Post by New Admin on Oct 12, 2007 17:04:45 GMT -5
A hunter is unique in WoW because you effectively get to play, level, and train two characters at the same time. As such, your choice of pet is should be a lasting one. Yes, you can abandon your pet at any time and replace it, but you will have to get its loyalty up (a minor issue), but also potentially level it up to your level, which can be a time intensive process, especially at higher levels. Couple this with the fact that you can have up to 3 pets at one time, and you should be able to find pets that can stay with you.
Pets can be divided into two basic classes. Tanks, like bears, turtles, and crabs, and dps pets, like cats, dogs, birds, and dinosaurs. Some have special abilities specific to their category: scorpions have a poison sting, cats can stealth, boars have a unique charge. There are two sites that contain vast and detailed information about pets, pet abilities, stats, where they’re found, and what they can learn.
petopia.brashendeavors.net
www.goodintentionsguild.info/hunters.html
Some abilities can be trained from the hunter pet trainer, and others can be learned from pets themselves. Wherever they come from, a pet has to have “training points” to learn anything. Training points are based on loyalty levels (1 through 6) and the pet’s level. Growl (the pet version of taunt) is free, but anything else costs points. As such, like talent points for your character, a little planning ahead is a good idea. You have a total of 350 training points for a level 70 pet with loyalty of 6. There are several pet talent calculators you can use to see what abilities you can cram in your pet.
petcalc.tripod.com
There are a few general guidelines though. First, you can only give a pet 4 abilities.
Taunt is a given because it’s free and you need a way to get aggro onto the pet.
A damage enhancing one is a given too, because more damage means more aggro and faster downing of mobs. That ability varies by pet type, but all of them have something: bite, scratch, claw, etc. Along those lines however, it is best to only give your pet ONE damage ability: they rely on focus to use abilities like rogues, and they run out faster than they can generate it, so it’s best to focus on one damage ability because you waste fewer training points that way.
The third and fourth slots vary WILDLY depending on what you want your pet to do. You can use them for more specialized abilities like dash to make them faster, or an ability specific to a class like stealth for cat,s, poison for scorpions, thunderstomp for gorillas, etc. On the other hand, you can save your training points for the “pumping” abilities you get directly from the trainers to increase stamina, armor, and resistances. Again, it all depends on what you want to do with your pet, and you can have several to accomplish different goals.
For my part, I have 3 pets:
A tank pet with growl, bite, stamina, and armor.
A speedy dps/pvp pet with growl, dash, damage, and some stamina
A dps resistance pet with growl (why not?), damage, fire and shadow resistance. I picked those two as the ones encountered most often, but pet training, like talents, can be undone, and if I have to adjust the resists, I can.
On an aside, as you can see from the above link, there are different levels of the various learnable abilities you get from pets. To learn an ability from a pet, you have to tame it and keep it around for a small period of time, and let the pet use the ability in fights. This generally takes only 1-3 fights, so collecting the abilities is a speedy process. Once YOU learn it, you can give it to any other pet that is capable of learning it (if you have the requisite number of training points remaining).
So there you have it. Pets are highly versatile, highly useful, and can be specialized depending on your goals. Post any questions here, and I will address them to the best of my ability.
Pets can be divided into two basic classes. Tanks, like bears, turtles, and crabs, and dps pets, like cats, dogs, birds, and dinosaurs. Some have special abilities specific to their category: scorpions have a poison sting, cats can stealth, boars have a unique charge. There are two sites that contain vast and detailed information about pets, pet abilities, stats, where they’re found, and what they can learn.
petopia.brashendeavors.net
www.goodintentionsguild.info/hunters.html
Some abilities can be trained from the hunter pet trainer, and others can be learned from pets themselves. Wherever they come from, a pet has to have “training points” to learn anything. Training points are based on loyalty levels (1 through 6) and the pet’s level. Growl (the pet version of taunt) is free, but anything else costs points. As such, like talent points for your character, a little planning ahead is a good idea. You have a total of 350 training points for a level 70 pet with loyalty of 6. There are several pet talent calculators you can use to see what abilities you can cram in your pet.
petcalc.tripod.com
There are a few general guidelines though. First, you can only give a pet 4 abilities.
Taunt is a given because it’s free and you need a way to get aggro onto the pet.
A damage enhancing one is a given too, because more damage means more aggro and faster downing of mobs. That ability varies by pet type, but all of them have something: bite, scratch, claw, etc. Along those lines however, it is best to only give your pet ONE damage ability: they rely on focus to use abilities like rogues, and they run out faster than they can generate it, so it’s best to focus on one damage ability because you waste fewer training points that way.
The third and fourth slots vary WILDLY depending on what you want your pet to do. You can use them for more specialized abilities like dash to make them faster, or an ability specific to a class like stealth for cat,s, poison for scorpions, thunderstomp for gorillas, etc. On the other hand, you can save your training points for the “pumping” abilities you get directly from the trainers to increase stamina, armor, and resistances. Again, it all depends on what you want to do with your pet, and you can have several to accomplish different goals.
For my part, I have 3 pets:
A tank pet with growl, bite, stamina, and armor.
A speedy dps/pvp pet with growl, dash, damage, and some stamina
A dps resistance pet with growl (why not?), damage, fire and shadow resistance. I picked those two as the ones encountered most often, but pet training, like talents, can be undone, and if I have to adjust the resists, I can.
On an aside, as you can see from the above link, there are different levels of the various learnable abilities you get from pets. To learn an ability from a pet, you have to tame it and keep it around for a small period of time, and let the pet use the ability in fights. This generally takes only 1-3 fights, so collecting the abilities is a speedy process. Once YOU learn it, you can give it to any other pet that is capable of learning it (if you have the requisite number of training points remaining).
So there you have it. Pets are highly versatile, highly useful, and can be specialized depending on your goals. Post any questions here, and I will address them to the best of my ability.