Pet battles are the most underrated content in the game

i don’t do them as much as other things but, they are actually so fun
i decided to start doing pet battles and they got me travelling around the world collecting and leveling pets from different types that have different damage types that counter different pet types
nothing really made me travel around the old world this much since i started playing in 9.0
i like how you can get stones from world quests that you can upgrade pets to rare quality and so they have more stats
or that you can boost your pets after you fully level up one yourself
i haven’t tried pvp yet, i don’t think i have enough pets for that yet, is it good tho ? and what do we get out of pvp pet battles
pet battle dungeons are something i also hear of, can i do them at low level for xp? and what are the rewards for that

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Pet battles had a great start, but then Blizzard neglected them. It’s good that they at least added pet battle dungeons and achievements for winning various encounters with pets of the same family, but that’s precious little for what has been 8+ (10+?) years already. They could have hit the jackpot with pet PVP, but they did nothing. Well. It’s just a collection game with scripted fights with known solutions now. Most of the interest is in getting the pet, even if it is a complete dud in combat (eg, is a duplicate of other pets ability-wise). Don’t get me wrong, that’s still something. But it could have been much more.

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I used to find them fun, but then they went a bit OTT with the legendary pets and what not that are just so stupidly overpowered that you need that one team able to cheese them, it’s just not the same anymore. :frowning:

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huh ? i never heard of that

i mean it’s just a minigame right? i saw lot of people in old comments and stuff complaining about pet battles saying that they’re wasting time on it
i agree that it shouldn’t be their priority because it’s just a minigame, but isn’t adding new pets and dungeons enough? i’m curious what ideas do you have to improve them

I had ideas for (a) pet PVP with ratings and leaderboards and rewards and, most of all, interesting + rarely-repeating + think-on-the-fly fights, (b) being able to breed your own pets to get cross-abilities / whatever, and some other things. I wrote too much on them in the past years to do it again, sorry. I am not saying they had to do things I asked for or in the way that I asked, because some of the issues are, indeed, complex. But I would have been happy with any serious developments. And they just never did anything notable. Just pet battle dungeons (near-zero novelty, we had it on Timeless Isle, not a big feature at all), some achievements that I noted (nothing to code whatsoever, just a nudge to play in a particular way) and that’s about it.

It’s all new and exciting to you, I get it, but we’ve seen pet battles for 8-10 years, so the excitement from that novelty that you are experiencing passed a long time ago, and it’s just a collection game with scripted fights with known solutions and maaaaaybe some new pets entering pvp on a major patch forcing away some old ones. Not terribly interesting.

Since you seem to be new to pet battles, be sure to see this guide to help you start:

Guide: Your early pet roster - Gameplay / Pet Battles - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)

There are other guides on the pet battle forum.

In particular, look for posts from Grainne, he / she is an expert.

See this site for discussion of news, strategies for various fights, a tool to browse through your collection of pets, etc:

https://www.wow-petguide.com/

There are several other sites as well.

Welcome, etc.

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I’m pretty sure this got scrapped from MoP or warlords i feel like having pets that share abilities from it’s parents will make it less relevant to go out and try to beat pets in order to capture them, it also makes people less excited to obtain new pets it also lead to that situation where all you need to do is a few pets of each type and then you’ll eventually have one pet that’s of all types and has 6 types of damage which is broken

isn’t pvp like this anyway? , tho i don’t think that’ll be as much of a think on the fly fights like actual player pvp, because of how pets counter each other

Not really. You will see. (People run a few setups over and over.)

The achievement for 5000 wins in pet pvp is the most boring ***** I saw in the game. And I have honor level 420 on my main account.

tbh, pet battles are doing my head in. they are so boring and tedious. i tried looking up guides but idk, i just cant. it even feels like a chore reading through them and its quite confusing to me in general.

i probably could get into it if they updated it a bit.

Ty friend

you mean like there are few really good strategies / combinations of pets that people use and it gets repetitive?

Yes. /10ch

Don’t forget you can do many battles with a level 1 set of pets and Wowhead comments always show the best ones to use per fight.

