Though it is very much a Pokémon system for WOW, I’m very eager to get into the Mists of Pandaria Pet Battle System. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the pet battle system takes your collectable yet non-combat companions and turns them into characters you can level up, teach skills to, and even hunt in the wild to add to your collection!

So instead of just buying or finding pets as item drops, you can now encounter and capture pets in the wild. I’m excited for this. The main story to Pandaria sounds wonderful to me and I’m eager to enjoy that new WOW content, but the pet battle system sounds like a bonus game that comes with the universe you’ve already come to know and love. It’s there for those who want to finally name that hard earned rare drop pet and turn it into a high level champion of this new system. Read on for more details

As mentioned above, you can now name each of your pets. No idea if this means you’ll have to have a unique name on your own server, but I’d imagine that would be unnecessary. Pets have four stats, health, power, speed, and quality. The first three raise with level ups, and quality is a unique stat to gauge the overall strength of that pet and will vary on every pet you catch.

On specific levels, pets will learn new abilities that you will be able to choose from to have active for each pet. There’s even pet trainer NPC’s that will give you experience to your pets if you defeat them in battle.

So sure, this all sounds like familiar ground that many of us are used to. On the other hand, this adds something new to WOW that deviates from the usual gameplay. It gives long time players something different to do with all those collected pets, and newcomers a reason to visit Pandaria besides the sights, sounds, and intriguing story. If you’ve been unsure about this new system, give it a look on Blizzards official site. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/mists-of-pandaria/feature/pet-battle