Battle Pet Theme Team: Lunar Festival

For the first official Theme Team post the theme is based on the current in-game world event - Lunar Festival. Lunar Festival is Azeroths tribute to Chinese new year. MoP brought a whole range of oriental-themed items to Azeroth. Amongst them is a number of battle pets - such as dragons and kites. Whilst these may seem like obvious contenders for this theme I've decided to focus more on the lunar/magic aspect. For Chinese new year (10th February) I will post a more oriental themed team.

This is my first year doing the Lunar Festival achievements and as a result I don't have either of the two pets available form the event. There is two versions of the festival pet - a Horde pet, Festival Lantern, and an Alliance pet, Lunar Lantern . Both of these can be purchased for 50 Coin of Ancestry.

Wowhead's guide to Lunar Festival can be found here and WoW Insider's here.

The pet images presented below are taken from warcraftpets.com. The pet names serve as links to the pets respective pages at warcraftpets.com so you can look in greater depthy at their abilities if you wish.

Contenders...

Lunar Festival Pets - Lunar Lantern & Festival Lantern

These two pets (Alliance & Horde respectively) are both part of the magic family and share the same abilities. The abilities available to these pets are largely magical with only two abilities being non-magical.

 

Enchanting Pets - Magic Lamp & Enchanted Lantern

 

These two pets (Alliance & Horde respectively) are made by enchanters. They are both from the magic family but have different abilities. The Enchanted Lantern has the exact same abilities as the Lunar Lantern & Festival Lantern.  The Magic Lamp has different abilities with only one being non-magic.

 

Enchanted Broom

 

The Enchanted Broom can be purchased for 40 Champion's Seals. Again it is from the magic family of battle pets but it has a range of abilities including non-magic ones. The three non-magic abilities are spread throughout the ability slots meaning it's possible to not use a single magic ability.

 

Canine Beast Pets

 

 

The four canine (beast family) models above are the Fjord Worg Pup, Worg Pup, Alpine Foxling / Alpine Foxling Kit / Arctic Fox Kit and Fox Kit respectively. They are from a variety of sources including a dungeon drop, zone drop and capturable. They all shame the same set of abilities - a mixture of beast and critter. I've chosen to incude these beasts as contenders as they not only add a non-magic element but also because they howl at the moon.

Final Three...

 

The majority of the battle pets that I've chosen are from the magic family and most of them are heavy on magic abilities. This has made finding a balanced three-pet theme team quite hard. So, I've made as balanced a team as was possible.

 

I chose the Enchanted Lantern for its largely magic abilities, aesthetics and because it's the only lantern of the four included that I own, the Enchanted Broom for it's variety of non-magic abilities and the Fjord Worg Pup for not being magical and it's appearance.

 

As this is the first Battle Pet Theme Team post I'd really appreciate any feedback!

I toyed with the idea of talking about the individual pet abilities available to each pet and the possibilty of including a table of these abilities. In the end I wasn't sure how useful this would be to the overall blog (particularly as most of the pets in this post share abilities) and didn't include too much detail.

Please comment / email me any feedback / thoughts on how Theme Teams can be improved for the next addition. Thanks!