In a recent piece of information provided by Bears_Adventures in a still unreleased interview with Ion Hazzikostas, the World of Warcraft development teams do not believe that the community, by and large, are engaging with the pet system and going into Midnight, they’re looking to retire certain features, such as battling mechanics altogether.
With this news in mind, I want to encourage the pet battle community to sound off with their feedback in a constructive, meaningful fashion, not only to prove that there is still viable interest among the EU region but to hopefully have an open dialogue to discuss the pain points of the current iteration and what could be done to fix them.
I highly encourage anyone from US Region or anyone with Alpha/Beta access to PLEASE carry all of this feedback forward so the development teams can see.
To help jump start this, use the questions provided below as a guideline.
1. Do you pet battle? If so, why do you pet battle? i.e Gold Making, Collecting, Roleplay.
2. What aspects of the pet battle system do you love? Are there any you hate?
3. If you don’t engage with pet battles but may reconsider, what features and rewards would have to be provided to get your engagement?
My feedback, which can be based on wrong information so bare with me a little, would be summarized as the following:
1. Re-scale & Unlock Pet Content
If there is one pain point that needs an immediate fix, its the inability to access pet battle content unless either the individual character or someone within the war band has met the prerequisites for being able to discover content that reward pet charms.
Unlike other past features, pet battles have not been re-scaled. At this point in the game, only Dragonflight has retained its ability for alts to level through bonus objectives, world quests and all accessible storylines, main and side. War Within continues this trend by providing a similar experience for leveling towards the current maximum cap.
However, Shadowlands saw the removal of Threads of Fate for characters below 60-70 and, in the case of new accounts, requires the completion of story campaigns and selective content features to unlock.
Similarly, so does Battle for Azeroth. Not only does a new account require to do the introduction campaign and any other selective featured storylines but alts still need to unlock access to Zandalar and Boralus at 60-70 to benefit from high end pet battles.
Legion, for newly made accounts, requires that a character has met sufficient reputation milestones in order to unlock world quests across the Broken Isles. Meanwhile, alts may still need to turn in a quest to Khadgar to benefit similarly.
This leaves, for the majority of the community, with only daily to weekly quests found in the major main continents or having to grind through each scaled zone trying to unlock their first team of level 25s. For new accounts, they cannot collect any high level pet from the Auction House which further alienates them from being able to partake in endgame content due to having too frequent low-level pets they cannot quickly level.
2. Overhaul Progression & Rewards
Each of the pets have a maximum in which they can be improved and there is currently no means in which pets can be trained beyond this point. No pet families can learn new abilities. No pets can have their statistics, like speed, tinkered with.
Furthermore, beyond the above listed limitations, high level pets are easy to obtain if you have gold or have the time to collect the needed battle stones to bypass leveling altogether. There is, essentially, no reason to require battling.
I have tried, multiple times, to queue to finish family pet achievements and you can be waiting for hours in the faintest hope that someone else is doing the same. In fact, this Battle Queue has been dead for long enough that Blizzard have to include a weekly PvP quest and include pet battles in the traveler’s log to incentivize engagement!
Frankly, beyond having something adorable to show off every so often (especially for roleplay or collector reasons) there is no meaningful rewards or incentives for progressing in pet battles; no new cosmetics, no new titles, no new community events or seasonal activities, no underground fight arena solely for pets, no new challenge pet dungeons, no battle progression, no mounts, no nothing.
Majority of the community, for the largest part, do not see a direct reason for why they might want to engage with pet battles because there isn’t a reason provided (on Blizzard’s part).
3. Outdated UI & Complex Information
Pet Battles can be intimidating for new accounts joining our community and even as someone who frequently dabbles in and out of it, I still require third-party add-ons or guides to effectively manage, understand and remind myself on how pet encounters work, what each pet family can do and what operations each ability needs to be used in.
None of this information is communicated clearly in-game. There are no guide books you can collect that explain any relevant lore or system details to my knowledge. Everything discovered about pet battles has been through the community itself. This makes it challenging for new people to engage with this system because there is no viable means to learn from the game itself beyond trial and error.
Furthermore, the journal for pet entries is in sore need of an overhaul, both to the layout but also to introduce QoLs that third-party add-ons currently provide, such as the ability to save loadouts between battles.
I know this information will anger some but I can understand why, from Blizzard’s perspective, it might appear that the community isn’t engaging enough with pet battles and thus, if we want to save pet battles and to prove this can become evergreen, WE NEED TO SOUND OFF AND GIVE BLIZZARD USEFUL FEEDBACK.
for caring and trying.
. This is mostly as I do prefer when you can level up other pets with them, something that hasn’t happened in a long while – and if there’s nothing to level up anymore, and the world quests rewards eventually become good for nothing – what is there even left to do except some speedrunning?