They most certainly don’t need cut scenes and voice acting ( BRD ), They’re already too slow, too long, and painful enough.
And to a certain extant they suffer from the same problem as the Make Lo Go quests ( can you help Lo get to the X without crossing his path ) You solve them once, have your teams set and then it’s just a painfully boring and predictable process. The game is over, the puzzle is solved. But unlike make lo go, these aren’t a minute long, they’re closer to 30.
One of the big problems is the binary Iron Man nature of the challenge. It would be too infuriating to put a lot of random challenges 20 minutes into a pass fail experience that could force you to start over.
Another problem is pet battles need a skip animation option. Civilization, Hero’s of might and magic, almost all other turn based combat games, they don’t make you watch the animations forever. They get old well before the 10 thousandth time you’ve seen them.
I’m really not sure what the answer is here but these are definitely in the “Only there for the loot” category of content like Warfronts.
I think the best way to burn people out on pet battles is to take out the animation. If you’re clawing at your eyes because there’s an animation sequence associated with a pet attack, you need to take a break from pet battles.
I do sympathize with the pet dungeon, and this could extend to the legendary, pet battles. Most pets cannot beat them. Only a specific sequence using specific pets can beat some of them. If they weren’t as difficult, people wouldn’t be flocking to sites like Xu-Fu’s to find the key. Then set up a pet battle team (some addons even allow notes), to overcome each pet. Blizzard did this to make them a challenge, but they went overboard.
Now if the abilities were random (within a certain set), or even randomly executed, you wouldn’t be able to use those sites, and you’d actually have to think your way out of a problem. Right now, the strats are by far the easiest option, so that’s what most players use.
Kind of like the best way to burn people out on TV is to take out the commercials. The only people that would think like that are the advertisers. But to each their own I guess.
I’m thinking a long these lines as well. The problems I’m seeing is for the most part you’re not thinking your way out, you’re using trial and error and experimenting your way out. And trial and error doesn’t work well if 25 minutes in you get an error and have to start over. And that 20 minutes of that was watching the animations play out doesn’t help either.
Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ll be changing or tuning the existing Pet Battle Dungeons any time soon. HazelNuttyGames did an interview with John Hight (Executive Producer) and he noted that this content just doesn’t have broad appeal, so they’re taking a step back from it for a bit in Shadowlands. If there’s a demand they might revisit it in the future, so maybe that might be time to suggest/make changes.
Pet Dungeons are basically normal Pet Battles, just longer, sometimes “harder”, with exclusive rewards, and in a unique setting with its own mini-story, themes, and atmosphere. Gameplay isn’t any different, but to me, that’s fine. Might not appeal to others - it is what it is.
I guess, you could liken Pet Dungeons to War Fronts…? Except with Pet Dungeons, once someone has figured out a strat, it’s very easy to share it, giving the rest of the community an “easy” way through (save the team and the strat, use an addon to automate the battles, etc.). There’s no real convenience like that with War Fronts.
If you’re struggling to sit through the animations, look into using the addon to automate the encounter. You still need to be at your keyboard pressing a (single) button, but you can generally AFK and ignore the fight.
Addon’s called TD Scripts. You can find a guide on how to use it here: https://www.wow-petguide.com/index.php?m=UsingTDScripts
Kinda figured this was going to happen. Seemed like the pet battles were doing fine prior to BfA. Guess we should get used to less pets, battles and dungeons in SL.
It is unfortunate, but I’m not at all surprised that the content isn’t doing well.
They’re just so tedious the way they are now.
Think they need to be more like pet battle theme parks instead of linear climb the ladders challenges. Some way to save progress with the challenges spread out some.
I like the hardcore permadeath challenge in concept, it forces some depth in your stable, but it just might not work with pet dungeons.
The original Celestial Tournament was much less linear than the current dungeons, although you’d have to exaggerate to call it an “pet battle theme park”. Still, I haven’t seen an instanced pet battle event better than that.
Pet Dungeons are boring and tedious once you have your teams proved out?
Want dungeons to be a challenge, not a chore?
Well, you can challenge yourself!
Build your own teams.
Refuse to use the teams that won for you during your last visit.
Run the dungeon using the Family Fighter rules. (may cause sanity loss)
Using the first two suggestions makes a dungeon plenty interesting for me.
