Monday, March 4, 2019

Battle Pet Families - Least to Most Represented

After reading a post on the Bnet forums about which Pet Battle Dungeon could be next, I started thinking about what types of pets I'd like to see in the future. This piqued my curiosity about which pet families are underrepresented in our collections, so I looked it up. Here are the base results (from least to most, includes non-combat pets).

Pets in each family (as of Patch 8.1.0)
  • Dragonkin - 50
  • Mechanical - 69
  • Undead - 70
  • Humanoid - 72
  • Magic - 95
  • Elemental - 100
  • Aquatic - 125
  • Critter - 142
  • Flying - 180
  • Beast - 223

It's quite shocking how few Dragonkin there are compared to Beast. Pet families don't *need* to be balanced across the board, but it would be nice to see these numbers brought up to a more even level.

It was then noted that many pets have copy-pasted movesets. What would be the final count if those were not included? Would the numbers be a bit closer to each other?

Here are the results (from least to most), not including pets that have the EXACT same movesets as one other pet.

Pets in each family (excluding pets with same movesets)
  • Dragonkin - 36
  • Critter - 54
  • Mechanical - 62
  • Humanoid - 63
  • Undead - 66
  • Aquatic - 72
  • Magic - 85
  • Elemental - 88
  • Flying - 109
  • Beast - 117

Additional notes:
- Includes only EXACT moveset matches
- Doesn't take into consideration reskins/different colors
- Doesn't take into consideration (unique) breeds
- Includes non-combat companions

Unfortunately for Dragonkin, this makes the pool of possible pets in that family even smaller. Flying and Beast are still the biggest pet families.

Last but not least, here are how the pet families rank if the non-combat pets are removed as well. There aren't huge changes, but Humanoid takes the biggest hit.

Pets in each family (excluding same movesets & non-combat pets)
  • Dragonkin - 36
  • Critter - 54
  • Humanoid - 54
  • Mechanical - 62
  • Undead - 66
  • Aquatic - 71
  • Magic - 82
  • Elemental - 88
  • Flying - 102
  • Beast - 117

So what's the conclusion? It's clear that some families are lacking in size, making the list of possible pets usable in a Pet Battle match smaller (and maybe making it more challenging as a result). Even when pets with the exact same moveset as one other pet are removed, the disparity between the least represented to most represented is more than 50%.

It's likely the "right" situation or environment simply hasn't popped up yet to allow for more of certain pet types to be made available. Maybe, with some patience, we'll see the families with sub-100 pets increased in size.

Again, I don't expect families to have an equal number of pets. There's nothing that demands that. However, it would simply be nice to be able to collect more from the underrepresented families (from both a collector's point of view and a battler's). :)
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