Pet Loyalty
Pet loyalty is, roughly speaking, a measure of how much your pet likes you. The loyalty system in World of Warcraft is fairly complex, and it's not neccesary for hunters to understand all the details. As long as you:
- Keep your pet fed and happy, and
- Fight with your pet by your side,
But if you want to know more about how loyalty works, or if you have questions or have run into problems with loyalty, then this article is for you! It explains in excrutiating details exactly how loyalty works.
Loyalty Levels
Pet loyalty is broken up into six levels. When you first tame a pet, its loyalty level is 1: Rebellious. At this point your pet doesn't much like you and you can't teach it very many skills. As you and your pet adventure together, the pet's loyalty will increase until it eventually reaches a loyalty of 6: Best Friend.
You can check your pet's loyalty level at any time by looking at the Pet tab of the Character Info (C) panel.
The following table shows the loyalty levels and their corresponding names in-game.
| Loyalty Level | Label |
|---|---|
| Level 1 | Rebellious |
| Level 2 | Unruly |
| Level 3 | Submissive |
| Level 4 | Dependable |
| Level 5 | Faithful |
| Level 6 | Best Friend |
(Technical aside: The WoW client actually defines 8 levels of loyalty. Level 7 is called "Loyalty Cap" and level 8 is "Unused". These levels are never seen in normal gameplay.)
What Does Loyalty Do?
Loyalty has two important effects for pets:
- Loyalty level, along with pet level, determines how many total training points a pet has.
- Higher loyalty levels keep your pet from running away.
Let's look at those effects one at a time.
Training Points
Most pet skills cost training points. (The exception is Growl, which can be taught to any pet for free.) Each pet has its own pool of training points to spend on skills. The total size of that pool is determined by the pet's level and loyalty level, in the following formula:
Total Training Points = (Loyalty Level - 1) * Pet Level
A freshly tamed pet has a loyalty level of 1 -- which means that no matter what its level, it will have 0 training points available and can't learn any skills except Growl until its loyalty level increases.
(Note that pets who already know a skill when tamed will display negative training points: their total training point pool is 0, and they subtract from that the points for the skills they already know.)
At loyalty level 6, Best Friend, a pet has a total pool of 5 training points per level. So a level 70, loyalty 6 pet has a total pool of 350 training points.
It's important to note that it doesn't matter at what level you tame your pet. Training points are determined strictly based on the pet's current level, not how many levels it has gained since you tamed it. So it doesn't matter whether you tame a pet at level 10 or at level 70 -- by the time it is level 70 and your Best Friend, it will still have 350 training points to spend either way.
Running Away
Most hunters know that if your pet gets unhappy enough, it can run away. In fact, it's not happiness but loyalty that causes a pet to run away.
This is important to understand, because a pet that runs away is gone for good. You can never get your pet back after it has run away. (Well, in some circumstances you can convince a Blizzard GM to restore your pet, but you can't count on that!)
Pets run away when they reach loyalty level 0. Since a freshly tamed pet starts at loyalty level 1, it will run away if it loses just one loyalty level. A pet with a higher loyalty level, however, has a larger safety zone because it will lose one loyalty level at a time. For example, a pet that is loyalty level 6, Best Friend, will first drop to 5 (Faithful) then 4 (Dependable) and so forth, and won't run away until it finally hits loyalty level 0.
Of course, this is only a problem if your pet is losing loyalty. As hunters, part of our responsibility to our pets is to keep them happy and loyalty. So how do we do that? Let's talk about that next.
Gaining and Losing Loyalty
There is absolutely no way for a hunter to directly change their pet's loyalty. We can only indirectly affect loyalty, primarily through happiness.
(You can learn more about how to maintain your pet's mood in the article Feeding Your Pet.)
If you hover over your pet's mood indicator, you will notice that a Happy or Content pet is gaining loyalty, and an Unhappy pet is losing loyalty. Unfortunately, this is the only indicator of loyalty change that Blizzard has given us. But despite that handicap, we have managed to figure out quite a bit about how loyalty is gained and lost.
In short, the state of your pet's mood causes it to gain or lose a number of loyalty points every few seconds. The table below summarizes these changes.
| Mood | Loyalty Points |
|---|---|
 Happy | +20 per 5 sec |
 Content | +5 per 5 sec |
 Unhappy | -10 per 5 sec |
Each loyalty level contains a certain number of loyalty points, and when your pet has gained or lost all the points in that level, its loyalty level will change.
| Loyalty Level | Loyalty Points |
|---|---|
| Level 1: Rebellious | 3600 |
| Level 2: Unruly | 7200 |
| Level 3: Submissive | 10,800 |
| Level 4: Dependable | 14,400 |
| Level 5: Faithful | 21,600 |
| Level 6: Best Friend | 28,800 |
A newly tamed pet actually starts at Loyalty Level 1 (Rebellious) with 3600 loyalty points -- right on the brink of Loyalty Level 2 (Unruly).
Losing Loyalty
Let's look at a simple example with losing loyalty. Let's say that you have a pet with Best Friend (level 6) loyalty. He's been your Best Friend for a long time, and you've always kept him very happy, so you can assume that he's sitting at the very top of loyalty level 6. Now for whatever reason you let your pet get unhappy and stay that way.
Now his loyalty is dropping: every five seconds he loses 10 loyalty points. Since he has a full 28,800 points in loyalty level 6, it will take four hours of unhappiness before his loyalty level drops to Faithful (level 5).
