The purpose of all that is to continue the collector aspect. The battle aspect is what is being diminished. What was one thing and unified collector group before has been split in two now. You either collect to collect for your plus 1s of pets you can’t recall their names nor remember where you got or you collect pets with abilities but have nothing to do with those abilities.
7 Likes
Please explain to me as a big Pet Collector and Battler what am I suppose to do with over 66,000+ Pet Charms now? Buy leveling stones, nope have thousands of those already, buy some pets with Pet Charms nope it seems you want have new pets for me to buy and sell on the AH like I normally do in brand new Expansions….did you add some new play toys for us to buy with Pet Charms NOPE, nothing , again what am I suppose to do with 66,000+ Pet charms?
17 Likes
I’d be very interested to hear more of the devs thoughts about this. Are they even paying attention to number of folks who are unhappy about this
21 Likes
More then likely NOPE, they didn’t listen to the Disabled before TWW went live and forced us into another Pathfinder mess just to get back again Steady flying..
10 Likes
The reason people weren’t interacting with the Pet battle system is because you guys haven’t been iterating on it for some time now.
There are a lot of good, solid suggestions in this forum. There is a lot of passion around pet battles, but it feels like we’ve been forgotten for so long.
Some very strong points that I agree with and want to echo so they aren’t just skipped over:
- Amayita had a very good suggestion about letting people just get level 25 pets on the AH without one prior. People may be more likely to get into the system if they can do it quickly, and a lot of these pets on the AH are relatively cheap.
- Again Amayita mentions animation toggles. It would be nice to be able to do this. Some of the animations take longer than we really would like them to take.
- Hols mentions leveling up pets to epic. This would make the system much more user friendly and match the new philosophy of WoW. This was also a feature that was planned. It’d be nice if we finally added it.
- Hols mentions adding practical functions. This would be pretty cool to see, and I know I would engage with the system much more if there was something to gain, but not “mandatory” like player power. Having your battle pet loot for you would be an AWESOME feature. I’d purpose extending it more and even adding the ability for your battle pets to do minor buffs. Maybe like a certain kind of bet gives you +5% XP while it’s out if you upgrade and level it up. Of course, I’m not suggesting having a pet be able to give you a raid buff, but minor things would be cool.
- Taraart mentions good points like the level cap has not moved since MoP, there’s no sort of PvP win tracking, no more pet battle dungeons, and now zones are just launching with no battle pets at all. There’s so much stagnation. If you want people to interact with the system, give it a proper end game like battle dungeons.
- Taraart also mentions the UI is kinda in need of modernization like other parts of the game.
- Sothe mentions the addition of the housing system. Housing can extend the pet system in WoW as a whole. They mention cool things like dog houses, roosts, aquariums, etc. It would add value to both systems, pets and housing.
Pet battles are not interacted with, because you guys wont do anything with it. No one wants to get involved with a stagnant system with few compelling rewards and any sort of “end game.” If you guys would be willing to actually iterate on the system a bit and add this stuff, then people would actually care, and overall this could improve a lot of things. Again, Taraat makes a statement about the “magic and joy of exploration” which is something the game has been losing as of late. People may actually go out and explore the world if they could find cool pets with unique abilities.
22 Likes
I don’t know about this. I have almost a 1000 of my pets at level cap, and there are several folks who have even more than that. I don’t know if I want to have to level all those pets even higher. That’s just busy work, it’s not content.
13 Likes
If I may,
I believe part of the stagnation in pet battling is in the fact that once a pet gets to 25, you’re done with it. And that you seem to find that of the infinite pets out there, only a few standard pets end up being the “beta”
It makes me wonder if you should re-engineer pets. You use three, correct? So. Let’s go back to the idea of a “trinity” and take a page from Hunter Pets.
You have three build types you load in and a spot for a special, based on pet type. These are stand alone. Your pets then get slotted in to one of these three spaces. You change the rarity of the pet to determine the special, but you make all pets that rarity.
So all snakes become common.
But maybe there are a few types of snakes that are uncommon, so bring a special ability
And a couple of snakes are rare and provide a different special ability
And one or two kinds of snakes (maybe named) are epic, and bring a third type of ability.
Then maybe you use pet battles to collect appearances - so if you have 20 different designs for snakes, you pet battle all those appearances and there is an interface to select what your pet looks like.
