Classic Hunter DPS Pets Guide

Pets are perhaps the most iconic part of the Hunter's toolkit. At Level 10, you will be able to pick up a quest from any Hunter trainer that will allow you to learn how to tame a beast. After completing the quest, you will be able to go out and tame whatever pet you would like, allowing the pet to fight by your side in combat.

Taming pets can be quite dangerous. The cast is long, and you are left completely vulnerable during it. It is recommended to either have a friend help early on by tanking the animal while you tame it, to slow it using Concussive Shot before starting the cast, or most preferably to have a Freezing Trap set up ahead of time to freeze it while you cast Tame Beast.

Pets are separated into different families based on their type, such as cats, boars, or spiders. Each of the different pet families also falls into one of three categories: offensive, defensive, or general. As the names would suggest, offensive pets deal more damage while taking more damage, defensive pets take less damage while dealing less damage, and general pets are more balanced. Each pet family has different modifiers to their health, armor, and damage based on their category. All the different possible pet families and their modifiers are listed below.

You will also notice that some pets have unique abilities, such as a wolf's Furious Howl. These can be very useful abilities to have and it is worth having one such pet for whenever you might want that ability.

For leveling, the most important thing is to have a pet that can use two abilities to spend its focus on. If your pet only has one ability, such as a crab only having Claw, you are missing out on potential damage and threat from your pet. Cats (Bite and Claw), owls (Claw and Screech), raptors (Bite and Claw), and bears (Bite and Claw) are all great choices that you can pick up early on, depending on your starting zone.

At Level 60, you will have more choices to work with. Remember that you are not limited to one pet because you can use the stable to hold your pets and then choose a specific pet for a given situation. For PvE, you should have a wolf, a cat, and a wind serpent.

Unlike in later versions of WoW, pets in vanilla will die to dungeon and raid mechanics quite easily. This means that sometimes you will have to leave your pet on passive standing next to you, so that it will not die. Wolfs are excellent pets to have on passive, since they can still cast Furious Roar to buff you and your party members, which is still a nice damage increase by itself.

Lupos is a rare wolf found in Duskwood, and in Vanilla WoW was the best pet for damage done because his auto attacks dealt Shadow damage instead of Physical damage. This meant that all of his attacks ignored armor, since they were magic damage. However, Lupos was changed in Patch 1.9 to no longer deal Shadow damage, and thus is not useful to obtain for WoW Classic, since it will be on Patch 1.12.

Cats are one of the highest damage pets while also having the highest attack speeds. These are great choices for leveling, PvE, and PvP content. However, be careful using these in raids and dungeons because they must attack from melee range, making them prone to dying to mechanics. Cats are one of the best pets for leveling due to their fast attack speed, high damage modifier, and two focus spending attacks.

Brokentooth is a rare cat found in Badlands, and one of the most sought after pets in WoW Classic for Hunters. This is mainly because Brokentooth is the only pet in the game with a 1.0 attack speed. Every other pet, cat or otherwise, have 1.2 attack speeds or higher. This makes Brokentooth the best pet for PvP against casters.

Wind Serpents have Lightning Breath, making them the only pet in the game with a ranged attack. They are a great option if you need your pet to attack something, but you do not want it to get too close. Specifically, you will want to tame the Son of Hakkar found in Zul'Gurub, as they are the only serpents in the game that have rank 6 of Lightning Breath, which is the highest rank possible.

Pet attack speed is also quite important. Their attack speeds vary, even amongst families, so it is worth finding specific pets that you want to tame if you are wanting a specific attack speed. In general, a faster attack speed is better. The overall damage is not affected by attack speed, but if your pet only has a 2.5 second attack speed and misses its first attack, you are likely to pull threat and it will take longer for your pet to get threat back. Faster attack speeds are also very useful against casters because each hit will cause their casts to be pushed back. For PvP, you almost always want a pet with the fastest possible attack speed, which is usually cats.

Just like Hunters, pets can also learn skills as they level. These skills fall into two categories, active and passive abilities. Most passive abilities you will learn from a pet trainer, usually found next to a Hunter trainer. Active abilities, however, are for the most part learned by taming animals that already have that ability. This applies to new ranks of abilities as well. For instance, if you are leveling in Durotar, you might want to tame an Encrusted Surf Crawler along the western shoreline to learn Claw Rank 2. Once you have tamed an animal that has the new skill or ability rank that you want, you need to have the pet use that ability before it can be taught to your other pets. Sometimes this can take a bit of time, and it is recommended that you let the pet fight enemies while only using that new skill to quicken the process. After your new pet has used the ability enough, the ability should appear in your training menu for your original pet to learn. There are some restrictions however, such as Crabs not being able to use Bite, so it is important to figure out ahead of time what type of pet you want and what abilities you want it to use.

Once you have tamed a pet with an ability that you want your current pet to be able to learn, you can use the Beast Training ability in your spellbook to open the training menu. This will show you a list of available spells, which should include your new ability. To teach it to your current pet, you will have to spend some of its available training points (TP). Training points are like talent points in that your pet gains more of them as it levels up. Training points are also affected by your pet's loyalty. Your total amount of training points is calculated by taking (pet level) * (loyalty level – 1).

Training points are not permanent. You can pick different passives or abilities and retrain your pet quite easily. Especially for raid content, you should think ahead of time about what type of damage you will be taking and what you will mainly be doing. Some of the more important pet passives are resistances, which lower the amount of damage your pet will take against certain types. For instance, in Molten Core, you should always max out Fire Resistance and Shadow Resistance for your pet.

Pets have three distinct moods that they can be in: happy, content, or unhappy. You always want your pet to be happy, as their mood affects the damage they deal. Happy pets deal +25% damage, Content pets deal normal damage, and unhappy pets deal -25% damage. Unhappy pets are also in danger of running away if they remain unhappy for too long.

You must keep your pet well fed to keep it happy. The face icon next to your pet's health bar shows its current mood, with a green smile being happy, a yellow face being content, and a red frown being unhappy. You should always feed your pet as soon as you see it stop being happy. Pets eat food such as meats, bread, and fruit based on their type. To feed them, use the feed pet ability on some food in your inventory, such as feeding boar meat to your cat. Pets like specific types of food based on their type, and you can use the Beast Lore ability in game to help determine what type of food your pet will eat.

Pet happiness is also important because it increases your pet's loyalty. There are 6 possible loyalty levels, which starts at loyalty level 1 when you first tame a pet. To increase your pet's loyalty, you must have the pet summoned while killing enemies. If you use the pet for long enough, eventually you will progress its loyalty level up to 6. The higher its loyalty level, the easier it will be to keep your pet well fed and happy, while also increasing your its total training points.

For more information on specific pets or abilities and where to find them, you should check out Petopia.