No epic pets in Warlords of Draenor

So, guys, Mumper has been tweeting about pet battles again! And he’s very much backpedaling on some of the tweets covered in my post-Blizzcon pet roundup.

Specifically, they are no longer planning on giving us epic pets:

http://twitter.com/mumper/status/419155958359535616

Personally, I think this is for the best; considering how only rare pets are used for PvP by sophisticated players, the introduction of epic pets would lead in short order to only epic pets being PvP-viable and creating a massive barrier to entry into pet battling for a new or returning player. Does anyone else remember fighting opponents with gray pets during the first few weeks of What We’ve Been Training For? The devs’ ideas of what pet quality would mean to players ended up being vastly different from the community consensus, leaving players who aren’t reading WoW blogs and listening to pet battle podcasts far, far behind. Hence the reasoning on no epic pets:

http://twitter.com/mumper/status/419213265231568896

There is also still no plan to increase the pet level cap from 25–meaning that there will be no way to roflstomp the existing pet battle PvE content just by outleveling it or acquiring higher-quality pets. The fact that Pandaria tamer fights will remain relevant is great news for those who haven’t yet attempted it–but for those pet collectors who don’t love battling but want a Zao, Calfling of Niuzao to be adorable and follow them around all day, there’s no easy road in sight–just keep copying strats until you find one that works for you, I guess?

And for of us (like me) who have already completed every bit of PvE pet battling in-game (finally got around to earning my final Celestial Coin and buying Chi-chi today), the fact that they’re keeping all the old content relevant is slightly worrying for an entirely different reason–I worry that new tamer battles may not be challenging to those of us who have already amassed large high-level collections of pets. Hopefully there will be interesting & challenging types of new pet PvE content available in Patch 6.0–not just six new tamers available to everyone who’s defeated Aki.