Pet Breeding not in 6.0

[Quintessence]

Mumper recently Tweeted:

"We decided against pet breeding for the 6.0 launch. Mainly balance and content concerns."

It doesn't sound like the idea's been scrapped completely, so even though it's not planned for 6.0 it could still be a feature in a later patch.

[Nelaphim]

Between this news and the fact that Garrisons are now tied to your faction starting zone, my hype for the expansion has taken a massive nosedive.

[Luciandk]

Not suprised Breeding got scrapped, it had just too many balance issues bound to it. Alpha is alpha, its where things is in flux.

Regarding Garrisons, I heard some blabber that they are considering making moving it a lvl 100 only ability. But I can understand why they wanted to tie it down to a specific place, to connect it more closely to the leveling experience. Then they can more freely script the attacks comming to your garrisons when you annoy the opposing groups in Draenor as you level up. Like completing a massive quest chain that spanks the Iron Horde, but which immediately triggers a followup that sends a punishment attack to your garrison that you need to return and help fighting off.

[Index]

Bah!! they're backing out of an awful lot of things again. No epic pets and now no breeding in 6.0. That, the class changes (read gutting and homogenising) means I'm probably not long for the WoW universe. Shame. Was a fun ride :/

[Rioriel]

Hmm, can't decide whether I'm for or against the breeding idea anyway. The way it was being presented and commented upon on here made it sounds like a massive faff.

Generally underwhelmed with how Blizz is moving forward (v e r y s l o w l y) with 6.0 and beyond.

I know I'll enjoy pottering about on my own, completing the quest lines then going about catching all the wild pets, but I've not even been taken in by the plot hook this time round, and for someone who's played Warcraft for many, many years, I think they've dropped the ball on this one.

Bleh.

Still at least there's a BLIZZCON taking place thousand of miles away in six months. Joy.

[Keltoroq]

And finally it seems this is the year i will try to actually go to Blizzcon in person. That will be an adventure

Hope to see some of you guys there. Should be fun. Hope i can get those tickets. They always fly up so fast.

As for WoD i was won over when i heard the word Babby Hippo. Count me in

[Maizing]

Meh... I am planning on waiting a bit after launch before I even get the expansion anyway. Not too taken with the whole "no fly" restriction for current content. In fact, lately I have been avoiding the Timesink Isle and playing with my lower level alts instead.

[Kpb321]

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but isn't 6.0 the Pre-WOD patch that will happen a couple weeks before WoD is released with some of the big WoD changes in it like the class and gear revamps? Actual WoD release will be something greater than that and Pet Breeding could still be in WoD release just not in the pre-WoD patch.

For mists, 5.0.4 came out on 28 August 2012 and the actual expansion was released on 11 September 2012.

[Peanutty]

I have to admit I'm a little relieved hearing about breeding being pushed back or scrapped. As much as people want epic pets or pets with customized breeds, it just seemed like a RNG nightmare to me if there's no way to guarantee getting epic pets (plus I think we'll have enough to do at the start of the xpac to not want to worry about "did I mate my cats today?") I think it would have affected pet PVP the most... it wouldn't be good enough to have a well rounded team with synergy, but to win, you'd want an all epic, well rounded team with synergy.

[Doobjanka]

I got the sense at Blizzcon last year that all the pet announcements were made flippantly and nothing was truly planned out. Garrisons are meant to be the big time sink (As Archaeology was in Cata and Pet Battling in MoP.) but if you don't get XP for it (As far as I know!), how am I supposed to level all my alts? I don't mind questing on Doobjanka, but once is enough. I level everyone else up with the expansion time sink.

Officially, you could consider 6.0 to be the pre-WoD patch, but I believe they're referring to the all-encompassing pre-launch and post-launch, with 6.1 being the first chance at pet breeding.

[Ravnhawk]

I personally don't want to see the Garrison thing tied to leveling my toons. I know I'll do it on my main but to do it on MOST of the alts that I enjoy playing is going to make WoW really un-fun and time consuming for each and every toon. But tying it to the starting zone sounds like you'll never leave the starting zone... or am I missing something.

Still lots of things I think we still don't know.

If you only needed 1 garrison for all the toons on your bnet account that would be much better.

