Too many pets

Gameplay Pet Battles
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I have tons of pets, almost all pet achievements and… I’m losing interest because the amount of pets they are adding to the game with every patch is ridiculous. They are mostly uninteresting and not memorable at all with a few exceptions. I’m sick of collecting 30 kinds of crabs and snails and whatnot… they’d better make less pets but more memorable/quality type. With all the surge of pets I’m just losing my interest because it’s just getting stupid. Not to mention some of the pets are ridiculously RNG to get (or real gold sinks).
This is just not fun anymore.

It’s getting progressively more overwhelming for newcomers too…

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Yeah, me too.

I had accepted there were some pets not currently available that I was never going to get, like the Panda Cub. That was ok, but I could at least get all current pets, right?

Then came Bucketshell/Sir Snips. While I expect WoW to survive for a long time, it won’t be long enough for me to ever get those. That broke my resolve.

Now we have the rare rares in 8.3. No. I’ve stopped. No more. I detest the corrupted Uldum. I detest the corrupted Vale. I detest the cheap blue light they turn on from above. I detest the cheesy attempts at creepy ambiance, the random noises, the music. They’re not as bad as Nazjatar, but they’re bad. I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to spend time there. I damwell WILL NOT camp there for hours for a small chance at a pet I care nothing about.

There is nothing that interests me on the battling side either. That’s to some extent my own fault; as the saying goes, I’ve “completed the content”. They show no signs of making PvE interesting. They show no signs of interest in boosting participation in PvP (I grant that’s not easy or straightforward.) Still, what it means is that I have no interest in trying a new pet to see if I can craft the 74th known strategy for a particular levelling tamer, or form it into an interesting synergy for a PvP team.

I don’t quite know what they think they’re doing with the announced SL changes. What the devs said, and what we’ve seen so far on Alpha, doesn’t show a complete picture. But whatever about the plusses and minuses for the battling gameplay, it doesn’t yet include anything that sounds like it will revive interest.

When you have 1200 pets, it’s really hard to get excited about #1201, unless you know what you want to use it for.

Having said all that, I don’t think it’s so terrible for newcomers. The wirst of it is, I think, that they mostly don’t get to pursue the brilliantly designed original levelling path. OTOH, the speed and ease of levelling pets now is amazing; it would look like science-fiction to a player time-travelling from Mists. So they have a lot to expand into, but a lot of boost to help with that.

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AMEN!
less boring copy pastas with bad movesets and stats that don’t make any sense and don’t synergize with the abilities the pets have…

i’d also rather get fewer pets with every expansion/content patch as long as the new pets are original, impactful and also balanced (bfa balancing amirite?)

on top of that i don’t understand how it’s ok for them to put that much work into creating this mass of new pets every single content patch in BfA… but apparently fixing bugs, balance issues or just improving existing systems that are either terrible or no longer meaningful is too much to ask for

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I’m coming to believe that issues, balance and otherwise, are seen differently by the devs.

Now, I famously see balance in a very different context from you and Rosqo, but that difference is not what I mean. The devs put TCS into the game just a year-ish after they had made a big thing out of nerfing AoE, and specifically “Meteor-type” abilities. That wasn’t a mistake. They didn’t forget. And they added Hermit Crab knowing that its stats didn’t add up. That wasn’t a mistake either.

They’ve been ramping up AoE since the start of BfA. Why? It barely registers in PvE. Is that the reason? to try to tempt PvE strats to use AoE? Or did they do it just to shake things up a bit so they could shake them again when removed?

Why is Black Claw/Hunting Party an “issue” now, when it has been fine since Mists?

I don’t know. I just think we don’t have a handle on the devs’-eye view of what constitutes “issues”. Their perspective seems very different from ours. Maybe we who have 1200 pets, in the best breeds, all levelled, are not seeing the perspective of the “casuals”! :stuck_out_tongue:

Fixing bugs that bother only a very small minority of people is clearly low priority. That, at least, I can understand. They clearly don’t have a Vision for expanding PvP, so they don’t want to spend time fiddling with it. That, too.

