It’s not a high traffic form of content bc they refuse to design anything repeatable. If they gave pet battle dungeons seasonal affixes or increasing difficulty levels like M+, or introduced multiplayer raids like in recent Pokemon generations, maybe that could change. If enemies had a multiple teams or learned to play differently based on pet usage or whatever, that might help too. But there hasn’t even been a new pet dungeon for almost 6 years; can you imagine not getting a new raid for 6 years? What would raid engagement look like at that point?
15 Likes
Starting with Midnight instead of battling and capturing pets, instead we will collect them in the wild by right clicking them, which throws cages. These new ‘wild pets’ will not have the ability to level up or engage in pet battles.
The current in game pet battle system will not be removed and shall remain.
I’m not uncertain if we’ll get pet battle world quests in Midnight and I’m unclear on what this all means for the pet battle week.
8 Likes
The answer is quite simple. It’s a system few people were engaging with. The main reason people did pet battles at all was to capture and collect the pets. PvP pet battles were extremely rare, hardly anyone was doing the pet battle dungeons etc.
Why devote hours and hours of manpower to a system that hardly anyone is using?
No, the Nintendo patent has no bearing on this change at all.
6 Likes
Just use nugminipet addon and its always out?
My main has a flying/ground mount of its own so it doesn’t even despawn when I mount and fly.
Will old pets retain the ability to battle or are they nuking everything?
1 Like
Old pets aren’t changing and all the pet battle activities in the game will also remain. It’s just not something they’re going to be focusing on moving forward.
7 Likes
All of those can be true at the same time and I totally bet it’s all your reasons plus not wanting to have even an inch of sue-able content by Nintendo.
If it was low engagement content and now it poses a financial risk, it’s 100% understandable it happened. I hope they integrate pets into housing eventually.
You’d lose that bet, because it’s not happening due to Nintendo.
The Nintendo patent means nothing as far as this game is concerned.
7 Likes
Metric: Development time to upkeep and maintain is greater value than the number of players utilizing it.
Not enough people for making it profitable sadly.
It is what it is.
I stopped pet battling, collecting for two expansion , it was a lot of fun during mop but it kinda got stale for me
I don’t think they should remove it but if they don;t want to balance it any more, then go ahead remove pvp pet battles and the legendary battles. If players want to duel they should be able to do that .
1 Like
I use an add on called PetWalker, it summons random favourite pets so you always have one by your side.
4 Likes
So, I’ve been chipping away at the 1,000 PvP wins achievement for the ‘Trainer’ title, about halfway there now. It has been a few expansions since I started.
Will do a few pet battles a day/week, depends on how much I feel like grinding between other content, and I will pet battle while watching YouTube sometimes.
I have noticed this- pet battle queues are rarely ever that long.
I don’t think it’s bots/CPUs, because sometimes they take a while to take their turn.
What I do notice, is that pet battle queues are always shorter than PvP queues, no matter the content. (The rare exception for an instant Blitz pop during some nights.)
Are pet battles more popular than PvP? Hard to say lol.
And yes, I wish the battles themselves were more variable.
I shouldn’t see Anubisath Idol for like 33% of all fights.
Or just weather-based attacks/strats being overpowered as a whole.
Pet Battles becoming the new Archaeology is sad, either way.
5 Likes
What is there some news that pet battling is being discontinued?
Seems awfully weird when the mechanics of it happened changed for so long now and all that do is copy/paste new skins and tack on the abilities.
As a collector, pet collecting is tedious at best nowadays.
1 Like
Pretty much, they haven’t put anything new into it for years (I think BfA? When was the last pet battle dungeon?), just adding pet appearances with the same abilities as all the rest.
Tbh, maybe the writing was already on the wall.
And the Nintendo lawsuit thing just made them stop altogether.
I always liked collecting more than battling, personally, but still, side-content being removed isn’t a great feeling.
1 Like
This.
Also, most people who collect/battle a lot, just bot it. You go to a big pet battle web site, it’s full of scripts to paste into TD_script, which automates the pet battle for you.
So while people enjoy collecting pets, the tiny handful of people enjoy figuring out the optimal comps to win pet battles, most people don’t care for the battles themselves.
As a big pet collector, I also despise pet battles, since they’re 5% gameplay and 95% sitting there waiting for animations to finish.
4 Likes
Well, that explains the short queues lmao.
1 Like
I bet they thought it would turn into some esport way, way back when they first came up with the idea. It has slowly declined because let’s be real the pet fighting is pretty boring, what we’re all doing is really collecting pets.
But is there actual news/an update stating the feature is going away? I quickly skimmed the first 2 pages of WoWhead and didn’t see anything. It’s entirely possible I missed it, but I didn’t see anything about battling going away.
I’m not going to lose sleep over it if so. I next to never battled humans (did friends a few times) and even these days I just can’t be bothered to track down every permutation of pet especially since they’re not even functionally different than other pets.
As they’re keeping the pet battle system for old pets it would seem they just don’t want to waste energy/time on designing abilities and tuning etc for new pets going forward. Can’t say that I blame them.
3 Likes