[Silverstarr]

I wish they would let you hire your alts as followers in your garrison. My alts are there for the professions, and it would be so nice to have them be able to level up, along with maxing their professions, through my garrison. I can dream, can't I?

[Luciandk]

Regarding proffessions. Spotted this on mmoc.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/393 ... es-DLC-437

Is there any plan on giving more profession slots to chars, so we don't have multiple alts to have them?
Garrisons will let you essentially have up to 4 more if you choose those buildings. (Source)
can you clarify, is that 4 more above what we currently have or 4 total?
4 more, if you choose to use all 4 of your small plots.
will the garrison profession slots be just like having the actual profession or will they be missing things the real prof could do?
Pretty similar to the normal profession. (Source)

[Poofah]

I'm glad they scrapped it. But the balance concerns have been obvious since the original announcement. If that's the deal-breaker, I can't imagine why it took so long to come to this conclusion.

I got the sense at Blizzcon last year that all the pet announcements were made flippantly and nothing was truly planned out.

Yes, and this is a problem. There's not really any 11th-hour additions they can make without running afoul of the aforementioned balance problems. Epic pets or a higher level cap would have been trivial to implement and balance, but they've ruled those out. Any other systemic changes (to stats, or movesets, or mechanics) would require further testing to achieve balance. And they seem to regard pet battles as something that should be on auto-pilot at this point. Ie we should expect new tamers and new pets, but not any substantive additions to the pet battle mechanics or to existing pets.

[Kel]

I'm kind of struggling with the thought of all the WoD pets/battles being level 25 capped. What's the point then? We already have level 25 content, do we really need more? You'd think they'd at least bump it up to level 28 or something. I don't know.

[Kpb321]

The way I always assumed they'd do breeding I never thought it would be a huge balance issue as it wouldn't be creating new pets with new abilities or new combinations of abilities. It also wouldn't be changing base stats on any pets to make a super strong or super fast pet. It would basically just be unlocking breeds that aren't currently available.

Allowing you to randomly breed epic pets did seem problematic but they also dropped that pretty quickly.

I sure hope there is more for pet battles in WoD than a bunch of new wild pets and pets available from other sources, some more trainers and a new CT or other more of the same. I don't think I really want anymore pet levels or epics but something new and different would be nice.

[Poofah]

We already have level 25 content, do we really need more?

Totally agree. Also, as it stands, we will still be using Pandaria tamers to level our pets in WoD.

The biggest issue is that at present, there is no substantive change incoming to the metagame or to PvE strategies. We are relying completely on new pets to phase out older pets and encourage new strategies, rather than a systemic change that might shake up the metagame at large. The correlate is that if a pet isn't good enough to play right now, it will never be good enough. Bad pets will enter the game and be forgotten; good pets will enter the game and last until they're replaced.

The biggest issue with pet battles since their inception is that there are 400+ pets that are never played. The xpac is an opportunity to shake up the game at a basic level and bring the bad pets closer to the good pets. But it's being missed.

Imo the best possible solution would be to raise the level cap to 30, and give every pet a new ability at lvl 30. Stats already scale predictably with level, so this part is trivial to implement and balance. The new ability would require balancing and testing (which is why it won't happen). But this or some other change is needed in order to give all the bad pets a shot at being playable.

It would basically just be unlocking breeds that aren't currently available.

Yes, I don't completely buy their explanation tbh. The pet battle system was set up specifically in 5.0 so that you could mix and match breeds/base stats with movesets, while retaining balance (as long as the moves themselves were balanced). So whatever balance issues there are with breeding are already present in the basic pet battle system, and should have been easy to predict. I think it's much more likely that the decided not to put the effort into it, and gladhanded us a 'balance issue' explanation.

[Azrile]

Probably a bit to do with the person who does most of the work on pet battles is also the person doing most of the work on Garrisons.

I wasn´t really that excited about epic pets or breeding overall, so no big deal. I think Garrisons are going to fill that big void of ´ok, I am tired of raiding´ .. pet battles are probably going to just become like archaeology.. they will just add enough so that you can complete more, but there won´t be any big additions. Probably a daily tamer in every zone and new stones that can be used to level pets faster, not much else.

[Rioriel]

Garrisons are meant to be the big time sink (As Archaeology was in Cata and Pet Battling in MoP.)

... and all utterly overlooked come the following expansion.