When I say major changes I mean that more has changed than has stayed the same.  So many changes, in fact, that it’s going to be hard to do more than just hit the highlights in the space we have here.  But since we’ve had so many requests for info from the Beta, we can feel pretty comfortable publishing these since they seem about 95% locked in and will probably stay the same on release day.  So let’s get to it.

First, a LOT of the effort hunters used to have to put into pets is simply gone.  Training new pets and getting them up to speed is merely a matter of taming, and that’s about it.  Here’s a list of the things that just went “poof.”

• Pet training points - these are gone, so you don’t have to worry about where to place those odd points that just don’t fit.

• Pet Loyalty - axed for WotLK.  There may eventually be some sort of system to entice hunters to keep pets, but for now, it’s the equivalent of taming a pet with “Best Friend” status.  When training points disappeared, so did the need for loyalty.

• Pet leveling - mostly gone.  Pets will still have to level to some degree, but it will be a lot more transparent than it is now.  A level 1 beast trained by a level 80 hunter will hop to level 70 instantly.  That way the pet isn’t completely useless while you try to work on levels.  So if you missed that ghost saber at level 22, it’s not such a big deal to go back and get one for the coolness factor.

• Nearly everything associated with training points - you will no longer have to make hard choices (since training points are no more) between things like armor or resistances.  All pets now get base levels of resistance to all 5 schools of magic as they level, although you can still choose to increase these if you like through another method.

• Learning new pet skills - completely gone.  Never again will you have to go train Bellygrub to get Gore 4.  Instead, all pets will know 3 basic abilities (and a number of talent skills, more on those later) and those skills are set in stone.

• Having to keep an open slot at the Stable Master - all we can say is yeehaaw to this one.  Since you don’t have to train a trash pet to learn some skill or other, you will be able to put real pets in all your slots (the beta even shows an additional slot you can buy, which means you can have 5 pets).

• Some of your Current Pet’s skills - sorry, but if your pet knows claw and bite, they are going to lose one for the reason mentioned above.  All pets will have a set number of things they can use, and they will not get more than one “Focus Dump” skill.

• Crummy Pets - there is simply not a single pet in the game that will get you laughed at.  Up until now, there was a set of “caster” pets that had such awful stats that training points just couldn’t make up for how bad they were.  In WotLK if you can tame it, it will make a good pet.  There are even some pets that have surprisingly useful special abilities.  I mean, who would have ever guessed that they could make a moth a decent DPS pet?

That’s a good basic look at what’s gone, now let’s look at what those have been replaced with.  Personally, I like the new system a LOT more.  Pets will now be much more like your own character, and have a special talent point screen where you can select and customize that pet to be exactly what you want it to be.  This new system also has some wicked skills that don’t even exist now.  A level 70 pet in WotLK will be much better than a level 70 pet now.

• Three Pet “Types” - All pets are now divided into three distinct “types.” Cunning, Ferocity, and Tenacity.  These types loosely correspond to Cunning pets normally having some sort of debuff or short duration Crowd Control, Ferocity pets have DPS skills that can buff themselves or even an entire party (or raid, we’re not sure with all the raid buff tweaks yet) and Tenacity pets generally have talents that will help it to tank well.  There is a LOT of mixing and matching in the special skills, so remember that these are merely generalizations.  Each type also gets a specific modifier % to Damage Armor and Health.

• 31 Pet “Families” - All pets are further divided into 31 family groupings that determine the 1 “Special” skill that they will use.  Some of the special skills are simply incredible.  Rhinos get a skill called Stampede that knocks all enemies within 10 yards back 15 yards!  Warp Stalkers no longer warp toward their enemy, but they will instead warp the enemy away from them up to 30 yards.

• Pet Talent Trees - there are so many awesome tricks in the talent trees you’re just going to have to browse through them for yourself.  But basically, not only can you have a decent tanking pet, but that tank pet will can also be given talents that will help it do good damage as well.  The talent trees as a replacement for training points is an incredibly awesome change.

• ALL pets can now get a Speed increase skill - no longer will you be stuck with a pig to get charge.  All Tenacity pets can learn charge, and the other two pet types can all learn dash or dive.

