PVP pet battles better if only 1 family per team?

[Rosqo]

Does anyone else here think that PVP pet battles would be considerably better if you were only able to have one family type per team. It would massively improve family balance and limit same family teams such as triple undead. I think the only people in favour of keeping it run the most OP families and as such this would have a detrimental effect on their teams/success rate.
You won't have team such as triple BS, multiple darkness fliers or sunlight elemental teams in the meta.

I know this has an impact on the Family Brawler achievment but who actually cares about that achievement, over half the games I played doing in ended up in my opponent fleeing. Not much of a sense of achievement there and lets be honest it was a lazy idea to swap something that works in PVE into PVP.

Lets hope Blizz can eat some humble pie and actually admit their mistakes and get this fixed.

[Gráinne]

For PvP only? May-y-be, if the devs had built that into the foundations of the game as a restriction from the start. I'm not convinced it would improve much, though.

And it will certainly never happen now that the Family achievements are in.

I remember in some thread batting around ideas back in 6.2, I mooted the idea, and someone immediately shot back with Murk + Graves + MPD. Which was certainly in the running for the strongest possible team at the time. Graves was bad enough, but Graves using Murk as a launching pad was seriously broken. BS was the only real counter for MPD, and a team without BS would have had no chance at all, but even a BS wouldn't save you against the Graves Menace. And I immediately saw that the idea went nowhere.

In the same spirit, I suggest as a counterexample Serpent + Teroclaw + .... well, whatever: you pick 'em - Trap, either Imp, Pyreclaw, TCS, Starlette.

No, the only simple restriction I can see having a positive effect is forbidding duplicate species, or, better, duplicate abilities in PvP. That would make a definite improvement, but a limited one: to make PvP more popular, we must see

a) more short-term goals
b) a wider range of pets used

[Lordy]

I kind of agree with you Rosqo but like Graine says it won't really stop people playing OP teams and the same small pool of OP pets.

How about limiting the number of times any given pet can be used in PvP in any 24 hour period? That way players would be forced to try out all sorts of new pets if they want to Battle for extended periods. I bet you would see all sorts of teams then

[Gráinne]

How about limiting the number of times any given pet can be used in PvP in any 24 hour period?

Putting CDs on pets in PvP is one of the suggestions that comes up regularly.

It has downsides: you can't really play a team in a half-dozen matches to get a feel for it, you can't take two pets and Seek A Third to go with them, and it would put a pretty big crimp in the side of Family Brawler, which already has its own artificial constraint.

[Lordy]

It has downsides: you can't really play a team in a half-dozen matches to get a feel for it. You can't take two pets and Seek A Third to go with them.

That might actually be a good thing. After all you are really playing abilities rather than pets so if you have to swap to pets with similar move sets to keep experimenting with synergies etc that's just encouraging diversity.

it would put a pretty big crimp in the side of Family Brawler, which already has its own artificial constraint.

I cant argue with that though I wouldn't be the first person to point out that achievement is just a PvE idea lazily applied to PvP. IMO The whole concept should be scrapped in favour of something like Rosqo suggests where you have to use teams of different combinations of three families for the achievement rather than teams of just one.

[Rosqo]

Limiting teams to one of each family wouldn’t be aimed at removing OP teams from the queue.

It would remove the advantage of using a full family team if they have an imbalanced racial. Undeads are the perfect example of this problem at present. Triple undead racial is very strong giving up to 6 ‘bonus’ turns is unmatched.

It removes the possibly of duplicates that could otherwise not be limited by one of a pet per team. Darkness birds, rabbits, photosynthesis elementals.

You also remove the amount of OP teams available opening up the meta for new pets or teams. The guy that uses triple bs might actually think well maybe I need to build a team, some will still fotm it up though.

[Brawler]

If you’re asking devs to make changes, wouldn’t the simpler solution be to just balance the racials?

[Rosqo]

I think there’s always going to be a ‘best’ and ‘worst’ family stopping players from abusing this would be the reason for the team limit.

[Alunaria]

That's a great idea. PvP Pet Battles tend to be something I find dull, when I run into teams that are so overused.

What I'd love to see, is some kind of random Pet Arena, where each player gets the same pets random assigned, but free to choose the spells they will use. Like, you enter, have 30 seconds of preparation to "go over the tactics with your pets", and then you go into the Arena. That'd be awesome.

I like how the Brawler achievement has helped spice things up a little, if only for a short while. Things like that makes it a lot more fun. But making sure only one pr. pet kind would be welcome too, I think.

[Guestt666]

Maybe in a ranked queue. Maybe with some bans, etc. but i surely hope that they never implement this on the normal queue.

I want to be able to play any team i want and that includes my 3 butterfly, 3 falcossaur, double humanoid + touch of animus user, etc. And if i run into a 3 undead team i'll just run fox/rabbits.. teroclaws ? No prob dream whelpling or fox or almost any hard hitter pet with a dazzling dance user... Imp users? ok i'll get my wicked soul.

If you think the undead racial is so broken that a team of undeads break the game so the solution is to fix the undead racial not remake the entire battle system because of it... Same goes for sunlight-healer teams (a diminishing return in heals as the battle goes should be enought here).

