Persistent Pet Pals At Last!

I threw a bit of shade at the devs in my last post for failing to communicate what felt like some pretty important changes that weren't entirely well-received in the patch notes ... but 7.4.1 also contained a very good change that they forgot to include in the patch notes. Intisar was the first to point it out to me on Discord, but I haven't really seen anyone else mention it so far, so I wanted to give a shout-out to it here:

Pets now persist through loading screens and relogging.

Pets disappearing every time you zoned had been an issue for literally over a decade. There was a thread on the bug report forums for it, created in June 2013, that people bumped every so often, but it was clearly not a priority for the devs to fix. And to some degree I could understand that, but on the other hand... they sell pets on the Cartel Market! Pets disappearing all the time has got to have hurt sales of the little critters, surely.

I'm not exactly a pet fanatic myself, but I do like them and have some fond memories attached to more than a few of them. Just check the pets tag on this blog. Remember my grophet phase? Those were the days.

However, the constant need to re-summon them was just too annoying. Even if you put them on your quick bar for easy access... this game has a LOT of loading screens. I'd usually get a new pet, get it out and go "aw, how cute"... but it'd be gone within five minutes of me doing anything and at most I'd remember to re-summon it a couple of times before getting bored and giving up/just forgetting about it. Which is a shame!

I also put this piece of feedback into one of my responses to the survey Broadsword sent out back in November, so I've been absolutely delighted to finally see this bug get fixed. I think my guildies were rather bemused when I told them to all get their favourite pets out during Friday night's ops.

After a bit of testing, I can confirm:

• That pets do now persist through general loading screens/area transitions.
  
• The game does remember which pet you had out when you last logged out.
• They do go away if you are defeated - the little toggle on the icon stays on as if your pet was still there, but you need to un- and re-summon it after dying. I can live with that one; just means I have to remember to re-summon the little buggers after wiping in progression ops.
• They won't follow you into PvP, but they'll re-appear by your side when you come out of the match, even if you died during the fighting.
  

I'm excited every time I log into an alt now, thinking about which little critter they should have by their side... because I know the game will finally remember and I won't have to think it through all over again the next time I log in. I'm also looking forward to seeing more of the little buggers around the fleet!

So if you have any pets you like and you just kind of gave up on getting them out in the past because they'd just disappear - now is the time to get them back.

Just remember to un-summon your pets if you're doing the Coratanni fight in Ravagers. As far as I'm aware she still has that bug where someone having a pet out can cause the encounter to reset (I'm guessing because some boss ability targets the pet and causes things to go wonky).