That way, all you need is one actual snake. Any other snake you catch just adds to the customization of that snake. But to compensate, you can get 1 common snake, one uncommon snake, one rare snake and one epic snake (I did not think this analogy through). The battler then has countless pets they can slot into the three combat “seats” with maybe gameplay being how many of what rarity can be used.
To be honest, I’d get rid of leveling, as that is just grind. Most people wait for Squirt, or like me, throw leveling stones at pets. The joy is in finding the pets and catching them.
Though I would say, if you made a reward for collecting be you can display your three pets at a time (which should be doable. In Legion that visual was available through one of your champions, Mylune, I think). I would pet battle like it’ was nobody’s business. I want to be surrounded by Faerie dragons.
2 Likes
For context, I’m an experienced pet battler. I currently have around 1600+ pets, and it’s a large part of what keeps me involved in the game.
I’ve been playing the midnight beta just focused on what battle pets look like in general as of this expansion, and I’m going to be honest, it does not feel like you’re iterating on it. It feels like we got the old yeller treatment, and you’re trying to convince us that the plush you got us is the same thing.
The response I’m hearing from other people is mostly “oh well that sucks move on” but I have a passion for this. I’d seriously be less upset if you got rid of dungeons and raids over getting rid of pet battles.
This is the same as if you said “No more new dungeons, but you still have timewalking!” for me.
In all the zones I’ve been too it seems you have a small handful of pets, often in some obscure random location where a single one will be wandering around, and as others have said, you throw the crate, and you catch it. They are always common, and none of the ones I’ve picked up so far have been able to battle of those I’ve caught in the wild.
Haven’t hit 80 yet, but I would be very surprised if the max level zone is any different than the others.
WoW replaced Pokemon for me as my favorite pet battle game, and hearing that we wont get anything new in the new expansion is like hearing going forward, we aren’t getting any more games.
Achievements for old zones is something, but day to day, I’m going to be hanging out in the areas for the new expansion. I’ve already cleared out all the old zones for collecting, the old zones wont give me rewards related to the new expansion (like say, doing a world quest to unlock my coffer key quest for the week) .
Many of the critters in the new zones are just cosmetic, not pets, and being able to pick them up as pets is part of the fun of exploring those new zones.
Since we’’re going back to Azeroth proper having some returning pets would be awesome too, like bunnies and butterflies and such. It’s okay to reuse pets.
Part of how I play is using battle pets as part of the leveling process, collecting the new ones, and mixing in pet battles whenever I’m burned out on doing quests and fighting things.
I can start a pet battle, get up, stretch, think about what to do, use the bathroom or whatever, and come back to the game, and go back to questing.
There are a few big things you can do to make pet battles something people do, that I think past expansions tried and failed at:
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Please don’t get rid of it, even if you just call it in, copy paste old stuff, throw in a trainer or boss pet per zone with a world quest, and call it a day that’s at least something.
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Change the battle pet weekly. PvP pet battles are a subset of a subset. PvP is intimidating, give people a way to engage in a mostly PvE activity in a PvE way, don’t force PvP into it. Put the PvP weekly up with the other PvP weeklies, where it belongs. Make the PvP quest give some honor for fighting other players, and give us an event quest to actually engage with it.
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Catching things is something we do once. Yeah you tried to make it a thing with the chett list, but we can only have a max of 3 per pet. Give us something for catching #4. Leveling stones or something.
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Rewards for just doing pet battles are far and in between, so many people who enjoy them aren’t doing them all the time. You catch the pets, wait for squirt day, maybe do a few odd ones for the monthly thing and do the odd world quest, and that’s it.
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Limit scope. BFA tried, and failed, by gutting the charm system. I don’t think making it totally seasonal is the way to go. Respect the old pets, but limit the scope. Give us quests / acheivements focusing on the new pets for this expansion.
Go poke the people over on the hearthstone team for how they deal with the standard / wild split. Let us keep using our old pets, but give us a reason to focus on just the new ones. Messing with the currency isn’t the way.
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Let us buy generic things for pet coins. Drake treats, Bag of resources, sack of gold, etc. Those people hording 60k of them will run out in no time. There’s no reason to collect more once you cap out.
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Give us a daycare, leveling sucks, let us drop off our pets with someone, let them level, and come back and pick them up when maxed. Or just, make it faster. You have over a thousand pets, hours to level each is sadistic.
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GIVE QUESTS. Just normal quests and dailies. You want people to engage with it? Give them a reason too! You created one of the most awesome things ever with Little Scales. Why didn’t you repeat this!?
