Darkmoon Zeppelin

Available from Lhara at the darkmoon faire for 90 Darkmoon Prize Tickets the new currency for the updated Darkmoon Faire.

[npc=68838] is a somewhat dangerous and increasingly common pet to see in PVP battles due to the "I can one-shot you in 3 turns" mechanics (Wind-Up + Supercharged + Wind-Up). A somewhat novel way to counter this pet is with [item=73905] . Note that [item=87526] is an identical pet (in terms of the abilities you will be using) and thus works as well, but comes as Uncommon by default, meaning you have to get a stone to upgrade it first. I'll be referring to the Zeppelin in the explanation for this reason, but the two are obviously interchangeable.

First of all, you'll be equipping Thunderbolt in the tier 1 slot, not surprising, since it does extra damage to mechanical. You'll basically be Thunderbolting them to death with a few exceptions where you'll be using Decoy.

The real trick is Decoy in the tier 2 slot however. This ability will absorb 2 incoming attacks, which by default works well against one-hitting attacks that only occur every few turns, like the Fluxfire Feline's. Now, there's a few ways that this can play out:

1) If your Zeppelin is faster than their Fluxfire:
This is a little bit of a simpler situation. You can wait until you see the opponent cast Supercharged and then drop the Decoy on the next turn. This will cause their Supercharged attack to get absorbed with the decoy, wasting their 3 turns of preparation as well as putting their Supercharged on cooldown. They'll then follow up with a tier 1 attack to break your Decoy, at which point you'll be back to a slug-fest.

If the opponent is smart, they'll realize what you intend to do with Decoy and try to attack a turn early. At a bare minimum, this will prevent them from using a Supercharged combo, but will still hit hard. If you anticipate your opponent trying this, you should drop your Decoy a turn early. THIS will do one of two things. If they Wind-Up a second time as you expect, you'll now absorb 2 turns with the attacks, and they'll still need to use their tier 1 attack once before they can start up again. Well worth the effort. If they Supercharge instead, unless they're stupid, they'll follow up with tier 1 attacks for 2 turns; however, this will still burn their Supercharge as it will get used up in the first tier 1 attack absorbed by Decoy.

2) Your Zeppelin is slower
Same idea, except now you have to anticipate your opponents moves a little better. If you think they're going to use a full-out 3-turn one-shot, then you need to drop your decoy on the turn that they're going to Supercharge so that it's up when they're ready to one-shot. Unless your opponent is naive, they'll now use two tier 1 attacks to break the Decoy, which will preserve their Wind-Up charge but will waste Supercharged.

If your opponent is smart enough to not waste a Supercharged Wind-Up because they know you're going to Decoy, then you need to drop Decoy on the first turn. This is obviously the least effeective case as it no longer wastes either Supercharged or a Wind-Up charge, but it will still draw 2 turns of their attacks in exchange for just 1 turn of dropping the Decoy. That is, unless they open with Supercharged instead of Wind-Up, in which case you still waste one of their cooldowns.

In either case, you should be able to delay for enough turns to kill the Fluxfire; remember that both you and the Fluxfire rez on death. Luckily, your tier 1 talent hits substantially harder than theirs (due to it being elemental), so you should easily beat them if you get into a tier 1 slug-fest, with their only advantage being if they combine both Wind-Up and Supercharged.

This is a pet I'd highly recommend if you're having problem beating the Thundering Pandaren Trainer. One of the hardest things about this fight is that the final pet is a beast with an extremely hard-hitting magic attack (albeit one on a cooldown). One requires magical attacks to exploit its weakness as a beast, but the magic attack will cause your pet to get nearly one-shotted. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of pets out there with mechanical attacks that aren't mechanical themself.

The key to the Zeppelin is its ability "Decoy". Decoy is a 5-round cooldown ability that puts up a target dummy. The target dummy will block the next two attacks against your team and has infinitely-long duration (that is, the Dummy will not despawn after a certain number of rounds; rather, it will stay for any number of rounds until it gets hit twice). The beast that Thundering Pandaren Tamer uses has two attacks, and both have 3-round cooldowns to them, meaning that the Decoy ability can be used to block almost every single attack he does (with the cooldown coming up almost as fast as he can do 2 attacks). He elemental attack will still hit incredibly hard, but he won't get many hits in; probably one at most.

And of course the Zeppelin uses an array of sufficiently strong mechanical attacks.

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Note that the strength of the Decoy ability is highly variable from fight to fight. It blocks a fixed number of hits. So for example, a mob that does an ability that hits your backline pets will eat up both charges of Decoy and still have one left over. A pet that does 3 attacks will have 2 blocked and the third hit. So against abilities like this, Decoy is really worthless.

Against "normal" attacks (one round, one hit), Decoy is a beneficial ability to cast; you lose one turn to do it, but you block two enemy turns worth the attacks, buying you one "free" round.

Against multi-turn attacks and cooldowns, this ability is extremely strong. If the enemy does 4 attacks in 2 rounds (think, for example, Lil Tarecgosa's 3-round strike followed by a standard attack), then you're essentially just bought 3 free rounds of damage. Actual players will probably be smart enough not to do this and at a minimum will use no-cooldown attacks, but the computer is not so smart; it generally uses its cooldowns more or less on cooldown.