I have so many pets yet I lost all motivation to level them. There’s so many and yet the leveling system is so slow.
Wild Pets in general give way too little EXP and trainer pets require cheese tactics if you’re trying to level pets.
I suggest greatly increasing exp gain in all forms and letting players have 6 Bystander pets that gain exp despite not being in the battle.
I can’t relate to that. At least, I can’t now.
When I was about at your stage of developing a roster, I remember I wrote a post titled
“How do you stay sane when levelling so many pets?”
But that was back in Mists, when the only Tamer battles available were the Pandaria dailies, when XP rewards were much much lower, and when there were effectively no Charms or Stones to help.
I would advise you to do what I did later: find teams for the repeatable Legion tamers and for Squirt, and then get busy when one of them is up. They’re all laid out on Xu-Fu’s https://www.wow-petguide.com/
Finishing yoru Taming The World achieve for the Safari Hat and the extra 10% XP would be good to do first.
I don’t understand the complaint about “cheese teams”. Legion Tamers - and Squirt - aren’t that hard to make your own strats for, if you don’t like the ones presented. However, the ones on Xu-Fu will generally be both faster and slicker than one you come up with yourself, and I suppose you can semi-automate them with Battle Pet Scripts addon if you really must.
That doesn’t sound fun at all… Farming Squirt over and over again with a cheese team.
Well, that’s an opinion. And you’re certainly entitled to it.
I tend to think that we’re kind of spoiled when it comes to leveling pets. I remember the time when the experience was nerfed in BfA because of Family Battler. Rather than be grateful for the new challenge that they gave us – Yay! Someone’s thinking about the Pet Battling community – the response instead was outrage. Never mind that all the tamers in Draenor and Pandaria are still available. We simply didn’t want to go to Draenor or Pandaria (never mind that these were both mere hearthstone clicks away, and possibly a portal or two.
I haven’t counted all the leveling stones in my bank, partially because I haven’t consolidated them all onto one toon. But I would venture to say if someone were to drop 50 random pets of all types, I could level them all to 25 without ever leaving my bank. And that’s a conservative estimate. To truly deplete my bank, the number of pets I could level is probably much higher.
I just can’t help but feel that, with all the leveling stones available in the WQ, if you’re frustrated with leveling, it’s because you’re not availing yourself of the resources you have available.
But you are right. Leveling pets, without using stones, tends to be a tedious process. There was a time when I was doing the Draenor and the Pandarian circuits every single day. And the tactics were always the same. It tends to get boring, and rather than use the stones I had, I tended to just hoard them.
On Squirt days, I would spend hours in my Garrison, watching Boneshard twirl his way through the opposition.
You’re not wrong, and honestly I think people forget that we have over 1700 pets available in-game, and telling someone to sit in one spot for hours is not appealing. Especially for people who haven’t had the benefit of leveling this massive collection in increments over years.
A passive leveling stable wouldn’t be a bad idea, where you could talk to maybe a stable master to slot X number of pets to passively level. Didn’t Pokemon have something like this? The daycare?
Yes, them killing a way for us to level pets efficiently any time we want Post-Legion is obnoxious. Not everything in the game has to have a punishment factor, especially for something that I am constantly told is not meant to be a primary way of playing the game. Let people level the way they want.
They could have just put all the tamers on a rotation. The biggest issue with the Legion tamers is the randomness. You can go a whole month without seeing one you need for the achievements. It’s a bad system. And it’s okay to point that out.
As for the WoD and Pandaria rotations, again, we have ~ 1700 pets, it would take an atrocious amount of time for players to try and level a whole roster that way.
Just 'cos my brain works on numbers, I pulled up a spreadsheet to estimate how long it would take to level EVERYTHING in the game.
Here’s the simplified version:
Assume each battle takes 2 minutes (that should be an overestimate)
Assume that Level 1 pets need 4 battles (that is an underestimate for reguilar unbuffed, but sausages and Pet Weeks would bring the average in line)
~1100 pets start at level 1, and need 4 battles = 4400 battles
~600 wild pets start at various levels, but most start at 23, so need only one battle. Call it 2 battles on average for these = 1200 battles.
Total = 5600 battles @ 30 battles/hour = 186 hours
Now, you can play with any of the estimates. You can say you will work only during pet Weeks, or that you never will. But that seems to me a reasonable estimate of the maximum time to level every pet.
It’s a lot. Ofc you get a twofer of XP because you will use a levelling alt. Still, it’s not trivial. But, soberingly, I realise it’s less time than I spent farming Clutch of Ji-Kun ( and then never used it.)
With Pet Battle week it takes 2 fights to level a pet from 1 to 25. Then hope that the Snail Fight WQ is up in Legion as it has the fastest fight strat currently of any repeatable trainer at 52 seconds.
Download Battle scripts and map the action key to Spacebar and then zone out and watch a netflix series while occasionally hitting space bar.
