Legion Pet Battle Tuning

We’re getting close to deploying some changes to pet battles that we’ll test in the Legion Alpha. We wanted to outline some of them here for you, so that you have a thread in which you can talk about this with us. As always, these are changes we’re testing, subject to further change, not final, etc.

Undead racial

During its invulnerability round, the active Undead pet will now do -25% damage.Developer note: The Undead racial ability has been one of the most powerful, and this change should help bring it in line with the others.

Frog Kiss + Sleeping Gas

Now has a 1-round cooldown.Dev note: The ability to chain stun opponents (until resilience kicks in) simply feels bad. Rather than a blanket change to resilience, we’re trying a surgical change to one of the more aggravating aspects.

Thunderbolt, Avalanche, Grave Destruction, Carpnado, Arcane Storm, and Psionic Strom

Base Damage reduced by approximately 15%Thunderbolt

Will now have a 5-Round cooldown, to match the other abilities with similar damage and effect.Cleave

Added 1-round cooldownDev note: AoE abilities are very powerful in the current battle pet metagame, especially “meteor”-type abilities, which are quite effective against both groups of enemies and single targets. This should bring them closer to their intended power level.

Graves

Clobber and Bonestorm slots swappedDev note: Graves has a bit too easy of a time damaging the entire enemy team. Though we see other setups with Graves, it’s been too easy to AoE, and a bit too powerful among AoE pets. We are wary of opening up additional new Graves combos with this change, and we’ll be testing this closely and reading all of your feedback.

Graves’ base stats changed: At level 25, Graves’ Speed will now be 244 (was 211), Power will now be 297 (was 314), and Health will now be 1587 (was 1668).Dev note: Graves’ base stats, along with the Undead racial (which favors slow pets), made him an unfortunate opponent to play against. Combined with high AoE and Consume Corpse, he had very few downsides. This change should help bring his output in-line with other, similar pets.

Overall, this constitutes a triple nerf to Graves. However, depending on your ability choices, you may consider the Clobber/Bonestorm slot swap an improvement. Please feel free to leave your feedback in this thread, and we’ll be here reading (and responding where necessary).

Thank you very much!

We have a few updates to share, feedback is welcome!

Cleave damage reduced by 25% (no longer has a 1 round cooldown).Dev note: We heard your concerns about adding a cooldown to cleave and agreed that this felt like a better solution.

Shell Armor duration reduced from 3 rounds to 2.Dev note: Shell armor was very powerful compared to other flat damage reduction abilities, this should bring it more in line with them.

The damage bonus from Howl now only affects one attack.

Pandaren Water Spirit's Whirlpool and Geyser now share the same ability slot.Dev note: This is our first iteration at disarming the Howl Bomb strategy in PvE, which has proven to be very powerful in too many situations. The goal is to make PvE battles more interesting and encourage the use of a wide variety of pets.