What i mean is that ATM everything is counterable. There are some annoying combos but nothing stupidly op.

PS: first post here and not a native english speaker(or writer) so be nice

[EDIT]
This. I agree with this:

If you’re asking devs to make changes, wouldn’t the simpler solution be to just balance the racials?

[Brawler]

I totally agree, Guestt.
Never take options away from players in a game - only give them more.

[Rosqo]

I hate to break it to your but there will always be an overpowered family racial. Hard to grasp right? This will mean the best pets will have more pets from that family. You end up with teams stacked with OP families.

I get that everything is counter-able but in a random queue with no assurance that you will face the same player trying to counter the last team you played is not straight forward obviously. Other wise stick to PVE for that if its your kinda thing. In PVP you need a balanced team with synergy or coverage to obtain solid results consistently.

I actually used undead as an example as the currently strongest PVP racial, its the simplest to explain. Its been broken for a log time so don't go holding your breath this will get changed considering the extra work they would need to put in to attempt balance.

Taking the option for someone to not run triple bs, rng moth spam, triple tcs, triple teroclaws, Elemental sunlight, multi haunt consume corpse etc will actually widen players choices a meta cant exist with 3/4 really top level pets available in one team. Your limiting options to increase range of pets.

[Brawler]

Your logic baffles me, man.
We have agreed on a ton of things, but this, I’m afraid, we’ll never see eye-to-eye on.
You’re suggesting we cut our toes off just to squeeze into a pair of shoes that don’t fit.

Balance changes > hard rule changes & limitations

[Sile9]

That's a pretty heavy restriction just as a roundabout attempt to minimize the potential of a couple racials. In any case, I couldn't go along with any change that decreases synergy and teambuilding options.

The undead don't even owe their supremacy to racial alone. Clearly the devs wanted to encourage triple family as a viable option with such skills as Photosynthesis, Healing Stream, and Rebuild as a means to balance out one or two pets type countering the whole team. It doesn't play out that way with undead though because the critter and aquatic families have such limited utility and the numbers of critters and aquatics capable of standing up to tier teams can pretty much be counted on one hand each compared to the number of star undead crowding the tier list. Heck, with the addition of Twilight Meteorite the undead became the only pet family that will never take strong damage in the backline!

As gamebreaking as a racial can be, I see it as far less salient a factor than the uneven distribution of abilities.

[Gráinne]

As gamebreaking as a racial can be, I see it as far less salient a factor than the uneven distribution of abilities.

I agree. Racials are not balanced, and even if somehow, impossibly, they could be, people would find arguments to suggest that they aren't.

And I do remember dreading trip-Undead during the Reign of Graves and the Evul Undead, and when I was doing stats on my rates against families, I remember that my worst record was against trip-Undead - but those were probably Graves + 2BS, which was far too common, so I can't lay the problem entirely at the door of the racial as it was.

But I think the devs did well with the Undead nerf. It's still the best racial, but not by so large a margin. The Bone Serpent owes little of its dominance to the Undead racial, not least because it's so often ability-locked in its Undead round. I wouldn't object to a further minor tweak, but I'm not out in the streets with placards about it. I'd actually be more interested in seeing minor buffs to the weak racials.

Still even more interested in seeing reasons to run a wide variety of pets, though!

[Rosqo]

I get it that if you take advantage of same family teams you probably think this is fine and working as intended, bias will always come into any that limits players using their favourite teams. And that’s ok I completely understand some players rely on this for completing weekly quests etc.

There is a clear balancing issue within pet battles one of those elements is stronger family racials, another is duplicates available for use and the third is almost zero ability changes or tweaks when things aren’t working.

We know that Blizzard invest the bare minimum when it comes to changing abilities or tweaks, hello shell rush, twilight meteorite, jar of smelly liquid, photosynthesis/sunlight, multi hit interactions with how a pet dies flurry etc etc.

It’s just being relealistic to suggest straight forward and simple changes opposes to the much larger task of ability pruning, tweaks and overhauls.

[Brawler]

It’s just being relealistic to suggest straight forward and simple changes opposes to the much larger task of ability pruning, tweaks and overhauls.

So, you essentially agree with most of us in that balancing is the answer, but you believe that answer to be a pipe dream and therefore propose this neutering of team options as your next best idea?

[Rosqo]

If balancing specific pets was a thing Murkalot, tcs, Graves, bs and th would not exist for soo long. I know they carry out specific nerfs during mid expansion early advantage got the nerf bats you know that massively broken ability, I’ve been told consume corpse was changed and clone got removed instead of working on making it work.

Balancing the pet families would be the ideal but I’m just being a realist

[Gráinne]

Balancing pets for PvP is impossible, and I don't want it anyway. We'd end up with an Ability Prune that makes the current in-game classes look almost interesting, and the impact on PvE would be disastrous.

Balancing racials might be imaginable. Maybe? Perhaps someone who thinks so should suggest what the revised racials should be.

But even if they did happen, someone would be complaining about imbalance, or imbalance in some situations. Meh.

I neither hope nor wish that either would happen.

I much prefer reasons to do things to arise organically, from the ground-up underpinnings of the game, but since balance is neither possible, nor practical, nor desirable, having the system give us reasons to use a wide variety of pets is the best available option.