really disappointed in the pet content

[Skavenged]

I don't know about you guys, but the new tamers simply have not been a big challenge in this expansion. It is certainly tough for newer pet battlers, but for anyone with a decent stable of pets, there really isn't anything tough out there. I miss the stress and heartache of the tournament. It was a real challenge, and took some time to overcome. I personally liked being challenged

[Index]

What bothers me, is that this patch added in around 80 new pets, a handful of tamers and a daily, none of which have been particularly inspiring

The number of pets in the wild Vs the number gated behind rep / grinds / drops etc is hugely imbalanced, there should have been much more wild pets vs other access options (which I know takes more work / time etc) and I'm not even going to mention Hatespark!!

The pet breeding was supposed to add the much needed variety and extra content, but as we know that didn't happen

Edit: the pets from the daily should have been slightly rarer too, I think I have all except Weebom, some twice, and got them all literally within a week (two L3 menageries) So some stuff is really easy to get, and some really quite difficult.

Index

[Iibis]

Tournament was only launched with the last content patch of Mists of Pandaria. I don't know whether they have anything similar planned for the future, but I wouldn't still draw conclusions that this is all we'll get.

Having said that, I'm still not sure whether anything new will ne that much of a challenge because pet level cap hasn't been increased, so more people will have more pets at lvl 25 (I remember when I thought even the requirement to have 15? maxed out pets was a big achievement :D) thus making it easier to find working strategies. But, I might actually try any new future content on my own before using guides. I want to test how much I've learned.

Also I think it's simply the fact that pet battles are not supposed to be the main content. You have plenty to do once you dive into pet battling, but I don't think we'll see pet raids any time soon. That would be quite awesome though :D One thing I've thought what could increase difficulty in PvE (while being still moderately balanced to allow multiple strategies) would be if they'd start adding 4 vs. 3 fights or something like that.

What I'm overall disappointed in is the (lack of) design of wild pets. Seems like quantity > quality with all the roaches, beetles and spiders lying around. I don't really like insects anyways, and none of them feel particularly awesome or unique. Spiders are somewhat useful. Not to mention how many new flying pets there are compared to any other family (I mean, why is even that one engineering pet flying and not mechanical like all the other engineering pets?). I dislike looking at my flying/critter/beast tabs because there are so many with duplicate abilities and breeds that it feels pointless to upgrade / level any of them.

[Awq]

t was a real challenge, and took some time to overcome. I personally liked being challenged

PvE content has not entertained me or challenged me (after I got a decent stable in 5.2). PvP is where I challenge myself.

The pet breeding was supposed to add the much needed variety and extra content, but as we know that didn't happen

I disagree. There are for example 21 pets with the standard roach set-up. The only thing that separates these pets is breed. Quite some thought went into the assignment of breeds and stat points (at least with the original pets). Pet breeding would instantly dismiss a large % of pets, and would favor min-maxing. While it would create content (get S/S Val'Kyr and get S/S Son of Animus for example), it would also destroy a lot of content.

I don't see how pet breeding would benefit pet battles as a whole. There are some other disadvantages.
It would create a huge barrier-of-entry to new players, especially for pet pvp. I want an active pet pvp community, I don't want to see it die a slow death.
Changing breeds would be counter-intuitive for new players. It took me a long while before I understood breeds, they might make horrible decisions.
I dislike sacrificing pets. I've named almost every single pet that I played with. Sending John to its death/into the void does not seem fitting.

I would rather see the level cap increased to level 35/50, even if this means additional grinding without any real content.

[Melfice]

t was a real challenge, and took some time to overcome. I personally liked being challenged

PvE content has not entertained me or challenged me (after I got a decent stable in 5.2). PvP is where I challenge myself.

The pet breeding was supposed to add the much needed variety and extra content, but as we know that didn't happen

I disagree. There are for example 21 pets with the standard roach set-up. The only thing that separates these pets is breed. Quite some thought went into the assignment of breeds and stat points (at least with the original pets). Pet breeding would instantly dismiss a large % of pets, and would favor min-maxing. While it would create content (get S/S Val'Kyr and get S/S Son of Animus for example), it would also destroy a lot of content.

I don't see how pet breeding would benefit pet battles as a whole. There are some other disadvantages.
It would create a huge barrier-of-entry to new players, especially for pet pvp. I want an active pet pvp community, I don't want to see it die a slow death.
Changing breeds would be counter-intuitive for new players. It took me a long while before I understood breeds, they might make horrible decisions.
I dislike sacrificing pets. I've named almost every single pet that I played with. Sending John to its death/into the void does not seem fitting.

I would rather see the level cap increased to level 35/50, even if this means additional grinding without any real content.

