Of the ones I’ve actually fought, since acquiring world quests, I’m kind of disappointed. I’ve never encountered a pet tamer I couldn’t beat by just making the logical choices. I fought one, for instance, that was a gnarly-looking tree. So, I surmised it was an Elemental and loaded up my team with Aquatic pets. And won.
I tried bringing a carry pet along, but the XP was dismal.
The only one that really gave me any trouble was Flicker, Thalia’s pet moth. Between its Dodge ability and Cocoon Strike, it’s the opponent that’s never home. But even then, with a Nexus Whelpling, which is what I chose, all you need is two good strikes, and Flicker is dead.
Agreed that they’re lackluster, but honestly I think the devs consider battling pretty much dead now. Pets are still useful as collectables, but I don’t see them putting anything into the gameplay.
Maybe someone will do a bit on it and come up with something next patch.
It frustrates me because it seems like this would be so simple to fix. If they want the dungeons to remain in use, they could add a new pet to each one. As I said elsewhere, if there was another pet as a reward, each and every one of us would be back there to get it.
Well, maybe not me. I have so much dungeon currency on some of them, I could buy one of each. Problem is, most of them suck. I think I’ve gotten two of the Tricorne and two Mechanical Cockroaches. Nothing else.
They add a new pet to the Trading Post every month. Why not add one to the dungeons? This month we have Claudius. A B/B Crab with an interesting moveset but rather meh stats. I remember the first time I looked at it, I thought something had blown a hole in its shell from the inside, and I was looking at a hole in its shell. Eww.
But no. It’s name is Claudius and it’s wearing a crown.
I disliked the dungeons, and hope never to see them again. Back in Mists, the Celestial Tournament was AMAZING! The dungeons though, I found a grudging chore.
Last time I looked, there was a pretty poor completion rate for the dungeon sequence - lotsa people started WC, not so many carried on to finish BRD. That doesn’t bode well for future return on dungeon development.
World Quests are pleasant enough, flying around, and they pay well, and they do keep us clocking up the game-minutes. I guess they don’t see any alternative or expansion.
Then they would need to capture what made the Celestial Tournament so popular.
I think the reason for that is that the Celestial Tournament treated pet battling for what it was. We were pet battlers competing against other pet battlers. And it was laid out in like pet battlers were engaging other pet battlers to see which one of us had the best pets.
The dungeons, however, were an ongoing drama orchestrated by a bunch of misfits who somehow believed that they could take over the world with their super-pet. Conquer the world with a battle pet?
The characters might have been amusing, particularly Therrin, the Night Elf mythomaniac who tries to convince everyone that he is so cerebral and logical that he can predict the future.
Zuna was also interesting, considering she’s apparently infatuated with a Tauren (who seems completely oblivious to Zuna’s interest. I wonder what their kids would look like.
But overall the pet dungeons made me feel like I was being made fun of. It’s just a shame that they’re not willing to try anything else. So, what if the dungeons weren’t popular?
I think inserting a pet boss into the Delves would be a good idea. Since it’s in a Delve, it’s an optional assignment, and since Delves are solo, no one’s being held up while one player does a pet battle. Plus, it’s very existence in the Delves might interest people in it.
One giveaway that the Pet Trainers aren’t getting a whole lot of time spent on them is the number of them with Boss ability teams. Any of your attacks only hit half as hard. A developer just sets one flag and now the battle is much more challenging.
Kind of goes along with overall design for TWW pet WQs. Most of them seem to drop Polished Pet Stones. And 250 of these will buy one each of all the pets they can in TWW.
I haven’t noted whether this happens with the pet tamers in TWW, but sometimes they also give the Magic pet special ability to a Boss Pet, i. e., no single attack can inflict more than 35% damage. I notice that in Wailing Critters, that’s the only thing that sets Hiss apart from the other three serpent pets that precede him. He has the Magic pet buff in addition to his half damage buff. So, if anyone thinks they can take out Hiss by doing the Microbot Supercharge, Ion Cannon, they will quickly learn otherwise.
