Today’s Team: Dreadbone
P/P Droplet Of Y’Shaarj (Corrosion, Acid Rain, Dreadful Breath)
H/H Scourged Whelpling (Tail Sweep, Darkness, Dreadful Breath)
P/P Dragonbone Hatchling (Thrash, Adrenaline Rush, Lift-Off)
Strategy:
I was running some more Quake teams today with the Dragonbone Hatchling as my sweeper when I realized that Quake may not be the main ingredient for my recent success. It may have been the P/P Dragonbone Hatchling all along. This pet was really getting the job done as a sweeper so I decided to try it out on other types of teams. Eventually I added the P/P flyer to this Dreadful Breath comp and ended up playing it a lot today. The plan is very simple. Use Acid Rain and Dreadful Breath with the Droplet Of Y’Shaarj until death. Then the Scourged Whelpling will come in to spam Dreadful Breath. The beefy undead can stay alive for so long that a lot of back line damage will have been done by the time the Scourged Whelpling is through. Then the Dragonbone Hatchling will finish off the remaining pets with its flying racial speed and 325 power.
Concerns:
There are a lot of counters to this team. Weather changes are bad. Dreadful Breath locks you in to a three round move so your opponent can set up whatever they like. CC pets were giving me a lot of trouble. The KLR is quite prevalent on my meta and it has also given me trouble today. I usually pat the little runts on the head and say “aww, isn’t that cute, a pet that was good in 5.2”, but they’ve given this Dreadful Breath team trouble.
On a sad note, I didn’t realize how lucky I’ve been to be on Magical Crawdad free meta. I’ve seen very few of them since I changed metas. Until these past few days, that is. Some joker realized how well the aquatic does in the current meta and has been using one a lot. Yet another annoying pet to have to deal with.
The Opposing team:
P/S Eternal Strider
P/P Kun-Lai Runt
P/S Pandaren Fire Spirit
The Battle:
There was no possible way I could stick to plan here but I decided to start with the Droplet anyways just to test the waters. Out comes the Eternal Strider to face my elemental, that’s bad news. I brought in the Scourged Whelpling since that made the most sense. I cast Darkness then spammed Tail Swipe. My undead got pounded by a Pump but was able to take out the Eternal Strider. The Pandaren Fire Spirit was next. It took out the Scourged Whelpling while taking a little bit of damage in the process. The Droplet Of Y’Shaarj was next for me but was fairly ineffective and went down quick to the Pandaren Fire Spirit. The Dragonbone Hatchling took one Flamethrower from the elemental before killing it. Now it was the KLR against my flyer. Just to be safe I cast Adrenaline Rush before the Frost Shock slowed me. The battle would come down to the Deep Freeze, would my opponent cast it right away or wait until I came down from the Lift-Off? I cast Lift-Off, my opponent cast Deep Freeze. After that the powerful flyer was easily able to take down the KLR with Thrashes. I guess this team was able to improvise a little better than I thought and the KLR didn’t give me as much trouble as earlier. That speed and power at the end of a battle is nice.
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Hi. Excellent site you got. I tried this team out, but with a P/P Wildhammer Gryphon instead of Dragonbone, not much difference I guess. I just wondered why you chose corrosion instead of Swallow You Whole. I know the plan is to really not have to use it, and this team is indeed working very well, hardly need to use the bird.
But I went with Swallow You Whole, and by luck I ran into a Sunflower. After a couple of turns of AoE my opponent switched to the Sunflower and did Sunlight. The increased health pools of course made it so the sunflower had below 25% health, lol, which then made Swallow You Whole hit like a truck(elemental blow 25%). Anyway that was a fluke, but I still would like to know your thinking of choosing corrosion.
/Vek
I would like to upgrade to a P/P Wildhammer Gryphon or Imperial Eagle Chick but haven’t gotten around to it yet. This is the first time I’ve used the P/P Dragonbone Hatchling seriously. I’ve been using the H/H Fledgling Buzzard up until now but I’m really starting to like these P/P birds, especially since Adrenaline Rush makes losing the racial not such a big deal.
As far as Corrosion versus Swallow You Whole goes you are right, it’s not really part of the plan to use it so I don’t feel that it’s a huge decision but there are still a few minor reasons why I went with Corrosion. I made the assumption that if I’m using the first slot move then something went wrong and I won’t be sticking to the AoE strategy. I’ll most likely be using Tail Sweep with my Scourged Whelpling and Corrosion can set up some extra damage from both Tail Sweeps. Also I already have an aquatic attack in Acid Rain, Corrosion gives some diversity in attack types. Neither of those are really compelling reasons but that was the thought process that went into it. I’m glad that you had Swallow You Whole in the scenario you described, sticking it to a Sunflower is always a good thing.