Adding pets is very different work from changing systems, or reprogramming. Adding pets will mostly take art/animation resources - and better they burn them on that fairly harmless activity than screwing up our characters even more, or creating markets for the next generation of GPUs. Though I won’t forgive what they did to the Emperor Crab model. :angry:

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well yeah, but i think you would agree that overinflated stats of like HC, slimy darkhunter, boghopper etc. are a matter of poor balancing without differentiating their actual use in pve or pvp.

honestly, i don’t think this was a mistake either. they must have done this on purpose, otherwise we wouldn’t see certain patterns like both boghopper and hermit crab having the same stats. but them coming so late to the realization that what they have done is harmful to the game is what really bothers me.

and in those situations this argument →

doesn’t work since they would literally just have to change some numbers.

now i can see that adding pets and changing systems/fixing stuff are two entirely different things when it comes to resources and time they have to put into it, but that is why i said i wouldn’t mind them at all stopping adding pets for a time and instead pay more attention to the issues we already have…

well yes, but if they keep neglecting the bugs and other flaws then they just keep adding up until they either become too many for the game to be (somewhat) enjoyable or have such a big negative impact that the devs are forced to find solutions to old problems they could have fixed a long time ago

i think the whole black claw+swarm situation is a good example for that…

exactly, it didn’t really change much, but having that one tool to counter most pve fights (mostly) unchanged over years was gaining popularity to a point at which now everybody knows about it and therefor the majority of pve content (which obviously is the one that most people play) became pointless when it comes to the difficulty/challenge

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(I think we’ve hijacked the thread enough on the subject of systems, so I’ll avoid the temptation and get back on the original point about numbers of pets.)

The point is not, though, the raw amount of resources used, but where those resources are coming from.

I think they have a LOT of graphics and animations bods. I think they have too many; I’d look at cutting that headcount. They’re just adding pixels for the sake of adding pixels at this point.

New pets just require time from all those graphics types. Yes, there are abilities to be added as well, but we can all see that not much detail work is being done there. And I suspect that people are being given pets to design and animate as part of their training with tools - and perhaps to keep the less competent away from more important things they can screw up.

Didn’t save the Emperor Crab from having its model trashed, though. :angry:

So, as I see it, adding uninteresting pets is actually a training expense. Further, new pets are very desirable to Blizzard; they form a layer of the reward structures of the game that does not affect or cause complications with main gameplay. If they can provide … 5% … of the playerbase with a reason to suffer through hours in those horrible zones camping rares, that’s great, regardless of whether these pets contribute to the actual pet ecosystem or not.

These are perverse incentives for adding many random pets that don’t really interact with battling.

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The fun fact is that you only need 5 pets to be good at random PvE and PvP
Ikky + Val’kyr for most PvE stuff

And my team of Tinytron, Blightbreath and Twilight Clutch-Sister wrecks pretty much any team in PvP. I have no incentive to play any other combo because I can even beat those lame and cancer-inducing teams :stuck_out_tongue:

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5 aren’t enough for pvp, because this:

is easy to beat and you would need a counter to the counter’s counter, you know? but let’s not get into that, wrong topic anyway

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not as easy as you would think. I was able to wreck teams with elemental and critter damage, basically countering me in theory ;v

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that’s not a counter.
qiraji guardling solos that team

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Hey at least the movesets are a bit more unique rather than all the snakes, squirrels, otters, moths and whatever in MoP.
…
But for neither there is anything to use them for.

I also go through burnout but in a bit different area.

I am interested in how to discern a good and memorable pet from an OP pet, as this is might not be as easy to a newcomer, and in the current system.
The old thread with creations was nuked.

If it’s just using them for something, I am afraid it’s not sustainable right now which goes back to not enough quality content.

And I guess anyone may suspect what this content could be but for the main world a similar milestone was supposed to be found in the expeditions.

