So, now you have a few slots and probably a few pets. This is where team building and synergy come in. Yes, I know I sound like I stepped straight out of Office Space in the previous sentence.

The general idea of team building is that there are certain abilities and certain pet types which work together really well. If you can find pets that go well together, you’re frequently far better off than just picking 3 pets at random. A really good example of this is the Howl Bomb team previously discussed on the blog. Each specific member of the team brings something to buff each other, or an ability which benefits greatly from the buffs of the others, and then you annihilate your opponent.

There are a few basic guidelines that almost always apply, all the way up & down the gamut of battling.

1. You almost always want to use pets from different families.

2. Buffs, Debuffs & Weather Effects = Good.

The first is easiest to explain. In both PVE and PVP, most teams you face will have more than one family in its makeup. A family is a subset of pets with common defensive strengths and weaknesses. For example, all Undead pets defend weakly against Critter attacks.

However, if you were to make up a team with a couple rabbits and a squirrel, all critters, and fought a snake and a couple scorpions in the wild, you would have a really hard time winning the fight, because the wild Beasts would eat your Critters alive. If you added a turtle you’d be better off, and a clockwork gnome in your 3rd slot would even things out nicely.

Occasionally in PVP you may get lucky, and your team with a fel flame, water waveling and lil rags will come up against lil bling, a clockwork gnome and a tranquil mechanical yeti, but best believe the next opponent you face will be packing aquatics.

The second point is easy to explain, but as you delve deeper it gets into additional impenetrable Office Space-style jargon. It starts out with the same idea as say, Curse of Elements. If you’re a mage and have a choice between bringing along a warlock friend with CoE or a dps warrior friend with the Sunder debuff, you’d probably bring the warlock, because sunder does nothing for you, and warlocks pretty much exist to give mages buffs. It’s similar with pet battles. If you have an Eternal Strider with Cleansing Rain, you’d be far better off bringing, say, a Curious Oracle Hatchling with Dreadful Breath than a Spider which has no bonus to give to the strider’s abilities and vice versa. That’s synergy.

For lowbie wild fights, the family part is the most important. In the wild, there are usually lots of critters and beasts, and a smattering of aquatics and flyings. For the most part, if you join a wild pet battle, the seconds will be one of those 4 families. There are a few exceptions (winterspring & the plaguelands, for instance) but if your team features a pet which attacks strong against 3 of those 4, you’ll be in good shape. Namely, you’ll want something with beast, mechanical, flying or magic attacks. Some pets have attacks outside their family, so keep that in mind when you make your selections.

If you’re going to level up organically (ie, not through a cascade method), you’re going to want at least 2 teams of pets, so you can swap things around and not visit the stable master every other battle. Keep in mind, you can supplement with caught pets if your current choices fall flat. When I first leveled up, my team included a Terrible Turnip I eventually had to ditch, because he did less against both beasts and critters, so my other 2 pets were pretty much dragging him along. And if you do make a poor choice, you can swap out on the fly without a ton of consequence.

At this point, go level your chosen pets up to level 3 or so. Next post is team building for your very first tamer battle.

I’ve devoted a lot of time recently to hashing out strategies for the end-game of pet battling. While I was doing so, it occurred to me that I’ve barely touched the topic of starting out, leveling from scratch, and how to build your teams. So, I’m doing this brass-tacks set of strategies for pet battling.

To start at the beginning, we’ll go to any pet battle trainer. There are some in most lowbie zones and capital cities, but the 2 most notable, depending on your faction, is either

Audrey Burnhep in Stormwind,

or Varzok in Orgrimmar. Varzok is on the upper level, near the flight master and the zeppelin towers.

Your initial cost can vary a bit depending on your reputation. The trainers will also sell you a pet that varies depending on your race. If you’re a Worgen, for instance, you’ll get a Gilnean Raven from Audrey (or any other pet trainer), while if you play a Blood Elf you get a Golden Dragonhawk Hatchling from Varzok. It’s fairly likely that you’ll have a pet or two from a holiday or something kicking around in your pet log, and you can use those as well. You’ll only get one pet from your trainer per character, so you can’t endlessly purchase and then flip those Ravens onto the AH for a tidy profit.

