WhelpCamp'08

The Mounts and Pets Tab Feature is coming. I must prepare. As many essential camps as possible must be out of the way before WotLK goes live, because once that occurs I will be concerned with the leveling of 3 characters and I will not have time to sit on my ass in Burning Goat and pop lowbie trash in the hopes they'll cough up something cute.

I figured I'd start big and get cracking on one of the biggest Pain in the Ass Pet camps: whelplings. Whelplings come in four different varieties: black, green, blue, and red (or as I like to call them, Death, Pestilence, Famine, and War). The black, green, and red whelps all drop from level 23-43 mobs in equivalent zones, while the blue whelp drops from elite dragonkin in Azshara. Each whelp is a 1 in 1000 chance drop from its respective mob. Good times!

My first stop on the Whelp Train was the green whelp camp, in the aptly-named Swamp of Sorrows. The green camp is generally considered to be the worst out of the bunch, as there are a very small number of whelps available to kill and only about a third to a half of them are the actual mobs (Dreaming Whelps) that drop the whelpling pet. The rest of them (Adolescent Whelps) are potential placeholders for Dreaming Whelps, though, so you have to kill everything in the hopes that more potential whelp drops will spawn. It's inefficient and very, very, boring. There's downtime while you wait for respawns. There's nothing else that's fun to kill nearby. You're stuffed into a small corner of the zone away from everything with no company except for a batty night elf NPC in a cave nearby who won't talk to you. The zone's color scheme gives one the impression of being in a depressing 70's era apartment with avocado kitchen appliances, nasty brown shag carpeting, and an orange multi-print couch next to an album shelf containing nothing but the collected works of Zamfir, Master of the Pan-flute. If that isn't an excuse to drink heavily, I don't know what is.

Adding in some more fun to the mix is the fact that these whelps are also the target of a quest line in SoS, so every once in a while you have to deal with lowbies coming in who not only want to kill all the mobs you've been painstakingly trying to get to spawn for the past couple of hours, they can't understand why you're a little reluctant to back off and let them do it. I'm generally a very accommodating soul, and most of the time an amicable agreement can be reached, but I had two winners at life show up about an hour and a half into my time there and begin to gank as many spawns as they could get their greasy little meathooks on, then send me a tell saying how incredibly rude I was to not let them quest here. I apologized for not wearing my psychic pants (they had not given me so much as a "howdy, mind if we finish our quest" or anything) and offered them all the adolescent spawns if I could kill the dreaming spawns, as those are the only ones I'm interested in. They decided that wasn't a good option, put me on ignore, and continued to try to race me to any whelp that popped in the area.

Well. Once negotiations failed, I was faced with two options. Option one, back off and let them quest and eventually they will leave. Option two, go Jihad Mode and make them earn every single spawn for their retarded quest. I think we all know what I chose. Hey, it gave me at least a solid 30 minutes of high-octane entertainment until they decided to leave. I stuck around for a bit after that but the magic was gone. I called it quits at the green camp for the time being and headed somewhere else. Green whelp camp: marginally more fun than stabbing yourself in the eye.

During this time, through some judicious leverage on my part involving CCing a Shadow Labs group, I acquired a minion to help me camp the whelps. He went over to the blue whelp camp, and I decided to go down there and keep him company.

Compared to the green whelp camp, the blue whelp camp is like flying a winged unicorn around in a field of marshmallow flowers next to rivers of chocolate and honey, while a golden sun smiles down upon you and all is right and peaceful with the universe. Azshara gets top points for scenery in my books, and the mobs are elites so I don't have to worry about any lowbies cramping my style. It seemed like a very pleasant camp overall, so I was all ready to hunker down and have some nice few hours of farming in a place that didn't blow goat balls. Natch, I get the blue whelpling drop after about 5 kills. Oh well. Onward to the red camp!

Overall, red camp isn't that bad. There's TONS of little whelps flapping all over the place so there's zero downtime if you just pick a spot and run around in a big circle killing everything you see. Two people can easily share the camp and the mobs are very low level (mid-20's) so they die fast. Anyone who tells you Lost Whelps are placeholders for the other whelps, though, is a big fat Lying McLiarson. Lost Whelps always spawn Lost Whelps and they do not drop a whelp pet, so don't waste your time with them. Terminate everything else with extreme prejudice.

(Side note: after about 3 hours at red whelp camp, I really began to wish my character had skinning skill.)

Eventually my minion and I decided that greater efficiency would be had if we split our time at the various camps, so he stayed at red camp and I headed over to Badlands to see a Scalding Whelp about a whelp. The black whelp camp has its pros and cons. Pro: no other mobs in the area except for whelps, and no irritating placeholders. Cons: the camp is split into two equal-sized sections by a large area with big black drakes flying around in it so there's some time lost riding back and forth between the two locales. Also, the scenery is boring. However, there is mithril. If you're a miner, you can make some decent bank off selling the mithril you find while doing this camp. While it's not my top choice for camping, it could always be worse, like the green camp. I don't think I can express how much of a festering pile of dog stink the green whelp camp is.

While doing the black whelp camp, I also got this as a drop, which while definitely NOT a whelp, was certainly appreciated nonetheless. You'll be killing enough crap running through the WhelpamaPhoneaThon that you'll probably get at least one world-drop blue item if not an epic at some point. Once I hunkered down at black camp, it took probably about 3 solid days of 2-3 hours invested each day before the black whelp dropped for me. My minion, meanwhile, was still dutifully camping the red whelps. That meant the only thing left for me was heading over to the still-aptly-named Swamp of Sorrows (preferably with a large bottle of cheap red wine) and getting back to the ugly grind. Bleh.

I consider it the purest form of karmic reward that I returned to that godforsaken pit of a zone, killed 2 whelps and got the drop. Maybe there is a a Higher Power in this world, after all. The next day while we were raiding, a guildmate hand-delivered me a shiny new red whelpling, courtesy of my camp-minion, who had also gotten lucky the other day. My whelp collection complete after only a week and a half of solid work! I consider that to be "not too shabby."

Of course, this means I need to pick a new soul-breakingly long activity to finish. I'm currently debating either the Disgusting Oozeling Camp, or the Wintersaber Mount Grind. Judging by the horror stories I've heard from each, both sound like they sit at about roughly the same location on the Crappy Camp Scale, but at least the mount is a guaranteed thing after the time invested.