Well, if you do that, you’re looking at one-quarter of the time, or ~45 hours. Snail Fight isn’t up that often, but there are plenty around the 1 minute mark. You would be constrained by availability, but it would be possible, if not always convenient.
I would also point out that all of us, including me, have a surplus of leveling stones in the Bank that we don’t use. I just now did the Draenor circuit to finish leveling up four pets, two of which were captured 23rd level.
Obviously, I could have done that just by going to my bank, and I would have done it much faster. And with the surplus of leveling stones I have, I wouldn’t have even noticed the ones I spent.
I would submit that everyone, including me, has no right to complain about the difficulty of leveling pets when we have stacks and stacks of leveling stones in our banks. Moreover, there are opportunities to acquire more stones every day. And if you don’t get the ones you need on any particular day, you will acquire the pet charms on any given to day to buy what you need.
Personally, in BfA, I remember being overjoyed at the Family Battler achievement and I didn’t care one iota about the loss of experience (which they attempted to make up for by increasing the rate of leveling stones).
Finally, in an expansion full of exasperating time gates, like implausible and difficult geography, waiting forever for flying to finally be released, tiered professions, and every thing else that the Devs put into place to make everything as tedious and time-consuming as possible, here was an achievement we could all work on at our pace, with no time gates in place, no rep to acquire, no currency to earn, and the pet tamers, like Denny’s, were always open.
Perhaps I’m not the best person to judge this, since I already have all the pets I need to do whatever I want in game, but I didn’t care about the lost XP. I was just so happy to have something else to do that was fun and challenging, without the time gates.
You do. I do. Lots of us regulars do. Part of the reason I have so many Stones is that I enjoy levelling pets, and I always have an alt free who could use a little extra XP, so I mostly don’t bother using the stones.
Newcomers, OTOH, don’t have stones. And they’re the ones facing the most pets to level. More than that, they haven’t developed familiarity with the levelling process, the teams, the battles. So it is uphill for them.
And I wouldn’t object to some rearrangement of ways to gain XP. I did one long day of Squirt, and a second half-day, and it is not inspiring. The process of grinding non-stop is not fun, but when MMO players are given a choice between efficient and fun, it’s no contest.
Remember that the primary goal of World of Warcraft from Blizzard’s point of view is to keep all its participants busy so they’ll keep subscribing. There’s really no reason for them to make things easier or faster unless it’s become so discouraging that players start bailing.
Pet Battling, and collecting, is a most welcome addition to the game for many of us. But from the time it was introduced has meant putting in a lot of hours. Nobody needs over a thousand 25-level pets, fewer than 100 can handle pretty much any challenge in any battles. True there’s a good feeling about having a big stable of maxxed pets but you need to be prepared to work at it.
I can’t help but chuckle any time someone refers to XuFu’s strategies as “cheese teams” or “cheating,” or whatever other terms they use. Learning on your own is fine, but if you are running the cycle to do dailies or mass leveling at a trainer why bang your head against the wall and spending more time doing it when another option is available?
I look at it the same as I do dungeon and raid bosses–for the most part everyone does the same strategies because they know they work and are efficient. My time is limited in game and what I want to do is plentiful, if I can level a pet in 4 minutes versus double/triple that time I am going to do it every single time.
There are times when I will stop and try to figure out teams to beat a certain tamer
There are definitely certain tamers where I have developed a strat that isn’t optimal, but works for me
But I don’t see any reason to beat my head for an hour trying to come up with the right combo. There’s more stuff that I want to do than that. Thank God there are people that enjoy it.
But the OP has 357 pets and CBA to level them. At this point it’s so brain dead easy to level pets, it’s hard to be sympathetic.
At a certain point you just have to admit you don’t enjoy something and move on. I;m closing in on 1600 pets. If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t be there.
I seldom do. I have teams that I like to call “Steamroller teams.” You probably have such teams yourself.
Basically it’s just any team that can be reliably called upon to defeat almost anything. Which one I use depends upon the situation. If I see a tamer that is using two or three flyers, for instance, they’re getting my three P/P Nexus Whelplings. The results are predictable.
Or a beast-heavy team, three of my Iron Starlettes will work. Or three Timeless Mechanical Dragonlings if it’s a magic-heavy team, etc. Once you know who your heavy hitters are, you can usually come up with the counter.
The counter is always going to be:
You only need about 30-50 pets to do EVERY bit of pet battle content in this game. Everything else is on the player, a “cosmetic.”
So Blizzard will take the stance of “you don’t HAVE to do it. And leveling a mere 30-50 pets isn’t asking a lot. Working as intended. Done.”
Until you can refute this, nothing will change. I mean… on top of the fact the pet battle community is VERY small so I don’t know how much Blizzard would give a toss in the first place. But assuming you catch them on a good day, you have to address why they need to let people level pets in-mass, when it’s technically not needed.
