Preserving Multiple Collections

As mentioned before, there are some pets that will be classified as "unique" and therefore players will only be allowed one in their Pet Journals. Players can have up to 3 of the companions that don't fall under any of the unique categories. But what if you have more than 3 individual pet collections on an account? Does that mean all that work will have been for naught?

The answer leans towards "no", and you will be able to preserve all that time and energy spent into acquiring multiples of the same pet across different characters.

"Pets will still be merged on MoP launch, but instead of placing them in your bags or mail they will be placed directly in your pet journal. You will be allowed to have more than 500 and 3x per pet during this process. Any pets that are flagged as unique will be merged into one and also placed in your journal. (Unique pets are from Achievements, Pet Store, Promotions and Guild) You will be able to cage any pets that are tradeable and you can release anything that you have more than one of.

A few examples:

A B.net account has a total of 6 Wolvar Pups across all of it's characters. On merge the B.net account would have 6 Wolvar Pups. This would be the only time an account is allowed to have more than 3x of a single pet.

A B.net account has a total of 3 Murky's from BlizzCon 2005 and 4 Nuts from the pet collection achievements across all of it's characters. (both unique pets) On merge the B.net account will have 1 Murky and 1 Nuts.

Hope that helps clear things up." - Mumper

The hard cap of 500 total and up to 3 of the same pet still stand, but it's good to see that there's an exception for the beginning of the merging transition. Many players put a lot of effort into their collections, so it would have been devastating for them had they lost all of that progress. Even if it's not a complete preservation of separate collections (since special unique pets will ultimately be merged into one) it seems like a fair compromise.

One last thing to note, though: Once you've had the chance to re-organize and clean up your new Pet Journal of duplicates and so on, you won't be able to go back above the hard cap of 500 total and 3 of the same companion.

"The limit is 500 but players will be allowed to exceed that during the launch transition. Once you drop back under it, you won't be able to go back over." - Mumper