WarcraftPets Forum

With Shadowlands came some buffs and nerfs to pet abilities, and then there were more pets added to the game with the expansion.

So, as the title suggests, how are you feeling about pet battles to date? Good? Bad? Indifferent? And why?
What are you enjoying? What are you not enjoying?
And how are you playing this part of the game? Gathering wild pets? Dungeons? Trainers? PVP?

Looking forward to everyone's answers!

PVE is just Anomalus, supercharge combo's, explode and doom bird for the most part. When all the Shadowland WQs can be do e with the same team it should suggests the Devs missed the mark.

PVP is aoe and weather with the RNG at an unbearable level right now. RNG plays a decisive part in way to many games because of the 10% miss chance from darkness or sandstorm being up nearly every game.

The pets are ok but I can't help feeling that there's alot of pets that were released unfinished and not enough attention on what changes are required.

Hmmm, I have been thinking about this for a couple of days now, a great question. I see you just created the account you used to ask this question so I will indulge my imagination and pretend I am talking to a WOW battle pets engineer . . . dang, that would be such a great job. Has there EVER been a Q & A Session with WOW developers and the battle pets community?

When Shadow Lands opened up I could not wait to scoop up as many of the new battle pets as I could, as fast as possible. That is the collector in me speaking. As I started to sort through what abilities they had, how they meshed with other pets, and how they persevered in pvp, my enthusiasm faded.

I guess the bottom line question I ask with any battle pet is "is this pet viable in a pvp battle"? Of course many factors come into play here, like the skill of the player, right? Yet some pets just are not viable in a pvp environment. Why make pets that just aren't viable? I have 1081 unique pets and probably use 15% of them for pvp, though I try to use more, I truly do.

After my initial "collector's excitement" I was a bit disappointed. So many potentially useful pets, yet that 15% useful for pvp seems to hold true (well maybe 20% )***

While I do have a few favorites in the Shadow Lands menagerie, I look at pets like Courage, with the synergistic abilities pounce and prowl both in the #3 slot so they cannot be played together, and I just . . . just shake my head and sigh. I spent way too much gold in the action house to acquire pets I will never use.

***I speak from my experience as, maybe on a very good day, an advanced beginner. That 15% viability estimation would certainly be higher with a more skilled player.

My first observation is not about battles proper, but pets. I just checked Wowhead, and count 139 new learnable pets, of which 104 are earned from methods other than pet battling - drops. quests, and vendors. This ratio is all wrong - only 25% of pets are earned by pet activities? It feels uncaring and lazy of the devs to scatter so many pets around here and there as incentives to do unrelated things.

And then we have the pets themselves - 139 new pets and very little to do with most of them.

But OK. That's just a holding pattern, and at least the devs are still supporting pet collection to a decent degree, so while \I could ask for more, at least they are keeping the activity alive.

I'm very happy that we've seen the end of Pet Dungeons. I didn't get into pets to spend my time in dingy depressing caves.

The ability changes were bizarre. I still don't understand what mark they were aiming for withthe Shattered Defenses changes, but whatever it was, they missed it. They misunderstood the nature of the problem in the first place, believing it was the mechanism instead of specific power-creep pets. The Weather Darkness, Sandstorm, Lightning buffs were also bizarre, and instead of fixing other multi0-hit abilities to work like Flurry, they bugged Flurry to work like the others. I have no explanation for any of these.

We still have the downscaling to level 1. I don't like that, but I don't see that it does a lot of harm either. I'm not convinced that new battlers can/do take advantage of it, but what do I know about the numbers?

They didn't do amything interesting with the Abhorrent Adversaries, which was definitely a missed opportunity. Cycling some boss buffs like Iron Thread would have meen nice.

The world quests are "harder", in the sense that you can't just do them with any old pets. but not really. People are still scripting their way around them. But that's OK, since WQ are not intended to be challenges but opportunities to level or earn currency.

In summary, the whole thing is a holding pattern. We can see that players are supporting pet battles - I nearly always find others waiting at every world quest, and good Legion Tamers in Pet Week draw crowds - and the devs in turn are supporting pet collection and pet battling as well. Even keel.

They haven't done anything at all with PvP, apart from the effects of the ability changes. I guess that's what we might expect. If they don't want to mess with that, maybe they could at least look at pet battlegroups/queues?

The GOOD news is that the devs haven't imposed some crazy idea that really screws up the whole game. I always worry about that. Things like those ability changes scare me; they seem so irrational, and indicate a lack of understanding that could lead to someone pushing through an idea that seems "cool" to the people in the bubble, but destroys the activity for players. The inappropriate buffs are bad enough on their own; I don't want to think about what they could do.

With dungeons gone, they have the opportunity to introduce some other challenge system. As always, I'd like to see new PvE tamers with multiple teams/sequences/scripts that can't be laiid out on Xu-Fu's and botted with tdScript, but have to be solved every time. And please put them in the world, in a pleasant place we might actually want to be in, if there is one in Shadowlands.

Hi,

I have not seen a lot of these things and am still collecting pets as I can. However, it's kinda sad that it seems to me that almost everything is critter, beast, undead ... and I am not sure that I have seen any of the others at all. Got 4 or 5 of the Taz pets and the variety is gone. Seems just a duplication of previous pets, as I do not see any issues in pet battles in regular more. (I don't pvp).

in general far to many pets have become drops, with poor drop rates too.

With 10 days left on my sub, it's probably a good time to give some feedback.

Overall, I'd give the devs a Gentleman's C for Shadowlands. It feels a bit like a term paper that a student didn't spend a lot of time writing. It checks off all the boxes, but doesn't really make sense.

The distribution of pets is puzzling. We are in a realm of death and the number one family is - Flyers? 41 flyers, 34 critters, 32 beasts then 24 undead. Just seems odd. And the fact that the only dragonkin pet we get comes from the BlizzCon package is truly criminal. I guess we're putting the Con back into BlizzCon.

There are a lot of new pets, but too many are the same model with different colors. 10 Vulpine kits with some different movesets. Kind of the same thing with bats, cloudfeathers and moths. A lot of bloat to pump up the numbers.

The most maddening thing is the drop rate on pets and the location of the rare that drops them. If I have to fight a rare 30-40 times for it to drop a pet, it should be in an accessible location. Low drop rate pets should be in locations like the WQ fights. Easy to get to.

On the positive side, I do like the design of most of these pets. They do capture the look and feel of the new zones and the covenants. There are several very cute pets that do funny things. It makes me chuckle when one of the vulpines starts dancing on his hind legs when I'm in the middle of a fight. The look and feel is spot on and that part of the dev team deserves more money than they are making now.

PvP is a dumpster fire on a train wreck inside a toxic waste dump. It is long past time that this was cleaned up. Players have made several good suggestions and none of them have been followed. And the ability changes have made things worse. You can do better.