October 22, 2014

Farewell 5.4 Part XV
The countdown ends with my three favorite teams of 5.4. I’ve been using them all night for my own personal tribute session. They’ve been doing okay, not great. The time has arrived to say goodbye with one final battle with each, hopefully they can perform well.

Team 3: Obvious Ponies
Competitive Score: 9/10
Unborn Val’kyr, Fiendish Imp, Warbot
vs. Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling, Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling, Alpine Foxling
What? An Unborn Val’kyr in my top three! As 5.4 dragged on I got sick of this pet due to seeing it in about one in every four battles, but early on I was all on board the Haunt train like everyone else. This was my go to team for wins about a year ago and the way it racked up wins solidified it as an all time favorite. Haunt is still an amazing move with a high damage DoT and a free swap. One thing that Haunt doesn’t do anymore is protect your team from these evenly split DoTs like the new Thunderbolt. Sometimes I just don’t understand why some changes happen. AoE was already powerful, why buff some AoE moves for WoD? Why some and not others? Even with the imp facing two mech dragons this battle turned out to be a challenge. If it wasn’t for the valk taking weak damage against the final MPD I would have lost. But I won, phew.

Team 2: A Bloody Dream
Competitive Score: 8/10
Darkmoon Rabbit, Snarly, Infested Bear Cub
vs. Alpine Foxling, Chi-Chi, Son Of Animus
I’ve loved bleed teams for a long time so I was ecstatic when I finally got the DMR to complement Snarly and the undead bear. It didn’t disappoint. A critter that can apply a bleed then avoid for two or three rounds, awesome. For most of 5.4 I used Stampede but with the change to Burrow I’m now using the second avoid move. Well, at least I plan to. The problem I’m having is that Rematch doesn’t autosave like PBT so I keep changing to Burrow but not saving, then when I battle again my rabbit once again has Stampede. So here I am with Stampede against this sort of healing team. Stampede ended up helping a lot because Burrow would have just been avoided by Ethereal so I guess I got lucky. I think my opponent should have one this battle but they made a few extra swaps that were unnecessary. I ended up winning comfortably.

Team 1: A New Hope
Competitive Score: 9/10
Fiendish Imp, Warbot, Sen’Jin Fetish
vs. Alpine Foxling, Chi-Chi, Son Of Animus
So here they are, my nmber one team of 5.4. Three pets that I absolutely love using, two of which are great valk counters. The Warbot and mask also do well enough against adders if played well (or the likely case of the adders not being played well). I also liked the Warbot against the Anubisath Idol in 5.4 so this team had an extra dimension of safety to it. When I was having trouble in the queue this team would almost always get me a win. These three could possibly still be a force in the future, we’ll see once the meta develops. I wish this final battle could have been more notable; it was an easy win due to me countering the opposing team fairly well. Animus ended up running away. So anti-climatic.

Now that the countdown is finished it’s time for that break I talked about. I haven’t decided if I’ll be back on November 7th for release day or if I’ll give myself a few days or a week to level and catch some pets. The latest I’ll return is November 14th. Until then, thanks for reading!