[3,121 of 4,647] Pets and stuff

8/4/23: I started the day at Little Scales Daycare. I baked a pie a played tag and generally did things unrelated to warcraft.

Next up, I headed to the snail races for my daily. I always dislike this one a bit - it's too far out of the way and the quests all take a long time for a minimal 100 rep.

[Zaralek Cavern Safari]! I only needed Slabwing and found one as soon as I started looking.

[Battle on the Dragon Isles]! I got lucky where the two quests that I still had to do for this one were both up today.  I also finished up a pet quest for the Zaraleth Caverns achievement.

Moving forward, I'm thinking about trying to complete ALL of the pet achievements rather than doing them piecemeal. There are a LOT of Family Battler ones that need specific pets, so this is quite an undertaking. I generally have most of the required pets (1450ish unique pets) but most are not level 25 so I really need to level them up with Super Squirt Day and the like. (Next Super Squirt Day is in 42 days).

I think a reasonable approach is to try to do all the "easy" Family Battler ones first - i.e. I already have the required team for the strats on wowhead. I should also check Xu-fu and other strat sources. While I'm doing that, I'll add all the pets that are too low level to my Rematch leveling queue so I can track them and then write down any pets that I'm still missing so I can pick them up.

Actually, speaking of missing pets, it's probably correct to first pick up all the possible missing pets by doing all of the collection achievements, plus all pet battles that reward pets themselves, like the Gnomergan dungeon etc. THEN I'll do family battler. This also implies that I can hit 1600 pets for the final "count" achievement.

The ones like 5000 pet PVP battles need to be cheesed to be done successfully. I can get an alt to queue at the same time I do and just lose to them. The queue times are atrocious otherwise and I'm at less than 500 completed in all my time playing. I have an all-undead team with a high PVP win rate but even so, it takes forever. (I reed to remember to do this in my garrison to complete the 2000 pet battles in that zone achievement as well).

I'm currently 142 of 220 in this section of the achievements. https://simplearmory.com/#/us/spirestone/deathspiral/achievements/pets

 So, to start, collection achievements and ones that reward pets for completion. 

8/5/23: I'd almost given up on getting a Vicious Broodling. I have a macro to find and kill all the normal spawns and it takes 30+ minutes of doing this to find one usually. I easily killed a hundred of the normal ones. I HATE this kind of grind and planned on doing two more circles of the area before stopping and going to do something else. I got it halfway through the last circle.

[Broken Isles Safari] is mine!

Little scales daycare was next. I did the first of the races there as well - strange mechanics! 

After this, I decided to finish my Adventure Guide for the month. I was only missing 50 points, so I flew to Soridormi and did a /boggle at them to get the final points. I also picked up another mount, putting me at 399/400!

Next up: the daily for the snail in Glimmergogg. After that one, I'm now 4/5 and 0/700 so 7 more days to go unless I can find a couple more snails at level 25 to show him.

Now I'm headed off to complete [Nazjatari Safari] - I need two more for this one, the first of which is the Hissing Chitterspine which is supposedly easy to find but hard to catch because of crab aggro. I hearthed home and took the portal to Org and then to Zandalarr and was presented with a mount quest - Time to Fly. This gave me [A Horde of Hoofbeats], one of my long-term goals, quite by accident!

And of course NOW I find out there is a 500 mount achievement :)

Anyway, finding the Hissing Chitterspine was easy enough and so now I'm off to find a Bloodseeker. It looks like this is another pet like the Vicious Broodling, where it shares a spawn point with a more common pet/critter. I already mentioned that I hate this type of grind so I'm going to try a few cycles then move on to something else and come back to this one if I don't get it.

I got interrupted and decided to pay to do an AOTC run of the final boss instead for 270k gold. Not sure why actually, it doesn't give me much chance of gear and I don't care about AOTC since I'm not raiding at the moment.

8/6/23: The AOTC run ended up giving me two bits of 4/5 Heroic gear, boosting my ilevel by 2, so it wasn't a total waste.

Anyway, I headed back to Nazjatar to try to find Bloodseeker. I did another two rounds of the place without luck. I'll do one more then I'll go do something else - as I mentioned above I HATE this kind of RNG. That said, I DID find a rare for [I thought you said they'd Be Rare?]] along the way so it wasn't a total loss. I even ended up trying a fourth time to get Bloodseeker without luck.

I hearthed out of Nazjatar and went to Little Scales Daycare for the dailies. And then promptly realized it was before 8am and they hadn't reset yet. I DID get a daily I needed though.

I headed to Mechagon, where I'm missing quite a few pets. The first one I went after was the Scrapyard Tunneler. Apparently the tricky bit about this one is that it has "explode" as a potential action making it hard to catch. The trick is to keep retrying the pet battle until you find one without explode. Also, it only appears as a secondary pet so you can't search for it, instead you need to battle other pets and see if you find one.

I didn't find one immediately but I DID find a Motorized Croaker that I needed. I also finally opened box number fifty for [Tiny Boxes, Many Rockses]! This one was easy (buy 50 boxes on the AH and open them) but every box has a 15 minute cooldown so it actually took quite a while to get done.

Next, I found a rare Experimental Roach - another one I was missing. Still no Scrapyard Tunneler though.

I found a Scrapyard Tunneler! It was a secondary pet to a Rustyroot Snooter. But it exploded :( Dammit.

I found another one! This time there were TWO rare pets plus a Scrapyard Tunneler without explode, all in a single battle. I got the Tunneler!