WoW Pet Battle Addon: Pet Battle Teams

January 28, 2013

We look into our very first add-on this week, Pet Battle Teams. There are a lot of great battle pet addons out there, and we’ll be looking through them one at a time in between our team reviews. I’m still testing my recent Night Assassins pet battle team, built on the Gilnean Raven and Pandaren Monk, but for now, I want to make sure you take advantage of this awesome addon to let you swap pet teams easily in WoW.

This is the most basic pet battle addon I’ve used so far, and its simplicity is one of the reasons that I think it is actually essential for pet enthusiasts like us. It won’t bog down slower systems and doesn’t change so much that purists’ sensibilities might be offended. It’s called PetBattle Teams and it does exactly what you’d expect: allows you to create and save teams of pets in the game’s interface that you can swap between at any time.

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Basic Info

You can find PetBattle Teams on both Curse and WoWInterface, but it is only currently maintained on Curse, which means you should NOT download it from WoWInterface.

This is the best place to download the Pet Battle Teams addon from.

Created by: Nullberri
First released: July 2012
Still maintained? Yes, it is updated very often and Nulberri is very active in the comments section, taking feature requests.

What it does

I like this addon because it keeps its scope limited. It doesn’t try to do too much, and as a result, feels lightweight and focused. You’ll find the entirety of it inside your Pet Journal.

It adds a slim panel to the right edge of your pet journal that houses three buttons:

• Revive Battle Pets, the free ability all pet tamers have to heal and resurrect all their pets
• Pet Bandages
• And Create a new team

Let’s take a look at how those buttons and some one-time pet swapping are all you need to create your teams.

• Click the create a new team button and a new entry is created at the top of the panel, which shows pictures of your three current pets and a team name above them.
• You can swap out pets in the main interface until you have the team you want to save.
• Right-click the team in the panel and rename it to something more exciting than unnamed team.
• The addon is saving every change as you make it, so no need to worry about finding a save button. When you’re done, you’re done!
• Create a second team by clicking the green plus button on the bottom of the panel again.
• It will start out exactly the same as your previous team, so make the changes you want. For example, you could make the Mechanical Monsters team we used on the first show, and the Night Assassins team we’re playing with right now.

The addon will let you store an unlimited number of teams, but it gets a bit unwieldy beyond 8 for me, which is how many teams fit into the panel without having to scroll. There’s a little yellow star next to the team you’re currently using, and clicking on any team in the side panel will automatically change your active pets to that team.

On top of that, it goes even further by memorizing which skills you had active on each pet on a per-team basis. That means if you want your Pandaren Monk to be a tank on one team and a DPS machine on another, you don’t have to remember to swap abilities each time you swap teams. It does it automatically.

That’s the basic value of this addon: create teams, and swap between them.

Tip and Tricks:

Now that you have a general understanding of how the addon works, let me show you some of the less-obvious features of this addon, and some cool tricks for getting the most out of it.

A cool thing about this addon is that it’s a very small change that manages to greatly increase my willingness to experiment. My memory’s bad enough that I’d be hesitant to swap out pets all the time if there wasn’t a guaranteed way to bring back the lineup that I know works if things go wrong. Right now I have 4 different variations of the Night Assassins team, and you can use it to test your teams too.

You can click and drag pets from a team in the panel onto another team in the panel to put them on this team. If you want to copy the pet, rather than remove it from the original team when moving it, just hold down shift while moving it. You can also reorder the pets inside the window by simply left-clicking, which lets you fine-tune which pet is shown as the starting pet to your opponents and in PVE matches. Holding down control will let you rearrange teams vertically on the pane.

You can right-click teams to lock them, making it impossible to change them, which is good if you’re a clumsy fellow like me.For all you fancy typers, /pbt detach lets you detach the teams panel from the default pet team UI and swap between teams without pulling up the larger pet panel. /pbt attach will re-attach it.

If something goes horribly wrong, you can reset the whole kaboodle with /pbt reset ui

Concerns

As far as I can tell, PetBattle Teams is so concise and well-focused that there’s really no downside. There’s no real reason to not download this addon as a pet enthusiast, unless you’re morally opposed to addons in general.

First Things To Do Once It’s Installed

• When you create your first team, do it twice. This leaves one completely untouched as you start to swap out pets for your second team. I’ve accidentally saved over one of my teams way too many times.
• Create a separate team for each of the daily pet masters that you fight, like the Darkmoon Faire, Pandaria elementals, or whatever level tamers you’re fighting.
• This will save you a ton of time in the future of having to look up what pets each tamer has and what your best counters to them are.

Join The Podcast

• SUBSCRIBE to the WoW Battle Pet Crew podcast on iTunes or this RSS feed.
• FOLLOW me on Twitter or Google+
• MEET fellow battle pet tamers and discuss team strategies and the latest pet battle news in our Google+ Community.
• GUESS what the mystery pet on this week’s podcast is in the comments. This week’s hint is: It has the power to move you.

Tags: mod, pets, World of Warcraft