As first indicated indirectly through a streamer’s account of an interview with Ion, and now directly through a blue post around two hours ago, the reason for all of the changes to pets (including not adding battle capabilities to new pets and not creating new pet trainers or dungeons) is the following:
“As time has passed, we’ve seen fewer and fewer players enjoying pet battle combat, so this is an area we want to iterate on.”
The issue is that this is a flawed premise. Let’s talk about the four forms of content in pet battles:
- Wild Pet Battles: These are the equivalent to the exploration and gearing pillar of new expansions - they promote a burst of engagement when a zone is released, but aren’t returned to unless you need a specific breed of pet for some other challenge later. This is the biggest burst of excitement for a new zone for pet content players, but there is no replayability here.
- Trainer Pet Battles: At first, these were weeklies and dailies with rewards that could be bough on the AH, but in modern expansions they are all World Quests. They are always a single, predictable team, and the only reason to rechallenge them is for the WQ rewards or for a WQ quota of some sort. They have a reason to replay, but can be tedious because they are repetitive. Once all of your pets are leveled up (or achievements are earned), there is little incentive to do more of these quests. To make things worse, each expansion has had fewer and fewer trainers since BfA.
- Pet Dungeon Battles: The last dungeon released was Blackrock Depths in 2019. Dungeons have no procedural variety, are all set in unappealing, visually dark, old graphics zones, and are not new player friendly. They have limited rewards that mean no player would complete any pet dungeon more than 10 times.
- PvP Pet Battles: PvP is as different from PvE for pet battles as M+ and Raids are from Battlegrounds and Arenas, so I’m not going to talk much about it. Blizzard has never balanced around PvP pet battles, so the meta has been stagnant for years. In addition, player names and communication are blocked, and transmog and race is randomized, so you don’t even look like you and there is literally no potential for a social aspect.
None of these are replayable or drive long term engagement, so they’re getting cut. The planned changes in Midnight remove half of the process from #1, including all of the battling. This is removing content. The changes remove #2 from new content. #3 hasn’t had new content in 6 years (it’s the equivalent of not getting a new raid for four expansions). This is the death of pet battles, full stop, all because there was no engagement. But the design doesn’t allow for replayability, so where is the engagement supposed to come from?
How could we increase engagement via replayability, instead of killing a game mode?
- Wild Pet Battles: Create more conditions outside of battle that spread out pet spawns, like the three alternating weeks on Siren Isle or the rain on Jaguero Isle. Create new Trading Post goals that require defeating (not catching) super-powered pets in the wild; these can be tied to weather or invasions or the Prey system or handwavey magic, and because wild battles are randomized, it’s not predictable like trainer battles.
- Trainer Pet Battles: Give each trainer more than 3 pets and have them randomly choose which they get at the start of battle, but hide this information from addons and the players. Find some way to make the rewards themselves engaging as well: perhaps in order to use a pet in housing, you need to defeat a specific quest with it that is tied to its type or something. Reduce and limit the Trading Post rewards for standard trainer pet battles, and increase them for these hard ones instead.
- Pet Dungeon Battles: Take inspiration from M+ and make these procedurally scaling, with rotating weekly affixes. Tie a title to an achievement for beating all affixes in all dungeons in the same season, and add public rankings for seasonal score like in Dastardly Duos. The affixes can be simple: unchangeable Muddy Weather, all enemies get a bubble, players’ pets are all rooted, ban certain abilities, whatever. Put all future pet dungeons in aesthetically pleasing, modern instances (for all that is holy, please do this). These don’t even have to be well balanced - Legion Remix M+ will be fun, even if everyone is overpowered.
- PvP Pet Battles: At the very least, turn on all the social options available in every other part of the game. Balancing this is probably too much dev work, unlike creating a title, randomizing pets or slapping an affix down. Perhaps a leaderboard and a seasonal ban list would help though? Consider restricting play only to pets released in the current expansion, and having the available pets expand during timewalking weeks. You have pets’ locations and release expansions set in the Collections tab, so this data is available and wouldn’t be hard to access. At least then you have multiple metas, and one of them is more easily available to new players (since it’s the newest expansion).
- If the other options increase engagement, consider a pet raid, where multiple players team up against enemies. Pokemon has done this, but the concept is safe from intellectual property wars. Add a team leaderboard like DDuos. This is a lot of work, but it became popular for Pokemon streamers; it might work for WoW too.
TLDR: None of the four types of pet battle content are replayable, which is why Blizzard says engagement is low and wants to cut them. Add variety, randomness, challenge, visual appeal, titles and leaderboarding to increase replayability, in ways that require as little dev work as possible.
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They’re not being cut. They’re going to do more moving forward to make pet battles engaging.
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I find it amusing that they didn’t add any significant pet battle content for years, then pull a surprised Pikachu face when participation declines 
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There are no new wild pet battles (#1) or new trainer battles (#2) or new pet dungeons (#3). If there was no new dungeon or raid for an expansion, would you say that they were being cut? Of course you would. They’re being cut, and Kaivax’s post doesn’t even refute this.
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I really hope they do. MoP was an excellent start to the system and then I grew increasingly more confused by their vision after that. It became a jumbled mess as though they were just throwing everything including the kitchen sink at the wall and hoping something got lodged there.
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I didn’t even think about messaging and advertisement, which is kind of crucial. Probably a mistake on my part, but Blizzard should know by now how to advertise new patch features. It’s a very good point though.
