WarcraftPets Forum

Just had an idea for a good discussion topic. I've seen around not to expect Epic Pets this expansion... but what will you do when they are introduced? How will you feel about another 500+ pets to upgrade AGAIN and probably level AGAIN? (I'm sure they'll raise the level cap at some point, it's what Blizzards do!) How would you like them to work (like how would you want to obtain them: stones, catch in the wild... stuff like that)

Just curious to see how others feel about everything! Feel free to speculate, argue (nicely), debate, and just throw ideas around. Obviously we aren't going to influence anything but I wanna hear from the folks that are out there every day trying to push the limits of the pets in this expansion.

I might quit pet battles if I had to do all the upgrades again.

I don't want them. At all. Full stop.

I have nearly leveled my entire collection and I'm a few stones away from having every pet's quality rare. I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, but that is a daunting task. It sucked up so much of my time I pretty much took off from PvP and PvE this expansion to solely to focus on pets.

I don't mind getting new pets or having to level those. But the idea of having to re-level these to a higher cap makes me want to slam my head into a wall. I want the pet cap to always be 25.

For stones, I feel a bit more liberal. I don't mind having to re-stone these guys. Which ultimately would mean a bump down 2 levels which I could re-level back to 25 in one pet trainer battle. I just want the stones to be implemented in a better way because Blizz will have learned from the mistakes.

- Have the epic pet stone vendor trade in available from the start
- Have Beast of Fable-ish type quest chains which offers a sack of 0-3 random epic stones (I think it would be more incentive if people knew going through all that would get them more than 1 lousy stone per bag)
- Add more pet collecting achievements (really, there is no 500 pet achievement?! still?)
- Add more pet leveling gear/treats
- Add more pet vanity items (frisbee!)
- Better organization in the AH (learned and unlearned pets should show up in the same fields instead of this companion pet and battle pet non-sense)

The only way I see them working is if it were purely cosmetic, like a completely unique pet that only came in epic, without any choice from the player. There must not be ANY statistical improvement whatsoever, as this WILL render ALL rare quality pets inept, similar to the uncommons of today.

Five more pets and I'll have all the ones that show at rare... Give it 1year to 1 and half year to add a way to stone to epic .. and make epic not be a huge upgrade in stats so as to necessitate it for battles. Yeah, if they decided to add stoning pets to epic that's a timeline that would not drive me round the bend in how much it added to do. That's kind of the problem, too little to do and people lost interest, however if you add way too much to do people can get overwhelmed and just give up. I've lost a lot of guildies to that happening in the game.

That being said I'm honestly fine with them keeping rare the highest quality for a good while. I'd also be OK with a few epic pets, like fixed pets, like you can get this Epicus Maximus the epic quality warrior mouse - but you don't get to pick which of your pets goes epic. Honestly I think whey they do eventually add it, it should come in with a new expansion, not at the tail end of this one. It would be such a major change I think they'd want to have that extra buffer in balancing new PvE pet battle content around that quality as well as a level cap raise and a huge influx of new pets.


Edit: Oh and for that quantity of pets to upgrade, I'd really love to see epic stones be buyable with valor points. Because just the thought of getting epic quality stones for upward of 600 pets (have to count in that in a new expansion they'll add quite a lot of pests) is just flat out depressing without some more expensive but guaranteed way to supplement your bag drops.

If they are going to do it they should make it possible to continue to get XP at level 25 and use that XP to increase quality of the pet. That would mean you would have to play the pets to upgrade them and not just farm some stupid, boring, annyoing stones...

Kring wrote:If they are going to do it they should make it possible to continue to get XP at level 25 and use that XP to increase quality of the pet. That would mean you would have to play the pets to upgrade them and not just farm some stupid, boring, annyoing stones...

This is a great idea, with the new xpac they will most likely be increaseing the max level for all pets anyways so why not make the pets autochange to epic once they hit max level.

Kring wrote:If they are going to do it they should make it possible to continue to get XP at level 25 and use that XP to increase quality of the pet. That would mean you would have to play the pets to upgrade them and not just farm some stupid, boring, annyoing stones...

That's the best idea yet.

I want epic pets to be able to cast any of all six of their spells when battling. No stat upgrade...no HP upgrade...no lvl upgrade.

The beauty of the system is that its KISS.

How do I want to be able to obtain/upgrade too epic?.....I want it to be epic, i.e. not easy at all....you know, old school .1%.

Xak wrote:I want epic pets to be able to cast any of all six of their spells when battling.

That would immediately open up all the overpowered combos again that they disabled by shuffling spells around.

I want them to not implement epic pets at all.

