Hail, hearty pet battle masters! The new patch is coming Soon™ and with it will come many changes to our beloved pets. New pets, new abilities, and changes to favored pets all abound in this new patch, and I wanted to take a few minutes to let you all know what you can expect once you have finished installing Patch 5.2: The Thunder King!
Moar Pets!
That is right my friends, more pets. Lots of pets. Innumerous pets of varying styles and families. With the dinosaur theme of the out of raid patch content, I am pretty sure a lot of the pets will be based around dinosaurs, though there will be lots of other pets to be found too. There will be fishable pets, battleable pets, as well as ones dropping from rares and bosses. WoWHead reports that a recent PTR update showed more than a dozen new pets added! Some pets that at one time could give different coloring if caged and relearned will now have one uniform color, while others that had a different color each time they are summoned will be returning, and new pets with that feature are being added. There will also be new panda pets learned by fighting…
Elite Battle Pets
These are a new type of pet challenge in 5.2 similar to the Pandaren Spirit Tamer one. Dataminers have found at least one Elite pet per zone in Pandaria, and defeating them completed the Beasts of Fable achievement and rewards you with a Red Panda pet. Too cute! Elite pets will be very strong, and will be found alone with no companions against your three pets. Be warned, this does not mean they will be easily beaten, these pets will have much higher stats than your typical pet in the wild, even the rare pets! Watch out for these pets in the world, as they will be indicated by their distinctive yellow paw instead of the usual green print.
Making it a fair fight
This patch has made some of the tamer fights out in the world a lot more fair, as tamers in Northrend, Cataclysm, and even Courageous Yon in Pandaria have pets with more level appropriate stats. This should mean that some of the pet tamers that have been very hard, like the Dragonblight tamer in Northrend, should have a more even fight experience than they have in the current 5.1 battles. As someone who spent weeks trying to get tamers in Northrend down, this is a very welcome, albeit belated change. There will also be some fixes to existing pets that you can get that are a bit too high powered. Fluxfire Feline, Anubisath Idol, Tuskarr Kite, Mr. Bigglesworth and more have received a bit of a change to make them more balanced as compared to other pets.
There have also been some ability changes affecting multiple pets. Reflection has been replaced with Deflection, Ice Tomb, Elementium Bolt, Stun Seed, Geyser, Conflagrate, Siphon Life, and over a dozen other abilities have had their effects changed to either buff or nerf them as compared to others. In addition, pets afflicted with crowd control(CC) abilities will be granted Resillience, which will make them immune to crowd control for a short time. This will avoid facing people using the frustrating all CC team that basically constantly keeps the opponents stunned until they forfeit in frustration. Hopefully overall these changes will make for some more fair and balanced fights between players.
Space saving and rare making
Two great changes from the patch notes are first that Battle Pet Bandages are both account bound, and also stack in 25s instead of 10s, which will make the 80 or so bandages on my main stack a lot better, and that the other alts who have one or two can easily move them all to my one battling main. Second is that the Battle-Stones that came with 5.1 will not be a possible drop from a PvP battle. There are no notes saying these must be random, but it is nice to see that there will be more ability to get these stones if you don’t do much wild pet battling.
Charming side of battles
5.2 will also bring the ability for players at level 90 to get Lesser Charms of Good Fortune when they win a pet battle against a team who are within 5 levels of your highest pet’s level. For players not at the level cap, they will get a small amount of XP from winning a fight with the same level range requirement. This will help both leveling and max level players, and bring more people into pet battles. This should hopefully encourage those who want those bonus rolls, but don’t want to do the dailies to get the lesser charms, to do pet battles instead.
Fleeing your own mistakes
There are some changes to how forfeiting will work in the 5.2 patch, and I can tell you I know a fair number of folks out there who will be super happy about this. If you flee a pet battle, the pets you faced will no longer despawn, instead remaining in the world. The same will also happen if you happen to lose your connection to the servers while in a pet battle. However, any pets you killed in the battle will not respawn at all. This means that if you are out hunting a rare Scourged Whelping, if you forfeit the battle with one not of the quality you want, another battler will have a chance at that so they can have at least one in their journal. On the downside, if you accidentally kill a rare, it won’t come back.
For good or ill, there are a lot of updates to the Pet Battle system, individual pets, and the overall balance of the feature. While many of us, myself included, may not be happy with a few of the changes, I truly feel like the feature will be better off with these changes implemented. I look forward to saving space, chasing the new pets, and all the good stuff that will come along with the 5.2 patch for all of us veterans and noobs of the Pet Battle System! What pet battle feature makes you most excited from the 5.2 patch notes?
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