22 Likes
I’d consider myself a very experienced pet battler. I’ve won over 5000 PvP pet battles and have also spent a lot of time on PvE pet battling.
PvP
The last pet battle balancing happened with the BFA / SL changes, when abilities like Flock and Shattered Defenses were fundamentally reworked. This was well explained in a blue post at the time. However, there were also changes that were never explained by the devs - I’m talking about the weather abilities:
Ability: Base damage changes
Sandstorm: 25 → 45 (80%)
Call Darkness: 30 → 45 (50%)
…
The other weather abilities were also buffed, but I just wanted to mention the ones that really broke PvP. There is no way for other abilities to compete with these buffs, so PvP is now (for 5 years) dominated almost entirely by Sandstorm or Darkness teams. A good first step would be to roll back these weather changes so pet battle PvP can become more diverse again.
PVE
Content:
It’s a bit disappointing that in recent years there’s been less PvE content for pet battles.
I’d love to see another pet battle dungeon added in the future. The last one, Blackrock Depths, was quite challenging and I think for many players even too difficult.
That’s why I’d really like to see scalable pet battle dungeons.
Catching wild pets:
Some simplifications would make sense here — for example, removing the trap’s miss chance or removing the 35% health threshold.
XP:
All tamers should grant maximum XP for leveling. This would add more variety and keep players from feeling forced to only use the Legion tamers for efficient leveling.
Pet battle pacing:
For many players, pet battles feel too slow. Shortening some of the animations would make battles smoother and more enjoyable.
Unconventional / Fun / Creative Ideas
Pet Battle World Quests
Allow players to choose between:
- Classic mode
- Real-time mode
Real-time mode could have the player transform into an “angry chicken” and actively dodge, move, or attack in sync with pet abilities.
Housing
I’d love to be able to create my own pet tamer — fully customizable, with their own small area or home where pets are displayed or interact.
Auto-Battler Mode
We have such a huge variety of pets now.
A mode where players can build small armies of pets that auto-battle against large bosses (or other players teams) would be a perfect fit, something like a WoW-themed “auto chess” mode.
16 Likes
I just want something to use all my Pet charms on …I am sitting on over 66,000+ pet charms I have earned over the years, Yes I have brought 10K battle pet…matter fact I brought 2 of them for friends cause they didn’t have time to pet battle. Thank God they stack now too 5,000…at 1,000 they took up tons of room in bank alts bank.
6 Likes
You do know there are plenty who love to collect and do pet battles?
17 Likes
Still waiting for more Raiding With Leashes.
14 Likes
So your opinion is to screw those that like this feature to get something you would rather see? So of us happen to like Pet Battles and collecting these. They already screwed us out of archeology which was a fun diversion, now they have dumbed down Pet Battles…quite sad.
18 Likes
Nothing in the Beta notes about pet battles, and certainly nothing about them reversing it. I’m pretty sure Blizzard just doesn’t care about all of us posting here and in the Pet Battle forum asking for them to keep making pet battle content.
11 Likes
And you would like Blizzard to keep spending its limited resources on a feature that the vast majority of people do not engage with or enjoy. How is that any less selfish than my opinion? We’re all paying customers with preferences, and my preference is that the developers use their limited resources on features that I — and the majority of players — engage with.
Bestie you post in too many pvp threads to want to start pulling that thread but here’s the attention you are clearly craving. 
3 Likes
People wanting to burn pet battles to the ground are most of why those of us who do enjoy it are mad. Pet battles are a feature that many of us have been enjoying for over a decade.
You like pvp, imagine if the news you got was pvp was being disabled this expansion, and no pvp gear was being added, no new mounts or rewards, and all balance was stopped for pvp. Wouldn’t that make you upset? That’s why people who like pet battles are mad.
So I got a better question for you, assuming the existence of pet battles doesn’t take away from what you like, what would it have to change for it to be something that you would engage with?
16 Likes
For me you’re removing the purpose of having battle pets by removing the battle going forward. The collecting for me is 2nd to the battle, meaning everything I have worked/spent time on, collected, leveled, bought with real money or in game currency is all for naught with out pet battles. I wish player time and money spent on this aspect of the game was respected more. The new system is like here’s a mount you can’t ride. Thanks.
23 Likes
New store pack released with 2 very cute pets. But I will simply not be spending $40 on dust collectors.
14 Likes
So they should also cut out PvP, right? 
10 Likes