Pets play a crucial role in defining a Hunter’s identity throughout WoW’s various eras, undergoing substantial changes over time. However, in my view, Vanilla stands out as a pinnacle of pet design. Despite their quirks and the absence of later iconic additions like Spirit Beasts or Exotic Beasts, this era resonates most strongly with the essence of role-playing games.
During Classic WoW Season of Discovery Phase 1, your pet becomes an integral component of your damage output, irrespective of your level or gear.
Ensuring you have the appropriate pet and preparing them for combat emerges as a primary focus for every Hunter. Because if you use your pets wisely, you can earn a lot of WoW SoD Gold with them.
Basic Overview
Pets are divided into families in Season of Discovery.
Large groups 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, such as WoW Classic SoD Gold, 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.
Training & Abilities
Let’s talk about the big pain or joy of Vanilla WoW pets – training.
Someone at Blizzard HQ around 2003 was smoking that weapons-grade Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, ZaZa and decided that Hunter Pets should involve a scuffed Pokédex.
In order for your pet to learn any abilities, one of two things needs to happen:
- It comes with the ability out of the box.
- 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, 2 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 1 entirely, focus on the level 8 Claw 2 and buy WoW SoD Gold a lot. 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, this meant taming a Strigid Hunter. Once I had the old bird, it was just a matter of having it go apeshit for a little. Note that you have to 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 trained pet, pull your Cat back out, and open your Spellbook to the general tab. You’re looking for ‘Beast Training’, and from here, you should be able to just hit the train. If not, there’s one of two problems:
- Your pet is too low level to learn the specific ability, and you just need to grind with them for a bit.
- 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. Of course, this process will cost you a certain amount of SoD Gold.
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.
Cower, for instance, is not an especially amazing ability in SoD WoW Classic. 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 3, then Rank 4 will show up as still costing 25 TP. However, if you have 3 and then learn 4, you won’t pay the full 25, only the difference between the two.
Loyalty & Happiness
Now, we’ve bumped into training points and mood already, so let’s properly cover loyalty and happiness – 2 simple but really important mechanics in Season of Discovery.
If you neglect your pet, you won’t be able to train them at all, and they’ll eventually run away. Thankfully, loyalty is a more binary system than meets the eye. Of the 6 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.
Improving loyalty is just a matter of happiness, experience, and time spent together. 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 panel 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.
Attack Speed & Rune Considerations
With the absolute basics covered, there’s 1 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.
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?
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 pushback every time they’re hit. Faster, weaker hits are more disruptive.
There is also a much niche PVE application in later phases. If a tank drinks a Gift of Arthas and puts this debuff on the boss, then every time the boss takes damage, they’ll take an additional 8 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 in Classic WoW SoD improves Hunter’s fast SoD Gold farming capabilities. This ability immediately deals 100% of your pet’s melee damage. Again, because damage is normalized, a 2.0 Cat swings slower but with more individually bigger hits. Flanking Strike then gets much more value out of a 2.0 Cat 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.
Final Thoughts
All in all, pet training in can definitely be a lot to take in WoW Classic Season of Discovery, but it’s also non-committal.
If you’re up at any point, you can just untrain your pet at any pet trainer, much like respeccing yourself. So, don’t stress out about it.