Some rambling thoughts on pet collecting.
When Mists of Pandaria arrived I thought this is what the game was made for: pet battling. Yeah, getting pets in raids was a pain, but it was mostly about battles and exploring vast wildernesses for wild pets that only spawned at certain times of day.
Legion didn’t give me much to complain about-the chest rewards provided a great way to raise money for Francois and Celestial Calf…except for the Dreamweaver cache. I made an agreement: if I got enough curious coins to buy an Arcadian War Turtle, I would stop farming for Thistleleaf Adventurer.
I have an Arcadian War Turtle, and, by that time, had enough money earned after the Celestial Calf purchase to buy the Adventurer from someone else.
So, outside of that, no complaints…then Battle For Azeroth arrived. Dumpster fire of a story and I detected a disturbance in the pet battle force. Half the new pets seemed to be sold by merchants while the other half were wild crabs. There were so many interesting critters in Zandalar and Kul Tiras-like those feral cats in Freehold-and all we got were the same old crabs and rats.
Battling pets to buy pets didn’t bother me in Legion 'cuz Dalaran had a pet shop and, it was a floating island, so there was no place for critters to live. So it made sense. But in Dazar’alor, the city was so overgrown with jungle that druids were sleeping in trees, so it just didn’t make sense to me. Why weren’t these critters running around the city?
Then the mini expansions Nazjatar and Mechagon, with their weird, elaborate mechanisms to spawn/farm the treasures/rares that drop the pets. I tried farming every day until the next expansion but nothin’.
Ah, then Shadowlands. Another dumpster fire of a story. Aredenweald had the most pets-but that’s 'cuz they were all from vendors-and it’s a forest! Why aren’t these critters roaming free? And the covenant feature: I’ve been farming seeds like crazy but only get mounts and armor. Again, just bought them all from someone else.
Then Zereth Mortis and protoform synthesis. O’ course I only need the cunning and satisfaction glimmers-which are account bound for some reason-oh, and I learned it’s that way ‘cuz you need twelve characters eatin’ the stone soup to get one!
Like, why? How does this make any sense? The buff that comes with the glimmer of satisfaction looks like a leporid, so you know what would make sense? A leporid eating contest. Let the Enlightened squeal in horror at our sloppy eating habits. Make it a mini game like ones on Darkmoon Island. And the glimmer of cunning should be a drop from any spider, not the two egg sacs that everyone’s cousin’s seventh character is in a farming circle around.
Battle pets just isn’t making much thematic and environmental sense anymore. And I’m tired of every pet on the auction house costing 400,000 coin, tired of all the hours I spend farming chests for 4,000 gold (approximately) each, that I’ve started buying wow tokens jus’ so I can have some spare time to read my archaeology magazines.
And dare I mention the planned release of Ichabod? Via gifting twitch subscriptions? What happens if the streamer you picked already has those subscriptions? Did Elon Musk come up with this idea?
Just keep pet battles about battles, ya know? Finding wild pets in the wild, rare spawns that don’t have insane spawn mechanics, pet tamer quests, legendary pet quests, and battle dungeons. Keep it fun, not a full-time job of farming.
Sorry for the length of the post. After getting another mount from a seed earlier in the week it kinda hit me of a sudden: collecting pets used to be a fun, battling adventure.