World of Warcraft Pet Battle Guide

Pet battles is one of the things that is introduced in Mist of Pandaria, the 4th expansion for World of Warcraft. The new feature finally grants a purpose to our loyal vanity pets and it has caused very different reactions from fans. Some people are as excited as me to have this mini game included in the expansion, others snear at the feature and refers to it as Pokemon battles.

Whichever category you fall into, you probably want to try out the new WoW Pet Battle system. To help you get started I have put together this guide. Mist of Pandaria was released on the 25th of September and I have been levelling my pets ever since adding to the guide as I learn how to level up my pets the fastest, which pet is the best, strongest or most endurable for Pet Battles.

I will look at which pets I win Pet Battles with the most and I will add all the information to this guide.

5.2 is going live 6th of March 2013 and will bring a ton of cool changes to Pet Battles as well as give us multiple new vanity pets to collect.

Check out some of the new Pet Battle features added in 5.1

Good luck in the Pet arena!

Picture taken in World of Warcraft by Mistel - Please do not use without permission.

With the new Pet Battle system you get a ton of new ways to interact with your vanity pets. Here is a list of the new features available.

1. You can now Name your Pet. If you always wanted your Mini Diablo named Mr HugglyFace, now is the time.
2. You can level your pet. Who here has not dreamt of a level 25 broom?
3. Your pets will have stats. 4 stats in fact. Health, Power, Speed and Quality. This will help you compare them to other pets of the same type.
4. Your pets will have ability. They will also learn new abilities as they level up.
5. Like normal pets, vanity pets will belong to a family. The abilities a pet can get is dependent on which family it belongs to.
6. Pet trainers for getting the pet battle skill can be found in starting areas and in Orgrimmar and Stormwind.
7. The quality of pets can be as follows: Poor, Common, Uncommon and Rare. The stats of the pet and the increase it gets in stats when leveling up will be dependent on the quality.
8. The max level for vanity pets is 25
9. Wild pets can not be sold on the auction house. It was meant to be possible, however was changed as Blizzard decided pet battling should be for fun rather than profit. You can still hunt for rare spawns like Mr Grubbs and the Phoenix Hatchling, but wild pets are a no go in terms of making money in WoW.
10. There are three types of trap spells: Weak trap, Strong trap and Pristine trap. You start with the Weak Trap. Below is the specifications for each trap type:

    Weak Trap: Every time you miss you have 20% extra chance on catching the pet on next attempt.

    Strong Trap: Every time you miss you have 25% extra chance of catching the pet on next attempt.

    Pristine Trap: Every time you miss you have 30% extra chance of catching the pet on next attempt.

11. Is it easier to capture a pet depending on how low health it has? The answer is no, as long as the pet is below 35% health it wont matter if it has 200 or 1 health point.
12. You can get pet battle-stones to upgrade the rarity of your pets
13. Blizzard has released an official page with all the available Battle Pets. Check it out to find your favorite.

In patch 5.4 Blizzard will introduce The Celestial Tournament. Here is some infomartion about this new feature and in the future this will also contain a guide on how to win the tournament.

1. Q: What is the Celestial Tournament?

   A: Currently we don't have much information about this, but it will be on the PTR soon and then we will know more.

2. Q: What are the rewards from the Celestial Tournament?

   A: This is still unknown, but chances are there will be a neat vanity pet as reward.

3. Q: Do I have to PVP to participate in the Celestial Tournament?

   A: This is still unknown, but more information should be available soon.

Patch 5.3 introduces 16 new Vanity pets for us collectors. Most of them can be obtained from running the old TBC instances such as Karazhan, Tempest Keep and Serpenshrine Cavern.

For one of the pets the Unborn Val'Kyr the spawn location is still unknown, however we know that it will be found in Northrend.

Cory Stockton, the lead content designer for WoW has hinted that there will be speculated that you need to be a ghost to see it or that it is triggered from killing the Lich King, but so far noone has had any luck finding the Unborn Val'Kyr.

Update It seems that the Val'Kyr will spawn randomly and that the new spawn conditionwas simply refering to it spawning randomly all over Northrend.

There is a great list of confirmed spawn locations here.

