Pets are one of the core pillars of Hunter’s identity in every era of World of WarCraft, and they’ve changed a lot over the years.

As always, pets in Season of Discovery Phase 1 are also a big part of your damage. No matter your level or equipment, having the right pets and keeping them in fighting condition is every Hunter’s top priority.

Basic Overview

They divide pets into large family groups, and these groups determine what the pet eats, what abilities it learns, and what roles it excels in. For example, Bear is more tanky than Cat, but deals with less damage. Because different pets work differently, you can balance them out with almost anything you like.

Typically, you’ll want an offensive pet in your endgame group, specifically a Cat or Wind Serpent. And tank pets like Boar are very suitable for leveling.

Training & Abilities

In order for your pet to learn any ability, you need to do one of two things: it has the ability out of the box, or you learn it and then teach it to your pet. In either case, our journey begins with Petopia Classic.

Taking Cat as an example, we see that they can learn Bite and Claw, two very desirable DPS abilities. We will focus on Claw. Clicking on it brings up a potentially overwhelming list of potential trainer targets, sorted by level and rank.

Because we only get pets at level 10. We can skip Claw 1 entirely and focus on Claw 2, which is level 8. If you can get a higher level, you’ll never need any lower levels. But you can only tame pets that are at or below your level.

You’ll eventually get a message in chat saying you’ve learned X ability. Once it’s in hand, you can pull your Cat out and open your Spell Book to General tab where you’re looking for Beast Training.

From here, you should be able to start training directly without one of the following two issues. First, your pet’s level is too low to learn specific abilities. You just have to grind it out with them. Second, your pet is not loyal and does not receive enough Training Points. You just have to go beyond these learned abilities and hone in with them.

There are also some pet trainers in city centers. These trainers will teach your pet Growl spell and basic improvements, such as Stamina Armor and Resistances.

One thing to note about training is that, technically, at level 60 with Loyalty, it cap your pet at 300 Training Points. That’s not actually enough to get all the information they can learn. But we’re still multiple stages away from this becoming an actual issue, and who knows at which phase of Season of Discovery that will change.

Loyalty & Happiness

So let’s properly discuss the two simple but very important mechanisms of Loyalty and Happiness. If you neglect your pet for too long, you won't be able to train them. They’ll end up running away like this bastard.

Thankfully, Loyalty is a very simple binary system. It has 6 ranks, but only two really matter, the first and the last. At lowest Loyalty your pet may run away permanently. If you are unhappy for too long, the highest level of Training Point will be negative.

Proving that Loyalty is just a matter of joyful experiences, and time spent together. I would say you can actually go from 1 to 6 ranks in a brief period.

Happiness is really the only part we need to talk about. Simply put, feed your pet. Once you complete the level 10 quest, you can actually learn about pet feeding. You just spend WOW Classic SOD Gold to buy any food your pet will eat and drag and drop them on top of your pet.

Petopia Classic has all the dietary information your pet needs. You can also open the pet’s character panel and hover the mouse over its Happiness icon. Food closer to the pet’s level will reward more Happiness.

But quantity itself has quality, and it can also reduce happiness for many reasons. Simply letting your pet out will slowly erode Happiness as it gets hungry. Although its death or dismissal will also cause unhappiness in addition to Loyalty.

You’ll be motivated to feed your pet as much as possible. Because high Happiness actually increases damage. If you can help keep your pet fed and happy, the rest will take care of itself.

But if you’re really struggling to feed your pet, Fishing is a brilliant solution. Many of the best families eat fish, and you can quickly improve your cooking this way, too.

Attack Speed & Rune Considerations

With the absolute basics covered, there’s one last topic. This is probably the most advanced part of this guide.

They normalize all pet injuries within their families. But the developers have retained variable attack speeds in the game, for example Broken Tooth’s attack speed is 1.0.

Even within the same shared model, we can see that Mulgore’s Mountain Cougar is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. The vast majority of pets are in the 1.0 to 2.0 range, but some selected outliers are even slower.

If the damage was normalized, 1.0 and 2.0 would do the same AFK White damage to the creature, but that’s not the case.

Also Read: 4 Crucial Tips You Need To Take Advantage Of In WoW Season Of Discovery

If the tank drinks Gift of Arthas and puts this debuff on the boss. Then every time the boss takes damage, they take an additional eight points of damage again. Faster attacks mean more attacks, so Broken Tooth will gain more Mileage from this debuff than Mountain Cougar, which Mountain Cougar does not.

Although 1.0 is better than 2.0 now, I would say 2.0 will have more advantages. We have to delve deeper into Rune to explain why. For example, Flanking Strike ability instantly causes 100% of the pet melee damage again. 2.0 swing speed is slower because damage is normalized.

However, with greater individual attack volume, Flanking Strike will gain more value from the 2.0 cap than the 1.0 cap. Because if you don’t do Flanking Strike, it will obviously hit harder, so it doesn’t really matter. But if you are, this is something to consider.

Final Thoughts

There’s definitely a lot to learn about pet training, but if you can do it with any pet trainer at any time with the same respect for yourself, then there’s no problem. So by all means don’t stress about it and enjoy the different play experiences your pet brings to you!