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Well I don’t know about you guys but I made sure my 40k achievement point was from Pet Battling.
Try some pet battles if you never had 
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But there will be. Or did you not understand what was said?
Let’s get this out of the way right now: this is an alpha. It is not feature complete. Right now, there are no raids on alpha. We know raids are coming, but they aren’t in a testable condition yet. There are many housing features that don’t work. There are outdoor features that don’t work. That’s how things work in an alpha.
Pet battles are being iterated on to make something that, hopefully, is more engaging to players. But until they know what that system is going to be and how it’s going to work, they’re not going to waste their time filling out a roster of pets for the previous system, the one they know players are losing interest in.
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If it rotates every week on any sort of random rotation, then you’re going to run into edge cases where there are months in between one specific one. So it’d have to be a static rotation.
Also, just for the record I did try to pet battle all the critters on Ka’resh but they weren’t up to it.
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Of course, but every little bit helps. There can be other sources though, like Umbral Amalgam in Hallowfall (though hopefully not as bugged). Maybe require a rare to spawn, or a World Boss to die, or the Prey system to be active in the zone. Perhaps spread out the breeds into different zones. The secondary only pets in War Within were an interesting attempt too.
Are they? They already cut dungeons and scenarios. Then the family battler achievement. Then they removed wild pets. There are no new pet trainers. No new pet world quests. Then they copy-pasted the same abilities to all new pets that share the same model (and only added a handful of models).
The only “change” so far has been “get a random pet each week from the weekly K’aresh cache and pray you don’t already have two of those”.
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They are literally removing pet battles as a catching mechanic; it’s going to drive engagement rates up but time spent way down. If they change it from this brand new method they specifically implemented and that Ion specifically said was intended for the whole expansion, it will only be BECAUSE people got angry and made posts like mine. Optimism doesn’t stop Blizzard from making unpopular decisions; unhappy responses and unsubscribing does.
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I think it’s like many players have said: the interest has been lost because the system itself is making it less interesting.
It’s as if it’s frozen in time, with no changes or progress.
The latest pets added have almost all the same abilities as always.
There could be many improvements to the system; I’m simply sharing my idea: buying legendary abilities with pet coins.
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I thought losing pet battles in WoW have to do with Nintendo being granted a patent for summoning pets and having them fight each other?
I agree with OP I found the dungeons challenging in a good way. They made me go out into the world and capture a full team before trying again. I had so much fun collecting those pets and looking for guides. It all jumpstarted my collecting arc, and to be honest that’s what keeps me subscribed every season.
It was so satisfying finally completing these dungeons, but after I got all the rewards I found no reason to go back. If there was a reason I would still be doing them.
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This is false. Old expansion pets are still battled and captured the same way and the Nintendo lawsuit/patents are not as encompassing as the doom and gloom pretends.
Also does everyone just forget that Blizzard themselves is not an actual indie company when it comes to resources (including legal ones) and all but guaranteed had legal weigh in on if there was any risk by Pokemon and pet battles with copyright and all the patents but is ACTUALLY owned by one of the biggest organizations in the world giving them access to resources and legal minds beyond what they already had before? Nintendo may be a bully, but do we REALLY think they’re stupid enough to try and go after MS on the legal battleground?
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No, what you described isn’t copyrightable. I know it’s a common response, but let’s please keep this thread on the reason Blizzard (via Ion and Kaivax) have indicated they’re removing pet battle content, and what can be done to improve it. There are a lot of sources online elsewhere that can go into detail about Nintendo’s attempts at bludgeoning smaller developers with lawsuits.
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U mean they dont want a lawsuit with Nintendo over the stupid Patent they made.
Also its really dumb of the US to approuve an illegal patent they really trying to scrap some money. U cant Patent a mechanic that been used for over 20 year by other things its not new no more
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A few thoughts to your thoughts:
- wild pet battles: never have a quest/task that says capture X pets (I’m looking at you Undermine chetts). I do not want to be doing catch-and-release. I do not want to have my muscle memory ever considering the thought of releasing pets. Bad mojo. (laments a dear and precious pterrordax hatchling forever lost to a momentary lapse of concentration / misclick many years ago)
- trainers/dungeons so trainers and dungeons share a little issue for me where I’m not really a challenge seeker at heart. I tend to find the fun at just goofing around level rather than serious puzzle solving / wrestling RNG. Sure, one of my favourite memories is doing the Celestial Tournament back before guides were a thing, but that was sort of a unique moment in time, not an experience I want to repeat every expansion. However, I realize others may have a different opinion and I may need to get out of their way on this issue. I’d just like to keep some chill.
- seasons. I wouldn’t mind seeing some sort of restricted mode where we can only use pets from a current expansion, bringing things down a bit, making people feel more comfortable about jumping in late, etc. The downside is that being a completionist about collecting isn’t really viable any more so there’s a high risk of chase rares being unavailable to “middle tier” collectors (which I feel I’m drifting down towards)
- I have nothing to say about PvP battles. I did a few weeks of them in MoP and came to the conclusion that it just wasn’t fun at all to me. I didn’t enjoy losing. I didn’t enjoy winning. I didn’t enjoy what happened in between. So I leave this to others.
- I think it would be fun to import pets (individually or in groups) into some other minigame. A part of me would like to see a mass autobattler where I let loose the full might of my collection across a plain just once.
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