Potential for new Pet types? Light, Fel, Shadow, Life, and Earth

Gameplay Pet Battles
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With how shallow-yet-deep WoW’s pet battling is, I think it comfortably invites changes of this magnitude, once in a blue moon- just like how Pokémon has introduced 3 types over the past 20 years (being Fairy, Dark, and Steel type).

I see more and more often an abundance of Battle Pets that begin to thematically feel a bit ill-fitted or shoehorned into something else just because they have to. With how many Pet families there are in the game, as many as 5 more could be added without disrupting the balance much at all. Though converting older Pets to their potential new types would be a tall order worthy of a major patch or expansion release.

IMO the new types that would be very well fit would be:

  • Fel (for Fel pets that are objectively fel)
  • Life (for pets that are druidic, life-magic based, or represent creation)
  • Shadow (mainly for Void pets, or pets that don’t fit Magic, nor Undead)
  • Light (for pets that are objectively light-based, or as a literal concept)
  • Earth (for the new and old elementals, beasts, and critters that are more geology-based than animalistic)

(Additionally, all wind-based Elementals would be reassigned to Flying, all rock-based to Earth, all water-based to Aquatic, and the Elemental family would be renamed to Flame).

This idea mostly stems from examining the Warcraft Chronicles’ Cosmology chart, which has a lopsided distribution of pet families. All fel, light, and void based Pets are funnelled into “Magic”, despite Magic/Arcane being the polar opposite of those.
Life being a new type to contrast against Undead works as well for the abundance of beast, magic, and critter pets that are just put there because they’re animals, despite their life-magic movekits.

Just like Pokémon, this increased pet family count invites an immense amount of new family/ability combinations as well as more creative pets in the future that don’t need to bluntly be displaced into a family that doesn’t quite fit them.

A few examples off the top of my head of already existing pets that would be type changed:

Fel:

  • All of the infernal, minfernal, shard of supremus, gill’dan, mischief, fel pup, piglet, spider, basilisk, fel stalker pup, etc

Shadow:

  • Feline Familiar, Void reaver, Shadow, Twilight, the whispers of n’zoth pets, old god pets/tentacles, voidcallers, any of the Maw pets that aren’t undead, Lost Netherpup, etc

Light:

  • Lightspawn, Sunny, Herald of Light, Soul of the Aspects, Spirit of Competition, any Naaru pets, Argi, Sunglow Cobra, Purity, some of the Bastion/Zereth Mortis pets, etc

Life:

  • Yu’la, Daughter of Yu’lon, Night Fae/Ardenweald pets, Emerald Dream pets, fae dragon pets, Dream Whelpling, Murkastrasza, Jewelled Emerald Whelpling, a variety of Zereth Mortis pets, Marsh Fiddler, etc

Earth:

  • plenty of Zaralek Cavern pets, earth elementals, shale-crawlers and deepholm pets, blackrock/dark iron themed pets, generic stone-based pets, or pets that use heavy earth-based influence.

Would be cool to see. Maybe one day! Thanks for reading.

4 Likes
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While I appreciate the idea (truly), I would not be for it, personally. And it’ll probably never happen (just due to how much time and effort it would take for implementing and balancing for ultimately little or even negative return on investment). I think 10 types as we have now, is perfect and generally all-encompassing. I think once you start down a path of sub-dividing the sub-divisions already, it’s sorta like, what are we doing and what is the point? And where would it end? In Hearthstone they did this, and they literally jumped the shark so much that there are cards with like 3 types, or ALL types, and to me that is just so ridiculous. I think Pokemon could do it because the games/generations were all mostly self-contained, changing or introducing one thing, would not affect previous games/generations, and so it was fine and well received. But in WoW, I just don’t see it happening. And I’m not even sure I’d want it to.

3 Likes
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I thought that they may have had an opportunity to add Demons during Legion and I’ve always thought that the life/plant based pets in Elemental were a bit of a weird fit with their weakness to water/aquatic attacks, but I think it’s probably too late to be adding more families now, sadly.

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When Pokemon introduced two new types with thier second game it had me scrambling to learn everything I could about the new and recategorized creatures. The least amount of work for blizz would be two types existing outside of the wheel, with weakness towards each other only. So like light and dark being introduced. Many other games have that system for elemental weaknesses on thier first xpac.
A well written post and I hope we get to see any kind of updates for pb soon!

1 Like
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Rather than getting new pets I would prefer a massive overhaul of what we have. Lvl 25 max has been the apex since their introduction. I was hoping that this would have increased at some point(s) as the expansions progressed and everything else in the game’s max level increased. If the top level for pets could go up say, five levels every three expansions along with the respective trainers it would add a whole new perspective to the pet scene. Naturally, new abilities would need to be given to the pet, though not necessarily new to pet battling. It would add a ton of more leveling for the levelers and/or new potential/mandatory combinations for the battles.

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Blizzard kicked around the idea of upping the max pet level over ten years ago, along with letting us collect Epic pets. It didn’t go over well and was quietly dropped. Even with only 700 or so collectible pets, idea of all us Pet Peoples’ collections becoming obsolete overnight was not popular.

Now that we’re up to 1,700 pets, even harder to imagine anyone wanting to have to bring their collection up to date.