They’re pretty good. And my roster isn’t the best. Not sure about the xp for them but the main reward is the teleports to the dungeons. You can teleport just outside Stratholme, very handy since Alliance has no cities in Northern Eastern Kingdoms to portal to. Other locations include Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, Blackrock Mountain.
Apart from that you earn some tokens to buy some pets.

The Celestial Tournament is one to work towards, pretty tricky with a smaller roster, took me ages to round up the required pets.

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well that’s kind of the same thing as a card game right, maybe they can balance the pets a little bit, but i guess the more patches the more zones that bring new pets and maybe that brings some more competitive combinations
tho it’s okay to be done with something, you don’t have to keep doing this

they are useful if you’re lazy to get world quests done lol, and to get quite a bit of gold from the auction house selling max level rare pets , some of them go for a few hundred thousands of gold
i think hazel did a pretty good job in this video that kinda made me realize what’s cool about pet battles

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From Dalaran. Not like a mage’s teleport. Just clarifying.

Welcome to pet battling!

When I started with pet battles during the long, long drought of Siege of Orgrimmar, I too found myself delighted with revisiting all the beloved old zones with a purpose. :smiley:

It is really pleasant to tour the world collecting, and learning the mechanics of pet battling.

Like everything in WoW, it has been analysed to death, and I suggest you just work through the learning and beginning and collecting stages naturally rather than study the theorycrafting. They are the best, most enjoyable part!

Do please get these three addons:

  1. Rematch
  2. Pet Tracker
  3. Battle Pet Breed ID

all three are essenftially mandatory for anyone collecting or battling. There are others that are optional, but those three are your basis.

These two sites are your bookmarks

https://www.wow-petguide.com/ - though this one is for later, when you have a roster of level 25s

PvP is not good. Long and sad story. Basically, the devs don’t want to promote competitive pet PvP, and they give it very little. The best reward is a level 25 Purple boost stone from Pet Week, and that is much harder to get than just paying 60 Charms for one at the vendor. There is no PvP apart from level 25s, and the current meta is sooo crazy unbalanced that most of the few people who did PvP have stopped.

You will need a beginning roster of Level 25 pets to do the dungeons. The Celestial Tournament, the original, is AMAZING. The others … opinions vary. Your main reward from the dungeons is more pets that you can buy with currency you earn in them.

There is also the WarcraftPets Discord where you will find lots of jaded but friendly old hands https://discord.gg/967Vu7G

I recently wrote some guides for another player at about your stage who wanted to get one of the Celestial Tournament pets. They might help you, too, and answer some of your questions.

If you want to know ANYTHING more, do check out the Pet Battles forum or the Discord!

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Good point but it is account wide.

thanks. i will probably have a look into it as i dont really know what to do in wow atm.

its just, whenever i look something up, its so much information and then i see what pets i have versus what i need and then i have to level them. it takes so much time in order to achieve anything that my brain already says

and then oh you have the right pet but you dont have the right spells because you need to level the damn thing first and then i cant help but thinking “oh my god i just want to do x why do i have to do a thousand things before i can do it”. and when you do something else you have to do the whole shabang again.

it probably gets easier once you re settled with a certain roster but… meh.

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I like this phrase from a comment in one of the latest threads on warcraftpets:

“PvP is a dumpster fire on a train wreck inside a toxic waste dump.”

So much potential. All wasted.

Ehhhhhhhhh. I don’t think it’s that.

Pet battles had a great start, agreed. A great start. An awesome start.

Thing is, it’s not so easy to expand on the basic structure, and I’m not sure the community would respond well to any fundamental changes. Lots of people - not the ones talking in the Discords, but the silent majority - quite like just pottering around collecting, and getting their Charms and quest credit for doing the WQ.

I could legitimately say that the devs deliberately backlined PvP, but they have supported the current collecting and PvE playstyle very well and faithfully across the expansions.

The legendary pets in recent expansions are actually the easiest of battles, but they do specifically need a Bleed & Stampede approach, and yes. you must have that in your toolbox. But pick up a Valk, Ikky, Skitterspine along with your basics an you’re good.

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