Yep I agree 100% with you

I challenge myself in PvP as well! When I first read about the Pet Battle system...it was made for PvP to me, not PvE. I still enjoy the PvE elements of the Pet Battle system, but I rather PvP instead. I'm always looking for new comp and setups to improve my teams!

PvP is where it's at for Pet Battles big time! I love the challenge, and its a lot of fun to play against other people

[Index]

Not going to disagree with your comments, but honestly, the PVP side was a real killer. Running into the same people, with the same FOTM teams time and time again was fun? 5000 battles to get to the end, facing off against Fluxfires (RIP) then Valkyrs etc was not my idea of engaging content, and became a horrific grind.

The entry into pet battles now is already a huge barrier. I have guildies who are getting into it for sake of garrisons etc, and they are simply flabbergasted at the sheer amount of work involved in all the various acheevs. When I mentioned that one acheev was to win 5000 PVP battles they could not understand my madness in completing it!

I'm also not keen on the idea of leveling any more pets past 25. The XP alone would mean probably 25+ battles to get to 30-35, times that by 650ish that's 16000 more battles to get pets to max level. That's a lot. A very lot!

I love the pets, the system and the breeds etc, what I meant was that I'd hoped that pet breeding would have offered customization that was not ordinarily available... "What would happen if I cross a mouse with a Seagull... A FLYING MOUSE!!!" etc etc, more for novelty than min/maxing of pets.

I do however like the themed daily teams, which is quite good fun hunting through my list to find solid counters, but as stated, people new to battles likely will not have these pets, let alone rare or max level (lets not even talk about breed) so there's a huge block there straight away. It's sorta punishing people who've not been involved from day 1 of MoP.

Another point of downvote: the menagerie vendor offers nothing of any real value. Yes, you can get the bags which offer random upgrade stones, but that means being able to beat the daily, which means you need max level pets, which means that the bags are largely pointless, though I'm using them to upgrade the new pets etc. Another block for new players.

Apologies for the wall of text, but having been passionate about pets from launch (and I really wanted to hate them) I can see both sides of the argument. Needs more content, but also a way for people less engaged to enjoy it, not sure how they'll ever achieve it to be honest.

Index

[Skavenged]

Don't get me wrong, PvP is still my favorite part of pet battles. I'm currently right at 3500 wins. However, I also like challenging tamers. Don't you remember the first time you beat the tourney and thought... "OMG!!! I finally did it!!" I like that challenge. PvP is great, but PvE also has its place. Just because you like vanilla ice cream, doesn't mean you don't enjoy a strawberry cone too

[Luciandk]

Reputedly the next raiding with leashes will be added in 6.1. Thats what I recall seeing from a devtweet a long time ago.

Myself im getting quite close to finish collecting the draenor pets. Puddle Terror, Pygmy Cow and Deathwatch hatchling my missing ones from those currently available.

[Melfice]

Don't get me wrong, PvP is still my favorite part of pet battles. I'm currently right at 3500 wins. However, I also like challenging tamers. Don't you remember the first time you beat the tourney and thought... "OMG!!! I finally did it!!" I like that challenge. PvP is great, but PvE also has its place. Just because you like vanilla ice cream, doesn't mean you don't enjoy a strawberry cone too

Yes I agree that I want more challenging tamers too! The current WoD tamers are a cake walk, and I was surprised by how easy they were to beat

[Beave]

A few comments...

1) If you have 300+ pets in your collection and even half of them are leveled rares, you were never going to struggle with any of the tamers after one or two tries. In the last xpac you could use your Idol and one or two-pet half of the dailies with just him. You can two-pet all but the Thundering Spirit with only 6 pets. So it's not like the Draenor dailies are much different.

2) I was pleasantly surprised with the pets this go-around. You know what I didn't see? 30-50% of the new pets lazy reskins of old pets. We didn't get 3 "new" rabbits with the same damn abilities, two new cockroaches, a couple new snakes, etc. There is a new moth, they seemed to use their new wasp model and reskin it a few times and the Kaliri got a few goes, but for the most part there are a lot of new pet models and animation. Several they reskinned were pretty cool reskins too like the cats (Widget and Birman, the ghost goat, etc.). So I actually thought we got a lot of new models and pet variety.

3) I thought they really went out of their way to add some variety to the trainers and their pets. Especially if you add in the garrison dailies. Unlike MoP, you need a pretty different strategy for almost every one. I can almost guarantee that many here would struggle for a long time trying to figure out how to beat some of those garrison dailies if you didn't rush here to look up a strategy. Especially if you're trying to find a way to two-pet a few of them. I wish there were a few more trainers, but if you consider there are 15 new garrison dailies as well as 6 trainers, it's a nice mix.

