Pet Spotlight: Fluxfire Feline

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Today’s Pet Spotlight is the by-now-infamous Fluxfire Feline, whose claim to fame is the incredibly overpowered combo of Supercharge + Wind-Up.  Supercharge increases the damage of the next attack by 150%, and Wind-Up takes 2 rounds to perform, but does twice the damage of a normal strike (+10%).  The end result is incredibly high damage: In 3 rounds, you can do nearly 6 times the damage of a normal attack.  With the high-power breed pictured here, that’s about a 2,000 damage strike, enough to one-shot almost all tamer pets and player pets in pvp battles.  What’s worse (or better, depending on your point of view), the damage happens all at once, and there is no way to stop it by stunning the Fluxfire Feline; both the Supercharge and Wind-Up buffs are not time-limited, meaning they will stay on the pet until consumed.  And Supercharge is on a 3-round cooldown, so you can chain 2 Supercharged Wind-ups in a row by casting the following sequence:

  1. Supercharge
  2. Wind-up 
  3. Wind-up 
  4. Wind-up
  5. Supercharge
  6. Wind-up

Some of these imbalances will be addressed in Patch 5.2 in the form of a Supercharge nerf. It will now have a 4-round cooldown, and only increase the damage of the strike by 125% instead of 150%. A number of pets have Supercharge, but Fluxfire Feline is unique among them in that is the only one that can have both Supercharge and Wind-Up simultaneously; in all the others, you have to pick one or the other. The Fluxfire Feline will retain its ability set, meaning you can still Supercharge Wind-Up, it’ll just for hit slightly less; or you could Prowl Wind-Up for the same amount of damage, but at a higher cooldown.  In my opinion, this doesn’t change this pet’s usefulness very much; a post-nerf Supercharged Wind-up will still hit for around 1800, and a Prowled Wind-up will still hit as hard as it always did.  Fluxfire Feline will likely remain a pet of choice for many tamer battles and PVP encounters.

To get your hands on one, head down to New Tinkertown, southwest of Ironforge (the new Gnone starter area).  They can spawn just about anywhere above ground.  There are a limited number of spawn points, so if you are itching to get a rare one quickly, you can do what I did and make a few low level gnome characters on different battlegroups to try all the spawns.