July 2020   « Archives | Current News »

More pets were added in today's Shadowlands Alpha build, plus some interesting new models. [source]

New Pets
Today's patch included 7 new battle pets. This brings us to a current total of 77 datamined pets from Shadowlands Alpha!


Note that there are duplicates with placeholder(PH) names, however each has a unique ID which indicates separate pets. These will likely be updated in a future build. As with all things Alpha, not all are guaranteed to make it to release.

• Bloodfeaster Spiderling
• PH Abomination (pictured above, left)
• PH Abomination
• PH Hornet
• PH Skeleton Slime (pictured above, right)
• PH Skeleton Slime
• PH Slime Tentacle

List of all datamined Shadowlands pets

Is It A Frog? A Duck?
Two new interesting models appeared in the latest Alpha build, however it's unclear if they will be tied to a collectible battle pet. [source]


The first is named "Frog Duck" (pictured above), which looks like its name (we think it's more frog than duck).

The second new model is an adorable little piranha in a bowl (pictured right). My, what big eyes you have!

We'll have to wait and see where these two models turn up, but we certainly hope they'll be part of our collections.

What do you think of the new pets and new models? What would you name your frog-duck if you collected one? And will this strange creature be as close to an actual duck as we'll ever get in World of Warcraft?

We're in Shadowlands Beta! There's more to test, including some Pet Battle content. Note that there are NO Beta keys, and access is still invite only.

Additionally, Blizzard recently posted a blog post regarding upcoming Pet Battle changes in the expansion. [source]

Pet Battles In Shadowlands
Some key notes from the blog post include:

• No plans for a new pet charm currency in Shadowlands. Polished Pet Charms will continue to be the standard currency to buy vendor pets, consumables, and cosmetics.
• New pet abilities and mechanics will be added in Shadowlands
• Redesigned multiple abilities

Changed abilities include, but are not limited to the following.

• Black Claw + other flat damage taken increasing abilities
• Hunting Party, Flock + similar multi-round abilities
• Shattered Defenses debuff
• Twilight Meteorite + similar long-cooldown team-damage abilities
• Jar of Smelly Liquid
• Righteous Inspiration
• Last but not least, some healing abilities will have their variance adjusted or removed

What Blizzard plans on changing and why is detailed in their blog post. Keep in mind that this is still Beta, and these adjustments are subject to change as testing progresses.

They'll be monitoring how these changes impact older content as well as existing strategies for PVE encounters.

Those in Beta are encouraged to test old (and new!) Pet Battle content with the redesigned abilities, and to leave constructive feedback on the main Blizzard thread or on our forum thread.

What do you think of the proposed changes? Are there other abilities you feel need to be re-tuned?