I know where the door is.

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I don’t mind trash pets.
Not every new pet needs to be something special. Sometimes it’s just a wild critter to fill numbers.
And that’s totally fine, for every pikachu, there will always be a Trubbish.

Battle wise, it’s just numbers. They removed the bomb spam after WOD, then nerfed howl, now it’s blackclaw stampede.
Give it a week.
There will be something new, probably haunt bombing or something similar, there will always be gimmicks.

Pet pvp is more the same. People will eventually find out what has the highest chance of success and focus on that. Look at pokemon. Most of the meta there is the same teams with 2-3 different types. It’s so bad people made there own meta game for it, just to try and balance it.
For pokemon like minigames, call me pessimistic, but you can’t fix it. Since there’s no reaction based work, or mechanics outside of, press 1-2-3 then you can’t really expect much.

As for pet collection, I agree, locking pets behind some things is rough, I’m terrible at pvp I will never get the Crabs. But that’s like the mount collectors. They can’t get some of them. I will not be getting Brutus for a while because it’s tied behind toys of all things.

Now If I had my way.
Which is never a good idea.
I’d introduce replica pets. Versions of no longer available pets, you could do it for timewalking badges, or some new currency.
Have a pet battle cave in the caverns of time, you beat random trainers from the past for tokens. Then you can buy stuff that isn’t really available any more.

I don’t really care about exclusivity. As far as i’m concerned half the people that even had that stuff probably quit a while ago. And you ain’t really gonna brag about a low poly pet model.

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There is too many to collect. I gave up after i made list on where and when to go :smiley:

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WoW basically is a “collectible” game. That’s why the huge number of pet available and the repetiveness of the skills the pets have.
And as Grainne said, we, the “pet lovers”, are a very small community that doesn’t worth the effort to do something about this system.
I agree that the number of pets is ridiculous and most of them are forgetable.
For example almost all PVE content in BFA can be done with Valk+Ikki combo…so what’s the use of the other 1198 pets?

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Wod it was howlbombing. Then they add challenges like family fighters which makes the fights more interesting.
But that’s old content I guess.
Even saying that the common rabbit pet is incredibly useful in almost every pet dungeon.
Ikky can last. 1-2 fights tops.

Why there are so many pets?
Honestly I don’t think there’s enough!
I’ve wanted a little worm pet for ages. I want baby kodos, I want the headless horseman’s floating skull.
I want loads of things. Will I use them all in battle? Hell no. But it’ll be cool to walk around on my Warlock with an extra little demon pet. My engineer with a little robot friend etc.
After a while, they just become transmog options.

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Mr Grubbs? Dreadmaw?

Er, no. OK, yes for most of the Legendaries in 8.2 and 8.3, but that was simply unthinking, lazy, lazy design by the devs. If they keep setting up the same problem over and over, it’s not a surprise that the same solution works every time.

Try Valk+Ikky on Captured Evil, or Not So Bad, or … well, almost any regular three-pet battle, and that’s before we get to Family, or the dungeons.

OK, I get that. And if the pets came from pet battling, I’d be ok with it, even if not very interested. OTOH, it makes me just throw my hands up and stop caring when they want to make me sit for hours in unpleasant zones waiting for a chance to buy a lottery ticket, or gate a pet behind a crazy grind I would never finish in my lifetime or WoW’s.

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No the basic worm model, the old pink one. There’s tons of grubs.

I get your complaint though. But, mount collectors gotta PVP/raid/island expeditions etc. Same amount of crap we have to do for pets.

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Yes, but they’re merely cosmetic (besides flying/ground/aquatic functionality).
I wanted to say: imagine having to earn a character ability through something, but then I recalled a whole cascade of trinkets, Azerite gimmicks, the Covenant drama and so on.

This is the second side of the coin. Some pets just have to remain bland in this model. See reactions to certain decent Blizzcon pets.

Perhaps it’s a iteration of “pick one” meme with source/utility/characterisation.

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