I’m not sure I understand your point.
“You only need about 30-50 pets to do EVERY bit of pet battle content in this game” is not actually true, It is true for non-Family content, but you will want ~300 for Family stuff.
“You don’t HAVE to do it. And leveling a mere 30-50 pets isn’t asking a lot. Working as intended. Done.” This is all true.
“Until you can refute this, nothing will change.” Did I give impression that this is an issue I desperately want change on? Apart from some small things, the only change I’m personally invested in would be battles that can’t be botted, but have to be solved on the spot.
I said above that I could get behind some restructuring of levelling for newcomers with large backlogs to level, and that is true, but I’m not going to show up with a placard about it. Blizzard have just been dumping hundreds of new pets every expansion, while not addressing the battling aspect. This creates an increasing backlog of pets to be levelled (but probably never used). I did my levelling back when there were maybe 1000, but levelling was much hardere and slower.
“on top of the fact the pet battle community is VERY small” I don’t believe that. If we look at the Wowhead achieve numbers, we see up to 25% of players involved, and certainly 12-15% pretty current. Considering the fragmentation there is in playstyles, that’s not small.
“You have to address why they need to let people level pets in-mass, when it’s technically not needed.” Batch levelling isn’t great, but this IS a grindy game, so it’s not out of place. I’d be Ok with, say, a significant increase in the chance of getting Stones from each battle. But then, levelling is SO, SO much faster and easier than it was in my day, I can’t get excited about it. And, as we worked out above, if you take advantage of Pet Weeks, you can probably level every pet in the game over the course of three or four Pet Weeks without wearing out your keyboard. ( I wish I could say the same for Genesis Motes.)
Really?
I mean, I haven’t counted or anything, but my offhand observation would be that each of the “Family Battle” Achvs tend to have a core-team that always wins.
So yes, in SL/Dragon Zones you had multiple tamers you had to beat with all Humanoid teams… but EACH of those tamers could be beat with VERY SIMILAR/ the exact same Humanoid teams!
So while there were 9 tamers in SL, you didn’t need 27 pets (of each family), but more like 5.
And of that lot, many of the pets that are used, are ones that are ALWAYS used. Ikky for Flying, Zanda raptors for Beast, etc etc. There is WAYYYY too much crossover for me to accept your claim.
Otherwise, why make a post about it? Maybe you misunderstood my point. It’s not that I’m against your idea, I’m fine to argue for it. But the counter argument against it … just seems stronger. At least when it comes to just “doing content.”
Just to check, I asked Xu-Fu to dump all Family teams, and after de-duping, I get a list just short of 500. That 500 would get me a deluxe tour of the achievements, since they will be the highest rated strats, most likely to work first time.
Now, that ofc doesn’t mean that it can’t be done with less. And my 300 is, I admit, just an estimate. I can believe that someone with a lot of experience and willing to experiment and solve could do it with maybe half of that - say 150-200. I remember doing BfA, especially, very easily, using a core team for each Family, but having to change it up for several battles.
But I absolutely don’t believe 30-50 for all battles. You obviously would need to start with 30 for 10 teams of three. I make it 57 Family tamers, with 10 families per tamer, making 570 battles in total. If you need to swap in an exchange for just one in three of those, you’re already over 200. I’d be dubious of 100, but would consider it maybe possible, for someone willing to invest a lot of time in experiments and failures and RNG. Not 30-50.
But all of that is a bit OT here.
On the other point, which does relate to the OP’s complaint, I’m actually not sure what we’re arguing about at this stage. I think the devs are adding too many Level 1 external drops and not enough wild pets you gain organically within the system. And that adds some pretty empty levelling grind, and I’d be fine with adding some more organic XP to compensate. But I don’t consider it a big deal.
Horse manure.
There are ten families among our pets. To say that 30 pets is all you need to do the Family content, you would need a team of three of each family that can do all Family Battle content for every expansion that featured Family Battles, from Legion up. There is no team of three in any family that can do every single pet battle in the Family Battle achievements.
But let’s go to the higher end of your estimate. 50 pets to do all of the content in the Family Battler. That averages five pets from each family. You can take five pets from any pet family, and from these five, arranged however you want, teamed up in any combination of three, and you can do all the fights in every Family Battle Achievement.
Again, horse manure.
And this is to say nothing of the pet battles in Dragon Isles that call upon you to defeat the various pet tamers with one particular family. Or the various pet tamers on all the continents, which you would need for various achievements, many of which give pet rewards, and the Safari Hat.
Could you, with a stable of fifty pets, do all the Pet Dungeons, from Celestial Tournament to Blackrock Caverns, and defeat all the pet tamers, on all the continents? Maybe, but I doubt it.
Yes, I get that many pets do double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, sextuple, septuple, octuple, etc. duty, but 30-50 pets to do all content is laugh out loud hilarious.