Pet Leveling from 1-25

I power level my battle pets. No secret! Once I got that first team up to level 25 and 5.1 dropped I have been taking advantage of the fact that the high level pets no longer have XP soaking issues and been leveling a pet a night that I log on! It's been awesome!

But how do you get that first team up there? Well, that's the hard part. Much like your first level capped character, your first level capped team is a lot of hard work.

What I did was stuck with one 'main' pet. I only leveled one pet in my first team from 1-25. I found it was a lot easier to take on higher level pets with my current team and capture them and then switch out one of my two other slots for the freshly caught pet.

This way I was able to concentrate on a zone only long enough to level the one pet (the others were already at level!) and then move on. By the time I got to Outlands the pets (level 25) weren't staying capped so it was just a minor grind to get them all their last few levels and boom! I had a capped team!

I also found this helped me get my safari achievements and find quite a few rares! 

Other things that helped:

• Open up dailies as quickly as you can. The XP gains from the dailies and defeating the tamers are enormous and a huge help. 
• Horde dailies are in Kalimdor. 
• Alliance dailies are in Eastern Kingdoms. 
• Check out the tamers before you jump into battle! They will have their pets running around them. Clicking on the pets will give you their levels and types. 
• If your team can't beat a tamer wait a few levels and come back. This is much quicker then leveling a new pet that has the type advantage.
• Have fun! 

Sick!

Sorry for the unintended hiatus, I have been MIA for the last two weeks because I got horribly awfully sick and lost my voice as part of it.

Alludra's pets and Mannerly Mage are back on track!

In the meantime, check out the AIE podcast (episode 125) if you want to see what I did for the few hours I actually had vocal cords!

I was totally wrong!!

Nevermind! Looks like I was totally wrong about pet squish! Guys!! Go sell your pets!! make the gold and get rich!!

Pet consolidation?

In the latest show of battlepets I had to cut out about 10 minutes of discussion. This wasn't fun or easy but the tone of the segment didn't match the rest and the show was running overlong.

The topic was the upcoming pet squish. Or if there was a pet squish and how we'd like to see it happen.

Kaivax on the forums mentioned something that has had me wondering about this topic since the post went up :
4. All standard pets will be merged. There will be a limit of three per type for players, but the migration can exceed this limit. Examples of standard pets: Orange Tabby Cat, Brown Prairie Dog, Crimson Whelpling. (source)

It's the language here that has me thinking. It doesn't say we get to cage and sell our pets, in fact the first sentence implies that consolidation may be something out of our control. Now I read the rest of the 26 page thread, and most people seemed concerned with the migration part. That's cool and all, but the migration is over, successful, and hopefully went as smoothly for everyone as it did for me. Now it's time to wonder a bit about this merger.

I know many people are counting on the fact that they will be able to crate up their excess pets once Pandaria launches and hit the AH for profit, but there is nothing in this language that states that this will be the case.

Personally, I am not counting on it. Why? Because a flood of pets in the AH on these scales would drive down the prices of pets down to the ground. As Kephas pointed out, Blizzard is very protective of their in game economies, and them allowing us to sell hundreds of pets at once will not be good for it at all.

While I am of mixed minds about what I would like to see happen, Keph believes that having our excess pets go 'poof' will probably be the best thing for us all. It will protect the market, and it will allow us to make profit off our pets in the future. This is a fair point and one I understand, but I also put a lot of work into these pets, and while most of my collection is single pets I do have a few 'valuable' pets (even if putting them on the market will decrease their value). Moreover, I have a very strong desire to pick up pets on the cheap!

So what am I doing? Well right now I am actually releasing pets. Not all my excess, just a few of the less valuable ones, and multiples of that I know I can't sell (I have 15 pets that fit this bill just between the Miniwing and the jousting pets! ). Then I am trying to save pets I like the stats of or are more valuable by naming three of them. Hopefully those with the names might get avoided by the delete-o-squish!

Hopefully this is one of those cases where I am over thinking the situation and everything will be awesome and work out for the best! But we all know that there is no way to make everyone happy.

Trying to play the Beta

Tonight I tried to play the beta. I heard the harvest moon was implemented and I wanted to see for myself.

NO, I did not misspell farmville.

Anyway, I got a series of disconnects. Of course it's a beta, but I was still bummed. My first three went without comment. Why bother, but then I decided to have fun with the 'what were you doing?' message.

11:30 (Paraphrased)
Well I was eating some magey cake after a battle with some thuggish rodents who are terrorizing a farm village. I think the game is telling me to diet.

11:32
So I was running from my interrupted mage picnic mentioned in my last DC, and boom another DC. So first, don't eat the cake, now it's don't go jogging. Too soon after eating? (Mixed messages here Blizzard!)

11:37 (after taking the time out to start the post)
Was walking off my cramp from too much mage cake, game crashed. yes that's right walking! Hit the / button and everything. No idea where to go from here, can't exactly float away. (Chubby pandas need diets remember?)

11:41
Went to mount, got another crash instantly. Going to try floating again. See if that can help. Sadly I am not a priest. Is this a hint?

11:44
While pondering my non priest like powers it occurred to me to blink out of what is clearly a crash zone. Happily I was able to avoid crashing for a full two minutes! Got to run past a herd of thuggish rodents who were the reason for my initial cake indulgence in the first place. I turned to look to try and tag one of them quickly before they got out of range and this proved to be my downfall! The game had a fatal error. Crashed to desktop for what will be the final time of the night. For now I am logging into Rift.

A blog?? No way!

Yes way!

There are many times I just want to talk about something fun and amazing and I have nowhere else to put it! This is where I am going to stuff all that cool Alludra-ness that can't be contained in 140 characters or in a segment. (And let's face it, those have set topics!)

Time will tell how much I update all this, it's likely not going to happen often!