World of Warcraft®

A number of battle pets can be found in multiple colours. Collectors often try to capture more than one colour if they like them, though there clearly isn't enough room in the journal for every colour of every pet.

There's currently a bug where if you capture a pet that is a second in battle, and it comes in multiple colours, then it becomes a colour changing battle pet, and may not show up in the journal or game as the colour you won. Hopefully that'll be fixed soon. But it got me thinking...

Would it be possible to add a feature where you can capture different colours of the same pet (same ID) and then "merge" them in your journal to be one pet with multiple colour options? Thematically, explain it as something like making one the deputy or second of the other, or make them form a squad or something, so they all progress at the same rate and have the same stats. Whether you'd put a restriction requirement that they be all the same quality before merging, I don't know. Maybe they just take on the same stats as the highest or lowest member.

In practice you'd end up with just one pet entry in the journal, with a selector for the colour you want to use, depending on your mood. And maybe an extra "?" option if you want a random colour each time. And hopefully less data to be saved, as one extra skin on a pet is smaller than lots of extra pet data :)

(To be clear, I'm not talking about merging different pets that look the same, like two different beetles. Only pets that are colour variants of the same ID/name).

I actually really like this suggestion, and I'd be all for it--but particularly the part about being able to select the colour you want. At this point it's gotten extremely frustrating to get rares as secondary (or tertiary) wild pets in the battles, AND manage to fight against that RNG for that one colour you really, really want over the others... only to have it turn into a colour-changer once it's in your journal.

I'm most saddened at this when it comes to the Scarab Hatchling (I love the purple jewel-toned skin, but I've only successfully farmed a "colour-changing" version that started out that way, from capturing it as a secondary), and the Forest Moth, which was my first introduction to this issue and a rude surprise after going for a rare-quality version of the white moth (vendor-bought) and discovering I can end up with the other colours I don't care for instead whenever it's summoned.

I support this. I can't stand having to click-click-click-click until my companion is the preferred color: for example, I'll always use "Scorpid" instead of "Stripe-Tailed Scorpid" because I know that the Scorpid will always be the same color. Pets like the Worg Pup, that have a unique model but change colors, will unfortunately sit unused in my journal because of this. Let us choose the skin we want!