Pet Battles Updates and Patch 5.0.4 Reminder

UPDATE: Blizzard has an official Patch 5.0.4 post concerning account-wide collections that provides details on the new feature. [source]

Fine-tuning Pet Battles
Last week developers released a consolidated list of the changes made to Pet Battles. [source]

Some of the items on the list have already been mentioned, but there are some new updates. These include the following (however, this is not the complete list):

• Catching any pet level 15 or under retains its current level.
• Catching a level 16-20 pet will lose 1 level.
• Catching a level 21-25 pet will lose 2 levels.
• We have removed the pet swap on pets dying in everything except PVP.
• The matchmaking system has been adjusted to favor battles with opponents of similar levels over queuing speed.
• You can have up to x3 of any pet except for uniques. The pets in the following categories are unique: Achievements, Pet Store, Guild and Promotional. Note that TCG pets are not unique and will be tradeable.
• Release now works on any pet as long as you have more than one of that pet.

For the full list of updates to Pet Battles, check out this link!

Patch 5.0.4 Reminders
Patch 5.0.4 will be released on August 28, 2012. Many things will change, so here's a small list of what pet collectors should expect on patch day.

• New pet and mount UI. The old spellbook companion tab will be replaced with the Pet Journal interface.
• Account-wide collections. This means a merging of all collections into one that will be accessible by all characters on a WoW account.
• Duplicate pets will not be mailed to players. Instead, they will automatically be added into the Pet Journal. Some duplicates, such as achievement and special promotion companions, will be merged into one single pet.
• The transition from the old spellbook interface to the Pet Journal will be the only time players are allowed to have more than 500 total pets and 3 of the same pet. Once under these caps, players will not be allowed to exceed them again.

Pet Battles, the ability to cage companions (and therefore trade them), the ability to capture pets, and the new datamined pets that were discovered on the MoP beta will not be available until the expansion release date (September 25, 2012).