Also responding to alpha feedback.
First I’m going to repeat what I said back in MoP right before they started giving us valor for doing some of the pet battle content: You want people out in the world doing stuff for valor, and pet battlers are out in the world doing stuff. We should be getting valor.
Second, a dire warning:
Absolutely not. The limit of blue rarity is a feature, not a problem. We shot this idea down so hard right here on these forums back in MoP, alongside the awful proposition of breeding pets. And good thing we did, or pet battles would’ve been ruined practically at launch.
This would put a treadmill on a treadmill. Pet battles is inherently on a treadmill. Imagine grinding 2k+ epic rarities on top of that. No thanks. We’re already at the point where no one’s collection will ever be complete. We don’t need another artificial way to ensure that.
Epic pets would eliminate the evergreen nature of pet battles. If “old” tamers are made trivial because of epic pets, why would anyone do them? People will only do the “new” tamers because those are current difficulty. How many of us go back and do any of the questline tamers, even though they offer rewards? Hardly anyone. Even if players don’t feel this way, I guarantee the devs will, and will incentivize “new” content over old accordingly. And there goes evergreen status. It won’t just be everything up to Major Payne left in the dust, it’ll be everything up to the current expansion. That is how pet battles truly dies.
The same is true of any method of improving pets beyond baseline blue rarity, and arguably true of any breed altering or retraining system, as min/max pets could easily have the same impact.
I mean… Blizzard is already trying to kill pet battles by inches. Let’s not give them an extra mile down that road by nuking it ourselves.