WarcraftPets Forum

Guess Blizz changed their minds on the Epic Battle Stones idea for Legion. Wowhead posted an update a few hours ago with a blue post about it. Personally, pretty relieved. Like a lot of people, still trying to get my entire collection to rare. Didn't even want to go near that purple can of worms. Between the stones and the Water Striders, its kinda cool to see Blizz actively listening to player feedback and acting on it so quickly. Looks like they're putting more effort into additional pet content instead, and referenced the Celestial Tournament as an example, so good news all around!

Edit : The blue post was updated to the main page so this is kinda irrelevant now (:

I was excited for the chance to get epics, so a little bummed they decided not to go with it. I hope they have some new twist to throw in. I know they tossed around the idea of breeding before WoD. Something to shake things up, for me, would be terrific. I've been pretty afk from pet batteling for a bit now, and I feel like just collecting another 50 new pets and getting them to 25/rare won't really draw me in again.

Personally, I'm sad. I would have loved a long term goal in battlepet. I miss the early mop, where I had to hunt, and lvl a lot of pets, now, it's just super easy to hunt and lvl a pet. Beside the expansion rush, during all expansion, pet hunting and lvling is really quick. I don't even test 95% of the new pets, I just get them, blue stone, few tamers and hop lvling stone.

Instead of searching a good way to implement the epic battle stones, they just drop it. Well, I'm not surprised.

- They could have offer 5-10-15 purple stones with a quest chain, to help bring a few importants pets epic.
- They could have put a new xp bar to lvl the rarity once the pet is 25 (like the garrison follower), and just have the stones as a bonus.
- They could have made it so they stay blue (in stats) in PvP matches or against some tamers.

As for listening to player feedback... Well... I still remember the garrison / flying / shipyard / apexis... Basically WoD and all the non delivered content (brawler anyone?). So it's not because they reverse a stupid and useless nerf (water striders), that I will trust them and their ability to listen to players. Nerf a mount which is a big pain in the a** to get, just to make relevent their fishing artefact... and trying to justify this by : "players only use this mount, it's sad"

I have to say I'm a bit pleased about this.
As much as I would like a long term pet goal, the idea of having to upgrade 730+ pets AND whatever Legion throws at us was rather daunting.
And at 200 charms a pet it was definitely going to be a long term goal. But I felt those players with just one or two toons would be disadvantaged by players who have a lot of alts. Unless the garrison pet battle were getting nerfed. I currently have over 10k pet charms saved but that's not even enough for 10% of my current collection.

Personally, I was looking forward to a long-term pet project for Legion. As it stands, I have a lot of leveling stones stocked up and plan to get more (plus some quality upgrade stones). I know a lot of people with all maxed-out collections were saying no to this, but its something to do.

I just hope we get a fun long-term thing like the Celestial Tournament for Legion, since WoD didn't give us much (menagerie barely counts as a long-term thing).

I am very glad that they decided to scrap this idea.

The feedback thread is loading with reasons why it would be bad for hardcore collectors, bad for pvp, bad for new players, trivializing all the old content that many of us still enjoy

Increasing the rarity higher than Rare, increasing the maximum level higher than 25 and adding a 4th skill to each pet are, IMO, three of the worst possible changes that they could make to the pet battle system. Quite a few of the reasons people have mentioned about the epic pets would also apply to a higher level cap. And I wouldn't want a 4th skill for balancing reasons.

Almost any other change could be potentially interesting though. In particular, I would enjoy if they added cosmetics to your pets in battle, as long as they don't buff stats in any way. (Like golden cards in Hearthstone)