Caging Azeroth – Easing the Pet Battle curve

I have spent a fair bit of time doing pet battling, and there is one thing that has always been a pet peeve of mine through the entire process. If I am battling and capture a rare pet, the pet maintains close to the same level as what you tamed. At most you learn it 2 levels lower, which is a set of pet battle dailies from max level. However, if I learn a per from an item, or a reward from an achievement or quest, the pet is learned as a level 1, and often uncommon quality, even if the item you learned it from was rare in quality.

I find this to be very frustrating. I cannot count the times I have been excited to learn a pet, but then lost interest when seeing them as level 1 in my pet journal. Do I really want to spend the time to use that level 1 pet in battle after battle, taking days to drag them from the dregs up to a powerful max level, when the pet may not even be worth it? What I would like to see instead is that the pet is the same quality as the item that teaches it, and also that the pet had a few levels under them. The first part is very easy, just a small tweak to coding I would think. The second, though, would take a lot more thinking and planning. I do, thankfully, have a few ideas about how the pet level could work.

The first idea I had was that the learned pet could be the same level as your highest pet. This would encourage leveling pets of all families, but could have the downside of people just working to level a single pet really high, even if it would be overall ineffective in actual battles. I like the idea that work put in would be rewarded with learned pets being the same or a similar level. My next idea was that your learned pets would be the same level as a calculation, something like top 10 pets average level, half their level or something like that. It would be a small tip of the hat to those of us who have leveled many a pet to maximum level, and give us the chance to level pets with a few battles less in the pain department.

My third idea was a battle stone like thing that could boost a pet by 5 or more levels. This would be one way to ensure that leveling a pet from 1 would not be quite as painful. My last idea was that once you get the No Favorites achievement, which is for leveling each family to level 10, that all learned pets would then start at level 10. This would be the best method of doing it in my opinion, and would allow you to see a small fringe benefit from this achievement. I don’t think having the few pets you might learn after earning that achievement starting at 10 would be an overly cumbersome or unfair advantage in the grand scheme of a system that would still require 15 more hard fought levels to get to the cap.

Now, I am not sure I think Blizzard will actually do any of this, especially when it is so incredibly easy to power level pets from 1 to 10 with a couple of battles, but I think Blizzard should consider it. It would make the pet battling easier, but not enough to make it a significant edge. Would you hurry to get the No Favorites achievement in order to have all learned pets starting at 10? Would you like to see leveling learned pets eased?