Underwhelmed; a PVE battler's initial BFA thoughts.

[Edmuir]

Hey Gang,

As a player who enjoys the end game PVE content (Celestial Tournament, Family Familiar, etc.), BFA appears to be a big yawnfest for me. Don't get me wrong, MANY of the new pets look very cool/cute/funny what-have-you, but I'm not even really seeing anything here that rises to the level of [pet]Yellow Moth[/pet] or [pet]Cornish Rex[/pet] in terms of, "hey, here's a cool pet that I can use to beat ___________". I scrounged up 300 polished pet charms and did the mini quest so I could get the DMF rabbit facsimile (still needed to throw a stone at it to make it rare grrrr). Now I'm sitting on 100 or so and don't really see anything I'm all that interested in purchasing. I'm not expecting a new Anubisath or Mech Dragon here, but after a month or so of the expansion, I feel like something should have created a buzz or at least caught my eye. I'm sure I'm probably alone in this sort of mindset so someone give me a reason to grind pet charms and run Island Expeditions.

[Whoppadoo]

the Baa'l pet is a nice challenge and interesting pet to have

[Qaccy]

I'd like to think there are plenty of interesting pets in BfA. The problem is that we're all so used to the old pets that already work for just about everything that we have little reason to try them out.

[Tekulve2018]

There is the pet battle dungeon announced for 8.1 (could be released mid or late Nov.).

With the change to Teroclaw's atks, there is a chance that the dungeon will require us to have different pets to
come out of the stable. Back when the celestial tourney was released, it took many weeks for players to get through
and earn a token...best case scenario, we will get that kind of challenge again.

I know your title mentions Pve content, however I highly recommend pet pvp if you enjoy
pet battling. Despite what some people feel, there are endless comps that can befuddle your opponents and satiate
your need for variety. You would enjoy it even more if you experiment with pets your opponents wouldn't dare to use...
It's rewarding to pull off pet pvp wins with underwhelming, underused pets imho.
Tekulve

[Rosqo]

There’s loads of stuff that will be viable in pve released this expansion Boghopper, Foulfeather, Fozling, Bloodfeaster Larva, Elusive Skimmer & Glutted Bleeder. Probably the new families with Sandstorm too. That’s just off the top of my head.

Look at the new pets and decide if they will fill a criteria you will need or just wait until someone releases a guide I suppose.

[Gráinne]

I'm not sure I see Boghopper, Foulfeather, Fozling, Bloodfeaster Larva, Elusive Skimmer, Glutted Bleeder as interesting. A couple of Beasts get Explode. Another Ikky. The dull side of BA, with a Decoy-breaker. A second Aquatic with Stampede fills a function that Family showed up as missing except for the Gulp, but that is hardly headline news.

Apart from the breaking of the basic stats structure, I have no complaint about the new pets, they're fine, but I'm not seeing any interesting new mechanics. Aura of Gonk is maybe interesting for PvP, though it doesn't catch my personal fancy, but I'm not seeing it as compelling in PvE.

[Harpooha]

From a PVP and collector aspect, I have no problem with what they've done. There are several pets that I think look cool and they have mixed up moves on some pets to give you some different choices.

Xu-Fu's site made PVE trivial a long time ago. You just enter a script and let the computer do the work for you. How boring.

[Gilneas]

From a PVP and collector aspect, I have no problem with what they've done. There are several pets that I think look cool and they have mixed up moves on some pets to give you some different choices.

Xu-Fu's site made PVE trivial a long time ago. You just enter a script and let the computer do the work for you. How boring.

I'm surprised they haven't broken the scripts. That's clearly against their intentions and is just the sort of thing they generally put a stop to.

[Rosqo]

I read the OPs post as what will be viable in PVE not interesting.

There’s loads of interesting things to take away from the new pets:

- unique stat allocations essentially reducing wasted stats on pets. See Returned Hatchling and 261 speed. This is super interesting as it is a really artificial way to make this pet stronger than 257/260 ones but not wasting stats to the next traditional breakpoint of 273/276. The devs are basically saying use this new pet it wastes less stats.

- unique abilities being spread to new pets. See Snap Trap and Uncanny Luck. These older strong abilities are being added to new pets probably to get them used more often. Pushing players into using these more especially Uncanny Luck as Poda is literally set up for buffing 50% hit abilities. Shame they hamstrung the Gearspring with a H/H breed weird logic.

- providing families with a broader range of abilities. As you’ve mentioned aquatics had a limited moveset relying on Gulp Froglet for a lot of strats. Hopefully this is just to casual up old content and new content won’t be made trivial with these new additions. Fingers crossed it allows the Developers to design more encounters to be really challenging as they can assume we will have access to much more debuffs/mechanics even with family limitations.

- overpowered new abilities being added to the newest pets. Well I guess Jar of Smelly Liquid, Warning Squawk and Ironskin won’t be getting fixed anytime soon. Interesting to know how much the Developers appreciate these issues and want to address them. I suppose the more pets and families these are on the more chance the first PVE strats will have these pet on.

