Jodmos wrote:Pets should inherently be easyish (word?) to get from other activities, such as pvp, or raiding. Kind of an enticement to try pet collecting/battling. Hard pets should come from hard pet related activities.
I strongly disagree. Back in MoP I spent ALOT of time on "pet related" activities. Slowly leveling all my pets around Halfhill, making the daily trainer circuit, etc. Then with the introduction of so many stones and Squirt and other methods in WoD designed to make pet battling more accessible, my collection was suddenly all rare and max level and at most I now devote a half hour or so on Squirt days to leveling any new pets. This leaves me with significant time previously devoted to "pet related" activities where now none are required.
Now perhaps in an ideal world there would be 1-2 hours of content each day remaining that are "pet related," but right now there is nothing for me "progression related" (to improve my collection) that is "pet related" at all. And I'm not even sure it would be possible at this point to create 1-2 hours of pet-related content each day that would also not face an objection from the hardcore pet collecting community. There was widespread objection to adding in additional pet levels and epic battle pets, and pet breeding never got off the ground. They could add more pet battle pvp achievements, of course, but from what I've seen on the official forums, the majority of collectors would also object to any more battle pets added to these. And while things like the new pet battle dungeon are awesome, given the small number of hardcore pet collectors relative to the player base at large, I don't realistically expect Blizzard to create enough of this type of content to fill a couple hours each day.
So what
am I working on? The prestige pets and leveling alts. Would I rather just be done with pet collecting until the next patch? Personally, no. I do, however, understand that some people would. I also understand that some people do not have 1-2 hours a day to play. It is difficult. It is not that I want to say, "No, you should not be able to get these pets." to these people. It is just that I personally am not raiding right now and I really do appreciate having something I can do with my playtime to "progress," and for me, it is collecting these difficult pets. I do hope that the pets remain collectable next expansion and that everyone does have a chance to get them eventually.
Jodmos wrote:As for pets added for non collectors. who else cares outside of pet battlers (and to me pet battlers won't care much if the is a comparable pet that's easier to get) and possible transmog folks who want a pet to match. It's the pet collectors that go to that extreme to 'catch 'em all'. Pets will always be a primarily pet collector driven endeavour in WoW. They know it as they've added pet collecting related personalities to the game. And this has gone back years when pets had to be kept in inventory.
It's important to remember that pet collecting is a spectrum, much like mount collecting. I do not consider myself a mount collector, but I still appreciate mount rewards and happily, for example, ground out the archaeology quest for my cool new spectral moose. Similarly, I have several friends who do not consider themselves pet collectors, are certainly not members of WCP, but yet who I still see occasionally pulling out a companion pet to match their hunter pet or to name after a lost real-life pet, or just to check out the cool new reward they got from some activity. And to them a new battle pet is a reward. It is valuable. They just don't feel any desire to "catch them all" or do pet battle pvp.
I can easily see people like these, who just happen to main a dk, being the target audience of the dk class hall pets. Of course, as Quintessence said, we don't know, but it is not necessarily the case that every pet is added just for us "hardcore" types.