Video: Mists of Pandaria Pet Battles
Pet Battles are now available after the most recent patch update to the Mists of Pandaria beta. We've seen a few pet additions lately. Let's dive in, shall we?
The pet pane has been updated. Selecting the different pets shows you aspects like types and different abilities. Many of your pets won't have a full list of abilities yet. Naturally, your pets will start off at level 1, and as you enter engagements, they'll gain levels and gain access to stronger abilities. It's important to use the creature type that will give you an advantage over your opponent.
Read on for more!
In order to get started with Pet Battles, you'll need to find the appropriate trainer who will teach you the skills. Alliance players can head over to Goldshire to get started. I presume Horde players can find theirs in Razor Hill.
In the above screenshot, you can see what the Pandaren Monk's abilities are. You won't have full access to all of them. That only comes after you level it up.
Every pet starts off with one basic ability that you can use. The Pandaren Monk is a human type, which means it is weak against beast types but strong against dragonkin type. Some of the attacks have a multiple-turn cooldown. For example, after Staggered Steps is used, it'll take four turns before it can be available again.
The Pandaren Monk can eventually acquire the following skills:
By the way, team Matticus currently consists of:
Amidst the crashing and stability issues of the beta servers, I was able to get in a string of battles against various pets out in the world. You'll need to ensure that pet tracking is enabled on your minimap in order to engage them. As your character adventures around throughout Azeroth, you'll encounter creatures that you can capture. Right now, it seems as if though the actual capture function doesn't work. As you'll see in the video, I can "capture" a few of the pets, but they don't seem to be added to my pet collection.
The opposing pet's health needs to be weak enough for the WoWball to effectively capture it.
Time to go over combat!
Once you've found and swooped in on your target, you can interact with it, and the Pet Battle interface will spring up. From here, you can manage the actions of your pets, switch between the three of them, issue commands to capture, or retreat from battle advance in the opposite direction.
Your pet's abilities appear on the bottom. Mousing over them springs additional tooltip information on the side there, which includes damage done, strengths, and weaknesses. The yellow, circular button lets me switch pets in mid-combat -- useful in case your opponent decides to summon a pet to counter your current one. Remember that switching pets counts as an action.
At the moment, it seems the aggressor attacks second. Once I issued a command, the squirrel landed its hit first before my monk used Jab. The trap icon (fifth large button from the left) is the capture command. The white flag icon signifies that you wish to surrender. Lastly, you'll see a "pass" button just above your action bar. This button is available in case you used up all of your moves and they're on cooldown. Basically, you're forfeiting an action to the opponent.
Thankfully, since pets are now account-bound, once you find a pet, you won't have to look for it all over again!
All in all, Pet Battles is going to help keep players busy. I like the idea of it and can't wait for more abilities to be added. Hopefully, we'll see flashier and interesting moves.
It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
