Honestly, I think the ‘Family…’ style challenges are necessary. Yes, you might have pets left to level or collect, but other players may not. The challenges give those players something to do, if not for a short while. (again, arguably artificial content, but content nonetheless) Rewards could be improved, but overall, many Pet Battlers enjoy it.
What Blizzard could have done is communicate their intent and provide a compromise (possibly better than more battlestones from WQs). Nerf current-expansion trainer pet experience? Ok, but where is that heads-up so players don’t feel blindsided and can provide feedback/suggestions? Maybe someone else’s idea is even better and would satisfy both developer design and player desire.
The biggest flaw and downside of all of this is that it’s essentially pitting certain Pet Battlers against other Pet Battlers. Those that want to level pets feel they have a nice and convenient method of doing so taken away from them. But to not implement a ‘Family…’ challenge would be to withhold potential content from battlers who have achieved everything else they’ve set out to achieve. It didn’t help that dailies/weeklies were broken at the start of the patch. Anyway, it didn’t have to be all or nothing, one side vs. another.
Well, I’m sorry to hear that some people don’t like this achievement. I think it’s an interesting challenge, even without the reward.
Defeat Pet Tamers, but with a catch: you can only use the pets from one family. I think it puts an interesting spin on it. As for the comments that chide us for spending all this time for one lousy pet, there are ton of achievements in the game that don’t give anything for completing them.
Wanna take a look at your achievements and figure out how much time you’ve spent on achievements that give no reward at all?
You still don’t nerf an entire system because the very end of a long haul right before your goal gets slightly longer than the rest of it. If you only come out benefiting from the change under that one single circumstance, it’s still a junk system that needs to be reverted.
It might have taken 2 days of the pet battle world quests to go from 19-25, maybe 3 if you were unlucky before 8.1. Now it’s purely RNG-reward based and not feasible with the daily pet battle world quests, period.
Bingo. They didn’t HAVE to do all or nothing.
Lets be clear, many achievements, especially those that don’t have major rewards, are just there for people who are interested in them to obtain for a feather in their cap. There SHOULD be achievements like the Family Pet Battler ones. For every aspect of the game that people want to play: raid achievements for the sake of having them, pet battle, pvp, questing, dungeons, you name it.
But those achievements appeal to a smaller subset of people than the world quests as a whole are supposed to appeal to. You don’t change the entire experience system to cater to the smaller subset of people overnight without warning.
There are other ideas on the thread that could have easily accomplished both: keeping the status quo for those not interested in the achievements while catering to the achievement hunters. Like keeping the pet xp for the actual world quests the same but nerfing it the 93% for non-world quests or repeated battles. That way the casual leveling people would still have our benefit and purpose in the world quests, but the achievement hunters would also get the same intended benefit toward their grind.
They didn’t have to go for all of nothing with no warning. There are solutions that satisfy everyone. If they didn’t want to take 5 minutes to think of them, they should have at minimum actually sought out and LISTENED TO player feedback. But they didn’t even look for that, they didn’t care.
Please give normal XP for WQ battle pets. You can still do 100-200 xp when there isn’t a WQ up or WQ completed. Hardcore people will get them fast. Leisure person like me just do whatever is up for rewards. Once achievements are done we will be stuck with this low xp forever.
I might be accused of trying to second guess their motives, but I wonder if Blizzard is thinking that since we all probably have all the purchasable pets, their plan is for us to spend charms on buying more leveling stones.
Disappointing that Blizzard didn’t make these pet battles reward higher XP while the World Quest is up.
By the way, in case a Blizzard developer is reading this by chance, I would suggest using NPC phasing to accomplish this. It’s probably the easiest solution from what I know of your systems (which obviously isn’t complete knowledge but still considerable). If you phase out the normal tamer and make the WQ-version have a different tamer that appears to the player to be the same NPC, you can create a separate version of the same battle that rewards the higher XP amount while maintaining the accessibility of the tamer with the lower XP amount for achievement hunters.
I suspect that a lack of a proper system for rewarding the higher XP amount only while a WQ is up was the reason that you didn’t do it that way, but you could definitely work around it.
