WoW Pet Battle Review: Lil’ XT and Kirin Tor Familiar

April 20, 2013

I return to you a humbler, more anxious and paranoid man than I was almost a month ago when I introduced the Area of Effect pet battle team. I had dreams of killing pets by the truckload with a few simple button presses, but how did it work outside of dreamworld?

If You Enjoy This Article, Please Consider Donating

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe to The WoW Pet Battle Crew on iTunes or via RSS!

Goal of the team

I built this team because I’ve always wanted to try an AOE team that killed all 3 enemy pets at the same time, and patch 5.2 provided some minor buffs to the strategy that I thought might finally make it worthwhile. Lil’ XT had been sitting in my bench for a long time, begging to let me unleash his huge AoE ability, and I thought I had finally found a team strong enough to back him up.

Your suggestions

• Skruffy Zookeeper is a new listener who jumped right into the team with me this week, which is just awesome. I’ve been doing this show for 15 episodes now, and this was the first time that someone created the team and played alongside me–and actually a few people did it this week. Skruffy went out and bought Lil’ XT and paired it up with a Lofty Libram. After a few bad matches, he thought that the team needed more AoE damage and a solid dodge to avoid big attacks. So he put in a Spawn of G’nathus for his third

  I think Spawn of G’nathus is an incredible addition to this team, but he’s so hard to get that I didn’t even mention him on the original show. He drops off of a group rare in the ocean of Kun-Lai Summit (called G’nathus unsurprisingly). I tried to form a group for this every night for a week, since it takes at least 4 people to kill it without some intense 20-minute kiting tactic. I even offered hundreds of gold to anyone that would help me and never got a single response.

  But, hey, if you can get this pet–by all means give it a shot! Skruffy had amazing success with it! He got 47 wins and only a couple losses the first day he used it and in his own words, “ Most were not even close wins; some were so bad I was doing that I feel sorry for you kinda wins.” He also told me that “Lil XT is great but you have to use him knowing you are only gonna get to use hime once.”



Oh, Call Lightning, we meet again.

• Green Armadillo also pointed out that there is a cheap knock-off of Lil XT available in-game. Engineers can make the Personal World Destroyer. It has a lot of the same type of abilities, but all a little weaker. It’s AoE Quake hits for 17% less damage, and his damage buff is Supercharge, which doesn’t hurt himself, but only gives +125% damage boost for 1 turn, instead of 100% for 2 rounds.

  Armadillo also says that it’s really hard to not go with Call Lightning and suggests the dragons who can also cast Cyclone for more AoE damage. I agree that it’s extremely tempting, Armadillo–and I’ll talk about my experiences with it later.

• Fluid Core wrote in with a link that shows every AoE ability in the game, which is super useful! He also mentioned occasionally fogetting that the Kirin Tor Familiar is actually an Elemental-type family, despite dealing all magic damage. I forgot that a lot too, thinking he would survive a huge nuke and then watching it die. Whoops!
• Later in the week, Green Armadillo showed up to suggest putting a single-target DPS machine into the third slot. He found that having only AoE made it hard to eliminate threat, and that having a pet that could “clean up” after the AoE might be useful.

  He suggested the Nexus Whelpling for its Mana Surge ability, which lasts 3 rounds and deals bonus damage when in the weather effect that the Kirin Tor Familiar spawns. It sounded like a great fit, but I didn’t have a Nexus Whelpling in my stable at all.

• Thankfully, Holybee showed up, who’d also been trying this team and had a great recommendation as well. Holybee wanted a pet with “a nice single target burst, with small passive heals, and some small amount of speed.” And found it all in Harbinger of Flame–that pet we used on the last team and already have leveled up to 25. Perfect!

  Holybee also had two other insights to provide about the team:
  “If they trigger Heartbroken, Lil’ XT’s Tantrum is absolutely devastating. He is very much the glass cannon though”
  “This team is either extremely effective or you get demolished. Very rarely is it a matter of one hit, one miss, or who has the last hit like with some other comps. While it was not the most fun to level, it is pretty fun to play at cap, and seams to win more than it looses at cap too.”

Changes I made to the lineup:

I swapped pets around a lot while leveling this team. I wasn’t quite sure which AoE pet I wanted in that third slot, and even ran it without Lil XT early on since my XT was already level 21 and the rest were below 5.

I ended up ditching the Darkmoon Zeppelin because having one Mechanical pet on the team is already really hard, and having two just guarantees you lose against any team with an Elemental pet.

I ended up ditching Curious Wolvar Pup because I usually only got to use his AoE ability once before it died (it has a 4 round cooldown), and there are much better pets with single-target damage or utility to fill the third slot.

I wanted to run Spawn of G’nathus or Nexus Whelping in the third slot at least for awhile, but like I mentioned earlier, couldn’t get my hands on either in the time I had to test this team. So if you don’t like my lineup, try slotting in one of those.

Instead, I settled into having the Harbinger of Flame in the third slot. It excels at cleaning up the low-damage pets left behind the AoE torrent left behind by the third pets. He’s also just a really strong pet on its own, letting it duels with most of the big threat pets you might face.

