Beta Update - Guild Vendor Pet, Nameplates, Pet Battles

The latest beta patch didn't unlock pet battles, but there were some updates.



Companions and wild pets now sport an icon on their nameplates showing what family type they are in, as seen in the screenshots above.

The second pet battle slot now requires the achievement Just a Pup to unlock, and the third pet battle slot now requires the achievement Experienced Pet Battler to unlock. Again, these could just be placeholder achievements. It's a WIP afterall.


Last but not least, the guild vendor has a new pet, Thundering Cloud Serpent Hatchling, but it currently doesn't have a sale price. This could be a placeholder companion since I haven't found its spell or item ID yet, or it could also be a NYI pet. If the mounts are any indication, a Cloud Serpent Hatchling sounds pretty awesome!

Pet battles are still unavailable for most players on the beta, however a few might have the ability to pet battle (if they have the patience to withstand all the possible crashing :P). Last I checked, capturing pets is still turned off as well as collecting experience from pet battles. Those that were able to train for pet battles during the short preview might be able to track wild battle pets still.

It seems like it will be a while longer before Blizzard is ready to allow us to fully test this new feature. I hope it's worth the wait!

Singing Cricket Achievement Reward

MMO-Champion has datamined info from an upcoming beta build. Ready for this? Singing Cricket. It's the new reward for completing an achievement to raise 75 pets to level 25 (Pro Pet Mob).

My hope is that this cricket will actually sing! What's an appropriate genre for a cricket, though? Opera? The blues? Or perhaps it will be more like the Singing Sunflower and just hum a short melody of sorts.

I wonder if they plan on bringing back Laura Shigihara to compose and voice the sounds for the Singing Cricket (she did the vocals for the Singing Sunflower). That would be pretty neat. :D

Oh, and there's a new pet-related item: Battle Pet Bandage. Not sure how this will be used, though. Will we be able to use these to heal our own pets during a pet battle? Seems a bit unfair. Will companions require healing after each battle? Hopefully I won't have to make all the bandaids... I plan on doing a lot of battling!

Account-Wide Achievements In MoP

Ghostcrawler recently wrote a blog post about account-wide achievements, and mentioned some interesting information that will probably affect pet collecting and pet battles.

First and foremost:

"You also won’t be able to use a faction-specific pet, mount, or title on the wrong faction."

He does note that there may be some exceptions, but it's still a WIP and the developers will address any issues that pop up as they run into them.

Regardless, this is somewhat disappointing news, but I can see how allowing the use of cross-faction pets would be inappropriate. I guess this means no Horde Balloon for my nelf druid. Pity.

Secondly, Ghostcrawler explains how some achievements will be "account-only". This basically means you could add to the progression of a few achievements across multiple toons. So for an achievement such as Legendary Pet Battler, any pet battles won on any toon would be cumulative and add to your existing total amount. This is just an example, though, and it was mentioned that only a few achievements would behave in such a manner. We'll have to wait and see which ones actually fall under this category.

The system of account-wide achievements is obviously still unfinished, and it will need to be refined further.

What's In A Name?

I've come across a dilemma. Nevermind the GIGANTIC list of companions that need to be renamed, and nevermind that I need to collect a lot of them first (once MoP is released). My current predicament - should I rename the pets that already have proper names assigned to them. Or will I even be able to rename them?

Blizzard has made it possible so that many of the pets are easily customizable. A lot of companions are of neutral gender and often neutral faction. This gives the player a lot of room to personalize their collection. Companions such as the Fox Kit, for example, could be renamed to (almost) anything the player desired.

But there are some pets that have already been named and/or assigned a gender. Miniwing and Lumpy are just a few examples of pets with existing names, while Mr. Chilly and the Guild Herald are examples of companions that are classified as male (due to their preassigned name and actual in-game model).

So what to do with these pets that have already been customized by Blizzard? CAN anything be done? Will the final version of the new collecting system even allow pet collectors the ability to change the names of pets that have already been named?

It would be somewhat disheartening if we weren't allowed to rename these pets, but at the same time it feels a bit rude to overlook a developer's creativity. I mean, someone had to go through the trouble of coming up with a unique and suitable name for the pets with proper titles to them, right? Hell, some of those companions might even have interesting back-stories to their in-game names.

If I were to put myself into the shoes of a developer, I know I wouldn't want someone messing with the name(s) of pets that I've created. Then again, I'm pretty detail-oriented and anal about stuff like that. Maybe the WoW devs won't mind as much as I would.

For now, I guess I'll be leaving the pets with existing names alone. It's no sweat off my shoulders for the time being, since it means a few less names I have to come up with lol.

Come MoP, if we can rename them to whatever we please, I might have a change of heart for some of them, though. Or I might not. It's hard to suddenly stop using a pet's name that I've gotten accustomed to using for so many years. Then again, "what's in a name?" Right?

