From Mists of Pandaria Beta – Build 15689

• You are now able to rename pets as many times as you would like.
• You are unable to use your character to attack the critters that you can do pet battles with.
• When doing a pet battle, only the pets you fight with will gain experience, which is granted relative to the amount of damage they do.
• During a battle, the mobs that are very close will disappear, leaving only the farther away mobs. They will not interact with you until the battle is over.
• Pets now have a quality similar to items which is not based on the pet itself, as the same pet can have different quality levels for different people.
• When your pet dies in battle, you can switch to the next one. The damage persists between battles now, requiring healing using a Battle Pet Bandage or Revive Pets.
• The auction house now has a section for the different types of pets. You can sell almost every pet after using the cage function in the pet journal.

Source: MMO-Champion News

Blizzard mentioned that a lot of things would become account-wide in Mists of Pandaria, can you tell us what made the final cut and what will be applied to the entire account in the expansion?
For sure the pets have made the final cut. Your entire pet collection will be made account wide, which is important as it ties in to the Pet Battle feature that we are introducing. That way you don’t actually have to go and change out characters every time you want to level up a specific pet, or have to level a pet for each one of your characters, or anything really annoying and grindy like that. That is the only one we know for sure, but we are trying to make progress on the account wide achievements, which is the next one on the list.

The Pet Battle System is a very interesting addition to the game. How did this idea come up, and what benefits do you feel that it will add to the game as a whole?
It’s definitely something that we’ve talked about doing for a while. Which is the concept of a mini game. We’ve wanted to put mini games into WoW for a long time, but we never really had an idea that we felt fit right and didn’t feel jammed into the game. Mini pets are really popular, everyone has companion pets, it feels like something a lot of people like, a lot of people collect them. So the thought was “Why don’t we just put these two things together”. There’s so many it feels like we could create a game out of it. We could use all the exciting pets because doing a game would require so many new assets, with this, we can take all the pets and give them all this new game play with abilities and leveling and stats. Then take a new selection of pets, put them into the world, and let players go find them. So you can go into a zone and there might be a pet that only spawns during the rain, in Stranglethorn Vale. There might be a pet that only spawns at nighttime in Uldum for example. So we can do that kind of stuff and it adds a whole lot of gameplay to the whole world because now you can have exploring, you can have achievements. If you like the general combat system, you can get really into the combat. It’s a turn-based system. It has a lot of depth. It’s optional content. It brings options to the game, and that’s huge for WoW.

WoW is the kind of game where we have to deliver the core content, dungeons, raids, leveling, battlegrounds. We know these are core things we always have to do, but then we also want to add new things for people that want to move out of those core things that we’re always doing, or attract new players that might not even be into those things. Achievements for example are something that’s a completely optional activity, but has added so much to the game. The concept is, you get a pet, and then you have what we call pet cards. So we’ll have a whole new pet journal interface. It will show you the pet. When you select it, you’ll see stats for the pet, you’ll see its level, and then you’ll see its abilities. The abilities actually work kind of similar to our new talent system. So when you learn an ability, you’ll get an option of two choices, and then you can pick that choice, and any time outside of battle you can swap that choice. So even once you get a pet and you get it to max level, you can still make lots of changes to it by changing its abilities.

The next feature that I’d like to talk about is something that we introduced at Blizzcon, the Pet Battle System. A lot of you guys may have heard about this. For many years now, we’ve had pets in the game. Players have had these cute, little companions that have hopped along by their side, but not really done anything else for the last seven years or so. And what we’ve really wanted to do is kind of satisfy the desire players have had for a little bit of gameplay involved with those pets. Right now, players just collect them, but there isn’t really anything to do with that collection. At the same time, we have the philosophy that these pets should never really feel mandatory. There shouldn’t be anything about these pets that leads to your character becoming more powerful. So we view this as a purely optional activity the players can do. We also view it as the first mini-game that we’ve ever gotten to introduce to WoW. For many years now, we’ve talked about having mini-game within World of Warcraft, and this is really our first foray into being able to do that. So when you’ve gone and done your raids and all that kind of stuff, your questing, your challenge modes, your scenarios, all those different types of activities, if you’re still kind of hungering for a change of pace and more things to do in WoW, the pet battles give you an opportunity to do that.

So players will be able to pop open their pet UI. This is the kind of revised pet UI. On the left, it lists all of the different pets that you have along with all of the different pets that you don’t have. So it also serves as a convenient look-up tool to find all of the pets that you haven’t gotten yet and tell you where to get them. And then when you click on them, it also shows you the score card over on the right. The little pet card that tells you the pet’s different stats. In this case, this Tranquil Mechanical Yeti is level 22, he’s got a 99 attack, a 25 defense, a 40 movement speed rating. That movement speed is like an initiative type of value. And then the 65 health. To go along with that, he’s got 6 different abilities. Imagine that, since this is a mockup, those are actually different abilities. They’re not all Yeti Smash, although we will definitely have a Yeti Smash ability in the game. Each pet has 6 different abilities, and you’ll have to pick from 3 that you’ll want that pet to have available to them at any given time for any given fight. So right now, this is the pet line up that this player has. They’ve got there Fluffy the de-weaponized mechanical companion and Chuck the alligator. You also have the ability to name your pets, so you can have very clever, funny names for yourself. He has selected a handful of different abilities out of the 6 possible for each of his pets. As you level up your pets, you gain access to those different abilities.

Read the full story Here

This News Post is outdated, please read the March postings for more information!

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.

Welcome to PetDuels.com! Our website is now online, expect much content soon to come!