It all boils down to a few really neat points.  Training pets is easier than ever, and you have a lot more control over what your pet can do.  There are more pet choices than ever, and more skills to choose from.  It is certainly going to lead to a lot more variety in the pets running around.  You will be able to customize your pet skills in a way that suits your needs, and do so with a lot less effort than ever.

All these changes will certainly make pets for MM and SV hunters more useful, but it may be even harder to leave BM behind when you see the simply wicked awesome firepower of a BM hunter with a core hound or devilsaur exotic ferocity pet.  The 51st talent point in the BM tree gives the hunter the ability to train pets from the 6 exotic pet families and 4 extra pet skill points to put into pet DPS skills, or other tanking skills for the rhino family.

Here are some convenient links to where you can dig a little deeper into the WotLK pet info for yourself.  But I warn you: don’t look at them if it’s going to make you ruin your keyboard drooling, you still have a rather long wait!

Pet Talent Trees:

• Petopia

Pet Talent Calculators:

• Cunning

• Ferocity

• Tenacity

Pet Types and Families

• Wowhead

Extensive FaQ for nearly all Wotlk Pet changes

• Petopia

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(Spoiler Alert)

In the not too distant future, we plan to release a complete set of guides covering just about everything you guys have ever asked for. The following article is based on a section of our Hunter’s Toolkit. The Hunter Toolkit tells you everything you need to know to completely master playing a hunter in any tree, any instance, any zone you could ever encounter. In short, it contains every tool you could ever need to fine tune your hunter play even if you’ve never played on before!

Just to give you an idea how thorough this guide is we’ve pulled a short excerpt from the pet section. We made sure that we covered virtually every move a hunter could ever want to make, and this little gem is a tiny part of the hunter toolkit, but it’s only a very small part of the complete hunter guide. We call it the Pet Set.

(Spoiler Information Follows)

The Pet Set

In reality, this should really be called: the Cat Attack. It will only work with cats with the prowl ability. Here’s what it looks like:

Pet Prowl / Eyes of the Beast / Stealth to Target / Pet@ (attack)

Oh boy, do people hate this. With your pet in prowl, they are incredibly hard to detect. This works best if you have 3 points in Hawk Eye so you can shoot from further away than almost any class in the game. Once your pet prowls; toggle Eyes of the Beast so that you control your pet. Now you can stealth up to a target from WAY out of range and completely hidden behind a hill, building or forest full of trees.

Once your pet is close enough, just hit pet attack. Your pet will begin to chew their face off. Since they can’t see you, they will often mistake your pet for a mob and begin to fight it - Big mistake! As soon as your pet lands a hit, Eyes of the Beast will fade and you can begin to run toward your opponent. Stop at the very edge of your range and begin a nuclear shot rotation. By the time they figure out what’s going on – they are usually dead.

If you move to a new location after they die and hide in another spot somewhere else it’s golden. While they are on their corpse run, you can just use Eagle Eye to watch their corpse spawn from a mile away. As soon as they res and sit down to eat, just put your pet back in prowl and do the whole thing over again. After being killed a couple of times and never once seeing who is killing them, they will usually give up and leave the zone.

This technique is also particularly useful for attacking players several levels higher than your own. Because your pet will have done some serious damage to them before you even start to fire, they will already be weakened. Combine that with the fact that they will have to try to find and attack you; and they will have to ignore your pet for longer than normal to get you targeted. This gives your pet another 5 seconds or so of tearing the skin off their bodies. While this is going on; you’re burning them to the ground with a virtually uninterrupted Shot Rotation series. If they happen to survive long enough to find you and get started in your direction, you can just twist at max range and keep firing. We’ve seen hunters take down PVP opponents 8-10 levels higher using this technique.

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There are so many reasons to love the Ghost Saber I’m not even sure where to start. They are always a little transparent like this, and are one of the more difficult pets to tame. This is especially true for Horde toons on PVP servers. But for the twink Horde Hunter it might actually be much harder than getting your hands on Venomstrike. Personally I don’t think there is a single thing you could take to a lvl 19 battleground that is anywhere near as impressive as a ghost saber - especially for a horde hunter on a PVP server.  They are simply the most difficult thing for a horde hunter to tame or find and still come in under level 20.  However, because they are sometimes very hard to see, I believe it’s worth going after for the fully geared twink Hunter.

