My strange pet battle addiction

I finally succumbed to pet battle. It all began when I did the achievement Raiding with leashes. I farmed the old raids for a couple of week but Chrominius wouldn't drop. I was tired of running Blackwing lair so I bought it on the AH. The problem is that he was level 15 and I couldn't learn him. So I decided to level a team.

I did the pet battle tamer quests and tried to collect as many different pets as I could. My team consisted of three rares: a black rat, an ash spiderling and Chrominius when I got access to it. Having a critter in my team wasn't the optimal choice tough because I was often faced against beast opponents.

A typical battle would be my spider attacking first: web, leech, poison, leech, web and so on, slowly draining my opponent health. My rat would then go, hopefully against another critter since he had an attack that was strong against his own kind. He would poison then stampede them wich leaves a powerful debuff on the ennemy that would double the damage of the following attacks. The only drawback was that to apply the debuff you had to do three round of swarm wich do rather weak damage. I tried to apply it just before dying, so my next pet could benefit from it. Chrominius was my secret weapon for two reason: he could apply the same debuff with Howl and he had a magic nuke that could do up to 2k damage but that would leave him powerless for three round, so I would use it as a finisher, hope it connects and cheese most of the fight with it.

I managed to beat all pet battle tamer up to Northrend but then they became too much to handle so I leveled my pets to 25 before coming back. After this I managed to beat every pet battle tamer including Chi in Pandaria. I then moved on to the achievement Pandaren Spirit Tamer and Fabled Pandaren tamer. But here was a couple of fights that I couldn't beat with my group composition, such as Ti'un the Wanderer and the Thundering pandaren spirit. So I decided to level different family of pet with a method called "Haul em up". This method consist of attacking with the pet you are leveling then switching with max level pet to finish the battle. As long as your pet can survive one round you can match him against way higher level pet then him and get bonus experiences due to difficulty.  I leveled an aquatic pet this way so I could add a healer to my team and a flying amber moth, who was strong against aquatic and resistant against beast. With these two new members I managed to beat all the spirit tamers and all the elite beasts.

With patch 5.3, there is a new achievement called Raiding with leashes II: Attunement edition. So it  it will give me a reason to visit Kara again. All those raids can be soloed including Kara chess event, the red riding hood and Lady Vashj. Mileage may vary depending on your class tough, good luck!