Family Fighter battle pet achievement, plus a plethora of new pets in patch 7.3

With a new PTR build, there’s always a mix of discovery, as people stumble across things, and datamining, as Wowhead stumbles across things. The latest iteration of patch 7.3 is no different, with tons of new stuff to discover and datamine. This time, pets, mounts, and other collectibles were on the agenda. The pet journal is where you’ll find most of the new pets added in the latest PTR build. If you have a big collection, you can easily browse the pets you don’t have in the collections tab to uncover the secrets of Argus. If your pet collection is a bit on the measly side, Wowhead has your back as always.

In the next patch, we’re going to see several new pets from different sources, which is fairly ho-hum news. There are some new wild pets out there to tame, a few rares that’ll drop pet loot, same ol’, same ol’. We get a new gross grub pet to play with in a few colors, a couple of warpstalkers, and a heartbreaking ghostly draenei girl who is fortunately classed as a non-battling companion.

However, there’s one pet which really piqued my interest. The felclaw marsuul is awarded by completing a new meta achievement: Family Fighter.

This upcoming achievement is similar to the Family Familiar achievement. There are eighteen new pet encounters out there on Argus. You can defeat them with whatever mishmash of pets you’ve got on hand, but the Family achievements provide an additional challenge. Defeat all these encounters with only teams consisting of pets from one specific family to earn the individual achievements, working your way up to the meta reward. For example, to earn Aquatic Assault, you have to defeat all eighteen encounters using only Aquatic pets. Earn the achievement for every pet family, and you earn yourself a very prestigious marsuul.

Remember, you don’t have to use family-specific abilities for this to count. The Emerald Turtle with Emerald Bite was a favorite of mine against Flying pets for previous challenges, for instance. Note that currently, you must defeat all eighteen encounters to earn each achievement–you can’t just sit out the few that would be really challenging, as with Family Familiar.

Now, I hear some of you saying you really like pets but new content is for the birds. In that case, you’ll be excited to know Raiding With Leashes 5 is coming in 7.3. Now you can add Cataclysm raids to the rotation of old stuff you run on all your alts.