A heartfelt message from Xu-Fu’s Pet Guides on the upcoming Midnight changes

Gameplay Pet Battles
1

Hi everyone,

This has also been posted in the US Forums - if you want to respond, please consider posting there.

I don’t usually post publicly, but with the news about the future of Pet Battles in Midnight, I felt I needed to add my voice.

I’m the creator of Xu-Fu’s Pet Guides (wow-petguide .com), a site that has grown over the years into one of the biggest community hubs dedicated entirely to pet battles. It started as a personal project, simply out of love for this unique part of World of Warcraft. Over the span of a decade, it became a place where tens of thousands of players share their passion, strategies, and creativity.

Pet battling isn’t just a side feature for many of us. It’s our main way of engaging with Azeroth. For some, me included, it’s the reason we still log in.

Hearing that this system might be phased out or diminished is honestly heartbreaking. I completely understand that development resources are finite, and priorities shift over time. But the idea that pet battling, this quiet but passionate corner of the game, might fade away feels like losing a big part of what makes WoW special.

I’m adding my voice to the many others who hope Blizzard will reconsider this direction. Even small updates, or maintaining the battle system as it is, would mean the world to those of us who’ve built entire communities, friendships, and creative projects around it. But beyond that, we truly believe that with fresh ideas and some renewed attention, pet battles could once again become a vibrant and engaging part of World of Warcraft for a much larger audience.

Thank you for reading, and for everything pet battles have brought us over the years. I truly hope this isn’t the end of that story.

54 Likes
2

I totally agree with you. It baffles me Blizzard will remove the pet battles.
Pet battles are not my sole activity but i like the collecting and leveling besides the other stuff i do. It will be a real shame seeing it being dumbed down. I hope Blizzard will reconsider.

10 Likes
3

Thank you Aranesh for all your efforts over the years. Your website is phenomenal, and you’ve done the pet community a great service.

I wish there was more pet-orientated content in the game. I was never one for the pvp side of pet battles but I loved the pet dungeons and other content around them. At 1950 unique lvl 25 blue-quality pets I might have a bit of a problem :slight_smile:

10 Likes
4

Thank you for the message Aranesh, and thank you for all you have done which has added to my enjoyment of the game.
I also want to add my voice to the support for pet battles and pet collecting, it may not be the only thing I enjoy about this great and diverse game but has added to it, added goals, humour and depth. It made me sad that the wonderful critters of K’aresh could not be tamed and I really hope that pet battles as a system will not go away.

5 Likes
5

I’m absolutely gutted to learn of this. Pet collecting and battling has been a passion of mine for many years. Every new pet that’s released on the trading post is a joy. All the years I’ve spent chasing pets, and now for what? To have it taken away.

I don’t do any end game mythic. I only run LFR infrequently. The HC dungeon system has been diabolical and I gave up on it. The last time I tried, there was a Call to Arms for DPS. I joined and it said 2 minute queue. 40 minutes later I left the queue. I thought I’d like the delves, but turns out I actually hate them and I’ll go back for achievements after Midnight is released. I’m not interested in chasing gear other than for mog. I used to craft all the prof gear for mog but stopped at Dragonflight due to the changes, which means it’s not possible to craft everything I want for myself. I like a bit of pvp, it’s fun, but I don’t do it for any reason other than lulz, achievements and all the fun stuff a pvp scrub can collect.

And now this. I’m guessing archaeology is next, but now I’m in such a panic over the pets I haven’t got yet that I’m considering leaving Remix as soon as I’ve got the stuff I want. I’ll need to do nothing but grind missing pets and archaeology.

Please, please don’t do this. The system needs an overhaul and an update to make it easy for new players to enter. Having to grind xpacs on a new account just to open up the pet battles and get access to pets doesn’t help anyone.

Having nothing new to do in pet battles doesn’t help anyone. We need new pet dungeons, new pet challenges, and a better interface. I’ve got tabs for all the xpacs and there’s so many it’s difficult.

Blizzard neglecting the pet battle system, then realising it’s not as popular, and deciding to do away with it blows my mind. Imagine if they did the same to raiding, mythic and pvp. The uproar from the community wouldn’t let them get away with it.

