Gotta Catch ‘Em All: WoW Battle Pets Guide

By Kary Ragenroll | November 12th, 2017 | Categories: World of Warcraft

Even though Battle Pets are not going to change your game-style, these Pokemon-like companions provide an entirely new game inside World of Warcraft (WoW). You can go from just collecting WoW Battle Pets to defeat every tamer in Azeroth and the great dark beyond. Anyhow, I’m going to explain the basics: pet families, stats, breeds, items, and how to find them.

Table of Contents

Battle-Pet Family

Battle Pets in WoW divide into Pet Families, which define strengths and weaknesses against other pets. There are 10 families:

Aquatic
Beast
Critter
Dragonkin
Elemental
Flying
Humanoid
Mechanical
Magic
Undead

Being from a certain family doesn’t mean the pet can’t use different type abilities. For example, the Anubisath Idol belongs to the Humanoid family (which is strong against Dragonkin and weak against Undead). In fact, it can use Crush (Humanoid), Demolish (Mechanical), Sandstorm (Flying), Stoneskin (Magic), Deflection (Humanoid), and Rupture (Elemental). This means that the pet is flexible, it can be strong against Dragonkin, Beasts, Aquatic, and Mechanical while taking less damage received by Critter abilities.

Cheat Sheet

Warcraft Pets put together a great cheat sheet so that you can see if your pet is strong or weak against another type of pet. It’s extremely useful even though you can get the same benefits in-game with some of the add-ons below.

Battle-Pet Stats

WoW Battle Pets have three main stats (Health, Power, and Speed)

Health: how much health points your pet has.
Power: more power = more damage.
Speed: the pet with more speed goes first in the fight.

Battle-Pet Breeds

These are additional points given to base stats. The proportion in which they are given to the pet is called “breed.” 20, 18 and 15 points can be spent on these three stats depending on the breed. Let’s say we put all the points into Power, that would make a Pure Power (P/P) breed, we have spent 20 points.

However, if we put half in Health and half in Power, we will get an H/P breed, giving the pet more Health and more Power equally, in this one we’ve spent 9 points in Health and 9 points in Power, 18 points in total.

If a pet is Balance or B/B, the points are distributed in 5 for Health, 5 for Speed and 5 for Power, spending 15 points in total. The spendable points are less when they have to be shared with more stats. 20 for a pure breed, 18 for a half breed, and 15 for amixed breed.

A pet is not necessarily required to be Pure to be good battle pet. Let’s take the Rabbit as an example, the base stats of this pet say they have high speed by default, this pet could benefit from being S/S, it will be fast as light! On the other hand, the Turtle, contrary to the rabbit, is very slow and with much health; it could benefit from being B/B because they’ll have more of everything and they’ll still be tanky.

These points could mean a battle pet is strong or weak, depending on base stats and the breed (additional points). Choosing a pet by its breed has a lot to do with the role the pet is going to play in your party, so it’s nice to have that in mind before picking a specific breed.

Warcraft Pets have a nice Stat Calculator that aids you in the confusing matter of breeds, showing you how breeds affect your pets introducing your pets’ stats. Besides, they explain beautifully the head-ache-causing magic of breeds. Ok, I was never good at math!

Battle Pet Quality
Aside from breeds, pets do have qualities like all the items in the game: poor, common, uncommon, rare, epic and legendary. This dictates how much stats are given. More quality = better pet.

Race Starter Battle-Pets

Every race has a starter pet that is given by one of these NPCs in Stormwind and Orgrimmar so that you can get started by yourself. If you want to have the Gilnean Raven, you have to get it with a Worgen, no exceptions. The same happens with Pandaren and Goblins.

Audrey Burnhep (Alliance)

Human- Orange TabbyCat
Draenei- Blue Moth
NightElf- Great HornedOwl
Dwarf and Gnome – Snowshoe Rabbit
Worgen- Gilnean Raven (unique to race)
Pandaren- Jade Crane Chick (unique to race)

Varzok (Horde)

Undead- Undercity Cockroach
Tauren- Brown Prairie Dog
Blood Elf- Golden Dragonhawk Hatchling
Orcand Troll – Black Kingsnake
Goblin- Shore Crawler (unique to race)
Pandaren- Jade Crane Chick (unique to race)

Battle-Pet items

There are many items for you to use with your dear pets. They come in several ways: Pet Supplies (bags full of pet goodies) and Pet Charms. Pet Charms are the official currency for Battle Pets in WoW, which are used to buy pets, toys, and the following items:

Battle Pet Bandage: heals and resurrects all of your battle pets to 100% health.
Pet Treat: increases battle experience gained by your pet by 50% for 1 hour.
Lesser Pet Treat: increases battle experience gained by your pet by 25% for 1 hour.
Magical Pet Biscuit: doubles the size of your pet.

