Pet Of The Week #1
Welcome fellow PvP enthusiasts to a new segment, the pet of the week. It’s a weekly team making competition sponsored by yours truly. Each week I will will choose a pet. Entrants in the competition will then send me a team including that pet. I will try all of the submitted teams in the queue and then choose a “team of the week”, based on performance and creativity. Whoever submitted that team is the winner. At the end of each month I will randomly select one of the weekly winners to be the recipient of a Blizzard store pet of their choice.
Our first pet is an underused favorite of mine, the Imperial Eagle Chick. At 341 power the P/P breed hits amazingly hard. You have to be careful with this fragile flyer because it only has 1319 health. In the first slot you have a choice between Thrash and Slicing Winds, in the second slot Adrenaline Rush and Cyclone and in the third slot Hawkeye and Lift-Off.
How will you use this sharp-eyed bird of pain? Don’t limit yourself to the P/P breed, feel free to use another breed if it fits your team better. Please leave a comment on this page with your team. I would prefer the format with the names of the moves rather than the numbers. Also please include the breed, or otherwise state that any breed will work. Please include a name for your team as well. Here’s an example entry:
Cyclonic Pulverization
S/S Jademist Dancer (Steam Vent, Rain Dance, Acid Rain)
P/P Imperial Eagle Chick (Thrash, Cyclone, Lift-Off)
H/H Spirit Crab (Snap, Surge, Shell Shield)
Good luck! If you’re a new member to the site I have to manually approve you. Don’t worry, I check regularly so your comment will be up soon. The winner will be posted on Saturday or Sunday 
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I’m going to start this off and hope you’ll enjoy my team-recommendation. 😀
Two Gifts from Northend
P/P Imperial Eagle Chick (Thrash, Cyclone, Lift-Off)
H/H Scourged Whelpling (Tail Sweep, Death and Decay, Plagued Blood)
P/S Omnious Flame (Spiritfire Bolt, Nimbus, Forboding Curse)
Also one question, is there the possibility to suggest more than one team?
Let’s keep it at one for so now so I have time to play them all, I’d like to do at least four or five battles with each.
Blue Moon Buster
P/P Imperial Eagle Chick (Thrash, Adrenaline Rush, Lift-Off)
P/P or P/S Moon Moon (Moon Fang, Crouch, Moon Dance)
Spawn of G’nathus (Swallow You Whole, Dive, Paralyzing Shock)
The basic idea is to capitalise on a set of hard hitting pets that can hit the weak points effectively against a wide variety of pets by pushing their speed up a little notch to give them an edge. There’s an optional move set you could try using Cyclone and Thunderbolt if you want some AoE chip damage, but I don’t think this team is sturdy enough to stand toe to toe long enough to make either choice pay off. You may disagree. Try as you please.
Spawn of G’nathus is one of my favorite pets lately. Paralyzing Shock catches a lot of people out since they expect you to run Thunderbolt instead, and it lets him isolate and kill pets of his choosing. Moon Moon uses Moon Fang over Bite to give some coverage against enemy flying pets (since Thrash covers the beast damage needs), and the eagle uses Adrenaline Rush to keep it’s speed advantage against the true speedsters when it’s getting battered.
Hope it works out for you as well as it has in my head (since I unfortunately don’t have a Moon Moon)
Bleatdown
P/P Imperial Eagle Chick (Thrash, Adrenaline Rush, Lift-Off)
P/S Alterac Brew-Pup (Bark, The Good Stuff, Call the Pack)
P/P Stinker (Scratch, Rake, Bleat)
Basically we’re trying to get as much value out of the IEC’s high damage as possible. We want to lead with IEC if we can, then rotate through the Brew-Pup and Stinker as necessary, using heals and damage debuff moves to buy enough time to bring the Eagle back out with high’ish HP.
For the record, I didn’t expect this to work. However, I actually fired up a battle with this team and managed to score a win. The other player was using Menagerie Custodian, Stitched Pup (he did cast Consume Corpse) & Lesser Voidcaller which seems neither the best or worst. I’ll take it.
Concerns: Too many list, honestly. Attacks aren’t incredibly diverse. I hate Slicing Wind, so I’d still rather have Thrash on the Eagle. Also, with the HP counts at 1400/1400/1319 we are really relying on our heals to keep us in the game. Call Darkness represents a likely auto-loss.
Pros: You get to play with a skunk on a team named Bleatdown.
Nice teams! I’ll be able to run these teams in the queue tomorrow and maybe a little bit tonight.
I was wondering what people think of the “competition” aspect of the pet of the week. Is it a good thing? I was thinking it could be a little more friendly by instead of picking weekly winners, everyone who submits a team could go into one big pool for the monthly pet store pet. Just throwing it out there, what do you guys think? Or maybe people prefer the competition side of it?
Honestly? I think it’s your money, your rules.