There are three issues that make taming this beast tough on horde hunters. Alliance will still use the same methods we talk about here; you just won’t have to run as far.

First, these kitties can only be found in the very far northern reaches of Darkshore. For a level 19 hunter that’s a really long run from the Barrens or Splintertree post through contested and enemy territories. Here is a map of the route you will need to run:

You may want to do this run with some experience left at the very end of level 18 or first thing when you hit 19, since you will get some discovery experience for the trip. Once you pass the grove of the ancients in Darkshore you will want to stay off the road as much as possible, since Alliance have gobs of quests in the area just around Auberdine.

The Second problem with this tame is that these cats come in either level 19 or 20. Not a big issue for the hunter who isn’t twinking, but a potentially serious problem for the level 19 guy. You see, these sabers already know claw 3 and you’re going to need some luck or a few good buffs to survive the tame without your freeze trap – which of course the twink won’t have since you train that one at level 20. This problem just gets worse when you hear what you have to do to get one to spawn.

Which brings us to problem 3: you can only get these to spawn by picking up little cat figurines scattered around the ruins of Mathystra. That doesn’t seem too bad until you get there and discover that the place is absolutely crawling with level 20-23 Naga Warriors and pesky casters. (The level 22 and 23 mobs are rare spawns, but you will find one from time to time).

There are quite a few spawn points for the figurines, but they are a little hard to see since they blend in with the ruins:

When you pick up these figurines, only every once in a while will a ghost saber spawn, and there is about a 50% chance it will be level 19. SO now you can see why you may be in for a long evening. Once you find a figurine and kill the Naga around it, you may have to pick up as many as 10 before a saber will even spawn, and even when that happens it might be level 20 and not 19.

But there’s some relief to all this pain. There are several spawn points on the outer edges of the ruins that generally require you to kill only one Naga to clear enough room to open a figurine. There’s no need to run all the way through the entire ruins looking for the statues. Just stay on the outer edges out of aggro range and you’ll learn to spot them pretty quick. We went there with a higher level toon and there don’t seem to be more than 2 or three of these figurines at one time even though there are more than a dozen potential spawn points. Once a figurine is picked up, it is replaced by another statue spawn in about 2 minutes.

What that means for you is that of the 6 spawn points for the figurines on the outer edges there will almost always be one ready for you to pick up that shouldn’t be a huge problem to get to.

The reason I mention six figurine spawn points is that you may be forced to open quite a few of them before a saber even spawns.  Many people report having to open 20 or more before they ever get a ghost saber to spawn.  This is particularly hectic for twink 19’s worried about dinging from killing naga to get to the statues.  The twink might open 10 statues only to get a level 20 ghost saber spawn!  Since we hunters can only tame beasts at, or below our level that situation will nearly make you scream.

With all that being said, these things are also what make the Ghost Saber such a wicked pet to have for Horde. Even Alliance toons are rarely seen with this guy since he can be such a pain to get. But the taming process isn’t all that bad once you claw your way to the figurines:

Just set your trap (if you have freeze trap, twinks are just going to have to try to survive the ride) and hopefully you catch a nice grey cat –

Start your tame right away, because when he breaks out of the ice he hits very hard with claw 3 – especially if you are level 19 or 20. Level 19 toons will need to have some stamina and life buffs or amazing luck to survive this tame. So get some scrolls and potions to take with you. (A higher level friend is even better) But if you make it you’ll have a nice new see-through cat to fight with.

If you survive the tame you get a splendid new cat that you will most certainly keep all the way through BT and beyond into WotLK.  This is one you just don’t get rid of.

I do need to warn you about a potentially scary quirk with the ghost saber.  Ghost sabers untamed have a despawn timer if they are not killed.  The timer is 5 minutes.  If a non-hunter opens a cat figurine and a ghost saber spawns and kills them or if they just run away the ghost saber disappears after five minutes so you will never a dozen of them running around without having to open your own figurines.

This despawn timer will scare you to death if you tame one of these and don’t know about it ahead of time.  You’ve spent hours opening figurines and dealing with naga - finally a saber spawns and you do the tame.  You’re happy as heck and hoofing it out of darkshore when, with a great big “MEOW!” your saber falls down dead as a hammer right at your feet.