The Val'Kyr is 100% worth hunting for, apart from looking cool, it also has an awesome idle animation. Check out the abilities in the video below or go to the end to see the resurrect animation.

In the meanwhile you can enjoy this look at another of the new Vanity Pets, the Phoenix Hawk Hatchling.

Video by Mistel

With patch 5.2 we got the quest Beasts of Fable that awards the Red Panda Pet.

To complete the quest you need to beat 10 Elite Battle Pets each with their own strenght and weaknesses.

It can be quite hard to complete this quest if you do not know what vanity pets to use or if you only have a few level 25 battle pets available, but there are some neat tricks that can make it easier to complete the Beats of Fable Quest.

First of all I recommend that you get hold of the Mini Mindslayer if you don't have it already as it will make things a lot easier for you.

Why you ask? Well the Mini Mindslayer has an ability called Life Exchange which is incredibly handy when fighting the high HP Elite Battle Pets.

The ability equalizes the health between your Mini Mindslayer and the Enemy Pet. This means that if your pet is at 1000 health and the enemy pet is at 4000 you will both end up with 2000 HP (note that your pet can not gain more health than its maximum, neither can you take more than your pets maximum life from the enemy pet). This means not only did you just half the HP of the Elite, you also healed your own Pet.

Below is a before and after Life Exhange example.

Start with your Mini Mindslayer in and use the Life Exchange ability, then change it out until the 5 turn cooldown is up. Repeat until the Elites life is too low for you to benefit from Life Exhanging.

Pair the Mini Mindslayer up with Battle Pets that are strong against the type of Elite Battle Pet you are fighting. I have found that Dragonkin works quite well against the Aquatic Elites because of the Lift Off ability and Mechanical Pets work great against he Beast Elites.

Using the Mini Mindslayer and otherwise changing my team based on pet types I had my Red Panda within 50 minutes of logging in after the patch. The only Elite Battle Pet that caused me any real trouble was Dos-Ryga because of the hefty heal ability.

When fighting some of the harder pet battles I have found that having a defensive pet as part of your team can make the difference between winning an loosing.

My favourite defensive pet so far is the Magical Crawdad which you can get from fishing up Mr. Pinchy in Skettis, Terrokar.

This is for me the best defensive vanity pet because of two abilities:

Shell Shield which will help you keep incoming damage down and completely negates most damage of time abilities your opponent may have.

Wish which heals you for 50% of your max health. This means it scales with health buffs and as an added bonus it is versatile because it heals the active pet, meaning you can cast it and swap in another pet that needs healing.

The battle pet with the highest damage output that I have come across to date is the Fluxfire Feline. As you can see from the screenshot to the left they have quite a high burst damage even when not critting (Although those numbers were obtained using the Stampede debuff that makes the opponent take double damage for 2 rounds).

In 5.2 Fluxfire Feline will unfortunately be nerfed. Not only have the damage bonus for the supercharge ability been reduced from 150% to 125%. Fluxfire has also lost the windup ability and had it replaced with the less interesting Flux abilitiy.

Instead of having a pet with 2 abilities that combos incredibly well you now have one with an okay buff and an aoe attack.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out at level 25, but I don't think the Fluxfire Feline will bear the crown as the most overpowered vanity pet any longer.

I will get back to you once I know who will take over in its place.

Video by Mistel

WoW patch 5.2 is on the testrealm and boy are there some cool features awaiting us Pet Battle fans.

Besides bug fixes and UI updates as well as a couple of neat smaller things we will also get the following improvements:

-When level capped you get a chance of earning Lesser Charms of Good Fortune when winning a pet battle vs a pet within 5 levels of your highest.

-If non level capped you will receive experience when winning a pet battle vs a pet within 5 levels of your highest.

-New pets on to hunt on Isle of Lightning, including rare spawn drops, wild pets and raid boss drops.

-Elite Battle Pets has been added. They are rare pets that will spawn on their own, but have special powers. A new quest will help you track the progress of these and completing the quest will give you the Red Panda pet.

I don't know about you, but the prospect of more pets to hunt is always very welcome and I am really excited for the launch of patch 5.2.

