Hunter pet skills in WoW: Forever

Pets scale off your gear, not your buffs

Your pet's stats now come from your own gear, not a fixed stat block of its own. On the current beta, a pet gets 10% of your Attack Power and all of your Critical Strike Chance, so a better bow or gun makes your pet hit harder too. Player buffs that raise stats no longer reach the pet at all, so a Strength or Agility buff on the hunter does nothing for the animal beside them.

A few more Hunter basics carried into WoW: Forever. Aimed Shot is baseline at level 20. Traps work in combat now, on a 30 second cooldown, and Frost and Fire traps no longer share that cooldown with each other. The dead zone inside 8 yards, where ranged attacks go quiet, is still there. Lone Wolf, an 11-point Marksmanship talent, gives 20% increased damage while you hunt with no pet out at all.

Pet families, including the new Fox

Foxes are new to Forever. Their family trick, Trickster's Dance, boosts the pet's dodge chance and attack speed for 12 seconds. Every family learns Bite or Claw, and Dive or Dash; Bears, Carrion Birds, Cats and Raptors are the four that learn both Bite and Claw.

Every family also keeps one ability nobody else learns: wolves howl attack power for the party, turtles raise a shell, bats slow spellcasting, boars charge and immobilize, cats vanish into stealth, scorpids stack a poison. The full set covers bats, bears, birds of prey, boars, carrion birds, cats, crabs, crocolisks, gorillas, hyenas, raptors, scorpids, spiders, tallstriders, turtles, windserpents, wolves and foxes.

A 24 September beta patch changed taming itself: you can only tame a beast at or below your own level. That is why old reports of catching a high-level rare at level 10 no longer hold up.

How to unlock Feed, Revive and new ranks

The pet system opens at level 10 with a short quest chain from your Hunter trainer.

1. Take the chain at level 10 and tame three different beasts to learn Tame Beast.
2. Turn the finished chain in at your Hunter trainer to learn Beast Training, Feed Pet and Revive Pet.
3. To raise an ability's rank, tame or fight alongside a beast that already knows the higher rank until your pet learns it.
4. Visit Beast Training to teach that same rank to the pet you actually want to keep.

Keeping your pet happy and stabled

A 1 October beta fix corrected pet ability ranks that had been set too high for some creatures. If your pet's rank looks lower than you remember, that fix is why, not a bug to report.

A Happy pet deals 125% of its normal damage, a Content pet deals 100%, and an Unhappy pet drops to 75%, by current beta testing. Each family eats from its own short list of food, shown when you hover its Happiness icon, and you cannot feed a pet mid-fight, so top it off before you pull. You can purchase up to two additional stable slots, useful for keeping another pet with a different rank on hand without losing your main companion's loyalty.

Wowdee will track which abilities and ranks each of your tamed and stabled pets already knows, so you can see at a glance which beast to tame next for the rank you are missing.