Beginner's Guide to Hunter Pets in Season of Discovery

pets are one of the core pillars of Hunter identity in every era of wow and they have changed a lot over the years but vanilla for me represents a high water mark for pet design yeah they're janky and no we don't have later iconic additions like spirit beasts or exotic tames but it has the most RPG feel of any era in season of Discovery Phase 1 your pet is also a significant portion of your damage no matter your level or gear having the right pet and getting them in fighting form is a top priority for every hunter pets are divided into families large groups that determine what the pet eats what abilities it learns and what role it specializes in bears for instance are tankier than cats but deal less damage as a trade-off different pets do different jobs you can level with virtually anything you please but barring any season of Discovery Shenanigans like the now nuked scorpion stuff you'll generally want an offense pet for endgame group content particularly cats or wind serpents while a tank pet like a boar can be great for leveling let's talk about the big pain or joy of vanilla Wow pets train you've tamed your first friend good but its hot bar looks like this and it Spellbook like this bad someone at blizzard HQ Circ 2003 was smoking that weapons grade Pokémon Ruby Sapphire ZaZa and decided that hunter pets should involve a scuffed pokedex in order for your pet to learn any abilities one of two things need to happen one it comes with the ability out of the box or two you learn it and then teach it to your pet in either case our journey starts on Petopia classic using cats as an example we see they can learn both bite and Claw two highly desirable DPS abilities we'll focus on claw clicking on it will bring up a maybe overwhelming list of potential trainer targets sorted by level and rank because we only get our pet at level 10 we can skip claw one entirely and focus on the level eight claw two you never need any lower rank if you can get a higher one but you can only tame pets your level or lower for me andril this meant taming a sdid hunter once I had the old bird it was just a matter of having it Go apeshit for a little bit note that you have to use use the Ability if you want to learn it even still it can take a bit some people say pet happiness speeds the process along or is even necessary for the pets to teach you their tricks but I've had some very starved and angry animals teach me their ways so your mileage may vary you will eventually get a message in chat saying you've learned X ability once it's in hand abandon or stable the trainer pet pull your cat back out and open your spell book to the general tab you're looking for Beast training and from here you should be able to just hit train if not there's one of two problems one your pet is too low level to learn the specific ability and you just need to grind with them for a bit or two your pet is disloyal and hasn't earned enough training points and you just need to grind with them a bit outside of these learned abilities there is also a pet trainer NPC in the capital cities these trainers will teach your pet growl as well as basic improvements like stamina armor and resistances one tragic thing to note about training is that technically at level 60 with best friend loyalty your pet maxes out at 300 training points this is not actually enough to grab everything they can learn we are multiple phases away from this being a real problem and who knows what season of Discovery changes but it's something to consider cow for instance is not an especially amazing ability it only has two real uses that come to mind at low level with new or uncomfortable tanks who don't hold threat well or for kiting much higher level Elites where you want your pet to DPS but not pull aggro from you you can pretty much play around both of these situations fine without cower but we have excess TP at the moment so if you really want it that's fine just be ready to part with it later regarding TP I would also say the user experience here is not visually great if you purchase say great stamina rank three then rank four will show up as still costing 25 TP however if you have three and then learn four you won't pay the full 25 only the difference between the two now we've bumped into training points in mood already so let's properly cover loyalty and happiness two simple but really important mechanic mechanics if you neglect your pet you won't be able to train them at all and they'll eventually run away like this bastard thankfully loyalty is a more binary system than meets the eye of the six ranks I'd say only two really matter the first and the last at the lowest level of loyalty your pet May permanently run away if it's unhappy for too long and it will have negative training points at the highest rank it'll be attached at the Hunter's hip and have the maximum training points for its level improve proving loyalty is just a matter of Happiness experience and time spent together and I'd say you can go from 1 to 6 in a pretty short session happiness is really the only part we need to talk about simply put feed your pet once you complete the level 10 quest to actually learn pet feeding you just drag and drop whatever food your pet will eat over them Petopia has all the dietary info needed for a pet and you can also open your pet's character pan and hover over their happiness icon food that is closer to your pet's level will award more happiness but quantity has a quality all of its own meanwhile happiness degrades for several reasons Simply Having your pet out will slowly erode happiness as it gets hungry while it dying or being dismissed will cause unhappiness too besides loyalty you're incentivized to feed your pet as much as necessary because High happiness actually provides a damage increase if you can help it keep your pet fed and in the green and the rest will sort itself out naturally but if you're really struggling to feed your new minion fishing is a great solution a lot of the best families eat fish and you can also rapidly level cooking this way too okay with the absolute Basics covered there's one final topic we need to go over some numbers are going to fly your way and this is probably the most advanced part of the guide but it's still not too bad so bear with me even within families there are slight variations and they're not all just reskins of each other in an ancient vanilla WoW patch all pet damage was normalized within their families but blizzard kept variable attack speeds in the game for example broken tooth has a ridiculous attack speed of 1.0 or every 1 second even in the same shared model though we can see the mountain cougar in mulgore is on the dead opposite end of the spectrum at 2.0 swinging every 2 seconds the overwhelming majority of pets fall within this 1.0 to 2.0 range but a few select outliers mostly bears are even slower okay so if the damage is normalized a 1.0 and 2.0 will deal the same AFK white damage on a mob why does it matter well for the most part it doesn't but there are a few interactions where it makes a big difference on the 1.0 side of things getting smacked every 1 second by broken tooth is a nightmare for casters who suffer spell push back every time they're hit faster weaker hits are more disruptive there is also a much nicher PVE application in later phases if a tank drinks a gift of arthus and puts this debuff on the boss then every time the boss takes damage they'll take an additional eight damage again faster attacks mean more attacks so broken tooth would get more mileage out of this debuff than a mountain cougar this does not however mean that 1.0 is better than 2.0 in fact right now I'd say 2.0 wins out and we'll have to dip into runes to explain why flanking strike this ability immediately deals 100% of your pet's melee damage again because damage is normalized a 2.0 cat swings slower but with metor individually bigger hits flanking strike then gets much more value out of a 2.0 cap than a 1.0 one as it dishes out a proportionally bigger hit obviously if you're not running flanking strike then this doesn't matter but if you are it's something to consider okay pet training can definitely be a lot to take in but it's also non-committal if you up at any point you can just untrain your pet at any pet trainer much like respecing yourself so don't stress out about it anyways subscribe to my Channel or I'll grief you in [Music] hardcore

Channel: specstre

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Keywords: wow hunter guide, world of warcraft, wow classic, season of discovery, sod, wow classic hunter, wow classic hunter pets, wow hunter pets, wow pet training, wow pet abilities, wow classic pet abilities, hunter pet training classic, vanilla wow hunter pets, vanilla wow pets, vanilla wow pet guide, season of discovery hunter, sod hunter pets wow, season of discovery pet guide, wow, wow sod hunter, hunter wow classic, wow classic hunter guide, wow classic hunter pet guide

Id: O6L78gaWIes

Length: 7min 48sec (468 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2023