Syrrie wrote:I want them to not implement epic pets at all.

I wish. We know it's coming though... might not be today, might not be a year from today...

I honestly don't know how I feel, that's kind of why I made this post. I am a bit upset personally about the prospect of it all. Chances are though, if your a big time pet batterer, you've let other aspects of the game go (I know I have). Isn't having to upgrade to rare pets the same thing though as farming and farming raids only to have things be instantly obsolete in a new expansion? I know it just makes you feel like all the time invested was put to waste, but that's how MMOs go. Am I happy, no. Will I keep on going, probably.

Granted I think I've put more time into pet battles than raiding, even when I did it consistently. It's nothing for me to sit here, watch TV, and level pets.

Personally, I don't want to see epic pets implemented. Buuut, if I had to choose, I think Kring has the best idea.

Kring wrote:If they are going to do it they should make it possible to continue to get XP at level 25 and use that XP to increase quality of the pet. That would mean you would have to play the pets to upgrade them and not just farm some stupid, boring, annyoing stones...

I would also be fine if instead of raising the quality of pet, continuing past level 25 would just continue to increase the stats little by little until cap. So technically it would be of "epic quality" in the stats, but not in title/color.

Either way, would work for me. It would still be an ENORMOUS grind to raise all pets to level cap and therefore "epic quality".

Ugh. No offense to Kring but that idea makes me queasy. The idea of releveling all those roaches, rats and cats doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather get a stone and just have to releveling due to the penalty. The penalty would be one or two trainers to get back to 25. Unless they implemented Kring's idea to function the same way.

I would be very unhappy if they simply implemented epic stones and I had to grind out 500+ of them to upgrade all my pets. I'm concerned that if they do implement epic quality pets, that will mean rare quality pets are no longer optimal for pet battles and to be competitive you have to upgrade. It's just too much work for me. I hope there is a better solution than stones because I can't see myself putting any more effort in to grinding pet bags for a small chance to obtain one stupid purple stone

I'm also in the camp that would prefer not to ever see epic pets implemented. It would totally destroy pet battling as it is currently implemented. Current PvE battles would be trivialized and PvP would be completely dominated by a few people with a lot of epic pets.

That said, if it is going to happen (which they've repeatedly said is the case), I don't want it to be even close to the RNG-dependent nature in which I upgraded all of my uncommons to rare. I want some guaranteed way I can upgrade all of my pets to rare, even it's just one per day. I would also like all the time I spent upgrading all of my pets to not be wasted, only rare pets should be eligible to be upgraded to epic. If epic battle-stones bypass the step-up to rare it's basically 9 months of my life I've wasted.

Livingdeath wrote:Ugh. No offense to Kring but that idea makes me queasy. The idea of releveling all those roaches, rats and cats doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather get a stone and just have to releveling due to the penalty. The penalty would be one or two trainers to get back to 25. Unless they implemented Kring's idea to function the same way.

But... levelling past 25 to reach Epic, and upgrading then relevelling to 25, are almost exactly the same thing in practise...

I hate the idea of epic stones.

That said, epic stones were added to the game files in 5.1: here's the wowhead link and wowdb link. They've said they intend to implement epic pets next xpac--this doesn't necessarily mean that the gamefile epic battle stones will be the implementation, but it's a good indication that they're thinking along those lines. They work exactly like the current rare stones: it doesn't matter what rarity the pet is, it jumps straight to epic, and it remains tradeable if it was tradeable before.

I don't know what's prevented them from implementing the epic stones already--it would be pretty trivial to just start rewarding them from daily quests or the new quests on Timeless Isle in 5.4. So I'm hopeful that the hold-up is due to them realizing what poor gameplay that would be, and they're working on ways to give us epic pets without forcing us to grind 500+ battlestones. That's purely speculation though.

I always thought that the stones should have been implemented slightly different to begin with. Instead of taking a pet directly to a specific rarity, I always thought it would be better for long-term design if the stones upgraded a number of rarity slots instead. For example, the green stones would upgrade a pet one slot, like from Uncommon to Rare or Common to Uncommon. The blue stones would upgrade 2 slots, from Common to Rare or Poor to Uncommon, and then the new purple ones could upgrade 3 slots, from Poor to Rare or Common to Epic.

I feel like that would make all of the stones useful, rather than now, where anything other than a blue is worthless (at least, that's how I feel about them). If they implement Epic stones in the current mechanic, that would make all of the green and blue stones undesireable. If everything gave you a few steps up, you wouldn't mind so much if you got a lower rarity stone, since it would still be that much closer to the rarity that you want.