Of course, if at any time in there your pet becomes Content or Happy, he will start gaining loyalty again.
The following table summarizes how long it takes an unhappy pet to lose a full level of loyalty at each level. Keep in mind that these are full levels of loyalty: if your pet has only been your Best Friend for a few minutes, he hasn't had time to accumulate all the points in that level yet and he will drop down to Faithful in a much shorter period of time.
| Starting Loyalty Level | Ending Loyalty Level | Unhappy Time |
|---|---|---|
| Level 6: Best Friend | Level 5: Faithful | 4 hours |
| Level 5: Faithful | Level 4: Dependable | 3 hours |
| Level 4: Dependable | Level 3: Submissive | 2 hours |
| Level 3: Submissive | Level 2: Unruly | 1 hour 30 minutes |
| Level 2: Unruly | Level 1: Rebellious | 1 hour |
| Level 1: Rebellious | Level 0: Run Away! | 30 minutes |
Remember that a newly tamed pet starts at Loyalty Level 1 (Rebellious) with 3600 loyalty points -- right on the brink of Loyalty Level 2 (Unruly). So when you first tame a brand new pet, you have a full 30 minutes to feed it and make it happier before it will run away.
Since a pet's total pool of training points is based in part on its loyalty level, a pet that loses a loyalty level will lose access to some of its training points. But a pet will never lose the skills that you have already taught it. Instead, the pet's available training points will go negative, just as with a new pet that already knows some skills. And you'll recover those points if you gain loyalty levels again.
Gaining Loyalty
Although hunters may worry about their pet losing loyalty, it's easy to avoid -- just keep your pet happy or content and the problem never arises. Gaining loyalty, on the other hand, is a subject that most hunters wonder about at some time or another, largely because loyalty is so important for training your pet.
For the most part, gaining loyalty works just like losing loyalty but in reverse. If your pet is Happy or Content, then it is gaining loyalty points. When it has enough points to fill up its current loyalty level, the loyalty level increases. However, gaining loyalty also has another component: experience.
Gaining Loyalty: The Time Requirement
But let's look at the time component first. The following table summarizes how long it takes a Happy or Content pet to gain enough points of loyalty to advance to the next loyalty level. As you can see, it is much more effective to keep your pet Happy than merely Content! Keep in mind, though, that time is not the only requirement for gaining loyalty.
| Starting Loyalty Level | Ending Loyalty Level | Content Time | Happy Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Level 1: Rebellious | Level 2: Unruly | 60 minutes* | 15 minutes* |
| Level 2: Unruly | Level 3: Submissive | 2 hours | 30 minutes |
| Level 3: Submissive | Level 4: Dependable | 3 hours | 45 minutes |
| Level 4: Dependable | Level 5: Faithful | 4 hours | 1 hour |
| Level 5: Faithful | Level 6: Best Friend | 6 hours | 1 hour 30 minutes |
* Remember that a newly tamed pet starts at Loyalty Level 1 (Rebellious) with 3600 loyalty points -- right on the brink of Loyalty Level 2 (Unruly). So when you first tame a brand new pet, it has enough loyalty points to advance to Unruly immediately, as soon as you meet the experience requirement.
Gaining Loyalty: The Experience Requirement
So let's talk about that experience requirement. It looks like Blizzard didn't want hunters to be able to just hang around in town to gain loyalty levels with their pets. So in addition to gaining the loyalty points to reach the next loyalty level, pets also need to do some fighting alongside their masters.
In short, your pet needs to earn experience equal to 5% of your next level before his loyalty level will actually increase.
"But wait!", you say. "My pet is the same level as me! It can't earn experience!" Or even worse, what if you and your pet are both level 70 and neither of you can earn experience? Well, okay -- I oversimplified. Here's a full description:
Your pet needs to participate in combats that would earn it experience equivalent to 5% of the total experience you need for your next level, whether or not it is eligible to actually receive that experience. (But that's a much longer sentence!)
Basically, you need to fight things with your pet that would normally give it experience. If it's your level, or if you are both level 70, it won't actually get the experience -- but that's okay, it still counts. There are a number of important things to note here:
- The enemy must be at least green to you. Combat with grey enemies doesn't earn your pet any experience and won't count towards the experience requirement for gaining loyalty levels.
- You must fight with your pet. If your pet attacks an enemy and kills it without your help, neither of you gets any credit for the kill. In fact, you can't even loot the corpse.
- Honor doesn't count towards the loyalty requirement, only experience. So while battlegrounds may be fun, they won't help get your pet's loyalty level up.
- Your pet still gets full experience in groups. So instance runs can be a nice way to work towards the experience requirement for loyalty.
Note that the experience requirement is entirely separate from loyalty points. You can gain that 5% experience while your pet is unhappy and losing loyalty, then feed your pet up and keep it happy to work off the time requirement. Just be careful: if your pet loses a loyalty level, the experience it may have gained towards the experience requirement is reset and you need to start all over with the 5%.
Conclusion
As we said at the beginning, pet loyalty is a rather complex topic and it's really not neccesary for hunters to understand every detail. Keep your pet happy and fight with it, and you'll generally be just fine.
But knowing how the underlying system works can be useful sometimes, and -- dare I say? -- even interesting. So hopefully this article has helped explain exactly what is going on with loyalty.