As always I will of course update when news are available and I will be hunting down the new pets to showcase their abilities.

In next update to the PTR all characters will be given level 25 battle pets so they can test out the new rare boss pet battles.

The new Battle Pet daily quest Beasts of Fable has just been made available on the PTR and I have been flying around trying to find the Elite pets that you need to kill to complete the quest. You can pick it up from Gentle San or Sara Finkleswitch once you have completed the task of winning against Aki the Chosen. On the PTR all characters are currently flagged to have completed the latter and everyone should be able to test out Beasts of Fable.

So far I have only had a chance to fight against Ka'Wi the Gorger, but I have found a few of the other Elite Vanity Pets for the quest.

Here are some screenshots of while you wait for more information on how to beat and where to find these new elite pets.

No-No can be found near the southern part of the western wall in the Vale of Eternal Blossom.

Greyhoof can be found to the east of Nesingwary's camp under a tree in Valley of the Four Winds.

For us Pet battle fans there are a ton of things to look forward to in 5.1. A small but important thing that will be introduced is the Safari Hat, that is rewarded for completing the achievement Taming the World the hat grants the wearer 10% more experience in pet battles. Something that should help when leveling your second or third set of pet teams. Note that this achievement is currently bugged and many players (including yours truly) does not receive the Safari Hat when finishing the achievement. Contacting a GM will not help as they are working on fixing the bug from the developer side.

Update on the Safari Hat.

The bug seems to have been finally resolved. I didn't receive the hat immediately after the hotfix, however it appeared after zoning in to Molten Core and back to Orgrimmar. So if you are still waiting for your Pokemon battle hat, then try entering a dungeon to refresh your character.

Another great feature that will be introduced is the Battle-stones which will allow you to upgrade the quality of your vanity pets. There are two types; general purpose battle-stones and pet family specific ones. You get the general purpose battle-stones as a low chance drop when battling pets in the wild or you can buy them for 1000 justice points. The family specific battle-stones will be a reward from the Sack of Pet Supplies that you get when you defeat tamers around the world. Battle-stones will come in two qualities, Flawless which will upgrade your pet to rare and Polished Battle-stones which will upgrade it to uncommon.

The general purpose battle-stones can be sold on the auction house.

On top of this there will be multiple bug fixes to pet battles and a lot of new vanity pets will be introduced, either as drops from raid bosses (in molten core for instance yay! :)), as professions specific crafted pet like the imperial silkworm and the imperial moth or as new pets available for taming in the wild. By the way, if you collect all the vanity pets from the old raid bosses you will get an achievement that grants you Mr. Bigglesworth from Naxxramas. He is an undead battlepet and comes complete with frosty whiskers.

Check out the full patch notes for 5.1 which is currently on the PTR.

Oh and just a small addition. WoW patch 5.1 might be coming out this week. Time to battle!

As soon as patch 5.1 went live I went vanity pet hunting. Molten Core was my first target as it is the easiest of the old Raid Instances that has had new vanity pets added to it.

My first drop was the Corefire Imp a cute little imp pet that drops from Magmadar. As a level 90 character you should have no issues soloing Magmadar on your own.

Mark of Flame drops from Sulfuron Harbinger in Molten Core and summons the vanity battle pet Harbinger of Flame. It has the following abilities:

Jab (Damage skill)

Magma Wave (Damage skill that destroys objects created by both teams)

Impale (Damage skill, if the target is below 25% it dies instantly)

Burn (Damage skill)

Immolate (Damage over time - 4 turns)

Conflagrate (Damage skill, if the target is burning Conflagrate deals double damage.)

To start battling with your vanity pets, you first have to seek out a pet trainer NPC. You can locate these with the tracking ability on your minimap. You will find them in the starter zones as well as in Orgrimmar and Stormwind. For a fee of 100g they will teach you the Pet battle skill and furthermore grant you the ability to track and capture vanity pets in the world.

You will find Master Pet Tamers across the continents of Azeroth, battling these will allow you to earn achievements and to level up your pets.

