Pet Battles: welcoming our new Crawdad overlords
 

In my case at least, pet battles were totally the sleeper hit of MoP. Of course we had to have a thread for the ins and outs of pet PvE and PvP. For the intro post, just some resources:

Wowhead interactive pet map--for anytime you need to know exactly where to find something:
Maps - World of Warcraft

Fast Pet/ability lookup:
PetBattleArena

Stat calculator for each rarity/breed:
Warcraft Battle Pets

General info:
WarcraftPets.com - WoW Battle Pets, Companions and Vanity Pets

I found that doing the chain of PvE tamers, up through the new Spirit Tamers, didn't present too many problems. I was worried I'd have to spend time leveling a bunch of various things in order to have workable matchups against all of them. But in the end, the same team of three carried me all the way to the top--I had only the 3 25's when I did the Spirit Tamers.

My team was Magical Crawdad, Mini-Thor, and Phoenix Hatchling. I think I was just lucky with my starting choices, mostly (I picked them on the first day based on rarity). Crawdad is just a total hero, I can't recommend him highly enough to anyone getting started. Mini-Thor is a really solid Mechanical option, but there are others--Clockwork Gnome is popular. Hatchling may not even be too special, all I really used him for was applying Immolation on the first turn and swapping out--there are probably better options there.

I think a "How To" is in order for the breed site. I've linked it to a number of people and it isn't immediately clear what they are looking at.

There is a hidden stat on all pets, their Breed ID. This number determines how much of a stat that pet receives each time it levels. You can see a chart description of this on the "Information" tab of Warcraft Battle Pets.

What is apparent is if you want to maximize the amount of stats your pets receive, you want pets in Breeds 4, 5 or 6. The in-game mods translate this to P/P, S/S or H/H (you receive a 2.0 multiplier on the appropriate stat.) Breed 8 would be P/S as the multipliers go into Power and Speed. Breed3 [B/B] gives equal multipliers to all stats.

It might seem that having a balanced pet is a good idea, why wouldn't you want a pet balancing Heath and Power together? The answer is because unless you choose a hyper-specialized breed you are losing as much as 25% of your leveling stat multiplier by using a B/B build.

There are plenty of good pets that have bad stat allocation, as abilities the pets have access to are far more important than the stats, but when you are figuring out what pet to use your upgrade stones on, or which to use for you ultimate PVP team you want to make sure you are putting your best option forward. Sometimes that means going out and finding the right breed to maximize the stats.

Battle Pet BreedID - Battle Pets - World of Warcraft Addons - Curse is a fantastic mod for seeing this information in game.

Accuracy Stat

On the topic of "hidden stats" there is another that causes a lot of headache on the public forums and in-game. Much like our player spells, there is a miss rate for pet battles. This is pretty obvious for anyone who has lost a battle against an even level NPC to a "lucky" dodge or miss.

It is also pretty clear that some abilities have a higher miss rate. They say right in the tooltip "High Chance/Moderate Chance to miss." What isn't clear is that many others also have this without a warning. You might have cursed your "two turn abilities" like Dive and Lift Off for always seeming to miss at the wrong time, but the Accuracy stat is playing into this.

Burrow, Clean Up, Deep Breath, Dive, Expunge, Heroic Leap, Launch, Lift Off, Mana Surge, Meteor Strike, Nut Barrage, Proto-Strike and Tail Slap all have a base 80% accuracy multiplier, when most other abilities begin at 100% (and Laser, the "never miss" ability has 200%) Abilities listed with "High Chance to Miss" have a 50% Accuracy Stat.

I haven't done a good test of what the base miss/dodge chance is, but it is clear that it is above and beyond this accuracy stat, and obviously there is a level based check as well which anyone power leveling a low level pet has seen.

Is the Accuracy modified by anything? Yeah, I'd noticed Lift Off misses all the time; I'm surprised to hear it's even as high as 80% to hit, but must have had an unlucky string.

That also really hurts their value since you're missing on a two-turn investment worth of damage. Part of the reason I like Mini-Thor so much is the damage on Launch Rocket, which doesn't have the high miss chance. And the mechs are tough enough that they don't mind taking the extra hit in between the two turns.

Well Lift Off isn't all for naught. Even if it misses you get a one turn dodge effect, which normally has a 3 turn CD by itself. This is what makes Lift off far superior to Deep Breath on something like Onyxian Whelpling. Same miss chance, similar damage, but one turn of dodges. Especially on faster pets, this can be very valuable.

