Pet Battles First Impressions?

[Damien 1,514]

My internet being down, I have to rely on a free, slow Wireless network, so I'm still downloading the last beta build...

I was wondering if anyone had had the chance to test the Pet Battles and what they thought of it. I wouldn't mind seeing a few screenshots :P

[Peelyon 416]

So far they are having bug issues - both your pet and the enemy pet die at the start of the battle and stop you from doing anything.

Other than that and the person standing on a huge mammoth over the trainer - it looks pretty cool*

*By pretty cool I really meant 2minutes of zooming in to talk to the pet trainer fly to Elywnn find a pet to fight and get frozen. :P

[Damien 1,514]

I finally, reached the part where I can connect, even though I still have 7.32GB to download :P

I was testing stuff in Orgrimmar for my Warlock preview and I read some people were complaining about the Pet Battles being bugged. Guess I'm not missing out on much :P

[Damien 1,514]

Haha, Wowjuju made a preview of Pet Battles on their website. As they are an official fan site, they were naturally linked by Blizzard on their Facebook page, and someone commented:

Apparently Blizzard sent the task of announcing this over to their team of Asian Blogfarmers because I can barely understand what this post is even saying. Make it a real announcement, run it past at least one editor, and put it on battle.net where it belongs, please.

[Peelyon 416]

Good god I just went there and read it through. How a website like that makes official posts is pretty horrifying even if it is only on the Facebook! Hoping to get back into the beta today and get you some half decent feedback anyway.

[Peelyon 416]

Well I've just managed to complete 10 battles or so and I must admit, I really like it. It seems a little clunky, and if Im honest theres a lot of running around not knowing what to do, but I think it has a lot of potential!

All of your current companions that you own are currently level 1 and I am assuming that trying to fight on release day will be REALLY difficult as you have to find little pet battle critters (I'm finding them around Elwynn Forest at the moment) and competition to fight them is pretty high already on the beta (understandable).

Off to play a bit more, but my first impressions are a thumbs up! Will help a lot with inter-raid boredom for sure

[Peelyon 416]

When you reach a level 3 pet (maybe 3-4 battles) you start getting quests to fight NPC trainers. As soon as you beat them you get a follow one quest to fight another NPC trainer. Currently it is looking like one per zone right now (first was in Elywnn, second Westfall and the third one in Redridge).

The first two NPC fights so far have both had two pets each, with the third fight having three. Although these fights arent that hard I dont think it would be doable unless you had a pet of similar level and a backup pet of at least a few levels just to play it safe.

Those who have played or are familiar with Pokemon will understand that a lot of pets have strengths and weaknesses, but the tooltips are all pretty self explanatory anyway for those that havent!

As you can tell Im actually getting really into it at the moment! I did try queueing for a pet battle (just the same as a LFR / LFD queue) but I seemed to get matched with a trainer who had level 12 pets compared to my level 4's so was a bit one sided to say the least! I'm assuming this is either lack of people queueing or the matchmaking isnt fixed yet

Edited July 17, 2012 by Peelyon

[Peelyon 416]

[Peelyon 416]

Quick picture showing a Pet Battle against the 4th NPC trainer (Duskwood). Apologies for the quality of the pic (you can click to enlarge). Pretty much everything you hover over gives some for of stats or tooltip info.

As you can see in the top left it shows your current pet, its level and health and hovering over shows more information like attack speed etc (to see who attacks first). To the sides of your current pet are your backups that you can swap in at any time and you can hover over these to check abilities too.

Exactly the same for the opposition so you can check to see what pets they are what level they are and their abilities etc.

Edited July 17, 2012 by Peelyon

[Damien 1,514]

Thanks for the write up. This looks awesome and I'm really confident that Pet Battles will be a huge success, just as the dungeon challenges and the scenarios.