Patch 5.1 Pet Battle Information

[Talmar]

Just posted...

Pet Battles

A new item has been introduced that can be used to upgrade the quality of Battle Pets: Battle-stones.

Battle-stones are available in two basic types, general purpose Battle-stones that can be used to upgrade the quality of any pet, and family specific Battle-stones, which can only be used to upgrade pets of a specific pet family.

Battle-stones are available in two qualities: Flawless Battle-stones can upgrade pets directly to Rare quality, while Polished Battle-stones will upgrade a pet to Uncommon quality.

Players will have a very small chance to obtain a general purpose Flawless Battle-stone after winning a match against wild pets; defeating higher level opponents increases the chances of obtaining a stone. These valuable items are not soulbound, and can be sold on the Auction House.

Family specific Flawless Battle-stones can be found in the Sack of Pet Supplies obtained from performing Pet Trainer quests, and are Bind on Pickup.

General purpose Polished Battle-stones can be purchased for 1000 Justice Points.

Pet Journal

The quality of each pet is now visible in its slot in the Pet Journal.

Pets can now be filtered by name, type, rarity and level, and filters will remain in place each time the Pet Journal is viewed.

It is now possible to search locations in the Pet Journal. For example, searching "Westfall" will display all the Battle Pets that can be found in Westfall.

Right clicking a pet's portrait will now offer the option to look it up in the Pet Journal.

Players can now keep up to 650 pets.

Battle Pet tooltips will now display whether a pet is owned, and how many pets of that type are owned.

Pet Quality is now displayed in battles, and will be visible on portraits, names and tooltips.

The level of battle pets in a zone can now be seen on the map, and it's now possible to see the strength of wild pets relative to your team at a glance.

Backline pets now display debuffs affecting them as well as the remaining duration of these effects.

The experience multiplier obtained by all seven Grand Master pet trainers in Pandaria has been increased to x5 from x3.5.

The experience multiplier obtained by defeating Pet Trainers Julia Stevens, Old Macdonald, Zunta, and Dagra the Fierce has been reduced to x2.5 from x3.5.

Macros have been added that allow for summoning random pets and random favorite pets.

The achievement Taming the World now awards the Safari Hat, which increases pet experience gained from Pet Battles by 10%.

The I Choose You achievement has been added for defeating Zen Master Aki. The reward for this achievement is 3000 gold.

A new Master Pet Tamer offering daily quests has been added to the Darkmoon Faire. Completing quests for the new trainer will offer the chance to acquire a new pet: the Darkmoon Eye.

Two new Battle Pets now roam Darkmoon Island waiting to be caught.

Fixed a bug where the Gazelle would join pet battles.

UI

A new banner will appear when a player is subjected to an effect that causes them to lose control of their character. The effect that caused the loss of control and remaining duration will be displayed. Configuration options are available in the "Combat" section of the "Interface Options" menu.

A search bar has been added to the mount section of the Mount and Pet Journal.

The Mount and Pet Journal remembers which tab you were last using.

[Imthedci]

Safari Hat... *drool*

Also, on MMO-Champion, it shows 3 kinds of Battle Stones... One to make pets Uncommon, one to make pets Rare and one to make pets Epic (Yes, that Epic...)

[Kaiyou]

I noticed on mmo-champion that they have models of baby peacocks. I hope they become new companions . Also, I want that safari hat...

[Wynn]

The Battle Stones are base off breed and looks like there are 3 levels of them. Also show there is a 4th tier now "epic" for pets.

http://ptr.wowhead.com/item=92701

[Vhale]

I'm not sure I like the epic stone thing. I guess it's interesting to a degree. But, some poor person is going to be the guy that never gets one from the bag. That and it's yet more dailies to run around and do. Granted, with my alt army I shall have an alt parked by as many tamers as possible.

[Mulot]

The I Choose You achievement has been added for defeating Zen Master Aki. The reward for this achievement is 3000 gold

I've already defeated him, will I get the achievment + gold or will I need to defeat him again ?

( Defeated with pandaren monk + emerald whelp + mechanical gnome before nerf :p )

[Moonkin]

In a way, I'm both dreading and looking forward to the battle stones.

Dreading, because I know I'll never be lucky enough to get one. Looking forward to because there are some pets (giraffe calf, flayer youngling) that I've only ever seen once and it'd be nice to be able to upgrade the ones I've caught rather than attempting to hunt them down again.

Safari hat, want!

[Lysi]

650 pets.. could have saved more to sell XD

[Adashiel]

I hope the pet interface also more reliably remembers what abilities you have assigned to your pets (e.g., for my black lamb, I constantly have to switch the first level ability from "Hoof" to "Chew".). I'm not sure what the pattern is -- maybe switching accounts or logging into a different machine -- but it's really annoying.

I'm also still holding out hope that they give us the ability to control how the color changing pets appear when summoned. I would love an interface that lets us set each pet to either have a random skin or a consistent default skin.