As far as I can tell there is no other modifier other than abilities that explicitly increase Accuracy, which are few and far between (and have no effect on dodge, as anyone who has had their Blood in the Water or Laser dodged can attest to.)

My assumption, and I'll be trying to test this today if I get some time is that there is a base miss rate (0% on 100% accuracy abilities) that is then reduced by the base chance to dodge/avoid the attack. So a hypothetical 5% chance to dodge, 5% chance to cause an attack to miss would make an 80% accuracy attack drop to 70%. If the base dodge/miss chances are higher than this, that would reflect our feeling that these abilities miss a lot.

Regarding Mechs. I really dislike Mechanical pets generally. They have, depending on your perspective, an inherent double weakness/double strength in that both the attacks they are weak against (Elemental) are the same family as mitigates their family attacks (Elemental.) Mechanical are the only family that suffers from this. This basically makes any Elemental a hard counter to pretty much any Mechanical, and Elemental pets are quite common which makes avoiding it difficult.

I put together a chart explaining this and allowing you to choose the best pet if you really want to farm a certain pet type: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...1E&output=html. The "best double dipping" pets is based on an assumption that the pet you are fighting uses abilities of their family ability school, which is generally a same assumption when grinding wild pets. You'll want to use the chart if you find cross family pets like the Pandaren Spirit Tamers. (The "Moth" that is a critter is a troubling one, but if you find a dragon with beast abilities, you mitigate his attacks while having strong attacks against him. Untamed Hatchling is ideal for this.)

Link dumping:

Guide to WoW Pet Battles - WarcraftPets
WarcraftPets Forum - Pet Tamer Quests and Info

More link dumping. A list of all the Battle Pet Trainers you can do daily. Pet Battles: FAQs, Links, Macros, & Addons - Forums - World of Warcraft

Hooray.

That is 100% awesome. It was pretty annoying to feel like the best/fastest way to level on trainers was to kill two, get the last one low and have my main guy die off.

Found this which is pretty much exactly what I had been looking for. List of all the dailies.

Pet Battle Daily Quests

Here is another link I like using for identifying pet stats:

Warcraft Battle Pet Breeds

On another note, I found a few decent pets for farming tamers.

Fluxfire Feline - At level 25, opening with a Supercharge, followed by 2x Windup, you will hit for about 1800 and 1 shot nearly all opponents. If you don't mind sacrificing the pet, you can get off another Windup > Supercharge > Windup and take out the first two opponents for the cost of your one. The main problem with the pet is trying to find one. They are pretty heavily camped now, not to mention level 95 Tinkertown guards by some of the spawn points.

Brilliant Kaliri - The main reason to use this pet is for the ability Predatory Strike. If you use this attack and it brings the opponent under 25% hp, they will instantly be killed (well, they will take anywhere from 8-20k damage). Since most tamer pets have a pretty high health pool, you can get away with using this spell when the opponent has 700-800 hp left and it will proc the instant kill.

Eternal Strider or Dancing Water Skimmer - These pets are essentially identical. They are quite useful against the elementals (ie Pandaren Spirits) since they are aquatic. If you choose to use Cleansing Rain, the second use of pump can hit for upwards of 1000.

Rapana Whelk - NPC - World of Warcraft is insane for farming the Pandaren Spirits. I can usually take out the elemental and one other of their pets with it.

I added a second sheet to the spreadsheet detailing all of the crossbreed ability pets (pets that have abilities that aren't of their breed family.) The previous list assumed that your opponent would be using the abilities typical of their family (which is the case for almost all wild pets, not necessarily for tamer pets.) I expect that we'll see more tamers with pets using crossbreed attacks in the future if the Pandaren Spirit Trainers are any indication, so having more options is nice.

Might be helpful if you are leveling a bunch of pets and want them to be useful in the future rather than just being +1.

Some of the listed pets have some amount of opinion in them, as there are often multiple pets with cross abilities. I tried to list the "best" one for each, or a list if there wasn't a clear cut favorite. I also italicized any that I listed that are using a low damage ability (like something that gives you a buff in addition to the damage), a DoT, or an ability with a CD. In many of those cases you might be better off using a different pet rather than trying to exploit double dipped weaknesses.

To read the chart, the vertical column is the creature damage type you are trying to mitigate, the horizontal is the type you are trying to get additional damage on. The parentheses are just reminders for which pet family has those traits.

I didn't list a "best pet" for creatures using family appropriate abilities as there are about a dozen for each and there just isn't much point. For some combinations there just isn't a good option, or I haven't found one yet

Chart: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...tLXA4Q1E&gid=1