Introduction to Pet Battles in World of Warcraft

Lately, most of my time spent in game has consisted of leveling up battle pets. It’s something I was intrigued by when it was first announced as part of Mists of Pandaria. I haven’t spend a ton of time playing, since release, but I still have noticed a few things that might help anyone who hasn’t tried it yet.

Beginners

• Do the trainer quests. At your battle pet trainer in each faction’s main city, you can start a chain quest to beat pet trainers throughout the world. Not only do these quests offer more experience than regular battles, but they also reward you with pet related items that might help you level up faster or cosmetically alter your pets when outside of battle.
• Level more than 3 pets at a time. When you start out, you’re only offered the option to fight one pet at a time. As you level, you unlock the ability to use up to three in each battle. I suggest leveling 5-6 at a time. Your cooldown for healing and resurrecting them is 8 minutes, unless you’re near a stable master. When you level multiple pets, you can continue to do battles if one or two pets die before the 8 minute cooldown is up. It might also be smart to pick pets from different classifications.
• Capture one of every pet you encounter, especially if they’re rare quality. While leveling you’ll encounter a bunch of different pets. I felt it helped me level faster if I captured them and tryed using some of them. Some of these pets have nice abilities that you might never discover otherwise.
• Learn your pet’s strengths and weaknesses. Each class’s attacks have another class they are strong and weak against. The problem is that each pet doesn’t only have attacks from their class. So sometimes choosing the right attacks could mean all the difference in battle. I recommend finding a chart that shows all this information and print it out for easy access. The one I’m using doesn’t appear on that site anymore, but this (http://www.wowjuju.com/uploads/gallery/album_12/med_gallery_2_12_95535.jpg) one is similar.

Advanced

• Play around with different pet combinations. Some pets have abilities that deal more damage if an enemy is “burning” or “chilled”. Unfortunately, I haven’t come across any pets that will both chill an enemy and cause more damage when they’re chilled. They may be some, but I don’t know about them. That’s why playing around with pet combinations can come in handy. Also, there are abilities that will increase damage by any upcoming attacks. Try pairing those with the most powerful attacks from other pets.
• Take advantage of your pet’s passive class ability. Every pet class has a special passive ability. These abilities can help you map out a strategy for how to advanced in battle. For example, Mechanical units come back to life with 25% health once per battle, meaning you can wait until you’re one attack away from dying to cast a healing spell, knowing that you can benefit from that additional 25%.
• Level in a zone higher than you’re current pet’s level. This will grant you more experience and help your pets level faster. When leveling from 1-15, you only face one or two pets at a time. It’s very easy to kill two level 13 pets with three level 11s. Plus, when you capture pets at a higher level, you can throw the newly added ones into battle and they’ll already be the same level as the ones you’re currently using.

Expert

• Get some more pets!!! There are a ton of pets out there and it’s your job to find them. Searching through past expansion dungeons, reputations and vendors might reward some hidden gem pets that would otherwise go untouched.
• Let your pets die. When leveling multiple pets at once, it’s sometimes a good idea to let one pet die in battle. If you have a higher level pet, and you let it get killed,all  the experience will instead be granted to another pet. Meaning you can do all the grunt work with a more powerful pet, only to have a weaker pet jump in for the final attack and benefit as if it killed all the enemies.

Recommended Add-ons

• PetTracker (http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/pettracker) – displays, on your main map, the location of either any pets in the zone, any pet you don’t own a rare version of, or any pets missing from your collection. It’ll also display what your opponent’s abilities are, enabling you to switch to another pet when facing something that’s strong against your current pet.
• BattlePetCount (http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/battlepetcount) – displays how many of each pet you have, they’re level and quality, both in battle and before you start a fight.

Resources

• WarcraftPets.com (http://www.warcraftpets.com/) – They were the #1 source for companion pets even before pet battles were introduced. Now they’ve outdone themselves. They include information on every pet in game and they allow users to upload their collections to compare them to other members.
• Global Pet Battle League (http://gpbl.gkick.net/) – Want to try out your skills against other players in a bracket style tournament? Now you can!