When it works:

When the lineup worked, my opponent jaw must’ve hit the floor. When Lil XT gets his Heartbroken damage buff for two rounds and unleashes his huge 3-turn AoE against a team with no Elemental pets and at least one beast pet, it can kill the frontline pet, and take the backline to below half health.

It’s amazing. Then I swap in the Kirin Tor Familiar to spam some more AoEs and kill the other two pets at the same time. When Lil XT’s ability dominated, I didn’t even need a third pet.

I really like Heartbroken as an ability
It’s the equivalent of a red-mana card in Magic. It’s high risk, high reward that relies on massive aggression. It’s a little frustrating that you have to rely on the other team being greedy enough to attack you and trigger it, but they usually did. The best was when there was a DoT on XT that I could use to trigger the buff a turn early if XT was faster than the opponent and the other pet used a defensive ability or swapped out.

Tympanic Tantrum was just as effective as I thought
Even not pumped up, it’s a solid damage dealer, and pumped up, it’s an absolute monster.

Lil XT has some on the most ridiculous voice effects
Anyone who fought the real XT in Ulduar will know.

Arcane Explosion was more effective than I thought it would be
If I got a couple lucky crits on the front line pet, it would provide some pressure on that pet to force it to use defensive abilities, just buying me more time to spam AoEs. The Elemental aspect came in handy more than once to avoid annoying weather effects.

When it doesn’t work:

There’s really only one reason why this team failed to win: I could not get XT’s supercharged AoE off on a non-Elemental pet. Whenever I could make that happen, it was almost always a guaranteed win. But without it, this team just didn’t have the raw firepower to take the match.

There’s two factors that make this problem a fairly big one:
1. Getting the supercharge relies on your opponent CHOOSING to give it to you. He has to attack you for you to get the damage buff, and smart players will resist the temptation of dealing more damage to you because they know it will hurt them in the long run.
2. There are a lot of elemental pets out there, and they’re still pretty darn popular.

Sandstorm is my bane once more
All AoE hits are broken up into smaller chunks. Even XT’s huge hits are broken up into two smaller attacks on the frontline pet that just evaporate in Sandstorm.

Arcane Winds is bugged
I was able to still be stunned by the Kun-Lai Runt on my Curious Wolvar Pup and Harbinger of Flame (both Humanoid). It was really annoying, because stopping stuns is pretty much the only thing that the weather effect is supposed to do, and it doesn’t do it. The Kun-Lai Runt is super popular right now too; I fought it in probably 20% of my fights.

So a bad game looked a bit like this:
I would take a risk and start with XT while they had an Elemental pet on my bench. They would start with the Elemental pet. I would activate Heartbroken and they would either spend that turn either powering up a big attack (Deep Breath, Pump, etc.) so I would not get the damage buff.
Or they’d unleash a huge Elemental hit that, thanks to the 50% damage taken from my Heartbroken would one-shot my pet.

In either scenario, XT would get one turn of a super-powered AoE or 2 turns of a weak AoE before dying.

In the worst games, a couple of the pets on the enemy team would dodge the AoE so that I lost an entire pet while only dealing about 10% damage to 2 of their pets. From there, my other two pets would take turns stepping up to the firing squad and getting exploded.

See the team in action

Note: Twitch seems to have lost my livestream for this team. I’m working with them to try and track it down. Apologies for teasing the livestream on the podcast while the it’s MIA!

Final record

49 – 39 (56% win ratio)

This is one of my least impressive win ratios so far, and that doesn’t really surprise me. I went into this team fully aware that it wasn’t an optimum team–that it had some glaring weak spots I knew would drag down the ratio.

Do I still use the team?

Yes. I still had fun with the team, despite not having a great win-loss ratio. Even though it happened less often than I would’ve liked, seeing Lil’ XT bring down an entire team’s health bars from full to zero was incredibly fun, and so surprising for both me and my opponent that I got a little bit addicted to it. Watching one pet just wreck their team is really quite funny — you just have to have be able to stomach the other 80% of games where you’ll have a much harder time of winning.

Individual pet reviews

LiL’ XT: 8 — Lil’ XT is a solid pet. He has the best AoE potential of any pet in the game, but that power is offest by being fairly easy to shut down. When your opponent lets you activate its full potential, however, it’s really, really fun.

Kirin Tor Familiar: 6 — This pet worked well in this lineup, but I’m not convinced he’ll work great anywhere else. His AoE spam isn’t worthwhile without a heavy hitter like XT to back it up, and it’s single-target damage is interesting, but not the most effective.

Harbinger of Flame: 9 — I’m sticking with what I said in his first review on the last team’s episode.

Curious Wolvar Pup: 4 — If Snap Trap was more reliable, I might be more excited about this little rascal. But without his most unique ability, the rest of his kit is just blah, and his visuals aren’t cool enough to carry him. Pass, unless you simply can’t resist ferocious yet adorable woodland critters.

Join The Podcast

• SUBSCRIBE to the WoW Battle Pet Crew podcast on iTunes or this RSS feed.
• FOLLOW me on Twitter or Google+
• MEET fellow battle pet tamers and discuss team strategies and the latest pet battle news in our Google+ Community.
• GUESS what the mystery pet is on next week’s podcast! Congratulations to Kiisu for spotting the obnoxious tones of Harpy Youngling on this week’s show!

Tags: pets, World of Warcraft