[Poofah]

Dreading, because I know I'll never be lucky enough to get one. Looking forward to because there are some pets (giraffe calf, flayer youngling) that I've only ever seen once and it'd be nice to be able to upgrade the ones I've caught rather than attempting to hunt them down again.

It's worse than this, however. There are lots of pets that just don't exist in a rare version: if you get a rare humanoid-upgrade stone, do you use it on your flayer, or on Peddlefeet or Wolvar Pup or Winter's Little Helper? You can always camp the flayer spawns some more to get the rare one, but if you want a rare of many of the holiday pets or engineering pets, the upgrade stone is the only route. I think that will drive demand more than anything.

For a similar reason, uncommon upgrade stones will be 100% worthless. I doubt anybody here sees any substantive difference between poor/common/uncommon for wild pets: it's 'rare' and 'everything else'. This is analogous to how I would pay 200g for the blue version of a gem for my gear rather than pay 10g for the green version (unless it's gear I'm going to upgrade within a week--but that's not the case with pets: they last until the servers implode).

This is also why epic upgrade stones would be a nightmare if they are actually implemented. There is no other route to getting an epic version of any pet, therefore the demand for these would be absolutely absurd. The announcement specifically doesn't mention them, but they are in the PTR game files so who knows...

[Talmar]

I agree Poofah, here's something I posted to the Bliz patch notes announcement.

All the UI and Journal stuff is great. I'll be able to loose 4 or 5 addons.

I love the Battle stones but hate the way they are earned. I'm not a fan of RNG personally. Especially for something like the pet battle system. I would have liked to seen the Flawless stones earned someway. Gifted for each pet you reach 25 with yourself maybe.

I don't like using Justice points for anything related to pet battles. It forces one into the PvE or dailies to purchase something for pet battles. What about those who only do PvP? I'd even rather see a new currency...Pet Biscuts or something...earned doing pet battle dailies. Use those to purchase GP Polished stones.

The I Choose You achievement should give a Flawless stone in addition to the gold. It pet battles after all, make the reward more pet battle centric.

[Talmar]

I started a thread over on the Bliz forums to talk about the implementation of the Battle Stones if any would like to chime in.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/6863526782

[Poofah]

Apparently the epic stones will not be in 5.1, but they plan to introduce them at some point. Linky.

I was hoping they would never exist at all, but if we have to have epic stones, I certainly agree that they should be BoP and that we can work toward them via pet battles. The datamined epic stones are all BoP, as opposed to the general-use rare stone which is BoE, so I'm hopeful.

[Moonkin]

Dreading, because I know I'll never be lucky enough to get one. Looking forward to because there are some pets (giraffe calf, flayer youngling) that I've only ever seen once and it'd be nice to be able to upgrade the ones I've caught rather than attempting to hunt them down again.

It's worse than this, however. There are lots of pets that just don't exist in a rare version: if you get a rare humanoid-upgrade stone, do you use it on your flayer, or on Peddlefeet or Wolvar Pup or Winter's Little Helper? You can always camp the flayer spawns some more to get the rare one, but if you want a rare of many of the holiday pets or engineering pets, the upgrade stone is the only route. I think that will drive demand more than anything.

For a similar reason, uncommon upgrade stones will be 100% worthless. I doubt anybody here sees any substantive difference between poor/common/uncommon for wild pets: it's 'rare' and 'everything else'. This is analogous to how I would pay 200g for the blue version of a gem for my gear rather than pay 10g for the green version (unless it's gear I'm going to upgrade within a week--but that's not the case with pets: they last until the servers implode).

This is also why epic upgrade stones would be a nightmare if they are actually implemented. There is no other route to getting an epic version of any pet, therefore the demand for these would be absolutely absurd. The announcement specifically doesn't mention them, but they are in the PTR game files so who knows...

oh man, you're totally right. . .holiday, drop and crafted pets didn't even enter my mind when I first read the PTR notes. I was just thinking about all the camping I've been doing and how horrible my luck usually is. The demand will be insane, especially for epic if those are implemented.

[Poofah]

Pet Battles

A new item has been introduced that can be used to upgrade the quality of Battle Pets: Battle-stones.
Players will have a very small chance to obtain a general purpose and family specific Flawless Battle-stone after winning a match against wild pets; defeating higher level opponents increases the chances of obtaining a stone. Family specific Flawless-Battlestones will be of the same family as the pets that were defeated. These valuable items are not soulbound, and can be sold on the Auction House.

from MMO-champion^

This is a big wrinkle -- for example we all have quite a lot of mechanical pets from Engineering that are stuck at uncommon and would benefit from the flawless battle stones, but the highest level wild mechanicals that I know of are the ones in and around Everlook, which are only lvl 17 and there aren't that many of them. Similarly for humanoids, and dragons: these spawns are few and far between and are already camped, whereas the majority of available humanoid pets are pre-MoP and many are stuck at uncommon.

I'm not exactly happy with the way this is shaking out at present.