https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/pet-battles-in-visions-of-n-zoth/364680
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If we;re going to go down that road, let’s take a swipe at the Fiendish Imp with the nerf bat. Either move Nether Gate to the same line as Immolation or ratchet down the passive healing humanoids get.
Hermit Crab may be overbudgeted, but the Aquatic racial is one of the weakest ones in the game. You added approximately 4192 Aquatic pets in BFA, but many are just not worth using. A more powerful racial might rectify that.
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Ikky is overpowered in pve pet battles, but easy enough to counter in pvp. Another overpowered pet in pve is probably iron starlette, with windup + overcharge.
On the one hand I’m not a big fan of the way pet battle stuff works and wish that development time was better allocated.
On the other hand, scaling pet battles means I can do the stupid quests for rep without investing in grinding through the system for days or weeks on end.
Welp, start doing those pet battle achievements you’ve been putting off, folks.
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I feel like the only thing that kept me from doing all of the pet battle dailies and everything was having to grind out pets to level 25 when it seemed like more grind I didn’t feel like putting up with.
If they make it so I can go and do that stuff with various pets that I don’t have to have a full roster of level 25, then it’ll probably be something I’ll be more interested in.
I imagine they’ll keep it the way it is now: Dailies can be any level, but achievements need level 25 pets.
I agree Sunshine is OP for both elemental and aquatic healing pets. it just makes a battle take so much longer.
I’m unclear if players really enjoy like 5-20 mins of me doing a self heal over and over and then swapping in an aquatic or other self-healer pet then they self heal, bring in a dps pet…over and over. If that’s what people like, I’m more than happy to continue. I have worn all those self heal players down.
I’m glad Blizz took the time to poll and chat us about pet battle changes…maybe they did at BlizzCon?
They did not. 
In fact, the only thing that was tangentially related to pet battles that was mentioned, was during the Make-A-Wish charity stuff. They showed off the baby alpaca, and then told us a little girl named Amara helped them with (what I think is) the current secret–Jenafur–as part of her Wish.
Unlike pokemon, the way pet battles are designed takes some very specific pets with specific moves to win (unless you have 500+ pets at your disposal and you have a lot of free time to come up with different types of strat), nerfing a pet because the majority of casual pet battler who are only doing it because it’s a world quest and a major way of getting reps in mechagon and nazjatar, imho it’s petty af. You’re making it so hardcore and keep other people from getting into the game, just because you don’t want players to win the game YOU designed, it’s pathetic really.
If you don’t want players to cheese the battle, try shutting down wowhead or xu-fu where people share their strats, please let me know when you succeeded.
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I have 1206 unique pets, but I still agree with you.
Anything that results in fewer players managing pet battles is bad for pet battling as a whole. I do not want to see my friends, who do not take pet battling as seriously as I do, driven away.
If Blizzard does not want us using stampede/bomb type teams, they should give future tamers 3 pet teams, instead of just one monster pet per tamer.
I am still concerned that after the changes pet tamers and elite pets in Argus, Tanaan Jungle, and Celestial Tournament will be impossible, or nearly so, to defeat. As things are it took me hundreds of pet battles to get the Argus family battler achievement, and some battles left me really feeling like giving up.
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I haven’t done argus and the celestial tournament yet but for tanaan jungle I use anubisath, a bunny, and a emerald proto-whelp for most of fights.
Last night I spent more than an hour on the goldenbot XD because he was stomping through all my elementals and bunnies, until I decided that a few rep and 15 pet charms isn’t worth the time and effort.
This is how I see the nazjatar and mechagon boss pets, most of them are able to 2 shot my pets, 50% damage reduction, and some of them can even heal themselves up. It’s just a world quest, not a celestial tournament.
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Some good ones but most garbage changes, like the “balance” changes that are not asked for… Good going Blizzard more bad changes you try to wrap up as a plus.
Lets hope “what the Future Holds” is not these trash changes.
Challenging pet fights are fun but I hate most of the new pet boss fights for reasons you just described. I loathed most of those Tanaan fights where your first two pets just got obliterated by turn 3.
A good challenge needn’t mean the boss kills your team by turn 4 unless you have that one pet with the unique move set. Since Tanaan they all seem to be like that and it’s not fun.
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This goes back to several OP moves from earlier times. Haunt and stall. Howl bomb. Clone Dance. All had their reign of terror in both PVE and PVP.
The problem is that whatever challenge they come up with, it will eventually be defeated by the collective efforts of hundreds of pet battlers. And once a strategy is disseminated, it makes a battle trivial.
No one can blame us for finding the easiest way to complete a battle. We have varying degrees of free time. I have no desire to spend 30 minutes on one pet battle on a daily basis.
OTOH, the devs have shown that they don’t like it when players come up with the one solution and everyone adopts it (think water strider).
The problem is that it’s a band-aid solution. Yes it will stop the Ikky Shuffle. But players will figure out something else and everyone will adopt that. It creates a lot of ill will but accomplishes very little.
There are better answers to this. But it seems the devs are either too lazy or not creative enough to figure it out. At least they are giving us a heads up. But it still won’t accomplish much.
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At least with other older content I can one shot all the boss mobs. Some of those older pet battles can be really tedious. Between all the flying around to get to them, then there isn’t an easy mode.
Trainers and bosses haven’t really stood up to the test of time. Sometimes I just want to smack around a pet trainer and be on my way so I don’t have to have a full on 25 round fight complete with animations and whatnot for the 900th time. Especially when I know exactly what the AI has in store.
I’m fine with some pets being tweaked, but you guys need to take a really long and good look at every trainer and pet npc mob. Some are near impossible unless you do things like the Stampede/Hunting Party/etc… tactics. Then when you add some elite battles that give 50% innate damage reduction and that pet has a move like Crouch which adds another 50%, that’s a bit much. Since it effectively blocks ALL damage for several rounds unless you have the Shattered Defenses debuff active.
I honestly fear you guys are just going to blanket nerf certain pet ability types while not even glancing at existing battles to see how they will be affected.
Make elite pet battles hard, by all means. But knock off the tediousness of 1 or 2 shot moves paired with 50% reduction, with the added bonus of sometimes healing to full, dodging multiple turns in a row, being able to block all damage for several turns in a row(again, unless Shattered Defenses is up), etc…
TLDR: If you are going to specifically target and nerf strong abilities that make the tedious elite battles less tedious, then perhaps you guys should take a long look at why people resort to those methods in the first place. Tedious is not fun. Tedious is not hard. Tedious is, tedious. Don’t just make things more tedious just because.
(Obviously I’m talking strictly PvE, I have zero clue how things go on the PvP side so won’t comment on that)
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I’m fairly sure that’s why they are taking the nerf bat to a lot of pets to try and reign in that kind of design which require the ridiculous force multiplier strategies.