to do it.

Starting with the note that begins the quest in Nazmir. You would have to be very careful getting to that note if you can’t fly. I frequently thought about how this might have played out if I attempted this before I could fly, and it makes me think that game design is about using geography to irritate the players.

Well, so much for that. It was difficult and frequently annoying, but at least I can say I did it.

And it’s nowhere near as impressive as someone who did this before flying was available. So, it’s not much of an accomplishment, but at least I did it.

10

I understand that perception. Sometimes I feel that about some of the things the devs do. But not this time. The Baa’l sequence wasn’t mean-spirited, exactly. It was an explicit challenge to the entire playerbase.

Remember, you - and all of us - were working from a guide. Where did that guide come from? The devs gave NO CLUES about where the pebbles were, or what we had to do to get to Baa’l. At the time, they just let us know that it was available, and a whole army of people descended on the problem. You think it’s bad that some of the pebbles blended in with the floor? When you were directed to the room and had pictures and videos? Consider searching for the next pebble when you don’t know where on the map it even is!

We have the guides because a mob of absolute maniacs had fun for - how long was it? - about a month, using all their WoW skills and technical analysis of the data files, tracing exactly where each pebble was.

It’s tough for the devs to set challenges like these, because what is hard for an individual becomes a lot easier when hundreds and thousands of people collaborate.

See also Jenafur, that had one weird step that couldn’t be solved from within the game at all!

You have experienced WoW on a very accelerated timeline. When you have been playing for years, maybe 1-2 hours per day on average, and you have goals in several areas of the game to make some progress on each week, you get a different perspective on the little treats like this. :smiley:

11

My buddy tells me that flying was a huge deal. Apparently, the Lead Dev was trying to get rid of it for several expansions, but the player base was adamant that it would be included or a lot of players would quit.

So all this tricky geography just feels like the Dev Team wants to punish the players for not being willing to part with flying. I remember taking my BElf to some vanilla zone to look for Goldthorn, and while it took a bit, I don’t remember encountering much difficulty in finding my way to a plant on my mini-map.

But zones like Argus and parts of BfA just feel like geography was made intentionally overly difficult to frustrate players. It’s like I can hear the Lead Dev snarling, “How dare you players force me to include flying? I will make you wish you just accepted my decision to remove flying! I’ll lock it away until the next expansion is about to come out and make geography annoying as possible!”

There’s challenging, then there’s really difficult. And then there’s game design that feels like malice. Parts of this game, like places with the nearly insurmountable geography in places, feels like malice.

But maybe that’s not so new. I remember being in Ashenvale, finding these five-foot steep slopes that my six-year-old self would have tackled without hesitation, but to my vastly powerful Mage, they were insurmountable obstacles.

I was amazed to discover I only had to find the bones to summon the Many-Faced Devourer once, and then from there, I could just click on the effigy once per day.

“What? You’re not going to make me find the bones every time I want to try to get Uuna?”

Ugh! Another Baal? I don’t know if I’ll have time, but I’ll take a look.

12

Jenafur is actually fairly easy to acquire compared to Baa’l. As for Baa’l itself, I did it at 70… which was a mistake, a lot of the suggest items to use to increase swim speed where level locked to me. I had given up on the sunken ship pebble until DragonFlying was released to all old content, that is what allowed me to get to the ship with enough time to get the pebble and progress on from there.

My recommendation for Viscidus would be to get a fast dagger with Elemental Force on it, can even be a grey item to help with the melee part.

And if you are into transmog, while you are hunting secrets–look into the Waist of Time.

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That’s odd. I can see restricting gear for being too low level, but too high level? Not sure what would be the issue with a level 70 using Feast of Fishes, which turned me into an orange roughy.

Funny thing about it, though is that once I turned into a fish. I couldn’t move, even a little bit, to get into the water. Fortunately, my Blink spell still worked in piscine form.

I’m not sure what I’m looking for when you say “elemental force.” Nothing I’ve looked at in the AH includes “Elemental Force” in the description. I’ve seen some decent daggers with good stats and almost at my ilevel. They all seem to have a 1.8 speed rating, though some come with haste.

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It’s an enchant that you can put on a melee weapon;

2 Likes
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Enchant Weapon - Elemental Force

In the Item Enhancements - Weapon category on the AH.

You should be seeing something like 4000 available for you

https://undermine.exchange/#us-daggerspine/74725

1 Like
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Thank you.

ETA: This is kind of a bummer, but it doesn’t work. All I get is that he’s beginning to crack, but he thaws out, so I’m back as square one.

17

Same experience my level 70 frost mage had.

She’d been warned though so had a friend grouped with her and standing by. Finally admitted defeat and asked for help and with 70 druid hitting too, finished Viscidius off.

Neither of them got the pet drop.

18

Yeah. I just tried it on my 70 mage.

Crate of Kidnapped Pupples was my go-to when I actually did this, but, as the Wowhead comments say, it doesn’t work now. I got 2 hits, but mostly misses.

BTW, where was my mind earlier? Elemental Force is just for adding the freeze, which you can easily do yourself as a mage. D’oh.

Anyway, apart from the freeze, the Wowhead page says 30 hits in 30 seconds.

41% Haste. GCD 1.06. 1.8 dagger. I started a Blizzard, cast a Comet Storm, auto-attacked, cast Ice Lances inbetween, right-clicked as fast as I could. I tried everything I could think of.

No success.

I don’t say it can’t be done, but I am dubious.

19

I wasn’t intending to make this thread about Baa’l, but just to point something out.

I heard someone say in this group that when doing the Draenor pet tamers, they skip Cymre Brightblade, and I absolutely understand why. The strats I used from Xu-Fu were at least dicey. It’s the Idol of Decay mostly. You have to back off at just the right moment, otherwise, it will cast Dark Rebirth during the immortal round of pet battling, giving itself another four rounds to vex you.

And Wishbright Lantern makes it even worse with changing the weather and that horrid Wish ability.

With all this iffy stuff, and a carry pet, too, I can see why you’d give up on this.

That said, the first strat on Xu-Fu for this, using an Inland Croaker and Baa’l, works amazingly well.

My P/P Inland Croaker makes beautifully short work of the Idol of Decay, and the Dark Rebirth ability is a non-issue, because Idol is stunned during the immortal round, gets swapped out with Wishbright, and dies in the backline.

After an opening salvo from Inland Croaker on Wishbright, Baa’l comes in and destroys Wishbright utterly.

Against the Gyrexle, Baa’l eats the first missile, giving you time to swap in the carry pet, then Inland Croaker comes in, its stun making it impossible for Gyrexle to heal itself.

Beautiful, beautiful strat. I was just about to give up on Cymre Brightblade, too.

Yes, I’ve only used it twice, but it worked flawlessly both times.

20

As a BM hunter I had to go get a certain bow to kill Viscidus …I had to get the Brunnhildar Bow to get that pet…if your a hunter and your spec Lone Wolf this bow won’t work…when you try this because your damage speed will not be enough to defeat him before he thaws again, that was posted back in 2017…not sure if that still applies…