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| Pet Battles - Fighting to Make Gold? |
If you want to read through all of the patch notes, you can find them in various places but here is the WowInsider version. My favorite bits are below though:
Pet Battles
- A new item has been introduced that can be used to upgrade the quality of Battle Pets: Battle-stones.
- Battle-stones are available in two basic types, general purpose Battle-stones that can be used to upgrade the quality of any pet, and family specific Battle-stones, which can only be used to upgrade pets of a specific pet family.
- Battle-stones are available in two qualities: Flawless Battle-stones can upgrade pets directly to Rare quality, while Polished Battle-stones will upgrade a pet to Uncommon quality.
- Players will have a very small chance to obtain a general purpose and family specific Flawless Battle-stone after winning a match against wild pets; defeating higher level opponents increases the chances of obtaining a stone. Family specific Flawless-Battlestones will be of the same family as the pets that were defeated. These valuable items are not soulbound, and can be sold on the Auction House.
- Family specific Flawless Battle-stones can be found in the Sack of Pet Supplies obtained from performing Pet Trainer quests, and are Bind on Pickup.
- General purpose Polished Battle-stones can be purchased for 1000 Justice Points.
- Players can now keep up to 650 pets.
- The Dragon Kite can now be used in Pet Battles.
- The Imperial Silkworm and Imperial Moth pets can now be created by Tailors.
- Two new Battle Pets now roam Darkmoon Island waiting to be caught.
- Pets can now be filtered by name, type, rarity and level, and filters will remain in place each time the Pet Journal is viewed.
The first thing I thought when I saw these notes was that it would be easier to find the pet I wanted in my journal - it's been a pain to find a specific pet until now & I only have 170 or so. I hate to think how frustrating it was for the really serious pet collectors! Then I re-read the battle-stone stuff - the battle stones you can win from a pet battle in the wild are not going to be soul-bound so that will be a new niche market to keep an eye on. If you already have a good team built up then perhaps using these battle-stones won't be quite so important to you & you can make some good gold on the Auction House with them.
It does say there's only a small chance to pick up battle-stones from a wild pet battle though - the other source is the Sack of Pet Supplies from Trainer quests & those will be Bind on Pickup - if you do decide to sell your battle-stone early on, price them high - with a possibly small supply, prices should be able to stay high for quite a while, at least until more people start pet-battling!
Secondly, there are 2 new pets for Tailors to make - the Imperial Silkworm & the Imperial Moth. Until now, crafted pets have not been very worthwhile in pet battles but with the introduction of battle-stones - might we see a renewed interest in the crafted pets? I'm sure many Engineers are hoping so - Engineering pets have traditionally been a good gold earner for Engineers (think lifelike mechanical toads especially) & I know several scribes who made fairly good gold from the Inscription pets.
The only thing we really need now is for the Auction House interface for Caged Pets & Companions to be 'fixed' somehow. At the moment, there is no way to see the prices of both versions of a pet except by searching them separately & that is a nuisance!
image © Florence Ivy under Creative Commons licence
I think there's definitely some upside potential there, but it would probably only cater to the rich or bored players in most liklihood.
ReplyDeleteWhilst the pet battle system has been a winner for Blizzard (still waiting for a good portable device version!), it's fair to say that people are more occupied than ever on just exploring content with the release of MoP and having so much to do in this xpac.
5.1 also brings two new factions, 3 scenarios and a host of new dailies, quests and achieves to conquer and again, that will draw the majority of the player base into the new content for the immediate future.
The battlestone concept is a really good one, but we have to wait and see how it weighs up in the supply and demand stakes for natural price discovery to see if it's really a worthwhile GPH venture or not.
Battlepets are definitely a niche aspect of the game and for all their success in the general sense, you'd have to argue this is probably going to be one of the most server specific niche's in the game to date and could change values wildly between realms.
That said, this might actually provide an opportunity if you're looking to do a realm transfer as a good way to transport your wealth if you're over the 50k cap.
Something to consider anyway!