Battle Pet Experience Question

Is there a website somewhere that show the amount of experience that the pet (under lvl 25) earns from being in a successful pet battle? Reason I ask is because I’ve been doing this WQ pet battle in BfA with a lvl 24 frog swapped in, and it only gives 149 experience to the frog. I’ve done this WQ 9 times today with this frog and it still hasn’t leveled. Feel like it should have leveled by now, which makes me wonder if they decreased the experience that the pets get?

I don’t know if there’s a current guide to pet XP. During Shadowlands was obvious Blizzard was playing with it, I suppose trying to come up with a best way.

Originally with SL pet battles, carry pets got same sort of pathetic XP your poor frog is getting. Later was surprise change with one of the patches, the carries started getting more decent XP. For example, now you can get a level for a 23 or 24 carry with 3 SL pet WQs (this from my experience using the 10% Safari Hat boost).

I hadn’t done much with BfA WQs and didn’t realize they’d gotten nerfed too, but is sort of consistent with all the other earlier-expansion nerfing that hit when SL launched.

1 Like

Well, there may be a problem with the experience algorithm then. I took the same Void-Scared Toad to Pandaria and battled against a lvl 24 cricket and my toad earned 544 XP and leveled to 25. I’ll try another lvl 24 pet and see if the exp is even higher, as some exp could have been mitigated by the pet leveling.

Update:

After completing a level 25 wild pet battle in Pandaria, my level 24 pet earned 1,020 XP. So, yes the EX from the WQ in Battle for Azeroth zone is FAR less than the experience from a wild pet battle. That does not seem fair, and makes me think it’s a bug.

It’s not a bug. Experience was significantly nerfed for all tamer WQ battles in BfA & onward to balance out the fact that the majority of the battles are available 24/7. If you’re looking for pet xp from WQs, you’ll want the repeatable Legion tamers:

4 Likes

Thank you, its good to know its not a bug, and I’m not going bonkers :crazy_face:

If you want the math behind it, I used to maintain a guide on warcraft pets about the equations and such, but haven’t kept it updated with new expacs. The basic equations haven’t changed, but the multipliers got updated in shadowlands, so a lot of the charts and graphs related to that are wrong. ( Original outdated guide: https://www.warcraftpets.com/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8829&p=70050#p70050 )

This is copy and paste with some manual edits, so I might make a few mistakes:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

A carry pet is one that is included with 1 or 2 higher level pets with the intent that the higher level pets will “carry” the lower level pet through the battle to help it get a larger experience boost and thus level faster. All pets gain experience based on a specific equation (will be provided below). For this guide, the expected context is usually two level 25 pets and 1 carry pet, though the equations can be modified for other scenarios.

The base equation for pet battle experience is:

experience = (your_pet_level + 9) * (opponent_pet_level - your_pet_level + 5)

Negative values result in 0 experience (this happens when opponent_pet_level - your_pet_level is less than -5).

In addition to the main experience equation, there are some multiplicative bonuses:

Multi-Pet Bonus: This bonus is based on the number of opponents faced and is denoted by the variable N.
N = 1.0 when fighting only one enemy pet (Little Tommy Newcomer, Celestials, Beasts of Fable, and low level wild battles)
N = 2.0 when fighting two enemy pets (Zunta and Julia Stevens are the only tamers with 2 pets)
N = 2.5 when fighting three enemy pets (Most tamers)

Tamer Specific Bonus: This bonus is based on the tamer. It doesn’t appear to have any correlation to enemy pet rarety (epic vs rare pets have the same bonus for some sets of tamers for example). It may have some correlation to the Tamer’s NPC level (not the pet level) as there are some trends, but there isn’t enough data currently available to verify that. This bonus is denoted as T.
T = 0.15 when fighting most Menagerie battles (Squirt is a notable exception at T=7.50)
T = 1.50 when fighting wild pet battles (non-tamer battles)
T = 3.00 when fighting any Celestial Tournament tamer
T = 3.75 when fighting Zunta, Julia Stevens, Dagra the Fierce, or Old MacDonald
T = 4.50 when fighting any other Vanilla WoW tamer, Outlands Tamer, Northrend Tamer, or Cataclysm Tamer
T = 7.50 when fighting most WoD tamers, any Pandaria tamer, legion tamers, the Feasel brothers, and Little Tommy Newcomer.
T = 9.00 when fighting Ashlei

Experience Buff Bonus: There are various ways to gain pet experience buffs. All are additive together before multiplying. This bonus is denoted as B.
B = 1.00 when not using any buffs
B = 1.10 when using only a Safari Hat
B = 1.25 when using only a Lesser Pet Treat
B = 1.50 when using only a Pet Treat
B = 1.85 when using all 3 together.
B = 2.85 when using all 3 together during a Pet Experience bonus event.

  • NOTE: Kiamoto on the WoW Pet Battle forums figured out that the Darkmoon Top Hat adds an additional 10% pet experience gain. It seems to be additive (I.E. B=1.85 becomes B=1.95). Be careful buying these as they cost tokens, cannot be sent to alts, and disappear for good once the DMF ends.

  • NOTE: Every so often a bonus pet experience event (Sign of the Critter, aka: SotC) occurs over the weekend. Whenever this occurs, you can add 1.00 to your experience multiplier. Doing tamers at this point can greatly increase your levels on a single pet, so you may want to use low levels to avoid wasting all that delicious EXP.

Difficulty Bonus: The game highlights a “Difficulty Bonus” when levelling against higher level pets. This bonus isn’t a multiplicative one and is already captured in the base experience equation. It is technically there when fighting lower level pets and serves as a penalty in those cases. It is represented by the opponent_pet_level - your_pet_level portion of the equation.

The final equation after all those factors is:

experience = B*T*N*[(your_pet_level + 9) * (opponent_pet_level - your_pet_level + 5)]

This is a normalized version of the experience curve for level 25 opponents so you can see what it looks like visually. Actual values will vary:

3 Likes

Note that I haven’t taken the time to verify the sign of the critter change with the overall 50% buff, I’m just changing the values based on their blue post description and limited testing that I have done. In the past I would do lots of battles to get data and verify, but not enough time nowadays. Let me know if you see any descrepencies. Make sure to include pet level before experience, any buffs you had, etc.

2 Likes

I did a couple of battles today and the few I did all exactly matched the EXP gains from my guesses above, so I think I adjusted the values correctly for the SL changes.

2 Likes