But for us, they Just ignored the content, let it get dusty other than releasing new pets and new pet battles, and what do they expect?

Please. Don’t take away one of the few things I still love about WoW. I don’t want to walk away from it. There’s only so many achievements I can grind and then what will there be?

For context: I missed nearly all of Shadowlands due to illness. I got two chars to 70 and logged off until the February after DF was released. In the time that I’ve been back, I’ve used my alt army to grind 15k pet charms to get the pets that sell for 10k and 5k charms (I bought the second one a few months ago). There were days I literally did nothing but pet battles on as many alts as I could (there’s 62 alts atm). I’ve since ground nearly 3k more in anticipation of what I need to buy from SL. That’s how much I’m into pet battles and collecting!

I’m grateful for all the hard work that goes into maintaining Xu-Fu. Without it, I would be lost. Without it, I wouldn’t know about these changes, because I haven’t even looked at Midnight yet!

10 Likes
6

It wasn’t that long ago that the pet battle system was called an “evergreen” system.

It’s not clear what Blizzard has planned (EDIT: just saw some more details about the zero ability wild pets… not good). Maybe it’s just tweaks like making the battles run smoother. On the other hand, no wild pets in Karesh was a bad sign, and they have left the system on autopilot for ages.

I think if Blizzard want more engagement they should incentivise it. One way to do that would be to put a pet slot in the new transmog outfit windows, allowing people to more easily attach pets to their general appearance.

The worst case scenario here is a phasing out of pet battling completely, with “managed” media posts about “declining engagement” and enthusiastic hyping about “adding pets to your house and character!!” That would be really disappointing. Pet battling is fun and adds a great dimension to the game.

It seems the only people really losing enthusiasm about this is Blizzard. They should be strengthening and maintaining reward streams in the game, not tying them off and letting them die out.

7 Likes
7

Pet battles was the feature that got me back into wow during Pandaria after years of inactivity. I’m gutted! Your site has been used time and time again. I was nervous about adding changes but this latest news comes as a complete shock. I noticed they removed Rumble Coins as well (badly as a couple still exist).

7 Likes
8

Thank you for all your support to the pet battle community! As a mostly solo player who likes to chill and interact with the old world zones of WoW, pet battle is the main thing that keeps these zones still feel ‘alive’. You will barely see any player other than pet battlers to go back to all of the older zones and new ones to chase their rare quality pet missing in the collection. We are the ones that goes to older zones than anyone else. Once we get the pets we want, we have no more reasons to get back there. Blizzard should work on their ‘evergreen’ feature more to give players more replayable content, just a little bit more deep system for pet battles(keep it simple and yet exciting to more ppl). They literally abondoned pet battlers and seeing the decrease in the number of players who enjoy the pet battles is expected of course. Another issue about trust of players to Blixzard is… They called this feature evergreen and yet if they are abondoning it, they may aswell abondon some other features like housing aswell. You can’t just call a system evergreen and then leave it to become a old dusty book on the shelf. If you do, you damage trust, you lose money. It’s that simple. I hope they come to their senses and make a small team dedicated to pet battles. We don’t expect much, some new stuff to pet battle content to refresh its soul every few patches isn’t much. You have a shop category dedicated to pets alone, it isn’t much to ask some changes and news to pet battles every few patches. They have money, but they are not passionate unlike the pet battle community, this is the problem right now. Only if we had a small team of pet battlers who love the system and plays it until today, maybe they can be even some players who knows about coding stuff, i trust they could revive the system and make it attractive and reachable to many more!

6 Likes
9

I basically only play Wow for collecting pets, where I live we have very bad lag times never better than 250ms and often around 1000 or more, so Running raids in a guild always make be be the worst player. So I collect Pets, now I also collect toys but that is only to get enough toys so I can get the Achievement pet Brutus.

