Hunt For Rares or Hunt For Stones?

I have a dilemma. I'm torn between continuing the hunt for rare quality pets, or hunting for flawless battle-stones. Doing both at the same time isn't really an option.

Hunting for Rares
If I continue my original route, and continue to look for rare quality pets, this would mean a lot of time spent (wasted) sitting and waiting for them to spawn. Now that these pets are on staggered spawn times, they're less predictable. They also spawn in much smaller batches, so there's fewer of these gems to go around.

But that's not what bothers me. It's the endless waiting while not doing anything other than waiting. I can't count how many times I've just sat a toon at a spot and then tabbed out to watch youtube or do something else. Every now and then, I'd tab back into game to check if any wild pets had poppped up.

It's not exactly the most interesting, exciting, or even fun thing to do. I mean, it's great if you stumble on a newly spawned wild pet, but when you're actively looking for one, most of your time will be spent staring at nothing.

It's kind of frustrating.

Oh, and I'm not talking about hunting for rares of the more commonly found pets. I'm referring to the wild companions that have specific spawns, only in one zone, and slow repsawn times.

Nevermind the RNG of happening upon a rare version of one of these pets. What about the RNG of even finding one? This makes the hunt for the highest quality a real pain.

I will grit my teeth and do it for the sake of a pet, but this is nothing like vanilla collecting when you were actively going around and doing something that would ultimately reward a pet.

Killing mobs that have a chance to drop a companion, questing for a companion, heck, even collecting the materials and recipe to craft a pet! Collecting back then required action and you felt productive.

Right now sitting and waiting doesn't feel all that productive.

Hunting for Flawless Battle-Stones
Trying to collect specific battle-stones isn't all fun and games either, though. There are specific pets that I'd like to upgrade.

There isn't a problem when it comes to pets in the Critter, Beast, Flying, and Aquatic families. You could easily go out and battle as many of those as you like for a chance at a battle-stone. Since family-specific stones can come from defeating a pet of that particular family, these four stones shouldn't be all that hard to come by. Critter, Beast, Flying, and Aquatic pets are everywhere. The world is saturated with them.

But what about Humanoid, Magic, Dragonkin and Elemental, Mechanical and Undead? Trying to get stones specifically for these families is a lot tougher. There are fewer spawns for these families, and on top of that many of them are the "rarer" (hard to find and slow to spawn) wild pets. Trying to battle a bunch of these for a shot at a family-specific battle-stone is extremely inefficient and near impossible.

If these family types had faster respawn times, maybe it would be feasible. Or if the family-specific stones had a higher chance to drop from these types. But as things are now, it's hard to even find one let alone get a battle-stone from defeating it.

Plus, if I'm using these wild companions as fodder for a chance at a certain battle-stone, it will probably inconvenience others who are actually looking to just collect the pet. While I'm killing the wild pets, someone is desiring to simply capture it.

Blah
Of course I could simply hope RNG is on my side and do the Tamer dailies every day (which I already do), but like I mentioned before, I'd like to upgrade specific pets. It's entirely random which one you happen to loot from the daily reward bag. At least if I'm out battling specific pets, I can have some control over which type of stone I might get.

So which path do I take? Continue to sit and camp spawn points? Go out and camp specific family spawn points? Just battle everything and hope I get a non-family specific stone?

The end goal remains the same: collect and/or upgrade pets to rare. Now I just have to pick how I want to go about this. It's just incredibly frustrating when your options are all pretty undesirable.