Pet of the Month - Feline Familiar

Discuss pet battles, strategy and theorycrafting.
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Quintessence
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Pet of the Month - Feline Familiar

Post by Quintessence » October 21st, 2014, 10:56 am

Many thanks to [profile]Liopleurodon[/profile] for writing the battling portion of our newest feature, [url=http://www.warcraftpets.com/news/feline-familiar-pet-of-the-month-october-2014/]Pet of the Month[/url]. Here are some additional points on the [pet]Feline Familiar[/pet] that she wanted to share!

How Do You Use Your Feline Familiar?
The [pet]Feline Familiar[/pet] has a number of things going for it which make it a good addition to your stable. [ability]Stoneskin[/ability] alone is an extremely powerful tool. This one ability makes the Familiar suited to a great many PVE fights, including Aki or Courageous Yon. Coupled with the odd Magic choices in the moveset, the Familiar can excel at taking down Flying pets, especially those with multi-hitting abilities like the ones in the Whispering Pandaren Spirit battle, or the first pet in the Hyuna battle.

Any weather effect is also fairly indispensable as a general point of strategy. Halving healing on its own with [ability]Call Darkness[/ability] is a huge boon, though with the new Accuracy changes, that reduction can be super aggravating, either to you or your opponent. The Feline Familiar doesn't have self-synergy with Darkness, but lots of other potential partners do.

Though having a Magic ability as a Beast is getting progressively less unique, and the counter combo is kind of odd (attacks strong against Flying, but defends against humanoid), it's still worth a mention. This goes double when you can combine this magic damage with the incredible buffing potential of [ability]Prowl[/ability]. Prowl can make things tricky with its speed reduction, but the Familiar's 289 speed isn't all that fast to begin with.

Another place the Familiar shines is in wild grinding. Its DPS is extremely high, and with [ability]Devour[/ability] you can grind a great many battles before stopping to heal up.

The Feline Familiar comes in only one breed (P/B), and its moveset is absolutely unique. The brand new pets also from the Hallow's End festival, [pet]Widget The Departed[/pet] and [pet]Cursed Birman[/pet], come the closest to replicating it. All 3 can be caged and traded, so if you miss out during October you're not totally out of luck til next year, but expect to pay a pretty penny.

The next closest pick is the extremely common Cats, which don't have much of the frills listed above, but make up for it by being ruthless murder machines.

No matter what appeal there may be in the battling arena, much of the Feline Familiar's allure comes from its model. It's pretty hard to compete with a tiny cat with a hat that flies a broom. If you think you can, here's the part where you can jump into the conversation!

So, how do you use your Feline Familiar?

-[url=http://battlepetroundup.com/]Tamer Liopleurodon[/url]
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Feel free to browse through my pet collecting blog: http://wowpetaddiction.blogspot.com

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Edonae
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Re: Pet of the Month - Feline Familiar

Post by Edonae » October 21st, 2014, 1:58 pm

The Feline Familiar is absolutely one of my favorite grinding pets, and one I would recommend EXTREMELY highly to anyone trying to level pets enough to take on trainers.

Not only does it have Stoneskin and Devour, they're both first-row abilities, so you have a full grinding moveset by L4. Stoneskin is amazing against most critters with their small, multi-hit attacks, and you can completely ignore basically any ability in the "stampede/swarm" family. What damage does make it through the Stoneskin is easily healed by Devour at the end of the fight.

The only flaw of the Familiar is that you'll have trouble against mechs, but that's a very very small number of wild pets anyhow.

All in all, it's an amazing battle pet, AND it's adorable to boot! Try taking off and flying, it follows you on its own broomstick!

(I realize I'm reiterating a lot of what Quintessence said, but I don't think I can overstate how much I like this little kitty.)

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Re: Pet of the Month - Feline Familiar

Post by Vek » October 22nd, 2014, 5:38 am

As said it works really well vs wild pets. The one thing that really holds it back in PvP is its low health of 1221. You will hardly have time to cast Stoneskin without losing a substantial amount of health for little gain so your only "defense" is to dish out your damage as fast as possible. It does have the tools for doing that with Prowl+Onyx Bite or Prowl+Call Darkness.

A couple of months ago I was trying out pets, as usual, and wanted to test the Feline Familiar. The Familiar had failed me before but I'm always up for a new try. On this day though I ran into a unsuspecting new player. First up was a bird, Prowl+Onyx Bite = Dead bird, opponent ran. Requeue my opponent tried with a dragon instead, Prowl+Call Darkness = Dead dragon, opponent ran.

So on inexperienced opposition it might be useful, but someone with a bit of experience and a tool to stop you(dodge/stun etc) will not let you get off that combination so easily. But all in all I can't really recommmend it for PvP.

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Re: Pet of the Month - Feline Familiar

Post by Ranok » October 22nd, 2014, 9:06 am

Since last Hallow's Eve I've been using Feline Familiar almost exclusively for leveling lowbie pets to 25. I've never come across another pet with its balance of hit, shield, and heal. A team with a lowbie, Feline Familiar, and a backup 25 can grind through Pandaria's 23-25 pets and hardly ever need to pause to heal the team (at least when Blizz fixes the bug that's stopped full healing on leveling). It's rare that the backup 25 is even called up. Using Devour to polish off the opponent and heal the Familiar, most battles end with the kitty at full or almost full health.

Must admit that I rarely use the Familiar for trainers or PvP.

Unfortunately, unlike the two new Hallow's Eve kitties, Feline Familiar only comes in Uncommon and needs to be battle stoned to get a rare. It's worth it.

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Re: Pet of the Month - Feline Familiar

Post by Gardenvariety » October 28th, 2014, 5:26 pm

Ranok wrote:Must admit that I rarely use the Familiar for trainers or PvP.
I have a lvl 25 Feline Familiar but I haven't really found much use for it. Most of my pets are leveled through tamers, so I don't really need it for wild pet lvling, I feel there are better suited pets for tamers (P/P Emerald Proto Whelp in particular), and I am not a huge fan of it in PvP.

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