Serpentshrine Cavern Pet Run

Among the rare battle pets added in patch 5.3, the ones that drop in the Serpentshrine Caverns (SSC) should be on your farming list. That’s because they don’t exactly have a high drop rate, and their price is typically high.

Here’s a short guide for what you have to do and which are the pets.

Requirements:

• Minimum level 90;

Where to go:

Teleport to Shattrath City, fly either to Zabra’Jin (33,51) if you play Horde, or Telredor (68,47) if you play Alliance, and from there go to Coilfang Reservoir (50,41), in the middle of the big lake of Zangarmarsh.

If you haven’t been to the instances at the Coilfang Reservoir before, to get to the entrance, you have to dive in between the big pipes coming out of the lake, and swim across the pipe below the lake. The entrance to the SSC raid instance is the big portal in the middle.

 

What to do:

There are three bosses inside Serpentshrine Cavern which drop a pet.

– Tainted Waveling is dropped by Hydross the Unstable
– Tideskipper is dropped by Morogrim Tidewalker
– Coilfang Stalker is dropped by Lady Vashj

You can see the location of each boss on the map above. It’s pretty easy to get to each one, just follow the ramps and suspended paths. You don’t have to clear any mobs if you don’t want to. Just go for the three bosses.

The first two bosses, Hydross and Morogrim are easy to defeat. With a 100 lvl character they should die in 2 seconds. Lady Vashj though, requires some tactics to defeat.

This is what you must do to defeat Lady Vashj.

There are 3 phases:

1) Spank until her HP drops at 50%.

2) Once at 50% she will become immune to any attack. So, in order to make her attackable once more, you have to deactivate the four towers around her. To do that, you must kill 4 Tainted Elementals that will spawn at the base of the stairs of the platform where Lady Vashj is. There is a timer between the spawn of each Tainted Elemental and when one spawns, you have to quickly kill it because they de-spawn after several seconds. When you manage to kill a Tainted Elemental, you will be able to loot a Tainted Core, which allows you to deactivate one tower.

Between the spawns of the Tainted Elementals, kill as many Enchanted Elementals you can, preventing them to reach the boss. Each Enchanted Elemental will give her a charge of damage buff. If you come here with a lvl 90 character, keep in mind that if she reaches 99 stacks (maximum), she will pretty much hurt you. So, try to deactivate all the towers before it gets to that. Also, among the mobs that will attack you in phase 2, you will see a Coilfang Strider from time to time. Kill that first, with a ranged attack if possible. They fear you a few times, and not only it can get annoying, it will allow many Enchanted Elementals to get to the boss, and you may also fail to catch a Tainted Elemental that just happens to spawn at that particular moment.

3) After taking down all the towers, just kill the boss, and take the loot.

One SSC run that involves killing just these 3 bosses, should take about 15 minutes. Now, if you do this with only one character, you may not get any pet. But if you have 3-4 characters at 90+, do a run with each one of them, and you should be able to get at least one pet.

The pets sell for up to 5,000g depending on server.

Loot:

On my last SSC pet run session, completing it with 4 characters, which took about an hour (15 min. each), I managed to get two pets:

Tainted Waveling x 1 = 2,000g
Tideskipper x 1 = 3,300g

Total: 5,300g after one hour.

Tips:

Avoid falling in the water while on the platforms and ramps. You will get attacked by fish while in the water, and you won’t be able to keep any water walking buff on. So, it will be a bit problematic to get back up.

Consider leveling up any of these pets before selling them. This way you can get up to 1,000-1,500g extra profit.

If you have Enchanting on your character, you can go for a full clear. You will get plenty of Void Crystals by disenchanting the BoP loot, and sometimes they can go for up to 10-20g a piece.