- healing is the flavour of the expansion. Look at these that push healing specifically under sunlight Fozling, Eat the Fly, Boarfly, Aura of Gonk and all those Aquatics with healing or Toxic Skin. I’ll also throw in B’aal 30% under sunlight. It’s not like Call Darkness had been effectively nerfed in prepatch. Certainly interesting to know what strategies are being suggested to us.

- bugged abilities or pets. Toxic Bite is fun on paper shame it bugs dots to both teams. Pets with inflated stats is fun but certainly makes some things trivial 3 vs 1 with a Hermit Crab in PVP (Boghopper and Mechanical Prairie Dog are the other two). Unstable shield literally a Godmode ability especially if used first is just silly, maybe it’s based off Twilight Meteorite?

Most people probably don’t find these interesting except possibly the broken OP stuff but that’s only fun for a while. To find the interesting stuff probably best to play with these new pets as there’s certainly stuff out there.

It’s a shame that the PVE guides generally use the same group of pets for every encounter to simplify the strategies and make them popular with casual players.

It’s also a shame that only the OP stuff gets adopted by PVP players who are all hoping for a new BS or Teroclaw, suppose there’s the TCS that’s as basic as it is strong.

[Gilneas]

It’s a shame that the PVE guides generally use the same group of pets for every encounter to simplify the strategies and make them popular with casual players.

You don't have to use them.

They keep them narrow simply because not everyone has 900+ level 25 pets.

[Rosqo]

It’s a shame that the PVE guides generally use the same group of pets for every encounter to simplify the strategies and make them popular with casual players.

You don't have to use them.

They keep them narrow simply because not everyone has 900+ level 25 pets.

I know this is why only a narrow selection of pets are used. I looked into these pets to create a guide on my PVP YT channel. End game content shouldn’t be aimed at players without a large selection of pets to use.

[Somanypets]

BFA's pet content is atrocious. Baa'l is the only decent thing and it's really not enough. If they don't add another Celestial Tournament type thing a content update I'm peacing out on pet battles. I'm tired of running the same content over and over.

[Qaccy]

BFA's pet content is atrocious. Baa'l is the only decent thing and it's really not enough. If they don't add another Celestial Tournament type thing a content update I'm peacing out on pet battles. I'm tired of running the same content over and over.

Pet battles are and have always been a 'side project' type of thing for not only players, but the devs themselves. It's purely for fun, but since there isn't really any power/gear growth associated with it the majority of players don't even participate in them at all which makes development for the system a low priority (they'd rather work on things that will draw in the most people, for obvious reasons). That being said, pet battles have continually received updates every expansion even if it's not always right at the start. The Tournament and two pet dungeons we have also took quite a long time to be implemented in their respective expansions. Just have to be patient.

[Gráinne]

Qaccy, while there may be a tinge of 'side project', because it is a separate minigame, I think the devs take it seriously and give it quite a bit of attention. (OK, maybe not so much PvP, but PvE and collecting for sure - and even PvP gets attention, as we see from Brawler and the expac nerfs.)

It's clearly quite successful. Looking at Wowhead profile stats, I figure something like 20% of the playerbase does some fairly regular pet battling/collecting, which is not minor - and it's not getting smaller! And devs are also focused on giving us all Things To Do. And pets are definitely Things To Do. So no, I'm neither complaining about nor suspicious about the devs' allocation of resources to pets.

Rosqo, the points you raise are interesting from a development / theorycrafting / meta point of view, but I'm not seeing interesting gameplay coming from them. Mabe Aura of Gonk, but it's not making my heart pitter-patter.

Though, as I said in another thread, I do suspect the devs have some gimmick achievement like Family (but it won't be Family) in mind for a later patch. I look forward to that!

[Rosqo]

I think family achievements work perfectly fine for PVE and would be disappointed if they dropped this element especially as this expansion has provided a broader range of abilities across families.
It totally doesn’t work for PVP the amount of players that I’ve seen get crushed running full family teams is crazy. I thought it was a lazy simplified approach when it was first implemented and every game I see a family team it just cements this belief. It should have always been win with 30 different pets from x family or something along those lines as less skilled players could run 2 tier pets and carry the third winning 30 games or skilled players can just win 10 games.

[Gráinne]

Yeah, you've been vocal about the wrongness of Family Brawler from the start. I don't even disagree. Who could disagree? It's exactly what you shouldn't do.

But we also have to consider, it's doing something with a handicap, which is the basis of most of the dungeon and raid achievements, and so right in line with a pretty common theme in the game.

I just want to say on a personal level that I think Family Brawler was the first time I actually enjoyed pet PvP since about the time I got my Direhorn. It made the game feel different.

From a larger perspective, it let the devs dip their toe in the water, run a low-effort, low-risk survey of what player reaction would be to doing something with PvP. And they seem to think it was a success. Maybe it'll encourage them to do more.

At the very least it broke up the stultifying Legion meta for a while.

I'm pretty sure they won't do Family Anything again. I doubt it's possible to do Rogue Azerite with Mechs, maybe Captured Evil as well. And with Family Brawler already available, they can't do exactly that again. Maybe they'll put a bit more work into this one, and make it a bit less forced.