7 Likes
10

Ohh no. Why remove something that works and is already in the game. I have loved it so much over the years. Go out and find new pets to battle when everything else from time to time seemed boring, or go do a pet battle dungeon to get the tokens …

7 Likes
11

I think Blizzard is being purposefully disingenuous with how they’re handling pet battles at this stage. They speak about lack of engagement while they ignored every aspect of pet battling in Karesh except for drops. They removed adding new pet trainers and have 0 wild pets that are catchable. If you look at Undermine, the family battler achievement of Undermine has about a 10% attain rate on WoWHead, suggesting a good amount of players focus on Pet Battles, as obtaining the family battler achievements is not really possible without focusing on it. They haven’t added a pet dungeon in numerous expansions, no achievements except for collection X number of pets and family battles, etc. There’s been almost no focus on pets for numerous patches which inevitably leads to a slight decline in engagement so that they can say “oh look, nobody cares about pets, let’s put even less effort into it”.

For me, pet collecting is the most important part of WoW, as M+/Raiding/PvP are filled with toxicity, but thankfully Blizz will ignore all that :smiley:

8 Likes
12

I do not wanna sound rude but pet’s have been just a huge mistake from day one, it’s a pokemon waste of time… Sure Pandaria introduced these things because ppl were bored but if they decide to remove it, it makes no difference to me

13

Not to be dramatic but if it wasn’t for pet battling, I wouldn’t have had my subscription running for the past 2 years continuously. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the other ways to play this game and do delves, mythic+, old content (questing and mount runs) but I manage to get bored of all of them often. Pet related content has kept me coming back, either to do the family battler achievements, the dungeons, leveling new pets to do said content or sometimes even PVP pet battles… Luckily I’m only a casual so there’s still a lot for me to do from old xpacs for a little while yet but I was so excited to see what new pets/pet related activities there would be in Midnight, some of the best quests or funnest grinds I ever did were pet related. I’m working my way through collecting most of the old areas’ wild pets and it’s such a fun way to explore the game. I would’ve probably been happy even if they just continued with their half-assed releases in terms of pet content as I would have still gotten to battle and collect all the new pets and try and get the new achievs, but knowing that everyone can just walk by one and click it to collect it makes it so incredibly dull that I don’t even care what the pets are, everyone can have them with a single click so what’s the point of them? (DING! Midnight Safari achiev - you aimed at little creatures and left clicked 15 of them)… Sure pet battles and caging weren’t that difficult, but you still needed a bit of intentional effort and going out of your way to do it (Turnip!!). Recently I was catching up on the little whelps daycare quests which was only previous expansion so I did have a little bit of hope for more dungeons or any other fun ways to enjoy pets to be added so I’m beyond upset that they decided to dumb it down or slowly kill it off…

6 Likes
15

Dear Aaranesh - thank you for all your work on Xu-Fu’s Pet Guides - it is fantastic.

Pet battles and pet collections has been my favourite thing is WoW since it was introduced and I am devastated that it might go away. It is first thing I get active on when new content is released. it is soothing, fun and I love figuring out strategies and catching them all.

Please keep this feature!

5 Likes
16

I completely agree with everything you said.

Pet Battles have always been one of the most charming and creative parts of World of Warcraft. They might not be the biggest feature, but they’ve built a wonderful and dedicated community that truly adds life to the game.

It would be such a shame to see this system fade away after so many years. Even small updates or occasional new content would go a long way in keeping this part of WoW alive. For many of us, it’s not just a side activity — it’s something we genuinely love and look forward to.

Thank you for speaking up about this and for everything you’ve done with Xu-Fu’s Pet Guides. Your work has kept the spirit of Pet Battles alive for so many players around the world. I truly hope Blizzard listens and gives this amazing feature the attention it deserves.

5 Likes
17

As someone who’s mostly focused on raiding, Mythic+, and PvP over the years, I only recently gave pet battles a real chance - and to my surprise, I’ve found them to be way more engaging and fun than I ever expected.

It’s such a unique and charming feature that offers something completely different from the usual endgame grind. There’s strategy, collection, and a sense of progression that scratches a different itch than raiding or dungeons ever could. It’s also one of the few systems that can be enjoyed by players of all skill levels and playstyles - whether you’re a casual collector or a theorycrafter optimizing every pet combo.

