How to Choose the Best Pet
Choosing a good pet these days is pretty easy: just close your eyes and pick, and you'll probably get a pretty decent pet.
But if you want the best pet -- and who doesn't want the best pet? -- you may need to put some thought into it. This guide aims to help you with that.
The Short Version
- Think about what role you need the pet to fill.
- Choose a pet talent tree (Cunning, Ferocity, or Tenacity) that fits that role.
- Choose a family from that tree based on:
- How well the family skill fits the pet's role.
- How easy the pet will be for you to feed.
- Family personality: overall looks, animations, and sounds.
- Choose an individual from the family with whatever look you like best.
The Really Long Version
Best For What?
The first question you need to ask yourself is: the best pet for what? Unfortunately there is no single one best pet for every hunter and every situation -- if there were this guide would be very short!
So let's start by thinking about what you'll be using this pet to do. Here are some possibilities, and you may have others in mind as well:
- Solo questing and leveling.
- Tanking for you and a friend.
- Providing extra DPS in a raid.
- Looking good in town.
- Causing consternation in battlegrounds.
- Filling an important part of your character's ongoing story.
- Working with a particular arena team setup.
Since hunters can now purchase space for five total pets, you may very well want to cover several of these purposes, using a different pet for each. (But just to simplify the process, we suggest you work on choosing one pet at a time.)
Of course, not all these roles listed above require the same things from your pet. Some of them, like looking good in town, are very subjective. But for if you need a pet for combat purposes -- and most hunters do -- then we have some basic guidelines that may help you choose a pet. You'll want to start by looking at the different pet talent trees.
Pick a Tree, Any Tree!
Each pet family is associated with a pet talent tree. Each talent tree has its own stats (high damage, for instance, or low armor) plus a whole set of talents. So the talent tree is a big defining factor in what roles a pet is best at.
Tenacity pets have high health but low damage, plus a lot of defensive talents aimed at keeping themselves and their hunters alive. Tenacity pets are very good for solo questing and leveling because they can protect you while you kill the enemy. They can even act as a main tank for small groups!
Ferocity pets have low armor but high damage. Many of their talents are focused on increasing that damage even further, but they also have some talents to avoid taking damage, heal themselves, and even resurrect instantly, all of which helps offset their more fragile nature. Ferocity pets are an excellent way to add extra damage to a raid or group.
Cunning pets have nice medium stats -- their health, armor and damage are all neither high nor low, but right in the middle. Cunning talents are a mix of offensive and defensive abilities, plus a couple dedicated to increased mobility. This mix makes Cunning pets particularly flexible and good at dealing with diverse PvP situations in battlegrounds or the Arena.
Now does this mean that all leveling pets must be Tenacity and you can only use Ferocity pets for raiding? Of course not!
The truth is, pets are pretty strong right now. Most pets can handle most roles without a whole lot of trouble. In particlar, all three talent trees make strong solo pets. And remember that each family has a unique family skill; the family skill and your particular playstyle can both have a big effect on how your pet works.
So don't fret if you have your heart set on a Cunning pet but you never PvP. But if you aren't sure what you want, the pet talent trees are a good place to start narrowing down the best pet for you. And once you've decided on a tree, it's time to start looking at family skills.
The Skill Makes the Family
Each pet family gets to use one unique family skill. (Technically, cats and spirit beasts have two family skills each, but since they share Prowl it isn't really unique to either of them.)
The pet family skill is important because it can really add a lot to your pet's role if it's a good fit. Of course, if the pet you want doesn't have a family skill that fits, it's not the end of the world. But it is a missed opportunity.
You can find a complete list of family skills on the Big List of Pet Skills. But you might want to start by looking over the Family Skill Comparison tables to see what kinds of effects are available.
For a PvP pet, you may want to look for stuns or immobilizing effects, or DoTs and negative effects that stack to protect your own debuffs from being dispelled. You'll notice a lot of these in the Cunning tree, but there are some in Ferocity and Tenacity as well.
If your pet will be doing a lot of raiding, you may want to choose a family with a skill that boosts damage or reduces armor. Most of these effects are in the Ferocity tree, but again there are some in the other trees too. You may also want to avoid AoE skills since they can break traps and other crowd control. The same skills are valuable for solo questing and leveling as well since they can help you kill your enemy more quickly.
If your pet will be tanking for you and your friends, look for skills with effects that will help the pet stay alive and keep the enemies focused on it and not you. AoE skills are often very good for keeping up threat, and there are plenty of defensive skills to choose from in all three trees. The same skills that make a good tank also make a good defensive solo pet.
Other Family Factors - Food & Attitude
But while the family skill is arguably the most important factor in choosing a family, there are a couple of other things you should think about as well, namely diet and what we might call family personality.
Diet
Each pet family has a distinct diet and some of them can be a little finicky, so you want to be certain that you choose a family you can afford to feed. This is pretty common-sense stuff: if you like to fish, take a close look at pets who eat fish; if you have a mage friend who likes to pass around the food, look for bread-eating pets. The most common food available from vendors is probably meat, while fungus is relatively hard to find at the store.
Check out the handy Diet Comparison chart for more on pet diets.
Personality
Finally, we come to family personality. Family personality is made up from the overall look of the pet models plus the way they sound and act. Croclisks, for instance, have a habit of heavy breathing noises while bats are known for their enormous (and sometimes inconvenient) wingspans.
The big question, when you are considering family personality is: Can you live with a pet from this family? Or are you going to hate it minutes after taming? If you hate cats, you probably shouldn't tame a cat even if the stats and skills look good for you! If you have a strong fear of spiders, you probably don't want a tarantula!
Try Before You Buy
Once you are happy with your chosen family, it's time to choose the particular pet. This step is simple: because all pets in a family are identical in gameplay terms, all you have to do is find one that looks good to you and is your level or lower (so you can tame it!).
Of course. once you tame the pet you may find out that its skill doesn't quite work as well as you'd like with your playstyle. Or maybe you get really sick of fishing for its dinner. Or maybe you find that the squeal it makes when it attacks is really getting on your nerves. That's okay -- there are 31 other families for you to try out. With that much choice, you will find the best pet for you.
Conclusion
One final words of advice: don't get too caught up in choosing the single most absolute best pet in the world. What matters is that you and your pet work well together and that you both have fun.