All your pets are shared across your account, so if you’re on a fresh character or bank alt you’ll keep all the pets you already collected and leveled. This can make for some quick cash if you’re rerolling to a new server.

To view your pets and set up your team, open your pet tab (either shift – p for the non-pet classes or click the pony in your minibar and then click on the Pets tab). Yours will be slightly different, because I have a bazillion battling addons. You’ll see all your pets over to the left, with your team pane in the middle, and a selected pet up above. There’s also a search box above the pet list (I was looking for squirrels).

To put your pet on a team, drag the picture of the pet over on the left to the battle slot you want. To start, you’ll only have one, but will add more as you level up. You can swap to a different pet by dragging a different pet’s picture over the icon of the first.

In PVE, the pet in your first slot will always join the battle first, and you’ll have to burn a turn to move that first pet out. In PVP, you get to choose who enters the battle first after you start.

You can sell many pets by right clicking their name on the list to the left and hitting ‘Put in Cage’. You’ll get a cage item in your bags and can then AH or trade at your leisure. When you do so, you can’t use that pet anymore. You can re-learn it if you’d like, though. It will retain its breed and level. If you choose to buy a pet off the AH, you can only learn it if it’s your current highest pet’s level or lower… if you just buy a level 25 right this second, you won’t be able to learn it. You cannot cage any wild pets, and there are a few outlier pets which can’t be caged either (eg, the Creepy Crate).

So, now for the actual fights! To find wild pets to fight, look at your minimap. The battling display should be on by default, but to make sure, right click your map and make sure the ticky box next to ‘Track Pets’ is checked.

Should you see a green paw print on your map, it will correspond to a wild pet with a green paw print hovering over its head.

Any pet with a paw print like this is ready for a fight. If you walk up to one and right click it, you should be drawn into your first pet battle! You do need to be out of combat (if you right click while in combat you’ll just auto attack and kill it, and if somebody PVPs you, even with a non-damaging ability, you’ll immediately drop the fight), and you need to be standing on level ground with enough space around you for battling. If you’re swimming or flying, or in a weird place, such as standing on the edge of a cottage (a completely hypothetical example apropos of nothing), you’ll get an error message.

If you walk around a little bit you should be able to find a place to battle. The battle is seeded from your position, not the pet’s.

At first, you’ll only have one ability for your pet to use. The other slots will unlock as your pet levels up. You will also have a few other player-side options. You can trap the pet once it gets low enough, swap your pets around, forfeit the match, (doing this for non-tamer battles will cause your pets to take 10% damage), or pass your turn. For most of these, you can use hotkeys. Your pets’ abilities are 1-3, swap is 4 and trap is 5. Pass and Forfeit don’t have default hotkeys, so you have to click those buttons. You can see these hotkeys at the upper right of each ability box on the toolbar.

The actual fighting is fairly intuitive when you’re starting out. Just use your pet’s available abilities. You should be able to decimate most pets in starting zones. Generally, if your pet happens to have a ‘strong’ ability, use it. Avoid using ‘weak’ abilities. You’ll be able to tell by the green up arrow (strong) or red down arrow (weak) displayed on the button (eg, the first ability in the screenshot above is strong). If you’d like to capture that pet, use your trap. The catch to trapping is that you can only use the trap when the wild pet’s health is below a certain percent. You may get an unlucky crit and kill the pet, or your trap may miss enough that your pet dies.

After a fight, your pet will likely be hurt or dead. Don’t worry! As a beginner you can either use the free ‘revive pets’ ability, which is right beneath the X close button on your pet tab, or go find a Stable Master and pay 10 silver. You can’t use the free heal within 3 minutes of logging in a character, because it has a 10 minute cooldown, and they don’t want you to just log on an alt, heal & log out to circumvent the cooldown.

If your pet isn’t hurt too badly, you may want to continue fighting. If your pet levels, they refill their HP completely, and after each win they’ll heal a little bit.

And now, you can go out and fight more pets! HOORAY! When your pet hits level 3, your second pet slot will unlock. You can either add a different vendor pet, or a pet you’ve trapped, to your team. The next post in this 101 series will focus on the basics of team building.