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This is my first crack at a column that is geared towards discussing potential tweaks to WOW gameplay and their implications.  Think of it as the equivalent of cloud gazing in Azeroth or what adolescent Dwarves think about when they’re daydreaming during Alchemy class.   Ideally, I’ll have a column up every Friday to get you excited for the weekend and primed to play. Here goes nothing…

How awesome would it be if…non-combat pets gave passive buffs. Imagine it, you visit the Crazy Cat Lady in Elwynn Forest, pick up an Orange Tabby to pal around with and that Tabby gives you a 2% Intelligence buff (we’ll name it after my old cat and call it Petie’s Wisdom).  The buff will only be active when you have the Tabby out of his cage and will behave like any other buff in game.

Blizzard could assign a rarity level to each pet in the game depending on how difficult it is to gain the pet (Green, Blue and Purple).  The rarer the pet, the better the passive buff.  Some potential examples:

• Timbermaw Cub: Increases your reputation gains with the Timbermaw Faction by 5%.
• Murloc Lifeguard: Increases your swim speed by 5%.
• Greedy Kobold: Increases money gained in any group by 5%.

Adding this level of complexity to the non-combat pet classes will achieve two things:

1. It adds a new gameplay element to the game, making pets important to those players who aren’t pet collectors.
2. It gives players the opportunity to differentiate themselves from one another (an important way to fight the wave of homogenization threatening to drown WOW).

The first point is self-explanatory; players will spend more time in game farming up the pet that they want.  More time in game means less time to play other games.  The second point might need some clarification.  Let’s say 2 warriors each leveled up with the same gear, the same time constraints but different pets (and for the sake of the argument, we’ll say that had the pets at Level 1). One player could potentially level faster than the other with a run speed pet (Speedy Mercury Jr. pet) while the other player could level his profession faster with a Gnomish Orphan pet (Randomly grants an extra skill point during engineering skill ups).  The play experience would be slightly different (plus you have the nostalgia factor of going through an entire leveling grind with a pet companion out).

Inevitably, there are going to be game balance issues but if Blizzards keeps the pet buffs focused on reputation gains, professions and leveling (avoiding the hot button issues of end game raiding and PVP) then they can avoid any real issues.  After all, reputation gear is now moot with all players having easy access to epics, the leveling grind is much less strenuous than it once was, and professions are more of a gold sink than an integral part of gameplay (Reasonable minds can differ on that last point).  Discuss.