One Fish, Two Fish

Curious about what The Angler's reputation pet will look like? MMO-Champion has a nice screenshot of the Tiny Goldfish. 'Cept it doesn't look all that tiny to me! :P

Note: The Tiny Goldfish should not be confused with Fishy, even if they have similar models. From what I can tell so far, they are two completely different pets.

The latter companion is a BoP reward from the quest Let Them Burn, while the former is from a reputation vendor and is BoU but requires honored rep with The Anglers faction.

Pet Teams Require Unlocking

As predicted, the second and third slots for your pet battle team will require an achievement to unlock. The achievement for the second pet slot is Building a Team, while the third pet slot is Pet Tamer.

Remember that this is the beta. These could be just placeholder achievements or they might actually be the intended achievements to unlock a team of three for battling. We won't know for sure until we get closer to the expansion release.

Keep These Beta Patches Coming!

MMO-Champion has news of a new beta build coming soon! Sometimes having insomnia isn't such a bad thing. I can catch more of these late night updates heh. ;)

So what's new in the latest beta patch? Not much in the way of pet-related stuff, but the placeholder for the MoP CE pet was added. There's still no information on what this companion will be, though. Oh Blizzard. Such a tease hehe. XD

Another possibly significant update can be found in the datamined client strings. Reading the descriptions of some of them seem to hint that a pet battle team of three will require some unlocking through achievements.

So an example and possible scenario for this: you start out with one possible pet on your team. To add a pet in the second slot you'd need to complete a certain achievement, and the same goes for the third slot.

I'm not sure which achievements we would have to complete. It might require winning a battle against a Pet Trainer/Tamer, or it could be as simple as collecting your first wild pet. Since most of the pet achievements are still non-functional (at the time of this writing), we'll have to wait and see what the achievement rewards are at a later date/time.

I don't even know what to make of the "PET_BREED_QUALITY" client strings, and I don't think I want to speculate about them right now. A legendary pet breed? Err... either it's simply one of the pets from one of the legendary weapons or a very, uhm, EXTRAORDINARY offspring from two special pets. Blizzard did mention possibly allowing us to "grow" our own pets on our personal farms in The Valley of the Four Winds, but I haven't heard much news about that since the initial MoP Press Tour. We'll see!

One of My Favorite Things

I'm really enjoying the Pet Journal and I think it's a great addition to the game. Even if Pet Battles wasn't a planned feature for MoP, I would still find the journal very useful and amusing.

Besides the obvious informational value, and the ability to rename, add, remove, and preview the pets, one of my favorite things about the Pet Journal is that it gives the game devs the creative ability and outlet that was somewhat taken away when pets became trainable spells. Pre-pet spells, a few special pet items would have flavor text on them. I've written about it before, but a great example of this would be the Firefly. "Still flying..." it used to read. *sniffles*

With the Pet Journal, I've noticed some pets have flavor text added to their "Info" section. For example, the Black Lamb's info reads, "Offspring of the black sheep, the black lamb is only found in the forests of Elwynn."

Ever since I discovered that, I've been checking each companion's Info section to see if there is any new flavor text. I'm not expecting every single companion to have something written there, as that would be overkill, but I love finding small surprises in the way of a newly added description that's amusing or informational. Those little details just show how much thought and tender care was put into the creation of the game and this particular feature.

My absolute favorite descriptive text so far is from a pet that won't even make it into the release of the expansion. Here's Jacob the Test Seagull's flavor text, in case you can't read it in the image below: "[DEBUG] This pet comes from the magical Test Land where it frolics all day in fields of structs." (Wikipedia: Struct - (short for "structure") is a computer science term for a record that is used to store more than one value.)


I can't help but wonder if all pets come from this magical Test Land, and when they "die" do they go back there? Instead of 'All Dogs Go to Heaven', is it 'All pets go to "magical Test Land"'? LOL :P

Anyway, I can only hope more unique and interesting flavor text is added for more companions in the journal. Especially if a particular pet has an interesting back story to it or is a nod to pop culture or something else.

Organizing a Pet Schedule

I don't know about everyone else, but it helps me organize my thoughts when I get a list going. So this is just a possible schedule of pets being released in the next few months:

- May 15 = Fetish Shaman from Diablo 3 CE
- (Some time after) June 5 = Murkimus from Arena Pass
- June 12 = Sand Scarab from TCG deck, Tomb of the Forgotten

After June and July, there might be a small gap for pets (other than the companions available from in-game holidays). I haven't found any news or hints that the upcoming seasonal events will have any new pets to offer, but we'll see.

Things that are still unknown: the MoP release date and the Timewalkers: War of the Ancients TCG deck release date. The MoP CE will likely have a special companion attached to it (just not sure what pet), and the common loot card for the Timewalkers TCG deck will be the Eye of the Legion.

I'm looking forward to all of it. :D

TCG: Tomb of the Forgotten Release Date

The next TCG deck, Tomb of the Forgotten, is set for release on June 12, 2012. If you remember from waaaay back when, the Sand Scarab pet was discovered to be the common loot card for this deck. :D Exciting news!