Bad Abilities

What’s up with some of the pet battle abilities? Some of them are legitimately terrible.

How about Uncertainty? Let’s take Faceless Mindlasher.

You can choose between Uncertainty or Inner Vision.

Uncertainty increases your critical strike chance by 100% and reduces your accuracy by 25% for one round with a three round cooldown!

Inner vision increases your damage by 100% with a 1 round cooldown.

Now I don’t think inner Vision is a particularly good ability outside of certain niche uses, but it looks like black claw compared to how bad Uncertainty is. Like am I missing something? Usually the abilities with drawbacks would be overpowered if they didn’t have them, but even without the drawback Uncertainty would be a contender for the worst battle pet ability in the game. I don’t even know how an ability that useless made it into the game. Meanwhile Hawk Eye increases your critical strike chance by 75% for 4 rounds.

Speaking of Hawk Eye, have you seen Caw? It’s a 50% critical strike chance for 3 rounds… strictly inferior. Seems like it could do for a tuning pass.

Then there is Cute as a Button, which gives you a 25% dodge chance for two rounds. Was memey enough on the Elekk Plushie, but BFA has brought out a bunch of pets that have this ability. Now there is Cute Face, which increases your dodge chance by 25% for 4 rounds, which isn’t super strong, but it’s not useless. Cute as a Button is a joke and nearly useless outside of a theoretically very gimmicky high RNG dependent strat. So is there some sort of anti power creep going on, are these pets deliberately being made inferior, or has some silly stuff up been done and the dev’s genuinely got confused between Cute as a Button and Cute Face?

While someone explains these anomalies, feel free to add your own candidates for terrible abilities if you have any.

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I’ve just seen the really bad moves as a way for Blizz to sneakily cut down on the options a pet has - sad, because it means some pets are much less fun than they could be.

When it comes to a percentage buff to a chance ability, I find it frustrating if I don’t know what the base chance of that ability is.
If I have a 1% crit chance, doubling it isn’t worth it.
If I have a 50% crit chance, doubling it is sweet.

very likely oversight
blizz have been really sloppy on that sort of thing in the last few xpacs

they probably meant to give cute face to those pets but just got it mixed up with cute as a button