You can also sign up for arena pet battles against other players in solo, 2v2 and 3v3 battles. To do so go to your pet journal and click "Find Battle"

In order to get started on Pet battles you can of course use the vanity pets you already have, but you can also go hunting for new species. A new tracking ability will allow you to find wild vanity pets and you will be able to tame these. The pets you capture this way will have different quality and of course the highest quality pets will have the best stats.

This means you can also hunt pets to sell to collectors on the auction house, making it a great opportunity to those that hunt gold rather than glory.

To capture a wild vanity pet you will need to fight it with your own creatures. Once you get the new vanity pet to low health you will be able to trap it and make it your own.

In order to start using your pets to fight other vanity pets, you will need to go to the pet trainers in the starting areas and capital cities. Here you will learn the ability to track vanity pets and to pet battle. Furthermore you will get a quest to introduce you to the new Pet Battle system. The quest is called learning the ropes

This quest chain will walk you through all the basics, like healing your pet, leveling up and in the end you will be taught how to capture another vanity pet. Note that you will need a pet that is level 3 in order to finish the capture quest, so it is a good idea to use the same pet all the time in the beginning.

As you level up you will also get the ability to have more pets lined up for battle at once. In the end you will be able to have 3 pets available that you can switch in and out of combat. This is very handy in some of the later NPC fights where you will be battling different pets that are vulnarable or strong against certain pet families.

Furthermore it is awesome because it means you can have 2 strong pets and one that you just swap in for a turn to get experience points. Pets will only get XP if they paticipated in the battle and if they survived, so be tactical!

and which pets should I choose for my team

To start a Pet Battle either find one of the many Master Pet Trainers scattered around Azeroth, start a PVP battle from your pet journal to fight another player or go searching for wild vanity pets to fight and capture.

If you opt for the latter, make sure you have vanity pet tracking on, on your minimap (found in the tracking menu). The pets will show up on the minimap as small green paws.

When you go near a wild vanity pet that can be fought and hover your curser over it, it will change to a green paw. Right click to battle the pet.

Now you will get a new action bar that has the skills of your chosen pet. Pets will unlock new skills when they level up (at level 1 they will have 1 skill, new ones will unlock at 2, 5, 10, 15 and 20). You can have 3 active skills at one time so choose carefully.

When you unlock the ability to have 3 pets it is time to get tactical with you battle line up. It can be hard to know which pets to use in the beginning, but for the strongest Pet Battle team I recommend the following: 1 very strong vanity pet, 1 tanky type pet (think turtles) and 1 very speedy pet. The families of the pets should be chosen based on what setup you are facing. This is of course not possible to know ahead of time with PVP pet battles, but for beating those pesky Master Trainers it will come in handy.

I have also found that the Spider is a very strong vanity pet for pet battles. At level 10 it gets a poison spit that does damage over time and the life leach ability means you can stay alive for much longer while taking damage. So far I have found it to be one of the best pets to have at least that you can get in starter areas.

I created this video tutorial to showcase how pet battles work. It is a brief overview of how to use your skills, how to capture wild pets and how to swap pets in and out during combat.

If you have any pet battle video guides you would like me to do, please do not hesitate to write it in the comment section below or in the comment section on Youtube.

Video by Mistel

The level grind for pet battles can be quite long, both because it takes time to track down pets, but also because the xp you get for battles is not incredibly high.

In order to grind most efficiently and reach max level the fastest I recommend trying to battle wild pets that are a couple of levels higher than your own pets. If you can find some that are 2 levels above you will get a very decent XP bonus due to diffulty and they should not be too hard for you to beat.

You might have to wait a bit for the healing spell though as you are likely to have low health pets after a each battle.

Once you have minimum 2 pets at level 20+ you can start power levelling lower level pets. To do this simply start with your low level pet and perform one action, then swap it out with one of your high level pets and let them finish the battle.

Check out the tutorial for using this method to speed level your WoW vanity pets.

When Mist of Pandaria is released you will be able to capture vanity pets that can be either used for pet battles. If you are a looking for a specific pet like the Tiny Harvester or the Infected Squirrel, then this list of vanity pet locations will come in handy.

There are some really cool pets that can be captured such as the Restless Shadeling from Deathwing Pass, which is only present at night time.

