Thursday 27 September 2012

Mists of Pandaria - Pet Battles - First Impressions & How To Make Gold

© Piez on Flickr, under creative Commons Licence
If you follow me on Twitter (@nevahaddict), you may have seen me bemoaning the fact that I wasn't going to be able to play Mists of Pandaria until next week when I get home from my travels. Well, as luck & a chance comment on Twitter would have it, it turned out that I could so like many others, I have almost lost the last two days in this wonderful new world Blizzard have created for us!

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole start area for a few hours but I'm out of practise with questing so I decided to head back to Orgrimmar & take a look at these pet battles. That was my biggest mistake! Multiple achievements, 70 captured pets & 100 pet battles later, I realised that it was almost time for my friend to get home from work so I just logged out. I didn't even put any of my MoP herbs on the Auction House.

General Gold Stuff
That brings me to this morning - I did eventually get all my auctions posted - manually as I don't want to mess up any of my friends add-on settings. My sales have been atrocious on this US server, about the only stuff selling is the few cheap herbs I manage to snatch up now & then or the level 77-80 green armour. We have the same glyph problem that so many others are bemoaning - even today, most of the Monk glyphs are under 100 gold with just 3 or 4 above the 300 gold mark.

Pet Battle Stuff
I currently have a lvl 15 twink on the Alliance side of my main US server & a little banker over there too. I decided to check out the Auction House for pets - just to see what was happening. I found a very busy pet section on their auction house - over 600 various pets listed as opposed to the 100 or so on the Horde auction house. Prices were much lower too so I snatched up a few bargains - 3 x White Kittens for 100 gold each & a Razormaw Hatchling for 35 gold. I've also been picking up Elementium Geode pets for 200 gold or less over the last few months so my little banker alt learnt 3 geodes, the 3 kittens & the hatchling.

I then logged back to my main & made up a team to get some pets leveled. I only took them to level 4-5 (without even leaving Orgrimmar!) but I then caged them up & listed them on the Horde Auction House at a higher price than the level 1 versions. This is still a work in progress type situation - there have been problems with the Battle Pets section not being searchable on the remote Auction House App & I haven't seen much in the way of price movements, undercutting or even any sales yet. I have a feeling most people are either leveling to 90 or playing in the new Pandaren starter zone or perhaps, like me, they got into a time warp & are still pet battling out in the wilds somewhere!

There is also a small problem where a vendor bought pet (Companion Pet) goes into the Miscellaneous/Pets section whereas one that has been learnt then caged gets listed in the Battle Pets section. If you just list a vendor bought item, you may want to check prices in both sections before listing it - variances between the two prices can be quite noticeable even tho at level 1, the caged version is identical to the uncaged one.

Making Gold From Battle Pets
So how will I try to make gold off this new pet battle system - well, for starters, I'm an altoholic - I have alts dotted over multiple servers & most are just the bankers, left behind after I deleted the leveling toon on that server. So with pets being account wide, I'm going to be searching for cheap pets across about 8 different servers. I'll learn them & perhaps level them a bit (we'll see how that market develops over the next few weeks, I'm sure) & then cage them & sell them on the most expensive of my servers. Eventually I think the most valuable battle pets will be the highest level ones of course but for now, it's a whole new market to test & explore.

I also quite enjoy farming stuff so I will undoubtedly be out there, farming or grinding away at getting some of the rarer pets from drops like the various whelplings, firefly or even the disgusting oozeling. I'm sure my tactics will change as this market develops but for now, I'm just going to poodle along & enjoy all the new stuff that Mists of Pandaria is offerings us.

Do you have a tactic you are willing to share? What do you think of the Pet Battles so far? Let us know in the comments or you can email me (email address in right sidebar). I look forward to hearing from you.

Edited to add: Whilst I was looking for a picture for this post, Cold has just published his post for today Companion Pets vs Battle Pets - Pricing Discrepancies & Warnings - I've only touched on some of the points so go have a read there too for greater analysis of this whole subject! Great Minds think alike huh?

1 comment:

  1. Thanks For The Link!

    I still haven't played around with any battle pets yet, myself. As far as flipping vendor pets goes, I'm thinking of abandoning that market altogether soon. Players will surely wise up to the fact they can just cage their own pets and the wild caught ones can be of better quality than the vendor bought ones. Of course, we goblins tend to not make most of our gold on the most informed players. :P

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