The pet battle system, or Warcraft pokemon if you wish, went live on the beta realms a while ago, and as the name suggests, it’s basically a Pokemon battle with pets. The system itself is a little more complicated than that though, you need to catch your pets yourself and then level them up to do battle. Right now it’s basically set to moderate difficulty to capture pets, if you mess up you ability rotations your pet will die horribly, but if you execute it somewhat properly you will win against the AI. One could consider the pet battle system as a new secondary profession, as you do have to skill up, or technically level up, but not as the traditional professions work. Your pets all have their own level and are kind of situational, so pick wisely depending on your opponent.

All in all it’s not the most useful, nor interesting feature in Mists of Pandaria, but it’s a decent addition, and something to kill spare time with instead of jumping around in Stormwind / Orgrimmar. As the beta is being updated constantly the system is not complete yet and it’s tough to say how it will turn out in the end, but right now it’s nothing impressive at least. There are a few achievements for those who like farming their achievement points, and I asume there will be some type of ranking system in the end.

Things like this hardly catches my attention in general as I’ve always disliked Pokemon and everything similar, but I played around with it a bit the other day and it actually exceeded my expectations, although my expectations weren’t that high so Blizzard didn’t have to set the bar that high to please me. But who knows, it might turn out to be truly addictive in the end, only time can tell.

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