For those of us not interested in the achievement, running these 15-25 times in row just to make near the old XP value is really not worth leveling pets anymore.
Something has got to change somewhere to make this worth while.
How many pets do you have left to buy with the charms? I’ll wager none. I suspect most of us pretty much caught up with the pets.
So, do the pet charm quests and buy leveling stones. I suspect another reason this was done is because the Devs don’t want us hording stacks and stacks of pet charms like we did last expansion.
The means to level pets and still do it in current content is available to you.
To be clear, I think the nerf was silly. They could have had the WQ version give the previous EXP and the repeat versions give the new value. They have different clicky targets, so diff NPC id’s, which would have made it possible to do.
That said, BFA content was never the place to go level pets. The exp was more of a convenience EXP you got while doing the WQ, but it wasn’t really a place to go if the end game is to get more levels (unless of course the WQ was giving charms/stones). The EXP gains were quite a bit lower than MoP/WoD/Legion tamers (3/5 the experience), so if one was interested purely in levelling, those older tamers were the place to go. Now I think that was silly. BFA tamers should have had MoP/WoD/Legion EXP values. I’m not sure why blizzard started out with less. Seems like a misstep on their part.
So: coming back to this thread after just playing the game for a while.
Just for curiosity, I’ve been working on the BfA Family-Familiar achievement the “classic” way, just doing the WQs when up. I have three level 120 characters doing WQs (fourth today, hopefully).
I’m at 80/150 battles done, or 53%. In under two weeks. Yes, I know it’ll slow down if the distribution of trainers isn’t random, but since you don’t need all the trainers for any of the subsets, it won’t slow down that much unless a bunch of them are never up.
So: we’re giving up almost all the WQ pet XP in BfA to make a few-week-ish meta-achievement take fewer days? Really? Months upon months of nerf to slightly speed up one series of achievements?
Could we possibly get a blue post that says, we’ve heard you and sorry, you’re stuck, or we’ve heard you, and we’re making changes, or we’ve heard you and we don’t know what to do yet? Some good solutions have been proposed in this thread; crickets on doing anything about it.
And, in the days since we saw one WQ with a moderately nice pile of non-family-specific battlestones, we’ve gotten a few piles for one family or another. Right now 3 of the 4 pet battle WQs reward war resources (and a pretty trivial amount of those).
Yes: there are other ways to level pets. Yes: we don’t “need” to be able to level them in current-content WQs. Yes: we’re not entitled to be able to level them in current-content WQs. But really, what’s the point of pushing players out of current content?
As I said, it doesn’t have to push you out of current content. You can still level pets in current content. Some tamers drop leveling stones, which you can use to level pets. Others drop Pet Charms which will allow you to buy leveling stones.
I suspect the Devs want us to be spending our pet charms rather than hoarding them until we’re sitting on several stacks of them, like we did last expansion, which is probably what prompted them to create a new currency in the first place.
And as I said, I like this achievement, because finally, in this expansion, there is at least something that I can pursue that isn’t gated behind time, charms or rep (or any combination of the three). Finally, I get to pursue something at my own pace.
Yes, it is what we’re discussing. This was done intentionally to allow the meta-achievement Family Battler, which I have now completed and now have a new pet to show for it.
Has there been a slight increase in pet xp today? Since the xp squish of 8.1 WQ, I have been using my level 24 pets that are close to leveling and wasn’t worth using a stone. Each WQ gives roughly 110xp (with hat). Today I’m getting 307xp. It’s not what it use to be, but wonder if an adjust might be coming or this is it.
They really should do what others are suggesting, or at least acknowledge what we are asking and answer it or something. I was looking forward to the pet battle week cause I figured maybe the exp would be a slight bit more doable. It is not. 100xp to 300xp is not an incentive to do anything. That is with difficulty bonus and the 200% exp buff. This needs to be changed.
Yep. I had been looking forward to pet battle week, but now it’s not really anything to consider.
They never even announced they were doing this. It wasn’t in any patch notes or anything. Someone just replied here toward the start of the thread that the change was intentional: from my understanding that is the ONLY formal acknowledgement that this change has even happened. They really need to acknowledge SOMETHING.