4) I much prefer the fact that almost all of these new pets are rep grinds with a guaranteed ability to obtain the pet once you hit the exalted rep rather than their previous approaches where you had to run a raid every week hoping for a <10% chance at a drop, or go grind for a 1/10,000 world drop. A lot of those pets were unobtainable to people who couldn't raid, especially in old xpacs where the LFR tools weren't very good. People who want to hit 100 and not become raiders can still pick up just about every pet in this expansion. Hatespark is the one pet they may have to cough up the gold for and buy on the AH.

Yeah, the dailies are a bit bland, but the old ones were too after about 2 days. Overall I've been very happy with the pet content in this expansion. I have FAR more fun doing pet stuff than garrison chores. I'm beginning to despise the garrison.

[Skavenged]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/15353775980

Two easily obtainable pets, that can beat every single WoD tamer, WITH a carry pet. Again... Every single tamer can be beaten with two very common pets. I think this validates my point

I do agree that there are a lot of good things that have come along for pet battlers, but the tamers are clearly lacking

[Rendigar]

http://www.warcraftpets.com/community/f ... =10&t=4580 <-- 2 pets that can handle the entire Masters list for all of Pandaria. So it's nothing different now than it has been for the past 2+ years. The "new" Flavor of the Month can handle 6 tamers (1 of which doesn't even count, because she has the Elekk Plushie), so 5 real fights. The 16 different garrison battles are a whole 'nother story.

I'm not saying your point isn't valid, or that there is anything truly "ground breaking" within the new pet content , but it's a mini-game. If we are lucky they'll add in another tournament in a future content release, but they've added plenty of new pets that are for the most part available and accessible to the majority of players (and not all gated behind RNG pain). If you take the time to enjoy the entire xpac and don't just grind everything to completion you'll get months of enjoyment out of it.

I'm an achievement & pet nut, but not rushing to do any 1 thing so I can enjoy the return to the game (though I must admit the garrisons on 7 characters, with 3 more to go, every day is eating up too much time and i need to knock it off before I burn out). I'll get all the reputation stuff, eventually. I'll get my carrot in another week or so. Someday an Ore Eater and Podling will drop for me.

But if you rushed to get everything done, yeah there's not much to it - but again, in Pandaria, until the release of the Celestial Tourney, you could do everything pet related in a couple weeks (depending on your luck with the aforementioned RNG pain). And even the CT just added another grind once you found/figured out teams for all of the opponents.

[Awq]

Not going to disagree with your comments, but honestly, the PVP side was a real killer. Running into the same people, with the same FOTM teams time and time again was fun? 5000 battles to get to the end, facing off against Fluxfires (RIP) then Valkyrs etc was not my idea of engaging content, and became a horrific grind.

The point that I tried to make is that if I want a pet challenge, I PvP. PvE is scripted. This makes it less challenging/dynamic imo.

II do agree that strong FotM pets can make pet pvp repetitive. I especially dislike FotM pets when they are too strong (Fluxfire Feline) or if they introduce randomness (like Direhorns). I personally did not mind the Unborn Val'Kyr, since it had dozens of counters.
I like pet pvp though. I used a wide variety of pets to keep things fresh. When I get tired of pvp I take a long break, to keep things fun.

The entry into pet battles now is already a huge barrier. I have guildies who are getting into it for sake of garrisons etc, and they are simply flabbergasted at the sheer amount of work involved in all the various acheevs. When I mentioned that one acheev was to win 5000 PVP battles they could not understand my madness in completing it!

That is why I am against increasing the barrier of entry. I personally feel that the breeding system would be horrible. Increasing the advantages of experienced players wouldn't be good, especially for things like pet pvp.

I'm also not keen on the idea of leveling any more pets past 25. The XP alone would mean probably 25+ battles to get to 30-35, times that by 650ish that's 16000 more battles to get pets to max level. That's a lot. A very lot!

I am not keen on this idea either. It won't affect me as much, since I do not want all my pets to be max level. I've only leveled pets that I intended to use. I do see what you are saying.

The reason why I suggested an increase in the level cap is the nature of pet battles. When you have large stable of pets at max level the game will feel easy. You will have a lot of tools/pets to counter the enemy teams.
If you implement a soft-reset, by increasing the level cap, one has less tools/pets available to solve the new puzzles. This would make the PvE game more challenging, until one has a lot of max level pets.
Implementing breeding would not have the same results. Experienced players would still have a lot of tools, and it would only create a new barrier-of-entry for newer players.

I love the pets, the system and the breeds etc, what I meant was that I'd hoped that pet breeding would have offered customization that was not ordinarily available... "What would happen if I cross a mouse with a Seagull... A FLYING MOUSE!!!" etc etc, more for novelty than min/maxing of pets.