At this point you get cold chills of fury.  It’s like that sensation you feel when a cop pulls you over - especially when you know for a fact you’re getting a ticket.  Skin-crawlies galore.  But you can relax.  It’s perfectly normal for ghost sabers to do this.  All you have to do is call pet and your new kitty will reappear never to suddenly die for no reason ever again.  Now you can go really wreck some folk in the battlegrounds.

These guys are can be a little hard to see in some map zones, which is why they can be killer in WSG, your opponents may not figure out what is slashing their face off until it’s too late. But once you can give this fellow prowl they are nearly impossible to see even for yourself or members of your faction.

On top is the regular, fairly hard to see saber, below - the Saber in prowl mode. You’ll be hard pressed to find another cat this cool.

You will see dozens of horde hunters with Echeyakee, and even though he is a quest spawn – everyone can do the quest with no problem or get help really easily, or find someone doing the quest, blah, blah, blah = pet. But you really have to go out of your way to get a ghost saber. Perhaps the only thing harder to get would be a Teldrassil owl, but even that is just a matter of making a few corpse runs through the Darnassian Guards, the owls are a snap once you get to them.

But the Ghost Saber is truly unique, pretty rare and always looks cool. And now you know the finer points of getting one for your stables!

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Hunters can be very picky about the pets they choose. If you’ve gotten your hands on our hunters guide we give you a full run-down of the best and not-so-good choices when it comes to actual pet abilities. Now some people may very well like pets that are not as effective statistically, and that’s fine. You should use what you like, but when you look at the numbers, there are simply some pets which really shine in certain areas.

Most hunters will use a cat. Cats are one of only two pets which get a 10% bonus to damage. Cats are also easy to feed and learn a most of the best pet skills. You can’t really go wrong with a cat, especially if you are a Beast Mastery specialization hunter. A cat will do more damage than any other pet you can have - except one.

We want to put up for your consideration the Ravager. Before the Burning Crusade expansion, cats ruled DPS, but now they have a serious rival. Ravagers look cool and have the potential to do more damage than cats. Possibly the only drawback to a Ravager instead of a cat is that they don’t get the prowl skill, but that may not be a big deal to you - especially on a PVE server.

Why are Ravagers at the top of the DPS pile? They get to use the really wicked ability Gore. Gore is an instant cast ability that uses 15 focus, and works a lot like claw (which we prefer over bite - check out our hunter guide for all the details). Even though Gore does similar base damage to claw, it has a 50% chance to do DOUBLE damage. When you average that out, it means that Gore will do 125 damage in the same amount of time as claw will do 100. When you stack the 50% chance at double damage with beast mastery hunter skills like frenzy for the critical hit bonuses, it can get seriously high.

Ravagers have a little more armor than cats, but lower health. They only eat meat and raw meat, and can learn Bite, cower, Growl, Dash, and Gore. Gore is a great skill only used by boars and ravagers. Unfortunately, for Horde players, a ravager can be a real challenge to tame before level 62 especially on PVP servers. The other problem with gore is that there are no known mobs from which to learn gore 5 or 6. So you’re stuck with Gore 4 until you get to blasted lands at level 48. Also Gore 3 is only learned from the named mob Bellygrub in Redridge Mountains; and he can be a load to handle at level 24. Overall, gore is the best offensive pet skill to have, but for horde characters, you might not want to consider a ravager until you get to outlands. Even for alliance, for 20-40 levels, your main pet attack skill is going to be way off the pace. Boosting stamina through pet training is also more expensive as far as training points than boosting armor. So we normally give pets with more stamina a better score than pets with higher armor stats.

All of that being said - it could be argued that ravagers have the ability to deal more damage than any other pet in the game. If you can be a little patient and wait for one until outlands, you might consider one if you go Beast Master. To save focus and use the really wicked DPS skill, gore, teach this guy Gore, Growl and Dash. Gore is instant cast with no cooldown, so if he gets a few double damage hits in a row, it can really be a killer. We’re not sure if giving up prowl is worth the added dps and extra points spent on stamina, but on PVE servers it may be a winner.

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