Saturday 22nd May 2021

Ordinarily in a day multiple things happen that could make a subject for the day’s edition of The Climb.  It might be progress on some writing or some new piece of productivity or progress.  However, today one and only one thing happened.

I leveled Battle Pets in World of Warcraft.

So Battle Pets are a bit like Pokemon but set in the worlds of WoW.  They can be rewards, loot drops or animals out in the wild that you capture.  There’s a whole game mechanic devoted to it.  There are PvE quests, Battle Pet Dungeons,  and PvP.

I’ve never really done a lot of Battle Pets stuff.  I like collecting them, but that’s about it.  And that’s been my problem.  Because each battle pet can be leveled up to level 25 and I just get one and leave it at level 1.  And so if there’s an achievement to do with a battle pet, I can’t do it because none of my pets are leveled up.  And they don’t seemed to be easy to level either.  You need to do a lot of winning battles with them to get them to level 25.

EXCEPT

There are two events that help players.

The first is the Battle Pet Week where XP gained is boosted.  That happens every 8 – 12 weeks (I’m not sure exactly).

Then there’s a NPC called Squirt that you can unlock to battle that you can easily do with just 2 battle pets, allowing the 3rd slot to go to a level 1.  There’s even a point in the NPC’s rotation that allows you time to swap your leveling battle pet in and out.  I think the NPC also gives bonus XP.

However to get this NPC you need to have the garrison from Draenor unlocked, have learnt the blueprint to build the menagerie and have built it (to level 2 I think), which needs specific resources.

Like the Battle Pet Week, Squirt is on a rotation.

But what happens about twice a year is that Squirt will appear during a Battle Pet Week on what is know as Super Squirt Day.

The idea behind this is that because of the bonus XP, and because you can put a level 1 in your third slot and swap them in and out while one of Squirt’s battle pets has a couple of turns of non-offensive moves, you can level up quick!

Indeed, in just two battles, you can get to level 24.  If you have some bonuses you can get to 25.

But it takes a lot of prep.

As I’ve said, first you need to get Squirt to appear at your Garrison by having a level 2 Menagerie.  But you also need a couple of specific battle pets at level 25 to do the strategy.

I’ve had the menagerie for a while now.  But where I struggled was having the battle pets needed to do this strategy.

I did that last year.  I had some power up stones (I don’t know where I got them from but I’d had them years and buried them away in a guild bank) I used to get a 2-man team.

The other challenge with Super Squirt day is that it is only one day and most of the WoW news outlets don’t tell you until late afternoon.  Last time, I found out early enough to go through and level up a lot of my decent pets.

It was a bit like opening the flood gates.  Once I had those 2 level 25s I could do the event and level up a load more.  I think I did about 80 last time.

But I made a note of the date for this time.

This time I was ready.

I played for close to 20 hours today, doing nothing but fighting Squirt.  The aim was to level as many of my battle pets as possible.  It was boring as hell but I watched a few Netflix programmes and Youtube as I did it.  Even when I went to the support sofa, I cracked out the laptop and carried on.

I think I did something like 300-400 Battle Pets today.  I still have a load left.

But with all these at level 25, it should mean I have more selection when it comes to some of the PvE achievements.

It was a long day, where I did nothing but the same thing over and over again.  But seeing as Battle Pets are shared across all you characters, it’s a really big investment for the future, and I hope it’ll allow me to complete some of the harder content before Super Squirt Day rolls around again in November.

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