These aren’t bought with Pet Charms but they’re equally important:

Safari Hat: a toy you can use to increase the battle pet experience gained by 10% while you have it on. The hat is a reward from Taming the World (defeat 40 master pet tamers).
Boon of the Zookeeper: is not a pet item but just a shoulders enchant that allows you to find Pile of Pet Goodies from the corpses you loot, similar to other boons like the Bloodhunter (Blood of Sargeras). It costs 200g and you can buy it from Draemus (Exotic Pet Supplier) in Dalaran.

Battle-Stones

Battle-Stones are a series of stones that can be used with pets, giving our little creatures a nice boost:

Flawless Battle-Stone: upgrades your battle pet to Rare These have some pet-family specific like “Flawless Mechanical Battle-Stone.” They’re good if you’ve caught a great pet with Poor quality!
Polished Battle-Stone: upgrades your battle pet to Uncommon Seriously, after having the Flawless Battle-Stones above who would want this one?
Ultimate Battle-Training Stone: instantly trains your pet to level 25. Lazy people like me love this one.
Flawless Battle-Training Stone: as the one above, it trains your pet adding more levels but in this case, it will only award one level. There is a stone for every pet family, too.

Find Battle-Pets

If you want to start and build up your Pet Empire but don’t know where to start, fear not, for these are the definitive tools (and the add-ons below) that will aid you enormously:

Warcraft Pets: let you filter Battle Pets by Zone, logging into the website. Updating your pets will give you a detailed list of your uncollected pets, so you can get to it and catch them all!
Xu-Fu’s Pet Guides: one of the best tools for a Battle Pet tamer, it has strategies for every fight you can imagine and it’s wonderfully arranged.
Wowhead: has an interesting guide about notable Battle Pets by family. There you can find beautiful rare appearances (or beautiful rarities) like Zao, Calfling of Niuzao, Slithershock Elver, Chrominius and the Tiny Snowman among many others. Check them out here! And they also feature the ultimate guide to ALL Warcraft Mounts and Pets.

Add-ons

Battle-pets involve us in a whole new game inside WoW. This pet-universe is so vast and immense we surely need some add-ons to make our lives better. As I always say, they’re not required to enjoy the game but they surely help! These are my favorite:

Rematch: possibly my favorite one, because it allows the player to make teams for determined trainers or wild pets. It sorts pets by “type,” “strong vs,” and “tough vs,” it’s a blessing when you’re trying to find out which team you should pick. The add-on also lets you see more about pets and their abilities just hovering over them, and you get many useful buttons like Safari Hat and Battle Pet Bandage. One of my preferred features is that you can have a leveling queue, great for trainers.
Battle Pet BreedID: this one is amazing if you’re into breeds. When you engage combat with wild pets, it shows you their breeds so you can choose to catch them or not. It also displays the pet’s final stats given each possible breed.
NPCScan: I’ve used this one since Pandaria to find rares; pretty useful when the pet you’re looking for is a drop.
PetTracker: if you’re out there hunting for pets, this is the add-on for you. It looks like HandyNotes but with pets! Showing in the map the spawn location of pets by name and pet family, this one is a must for the collectors.

There are more add-ons like PetBattleMaster and PetJournalQuickFilter, you just have to look and see what’s best for your needs.

The Wrap Up

Some people say that Battle Pets don’t add much entertainment to the game but let’s be honest, there are many types of players. You can find players that love to PvP and hate PvE and vice versa! There are ones that only like to level up and ones that play the end-game to all its extent. AND the collectors: the overachievers, they get mounts, pets, toys, appearances, and everything that can be shown as a collection.

Gladly, World of Warcraft has a thing for every kind of gamer.

Read our Archive: World Of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor and Game of the Week: World of Warcraft