World of Pokemon

I've been doing some reading recently in an attempt to figure out what's going on with the new pet battle system launching in World of Warcraft on Tuesday. We can currently see all the possible pets along with their abilities. We can see our current pets and their stats. This has me wanting to know what those stats do! Which abilities are going to be the best? What are the crazy good combos? Do I need to spend money to get the unique pets? I will if I have to!

Check this out, for example... An ability only found on the baneling pet which requires buying the collector's edition of the StarCraft II expansion...

KABOOM! One of the other baneling abilities increases crit chance by 50%. Is that good? Does that mean the burst will hit for 80%? This sounds cool! KABOOM!

Unfortunately information on the subject appears to be pretty limited. I can find lists of pets and abilities but there's no context to what they mean. Some abilities talk about crit and accuracy. Others deal with the impact of weather on combat. But I can't find any baseline information. What is base crit chance? What does critting do? What is base accuracy? Weather? Really?

In the absence of real information to make a decision the first pet I play with is likely to be the Singing Sunflower pet. It has a power of 10 and a speed of 10. What do these numbers mean? As an elemental pet she'll ignore weather effects. This sounds bad on the surface. Maybe weather will be brutal and it will actually be good? Who knows!

Apparently pets are going to have a rarity stat which will impact the stats a pet will have at max level. This sounds fine for pets you catch through battles since you can just fight lots to get a rare one. How will it work for quest rewards like the Sunflower? It sounds like they're going to be uncommon but actual hard pets to get will be rare. So maybe I should plan on using Mr Pinchy instead? Rarity isn't currently listed in game so I can't tell for sure. And I still don't know what power and speed do so I don't know if higher stats even matters. Power supposedly increases damage done in some way. Speed either determines turn order in a given round or how often you go. So either it's mediocre (like agility in Final Fantasy I) or it's awesome (like speed in Final Fantasy V).

There are tons of achievements with the pet battle system. In particular there's an achievement for catching a pet of every single wild animal type in the game. Wow! That'll be 10 achievement points well earned.

Apparently there's going to be a queue you can enter to get matched with a random opponent for a 3v3 pet battle. But they want to minimize trash talk and bad feelings so you don't get to know who you're fighting against and the system will only count wins, not losses. This makes me a little sad but I guess I can understand that they're trying to make pet battles into a more casual friendly system. I have hopes that they'll eventually add in a ladder of some kind since I think pet battles will be easier to balance than actual PvP.

At any rate... I went looking for information but it doesn't exist. I will likely fool around a little with pet battles  after the early realm firsts get claimed and try to work some of these things out on my own I guess.