Sign inHunter Pets
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A hunter's pet is a wild beast the hunter has tamed to fight beside them. In Classic every hunter gets one at level 10, and choosing, leveling and training a pet is a large part of playing the class. A pet in Classic is not a fixed companion but something closer to a second character, with its own loyalty, mood, diet and set of learned abilities.
Taming
Hunters learn Tame Beast at level 10 through a short class quest chain from their trainer, such as Grif Wildheart in Dun Morogh (Taming the Beast), Thotar in Durotar (Taming the Beast), Yaw Sharpmane in Mulgore (Taming the Beast) and Dazalar in Teldrassil (Taming the Beast). The chain sends the hunter out to tame three local beasts with a rod, then teaches the real spell and Beast Training.
Taming takes 20 seconds of channeling while the beast attacks. A hunter can tame any beast of a tamable family up to their own level. The new pet keeps the level it had in the wild and earns experience alongside the hunter, but can never pass the hunter's level. A hunter has one pet out at a time, called with Call Pet and sent away with Dismiss Pet, and can bring a dead one back with Revive Pet. Stable masters such as Morganus keep up to two more pets for a small fee.
Families
Classic has 17 tamable families: bats, bears, boars, carrion birds, cats, crabs, crocolisks, gorillas, hyenas, owls, raptors, scorpids, spiders, tallstriders, turtles, wind serpents and wolves. The family sets the pet's diet, its base health, armor and damage, and which special abilities it can learn. Cats can learn Prowl and hit hard; boars Charge; turtles Shell Shield; wind serpents Lightning Breath; wolves Furious Howl; bats and owls Screech; scorpids Scorpid Poison.
Within a family, each beast also has its own attack speed. Most cats attack every 2.0 seconds, so a rare cat that attacks faster is worth seeking out.
Loyalty and happiness
A newly tamed pet is "Rebellious", the lowest of six loyalty levels. As it fights alongside the hunter and is kept happy, it rises through Unruly, Submissive, Dependable and Faithful to Best Friend. Loyalty matters because it grants training points: a pet has its level times one less than its loyalty level to spend. A level 60 pet at Best Friend has 300.
Happiness is the pet's mood, shown as a green, yellow or red face. A happy pet does 125% of its normal damage, a content one 100% and an unhappy one 75%. Pets grow hungrier over time and happier when fed with Feed Pet, using food the family will eat: meat for wolves and carrion birds, fruit and fungus for tallstriders, almost anything for bears and boars. Dismissing a pet and letting it die make it unhappy. A pet left unhappy loses loyalty, and one that drops too low runs away for good.
Training
Beast Training opens the training window, where the hunter spends the pet's training points. There are two kinds of ability:
- Learned from the wild. To teach a pet Bite, Claw, Dash or another family skill, the hunter must tame a beast that already knows it, fight alongside that beast until the hunter learns it, and then go back to the original pet. Higher ranks come from higher-level beasts, so hunters keep lists of which beast in which zone knows what.
- Bought from pet trainers. Pet trainers sell Growl, Great Stamina, Natural Armor and resistances to each school of magic.
Famous pets
Some rare beasts are prized for their looks or their numbers:
- Broken Tooth, a level 37 cat in the Badlands, attacks every 1.0 seconds, twice as fast as most cats. That made it one of the best damage pets for PvP and an attention magnet for hunters camping its spawn point.
- Humar the Pridelord, a level 23 lion in The Barrens, has a unique dark coat.
- Lupos, a level 23 spectral wolf in Duskwood, deals shadow damage with its bites, which armor does not reduce.
Later history
Wrath of the Lich King dropped loyalty and training points in favor of pet talent trees, and let Beast Mastery hunters tame exotic beasts. Cataclysm and later expansions removed happiness and feeding and let hunters stable dozens of pets. Classic Era and WoW Forever keep the 1.12 rules.
Sources
Categories: Game Mechanics