MoP Beta: Pet Battles Updates

Mumper recently released a list of Pet Battles beta updates and fixes. There will be tweaks to some pet abilities, and a few bugs and exploits will be sorted out. A lot of the changes will occur after another beta patch, but there will be hotfixes if possible. Hopefully this will be the end of the dreaded insta-death bug!

The change to non-captured companions (non-wild pets) should be a welcome change for many collectors. There was a bit of feedback on the forums that many existing pets should be tagged as a higher quality, depending on how difficult it was to acquire them of course.

It will be interesting to see how this change affects Pet Battles. The entry level for battling was somewhat high in the beginning since players didn't have any wild pets yet. Unlike existing companions in their collections, wild pets have a chance at being rarer in quality with better stats, and therefore scaled a lot better as they leveled.

Now that some pre-Pet Battles companions will be getting upgraded to a higher quality, starting out might be much easier (for players that own these pets, that is). Grinding those first few levels before finding a rare quality captureable pet might not be as frustrating or tedious. We'll see how it goes!

Then again, this change might be more superficial than anything since the scaling factor between quality levels and stat gains per level will be reduced. Maybe quality won't play as big a part in Pet Battles?

But I'm no expert on the technical side of these mechanics, so I'll just have to wait and see how playing through it feels.

On a more funsies note... I can't wait to be able to use pet biscuits on my captured wild pets. When I was going through my bags to see what I could get rid of to make some space, I debated for a long time whether or not to destroy my biscuits. I'm definitely glad I didn't!

I'm also looking forward to being able to use my new Chain Pet Leash on the pets that I've caught. Those wild ones, yenno? Sometimes they get a little too rowdy and need to be kept on an extra strong leash. Ribbons and ropes just don't cut it! :P