Given the people that come to your blog are going to be people actually interested in the material here, I don’t think you’re very likely to find people throwing tantrums over not winning some free stuff like they might over in the official forums.
Great initiative! Love to see how this works out.
Clonecrit
P/P eagle with slicing wind, cyclone, hawkeye
S/S jademist dancer with steam vent, rain dance, and acid rain
H/H scourged welpling with tail sweep, call darkness, and dreadful breath
Strat: Start with eagle to cast cyclone and buff it with hawkeye, switch to jademist for rain dance to super buff the cyclone and acid rain to set up the dreadful breath, bring in scourged welp to spam buffed acid rain until the weather fades/is switched or he dies. The opposing team should be quite low by now. Throw out more buffed aoe or finish with the speedy jademist.
Concerns: jademist and eagle are fragile, eagle is so slow without adrenaline rush maybe a speed breed would be better. Weather changers make this strat fall apart.
I think competition is fun, prizes or otherwise.
Ok, so I had a good idea around the competition part. I like the competition aspect, I just didn’t want the winner to be all about me making a choice. So I thought of a simple rubric for scoring:
80% based on record. Whatever record I get playing the team contributes 80% of your score. I like the number 80 because it’s divisible by both four and five, which is how many battles I’m planning on doing with each team. If I do more I can always scale it appropriately.
20% based on pet selection. I initially said creativity, but how does one score that? I figured that the creativity bonus can come through pet selection. We can make a list of “top tier” PvP pets. Any pets on your team that are not on this list give you 10 extra points, for a maximum of 20 extra points.
So under this rubric, if you used one pet on the top tier list and your team went 4-1 then you would score 74 points: 16 for each win (since 80÷5 = 16) plus another 10 for your pet that’s not on the top tier list.
I like it, of course any ideas are welcome.
Sounds fine to me! I would wager that most of your regular visitors are going to have fun with the puzzle/challenge regardless of reward.
Friendly competition is fun!
This was my go-to team before Direhorn patch. I dont think it has aged well.
Old Avoid
P/P Imperial Eagle Chick(thrash,cyclone,lift-off)
P/S Blighthawk(Ghostly Bite, Consume Corpse, Lift-off)
H/S Scalded Basilisk Hatchling(crystal prison,feign death,thrash)
Lots of avoidance moves. Never afraid to sacrifice the eagle to mines or a bit hit, so blighthawk get consume corpse.
Facing decoy it is good to start with eagle to get the cyclone up. Otherwise I used to start with basilisk. Crystal prison – thrash – feign – blighthawk comes in and if faster lift-off to do even more unanswered damage.
Weakness, thrash is really bad against birds, since it is weak damage and relies on being faster(wich is tough against birds). I usually used the blighthawk to get birds below 50% health and then switch to basilisk.
Also basilisk is really reliant on being faster. 305 speed is not that good anymore. And fast mechs like blingtron will totally destroy you. Good luck.
OK, this sounds fun. I’ve been enjoying this blog for a long time now, but not much of a pvp pet battler myself (stopped around the time I got my Stunted Direhorn, haha). I don’t care much about the rules/competition aspect though, seems like any of the above suggestions should work for me.
Fun with Flyers:
P/P Imperial Eagle Chick (Thrash, Adrenalin Rush, Lift-off)
P/S Chi-Chi, Hatchling of Chi-Ji (Fire Quills, Wild Magic/Tranquillity, Feign Death)
H/H Netherspace Abyssal (Immolate, Explode, Nether Gate)
Any power breed Eagle Chick should work, I think, since he is most often used as a sweeper here.
The basic gimmick: start with Chi-Chi, get up Wild Magic and/or a couple of hits of Fire Quills, then Feign Death (trying to avoid something like Blinding Poison at the same time) to the Abyssal. The Abyssal then puts up Immolate (if lucky, on a pet with Wild Magic) and uses Nether Gate to swap out if appropriate. Depending on your opponent’s team, the Abyssal can then either switch out, eat some big hits, or use Explode to do reasonably high damage to a pet you want to take out fast. The Eagle Chick with Thrash and the flyer racial can then mop up.
Weaknesses: Both birds uses multi-hit attacks, and the Abyssal uses a DoT, which makes this team vulnerable to shields. I try to mitigate that concern with Wild Magic, but in some situations the heal from Tranquillity has proven more useful. (I put up both, since I use both frequently; if the rules don’t allow it, then go for Wild Magic). Also, if the birds lose their racials, they go down fast (low health pools).
Thanks for signing up, welcome.
Something came up so I didn’t get to the daily today but I did have a chance to play some of these teams. A lot of fun.
I got home later than expected tonight and tried to finish up by spamming the eagle teams. Someone figured it out and started running double pets with magic attacks. I’ll finish up tomorrow. Dang, first week and I’m already late.
Maybe it would be easier to do it as a bi-weekly thing? It would let you pace yourself a bit better with the queues and give you more time to play with your own teams I’d figure.
That might be a necessary change in the future.