While it was interesting to interact with the miniature Wild Gods, I actually despise what you said, because this makes it easy for ill-willed people to just compare the entire thing to Pokémon.
(A little edit there: No, I don’t think we’ll ever see a reduction of that, but the open world quests and the meta achievements will remain a much easier option – for both the devs and players – to keep us occupied this way.)
As I said in the other thread, I didn’t find the dungeons flawless either. I am not entirely opposed to repetitive content but if you leave an instance knowing you’re asked for the same thing next week… why did I agree to do it in the first place? It makes me feel like I didn’t do a good job. At least CT had more teams, and BRD its little gauntlet so they were not 100% identical.
We have enough of that in all the other areas of the gameplay, but at least the lore progresses at a little faster rate, so it isn’t that much of a bummer.
I’ve been the staunch opponent of that aura for a long time, because it pushes people towards a select few options due to how the mechanics work. A bit ago it was Howlbomb, then it was, and still is Black Claw & multiple hits – the supposed nerf accidentally made it more, and not less, effective against the elites, which is why it was overused in the first place. And you will never go wrong with the HP%-damage because it ignores everything else (well, bar modifying the health itself) too, including the elite buff
This is funny when you have said buff used on a magic pet – a complete redundancy which makes them look worse than the rest of the ilk.
Now back to the topic, I think the main notion was that the movesets are (almost) completely random. Which again implies no one did actually sit down for this.
Personally, I think giving everything the 35% buff is cheating. Son of Skum also has it. If he actually were a Magic pet, I wouldn’t complain, but he’s a beast. He does massive damage, has a massive health pool and, as a Beast, he gets the Beast buff.
As for the 50% mitigation, why not just double the health pool?
As one who has completed the Safari, these are just my thoughts.
Considering over 95% of the pets will never be used, they give us too many. Personally, I’d rather have around a dozen pets per expansion, but have it take a little work to get them. Not just randomly find them. Imagine having to quest to get into some area, and this area has most of our wild-caught pets. I think collecting would be more meaningful if it were something that took work. Not just going out into the world and finding a green paw print on my minimap and going to get it. Or killing some super powerful boss mob and pray he drops the pet you want.
Despite having someone “despise what I said,” I will stand by it. The goofballs who make up the Minions of Mayhem are . . . I don’t know. Delusional? They seem to think that collecting pets and creating a super powerful boss pet (who would be destroyed instantly by a single AoE from me) is their key to world conquest.
I’d still rather pet battles be treated like pet battles. I mean just playing the game requires a massive suspension of disbelief. Now on top of that, we’re supposed to believe that fighting among tiny creatures with an average health pool of around 1400 is supposed to make a difference in the world?
Let’s go up against some mafioso who pet battles as a hobby. And we could put a wager on the battle. If we win, we get something useful. And improve our faction by demoralizing the dude.
And maybe the mafioso has a “Fredo” little brother who wants to learn pet battling, so we defeat his team and he’s grateful to learn from us.
Of course, I realize they don’t have the resources to create the kinds of stuff we’d like. On the other hand, there’s enough of us who would walk away from the game if it wasn’t for pet battles, so they can’t exactly afford to ignore us. (And they aren’t ignoring us.)
Not after the exodus they suffered for the Pathfinder debacle.
I see a couple of simple ideas that could be fairly easily implemented, if they cared to try it. Like suppose you can’t even access one tamer under you’ve defeated a previous tamer, with teams made up of all families. Maybe not entire teams made up of one family, but you could defeat a tamer with an Elemental, Undead and Dragon, then next go with an Aquatic, Critter and Mechanical. Then another team of Humanoid, Flying and Beast. Then create another team with a Magic pet, and you have all families covered. Then you can progress onto the next one.
And you will never go wrong with the HP%-damage because it ignores everything else (well, bar modifying the health itself) too, including the elite buff 