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Powerlevel Battle Pets From Scratch
Pikachu lays the smack down.
Despite being so “last expansion”, there are still so much upside to the whole Pet Battle thing in WoW.
1) It’s a nice break from the daily grind. Pet battles will give your brain something to think about other than garrison missions and… well, whatever else there is in WoD. There’s a whole other game out there with pet battles. Capture pets so you can face the World tamers, hunt the elites, face down epic bosses. I mean, there’s a reason Pokemon has had eighteen seasons on TV.
2) It’s an alternative way to level. It’s a mindless way to level up without having to sweat things like getting your hands dirty. The battle pets do all the heavy lifting, and the character leaches the benefits of getting XP along with the pets. After repeatedly questing through WoD, and speed leveling through WoD, and garrison mission leveling, it’s a nice change of pace from hitting the same content over and over again. Plus, with the 20% XP bonus from the garrison XP potion, each pet battle victory gives your damn near as much XP as a quest turn-in. Find a spot with packs of pets to battle without having to stop, and there are plenty of those, and you’ll get more XP per hour than you would through quests!
3) It gets you out into the World… of Warcraft. Pets are every damn where, and you need to beef up your roster to effectively fight the good fight. Plus there are achievements for capturing pets in various zones, so naturally you’re going to have to cross the globe (or globes, you inter-dimensional trekker you) to round out your arsenal and get all those ‘chieves.
4) It’s PVP that anyone can do. Even you. Yes, even you. Once you have your crew of tiny killers, you can queue up to throw down against other players. You might not know what the Hell to do when your class faces down someone of a different class in BG’s or Arenas, but by the time you level up a bunch of battle pets you damn sure know what to do when your opponent whips out a Critter pet.
As enticing as this all must seem to be, pet battlers have to start somewhere. To be effective, you’re going to need some maxed out pets. Every guide out there on the Youtubes discusses powerleveling techniques to knock out max level pets, but they all base it on the assumption that you already have a level 25 pet or two in your back pocket. If you don’t, you have the arduous task of grinding out max level on a couple of pets the slow way first.
Or do you?
(The answer is no — Editor)
Hazelnuttygames put together this handy dandy video to walk you through getting some max level pets from scratch.
Now get out there and catch ’em.
(Don’t say it — Editor)
CATCH ‘EM ALL!!
(Sigh)
MoP Leveling to 90 Like the Pros
Old school leveling for an old school hunter.
Since my damn OCD kicked in, I’ve been trying to level my Orc hunter to 90. He had been sitting at 87 for well over a year, and I just couldn’t get myself to push onward. I used pet battles as a way to fool myself into leveling him by leveling battle pets at the same time. The pets would “ding”, distracting me from the fact that I was getting experience as well.
Eventually my brain caught on, and punished me for the deception by making me forget my name for an hour. I decided it was time to try a different approach.
I’d been using the Horde Speed Leveling Guide to get a couple of my characters from 90 to 100, with what I felt was a great deal of success. The guide was designed by players who were hoping to get server first to 100. Not so big on things like story or lore. Screw that.
I began to wonder what previous players did to get to realm first for other expansions. Say, expansions like MoP. Did they have a speed route to take? Nail down some repeatable quest or something that wouldn’t get them banned?
I did a bit of research and wasn’t thrilled with what I was finding. There seemed to be two methods used to hit 90 fast – Zygor leveling guides, and mob tagging. Mob tagging (attacking a high level mob and then having others burn it down quickly) wasn’t going to work for me, since I was going to be doing this solo.
I was already using Zygor guides, and had used it to get other characters to 90. It was good, effective, but there was so much travel and running around between kills. Plus, taking the same route over and over was wearing a muddy path in my soul. It got my Orc hunter to 87 before my tires started spinning in the muck and I abandoned him.
What I needed was some kind of “Option C”.
I never understood why people made a big deal about the person who ended up getting realm/server first. After a couple of months, nobody would even remember that person’s name. That bit of truth was biting me in the ass since I now wanted to know who that person was, and if they did anything different than the masses.
Turns out that person was a druid named Fs, and they had a plan.
I watched the video with a great deal of interest. Sure, grinding mobs wasn’t overly interesting. But quick kills with the potential of greens dropping, and little chance of getting killed? Granted, the information in the video was old. But was it still effective?
Again, the answer was yes.I picked up one level and greens which I vendored for gold. Easy kills, especially with the 100% buff, and very quick respawns. I never once had to stop attacking. This could be a nice place to level while queued for a dungeon. If you’re trying to level a character from the mid-80’s, and you’re looking for a little mindless grinding, let those who got there (World) first guide you.
Rokk Talk 