Using the last suggestion probably would make me cry…
This might be more of a fundamental problem with pet battles, but just figuring out the dungeons can be tedious. Get two and half hours into trying to solve BRD and it’s “The hell with it, going to the internet.” just to learn the META for the fight your stuck on is going to be leveling a couple pets you haven’t leveled yet.
The system is pretty large and extreme. I’m at 900 unique pets, 300 at max level. And I maybe know 40 of them well. Unless pet battles are your primary focus you’re just making educated guesses on what might work. And the process is slow. Did that fail from bad RNG, bad team, bad move selection, bad move order? And then you have something like a regrowth battle which can be close to a 5 minute battle, four and half minutes of it being watching the regrowth animation a couple hundred times.
I have the most fun in Wailing Caverns of all the pet battle dungeons
you go in blind, whack together random teams to take on the semi-randomised packs you face.
The bosses aren’t so hard that you need a very specific strat to beat them- which actually makes them more spontaneous and fun to fight
I got so burnt out on BRD because there is no navigating the dungeon, no “theme”. Just a bunch of difficult encounters that require specific matchings to beat, and a lot of RNG that seems to just be frustrating.
There is very little difference between BRD and the Celestial Tournament tbh. Even tho I enjoyed both.
I’d like to see pet instances that offer a more randomised, but thematic experience. Something like islands, but with pets.
I agree. Generally, it takes me hours to successfully complete a pet dungeon when I am forming my teams on the fly.
I can actually find the time easier than the mindset to mono-focus for that length of time!
The tedium, for me, is not due to boredom, but frustration. Being brought to tears, a comment I made regarding pet battles, wasn’t entirely a joke.
I can get through a dungeon successfully on my own teams but not quickly and it’s rare for my teams to display much or any grace. That’s the what I’m chasing, elegant wins.(and the pet drops.)
There’s some pretty wonderful teams to be found on the internet, and I’m not above using them, but not right away. When I’m ranting about RNG favoritism and my pets are dying and I’ve lost the same fight multiple times, then it’s time to seek help or bust another keyboard.
I’d like to be able to stop/halt between battles and leave the instance, to pick back up where I left off. Easier then to find time, less time for tedium to build.
I actually liked the RP. Thought it was hilarious and actually appreciated the effort they made.
Anywho, given that they dont have great appeal I think they should just totally give up on dungeons and move the conversation away from how to fix them too what they can replace them with.
After making that decision, they could then allow healing in dungeons so that failure isnt as brutal for those who choose to follow in the footsteps of those who have already completed them.
In my mind, it’d be nice if the pet dungeons followed the same theme as the rest of the game.
You get to choose between two difficulties: Normal (Healing) & Heroic (No Healing). Normal gets you 1 currency, Heroic gets you 2. Higher difficulty = more reward. It’s the way it works everywhere else, why not pet dungeons?
This would be nice for people trying to get into the pet battles to feel like they can accomplish a dungeon run with fewer pets, while people who have worked on their rosters can do the no healing version and finish it out quicker.
Not yet. They’ve added some things to the journal, but there are no achievements, no new wild pet battles, and there won’t be any dungeons for the foreseeable future. I’m keeping this article updated as I go through the beta, and as new updates come out.
These should be experimental puzzle challenges but that is in a fundamental conflict with the dungeon and battle pet mini game design.
Want to try something different 4 battles in? You’ll be logging into an alt to heal or re-doing those 4 battles if it fails.
And that’s the problem, it’s just so cumbersome and frustrating to go in and experiment that you revert to solving these with internet searches or spending a couple minutes on the very questionable tactic of logging into alts to heal a team.
In the future linear iron man challenges need to go. One or the other is doable but together it’s just unnecessarily punishing for no conceivable reason.
But for now, If you lose a fight the pets should get healed to the health they had when they started the fight. Probably the biggest cause of frustration is you get half way in a dungeons and get stuck on a battle where only a handful pets work on the first or second opponent and you wear them out while working on the third. That way you can keep the challenge of needing a deep stable and not severely punish people for experimenting or figuring things out. ( or some bad RNG )
And a skip animation option with interface pass on the floating text indicators to make what just happened more clear.