That’s why it’s disheartening to hear that the system might be on the chopping block. The pet battle community may not be the largest, but it’s incredibly passionate. We’re not asking for the world - just some love, a few updates, and maybe some fresh ideas to breathe new life into this system that already has so much potential.

Pet battles are a special part of WoW’s soul. I really hope Blizzard considers giving this system another look and seeing what it could become with a bit of attention and care.

6 Likes
18

Please don’t remove the petbattles. I like to collect and raise the pets. I’m not good enough for pvp or mythic dungeons or even a normal raid. My pleasure is delves (so i can collect heroic-gear), questing (good forthe storyline and reputationfarming), trying to get achievements and pet-battles to collect new pets. I always look forward to see new pets with an update. And to battle the pets is a nice way to get new pets. Since I found Xu-Fu’s Pet Battle Strategies I can also get the more difficult pets in a battle.

5 Likes
19

My perspective is similar. The nice thing about WoW is that there’s a lot of systems and things to try, if you get tired of your main in-game activity. It’s one of the things that keeps me playing. I recently dipped into pet battles while achievement hunting and it’s a nice (and very different) change of pace from the rest of the game.

I can see the obstacles to getting started, which I’m sure put people off from giving it a try and fuel low engagement. I was lucky enough to get started in a Squirt week and had a bunch of pet charms lying around that I could use to start levelling a few core pets. However, there’s some easy tweaks that could be made:

  • Allowing people to buy level 25 pets from the Auction House.
  • A daily NPC to level pets against (rather than needing a WoD garrison).
  • Keep giving pet charms (or xp-items) in Renown caches.

This, plus a little extra content/new battle pets for the veterans, seems to me like a low cost way to keep a system fresh that keeps some people happy and playing (and buying the occasional store pet).

4 Likes
20

I can also just join the others.

Pet battles are very nice thing to do when you want to hang around with friends in Discord or such but don’t want to go raiding or such.

Collecting, training and battling (in PvE) has given me a lot of joy in the last three years.

Collecting achievements with them is a big part of my weekly routine. IF there is something open. I would invest more time if there would be more to do. I would love to run again pet battle dungeons. If there would be an incentive.

The whole reason getting engineering and doing the basics for M+ dungeons was to get more ways to travel around the game world to be faster at the bet battlers. Some days I still spend two hours to fight them. Pet battling, even PvE has for me being a Hugh time sink.

The entire system is to a large part very appealing for me as a, mostly, solo player. Just like delves. It keeps me occupied, gives me goals and there have been months in the past three years where my only activities, except LFR, where just collecting pets and achievements and training them.

On the trading post, I choose the pet over a mount.

In remix I buy the pets first, then the mounts.

If a bundle on the WoW shop has a pet, I buy it. No pet, low interest for the shop stuff.

Pets are a Hugh part of my WoW playtime.

So: please don’t abandon them. Please keep this feature alive and keep it even for current content!

5 Likes
21

Thank you for all of your hard work over the years. Aranesh!

In line with Blizzard’s new ethos of making gameplay more simple and accessible, they could look into removing the levelling aspect of pet battles or make it far easier. I honestly feel like levelling pets is the biggest barrier when it comes to engagement, because most people simply don’t want to invest that much time, and to make it efficient, you need A LOT of set up (specific pets to be able to do Legion pet battle quests with a levelling pet in the party, pet menagerie in your garrison etc. ).

They could look into adding something like passive experience when you have your battle pet out as a companion, or having it gain experience when you complete quests/content. Maybe they could do this so you don’t even need to have the pet out, but you could place a pet in a levelling slot in your journal? Or make a queue like you can with rematch?

They could also look into making battle training stones provide FAR more experience and drop from mobs (for example, if you’re fighting undead mobs they have a small chance to drop undead battle stones), and also making it so you can sell them on the AH? I think the experience provided would need to be significant, as in 1 stone is enough to get a pet from 1 to 25.

I don’t really want to diminish the many hours people have spent levelling pets (myself included), but I honestly don’t see a way forward unless they make changes to levelling or remove it entirely.

3 Likes