And remember, the pets you tame will have different quality so it might be worth it to hunt around for a little bit to make sure you get the best possible version of the vanity pet in question. That is the trick to winning pet battles.

There are a few rare vanity pets in the game that you can capture. The Restless Shadeling being one of them. The Shadeling is very strong and many of its abilities will help your entire team. Plagued Blood for instance works really well in combination with vanity pets that deal damage over time like the Nut Barrage of the Squirrels and Poison Spit of Spider pets.

To capture the Restless Shadeling you have to get up early in the morning and travel to Karazhan. In the dungeons below the tower you will find these powerful vanity pets.

They are level 16-18, but only one will join the battle so you can catch these will still having relatively low level pets.

I went with a setup of pets between level 13 and 14 and had no trouble capturing one.

The abilities of the Restless Shadeling are:

Arcane Blast

A magic damage attack that increases in power every time you use it until a maximum is reached.

Death and Decay

An AOE dot that damages the enemy pets and lasts even if you switch the Restless Shadeling out.

Death Coil

A single attack that damages the enemy and also returns life to the Restless Shadeling. It has a 1 turn cooldown.

Phase Shift

The level 20 ability of the Restless Shadeling allows it to phase out for 1 turn so it wont take any damage. Great for when the opponent is using one of their very powerful abiltiies. This ability has a 4 turn cooldown.

Plagued Blood

Casts a curse on the target enemy pet that causes your pet to heal every time it damages it. This does not just work for the Shadeling, but for any of your pets that damages the enemy pet with Plagued Blood on. This ability works really well with damage over time abilities as your pet will continously be healed while still using its other abilities. Lasts 5 turns.

Shadow Shock

The basic attack of this vanity pet. Pretty powerful especially against humanoids.

The Restless Shadeling is an undead which means it will return to life after being defeated in battle, this gives you a second chance to kill off that pesky enemy pet.

Clefthoof Runt

The Clefthoof Runt is a mini version of the great lumbering beasts hunted by Nesingwary in Nagrand. With Mist of Pandaria we can now get a cute version as a vanity pet.

The Clefthoof Runt is a tanky battle pet and can take quite a bit of damage. At the same time it also have some nice attacks for handing out damage. This makes it a great pet in any setup and actually in my opinion it is slightly overpowered.

To catch the Clefthoof Runt you need to go to Nagrand in the morning hours as it will not appear in the afternoon and evening. I have yet to find a rare version of the Runt, but it is just a matter of luck I suppose and even the uncommon I have is very powereful. You will find them to be around level 18-19 when trying to catch them and they hit quite hard so make sure you have a battle team that is strong enough to withstand the damage.

The abilities of the Clefthoof Runt are:

Horn Attack

Deals beast damage. If the opponent is faster than you, there is a 50% chance that they will be stunned and lose one turn. Extra effective against critters, but less effective against flying creatures. 1 turn cooldown.

Smash

Smash the enemy dealing beast damage. Extra effective against critters, but less effective against flying creatures.

Stampede

Stampede the enemy doing critter damage. The opponent will be taking double damage for 2 turns. The Stampede lasts for 3 turns. Extra effective against undead, but less effective against humanoids.

Survival

The next turn your health will not be able to drop below 1. Extra effective against undead, but less effective against humanoids. 3 turns cooldown.

Trample

Dealing beast damage plus an additional 10% of the targets health. Extra effective against critters, but less effective against flying creatures.

Trumpet Strike

Dealing beast damage and increasing the damage of your pet by 25% for the next 3 rounds. Extra effective against critters, but less effective against flying creatures.

Lofty Libram

The Lofty Libram is a rare pet that spawns in Hillsbrad Foothill at the Dalaran Crater. When going there, you will usually just find a lot of rats, but don't despair.

Keep fighting the rats and you will either get a Lofty Libram spawn or you will be lucky enough that one of the Rats are accompagnied by a Lofty Libram vanity pet.

Check out the abilities in action in this Lofty Libram walkthrough video.

My favourite pet right now is my Spirit of Competition. I love it's Lift-Off and Ancient Blessing abilities and it just looks really cool when it fights. What is in your opinion the best Vanity Pet to win pet battles? And why?