Mists of Pandaria: Pet Battles, Blue Posts, Fan Art, Curse Weekly Roundup

[chaud]

Mists of Pandaria: Pet Battles
We will hear more about Mists of Pandaria in the upcoming weeks, but while we are waiting for new announcements we can review the new pet battle system that is coming in Mists of Pandaria.

Previous Coverage:

• Blizzcon World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Preview Panel
• Official Mists of Pandaria Preview Panel Recap
• Official Pet Battles feature page

General

• Pets will be account wide.
• The battle system will be accessible to all players from a low level.
• The battle system works with almost every pet.
• Rare pets will not give any combat advantage, but may give a cosmetic advantage.
• Your pet journal will display info on all your pets, including stats, skills, and also drop locations and lore info for the pets you don't have yet. It will also let you manage your teams and battle parts of the system.
• You will be able to customize your pet with names or visuals for the abilities.
• Every pet can use 3 abilities in a battle at one time with a total of 6 abilities to swap around between battles.
• Every time you level you will also increase the stats of your pet.
• The current pet level cap is 25.
• You will level multiple pets to build your team, which consists of 3 slots for pets during battle.

Collecting

• Most pets will become tradable, even after being leveled.
• There will be Wild Pets that you can find in the world and engage in battle with. After defeating it, you will be able to get that pet and add it to your Pet Journal.
• Wild Pets have random stats, some of them will be very good at tanking, some will have a CC ability, and so on.
• Some pets will only be found during a specific season, while it's raining, or during the day or the night. For example, some of them will only spawn in the spring, when it's raining, in Elwynn Forest at night!
• There will be at least one unique pet per zone.

Battle

• There will be both PvE battles against Wild Pets and PvP battles against other players.
• It will be a simple turn based combat system.
• You can fight with a team of 3 pets.
• There will be a queuing system so that you will be able to find a fight pretty fast depending on the level of your pets.
• Winning battles will earn experience and levels for your pets.

Customization

• You will finally be able to name your pets, and see that name in battle.
• You can obtain items for your pets.
• You will have an item slot for your pet and might be able to socket gems in the item.
• There will be individual builds of abilities for each pet and different teams.
• There will be Pet Masters in the world who will let you earn Master abilities when you beat them. For example, beating the master of mechanical pets will get you a new ability for your pet.

Blue Posts

Cross Realm Raids and a Lack of Community
Unfortunately, that opinion is very subjective. The continued popularity of the cross-realm LFD tool, and now the LFR, indicates that a great number of players are just fine with using it for quicker access, rather than attempting to group up with people on the same realm.

Also, implying that every group in LFD/LFR is filled with people you'd gladly never group up with again is exaggerating the actual situation. There are many of us who use the tools a lot, and rarely experience this.

Having said all that, the future BattleTag system will go a long way to improving the ability to build and maintain cross-realm friendships, eliminating the need to fill groups with as many 'randoms'.

[...] We're always looking for feedback and ways to improve our features. Player feedback regarding dungeon groups and long wait-times contributed to the development of the dungeon finder tool in the first place. Now, in response to new feedback, BattleTags will address some of the issues players currently face when meeting potential friends on different realms.

No, unfortunately some people don't always enjoy the groups they find themselves in through the Dungeon Finder. But do you believe limiting the pool of players to your own realm, or offering an incentive to manually search for your own group will solve this?

Finishing a dungeon with a great group before the Dungeon Finder tool was available was indeed a fantastic experience, but I personally still get that feeling now when I'm grouped with a nice bunch of people. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Extra Character Slots
There are on-going discussions about how we want to handle this issue. If I recall correctly, there were some ideas brought up at BlizzCon about what we could potentially do to alleviate the concerns about extra character slots, but I don't have any more information on a specific decision right now. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

New Warcraft Fan Art
The World of Warcraft Fan Art Section has been updated with five new pieces of fan artwork.

Curse Weekly Roundup
Pico is back to tell us about the things you might have missed in Diablo 3, Guild Wars, SWTOR, Minecraft, and WoW news recently.

[Fatal Jinx]

Gotta catch em' all!!!!

[Kokiron]

Haters gonna hate, i'm so down for WoW Pokemon.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

It has to be said.

I wanna be the very best...

[Baygon]

if it was just pvp pet battles, it could be considered inspired by pokemon, but having wild pets? yeah....Blizzard just lost absolutely all credibility for this one..

[assilley]

i wonder if they will evolve into new pets?

[Duah]

Pikac- wait.... Onyxian Whelpling I choose you! No thanks... not really looking forward to this... If I wanted to play Pokemon I would....

[The Ogdru Jahad]

"A wild Hyacinth Macaw appears"

[Deleted]

Gief Pet battle NOAAAW

[Shiftia]

At first glance it seems like a Pokemon inspired thing...But really blizzard? XDGym leaders? Seasonal pets?

[Ieatsouls]

i think blizz is trolling us

[ahnjen]

Texas Chili Bomb..... so much win

[ozsmeg]

This just seems like a giant waste of blizzards time and money. I wish they would work on something useful rather than something completely cosmetic and useless to game play.

[Shawaam]

"Master Changsaladinthehouse"... The fuck?

[Lightfist]

You know, I didn't say anything about this until now. I ignored it as a fun little minigame to add some extra time to the game. I can remain silent no longer. This is a God-Damn, shameless Pokemon ripoff.

[Deleted]

FLASH your TiTS plz !!!

Infracted

[Andromedas]

You know, I didn't say anything about this until now. I ignored it as a fun little minigame to add some extra time to the game. I can remain silent no longer. This is a God-Damn, shameless Pokemon ripoff.

I hope we're being trolled.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

This just seems like a giant waste of blizzards time and money. I wish they would work on something useful rather than something completely cosmetic and useless to game play.

I ran a poll that shows this is exactly what most people wanted. Not necessarily this exactly, but the winner of my "what was the biggest flaw in Cata" poll was "Not enough to do at 85."

This is more to do at 90.

[Lightfist]

I ran a poll that shows this is exactly what most people wanted. Not necessarily this exactly, but the winner of my "what was the biggest flaw in Cata" poll was "Not enough to do at 85."

This is more to do at 90.

Yeah, I would like more World of Warcraft things to do at 90. There's quite a difference.

[DBZMerciter2005]

I'm looking forward to doing this while being tired of leveling alts. Does it help I love pokemon? Yes, it probably does.