I agree. As long as you can not change breeds and only get new pets, it would be amazing.
This sadly wasn't what Blizzard described when they introduced pet breeding at Blizzcon.

Apologies for the wall of text, but having been passionate about pets from launch (and I really wanted to hate them) I can see both sides of the argument. Needs more content, but also a way for people less engaged to enjoy it, not sure how they'll ever achieve it to be honest.

I like your wall of text. I mostly agree with it.
I feel passionate about pets too. And that is why I do not want to see pet breeding.

Don't get me wrong, PvP is still my favorite part of pet battles. I'm currently right at 3500 wins. However, I also like challenging tamers. Don't you remember the first time you beat the tourney and thought... "OMG!!! I finally did it!!" I like that challenge. PvP is great, but PvE also has its place. Just because you like vanilla ice cream, doesn't mean you don't enjoy a strawberry cone too

I did not have the same tourny experience. It took me one hour to complete, and I found the difficulty a let down.
I did experience a challenge in the next few weeks, because I created artificial handicaps. I found methods to boost lower level pets and I made custom guides for people who only owned 15-20 pets. One can still make artificial handicaps for the WoD trainers though.

The last time I had a "OMG!!! I finally did it!!" moment was Major Payne. After that I started leveling lots of pets, which made the game easier.

I get what you are saying though. I do agree that one can enjoy both PvE and PvP. I do agree that some would really enjoy challenging PvE content.
But I feel that they did a good job with releasing challenging PvE content. The Elekk achievement is both optional (which is nice for newer players) while creating challenging content.

[Melfice]

The last time I had a "OMG!!! I finally did it!!" moment was Major Payne. After that I started leveling lots of pets, which made the game easier.

Haha so true and the same thing for me too! At the time, I did not have more than 3 level 25 pets and I had no counters to Major Payne's pets. Maybe I did have a few lv 25 pets, but none that were good enough to beat him. I remember how happy I was once I beat him LOL

At the time, I was using my first pet team I got to lv 25.

1. Pandaren Monk
2. Lil' Deathwing
3. Lil' K.T.

These three pets got me to Major Payne with no problems at all, but he was tough to beat with this team haha. Now, Major Payne is easy as pie, because I have a counter for each of his pets. But man, I was soo happy once I beat this dude the first time LOL

Oh, and after I beat him, my team here pretty much owned the MoP Tamers until the Fable and higher. Good times

[Beave]

BTW, his two-pet strategies are not easily repeatable. I tried a few of them, and they rely on some serious RNG luck shining on you to complete a few of them. If you're new to pet battling it may be a good way to go, but it's not close to optimized.

[Rakrath]

Hi All,

what i would love to see, is some kind Pet Mission System. Very similar to the Follower Missions.

All the fun.

[Terrorpene15]

agree. Major Payne was a wall for me, so was the Thundering Spirit, then Nitun, but mostly once I had the right pets and they dropped the absolutely frustrating "misses", it rook away the frustration, but it also has made pet battles painfully easy.

I am not challenged at all, I enjoy collecting the new pets but once I do that and upgrade all my pets(96 percent rare right now, lack CE and the new profession pets, that is about it) I don't know what I'll be doing

I never had any interest in PVP. I have to be the only person with over 600 pets who hasn't even ATTEMPTED a PVP battle. not one. not even clicked it one time. can I get a cool pet reward for that. some scared cat or something, a dodger?

[Axarien]

I have been pleasantly surprised with pets battle content in this expansion! I have a ridiculous number of pets, but have hardly done any battling. The improvements made through MoP in the system have made PvE much more enjoyable and I am just now starting to level some things WoD lets you jump right in if you have only a handful pf pets at 25 and does not create large barrier for entry. I think this was a good decision on Blizzard's part and I personally appreciate it. I also think you will see more challenging content later on, such as the Beasts of Fable and Celestial Tournament which were added later in MoP.

[Gilneas]

I don't get the complaint unless you just had unfair expectations. The tamers are very much like the tamers we had at the beginning of MoP. They aren't more difficult than the CT (or even as difficult as) because that is not the intention or their purpose. The normal tamers in Draenor shouldn't be as difficult as the high-end PvE content from MoP was (and of course, in a scripted, turn-based setting, difficulty can only go so far anyway). That would be like complaining that the level 100 5-mans in WoD are not as difficult as Mythic Garrosh.

In MoP they added pets and/or pet content every patch. Do not compare WoD as it is now, as MoP as it was in 5.4. There will undoubtedly be a lot added by 6.4. Most likely new fights for us to do, and most certainly new pets to get (RWL3!).

Also, pet breeding would not have been a good addition and it was very good that they decided to drop it. Pet battles does not need more systems or complexity. What it has set up is good -- just needs periodic content updates for us (which we will certainly get).