What’s the interaction with multiple hunter pets?
I understand that when a BM hunter has two pets the second is missing some abilities (but not others?) but do things like mortal wounds stack? Also what if there’s a second hunter, does barbed shot apply to the other hunters pets?
Was looking to do a silly 2 BM hunter arena team for fun and was trying to work out which pets would work best together
All the pets meet in a huddle before each pull, and discuss who will do what. Then once that is all settled the hunter then works out a game plan that way the hunter and our pets are all on same page. Then when everyone is ready and we go in.
The talent that gives you a 2nd pet is called Animal Companion. That pet obtains the appearance of whatever pet you have in the first slot of your stable (page 1, upper left corner).
The Animal Companion can do these attacks
It cannot do
Utility abilities to apply to the AC.
Both pets will attack the same target. No way to make them attack independently. Although the AI for each will have them move independently at times and its possible for 1 pet to be out of range of a target while the other starts attacking.
All attacks done by each pet are reduced by 35%. Approximately your combined “pets” now do 120-125% of the pet damage you would have from a single pet. It’s less than 130% in practice since the AC pet does not get the basic attacks (smack, bite, claw) and your main pet’s basic attack damage is reduced by 35%.
Animal Companions can be targeted and killed. The only time in pve I’ve seen that happen is when your primary pet dies and it was holding aggro. I believe that to “revive” the AC if your main pet is still alive requires you to dismiss and call your main pet again.
To add to @Tinkerrific’s good post, a small note…
The 2nd pet you get from Animal Companion does not benefit from any passive effects tied to the specialization of your main pet, such as bonus Leech(Ferocity), additional health(Tenacity), or increased movement speed(Cunning).
Haven’t had the AC pet die on me in years, think since Legion, so I can’t say for sure how it works now, but last time it happened, the AC pet respawned automatically after roughly 30 seconds. If, for whatever reason, your main pet dies or disappears during that time, the AC would not spawn until the main pet was brought out again.
But yeah, this was years ago, so they might’ve changed something on that end.
Technically it gets the movement speed boost as it keeps up with you when your movement speed is buffed by it.
It doesn’t. The reason it keeps up with you when on passive/follow is because of the pet AI where it automatically adjusts to your movement speed to catch up, such as you can see whenever you mount up and jump off a ledge where the pet has to go around, it tends to sprint to your location, way surpassing normal movement speed.
The AI being what it is obviously makes movement a bit iffy at times, it doesn’t always work as intended. Sometimes the pet won’t speed up in order to catch up, sometimes the pet simply stays there and doesn’t attempt to follow, even when there’s an available path to take nearby, etc.
Anyway, in short, the extra movement speed from Cunning pets wouldn’t ever be noticeable as long as the pet is on follow/passive, beyond the fact that your movement speed is ofc increased as well.
All the pet spec passive effects show up as a buff/aura effect, both on yourself, but also on your main pet. If you check, you’ll see that your Animal Companion gets none of them.
this made me curious, so i tested AC respawning against a tanking dummy and against random mobs outside valdrakken. in both cases it respawned within 10 seconds as long as my main pet was alive. i’d say it was an average of 5 seconds, with some variance up and down
No no no
Don’t lie…we play rock, paper, scissors, lizard, spock to determine the attack pattern 
Aight then, sounds like somewhat of an improvement, compared to before where the respawn timer was significantly longer.
That never works cause pets always pick ‘Rock’.
So what happens when your second pet doesn’t spawn at all?
So to be clear - the second pet doesn’t matter it’s purely cosmetic (as in different pets for the companion)? Even wether it’s tenacity or ferocious type it won’t do more or less damage?
right. it has no specialization or abilities of its own, it just auto-attacks and performs certain abilities that you initiate, like kill command
as a side note, pet specializations no longer affect how much damage pets deal anyway. the only difference is which “command pet” ability and passive effect the pet grants—primal rage & predator’s thirst, fortitude of the bear & endurance training, or master’s call & pathfinding
The only way it doesn’t spawn at all is if you either don’t have the Animal Companion talent selected or you do not have a pet in your Hunter Stable in the “1st slot”.
The hunter stable is not the pets you “carry” with you and can summon by using Call Pet 1, Call Pet 2 to Call Pet 5. You have to go to a Stable Master NPC, select the option for “I’d like to stable my pet here” (ignore the battle pets thing, doesn’t apply to hunter pets). Then there are 20 pages of additional hunter pets you can collect. Slot #1 is on Page 1, in the upper left corner. Essentially you must have collected 6 pets to use an Animal Companion: the 5 you “carry” with and can summon + 1 more in slot 1.
Once those conditions are met (pet in slot 1 of stable, animal companion talent selected in build), whenever you summon any hunter pet, the Animal Companion will automatically appear (usually after a 1-2 second delay). The AC doesn’t have a separate set of pet commands, whenever you do any pet related command both your main pet and the AC will obey it as well. For example, if you dismiss your main pet, the AC dismisses. If you activate Pet Passive, the AC becomes passive. If you use Kill Command, the AC attacks the target indicated, etc…
For the second pet I like to use the toads from Tanaan Jungle (SW part of the zone) as they stay about the size of a battle pet and it doesn’t really obscure your vision at all.
(Or you can get two Bat pets because you just want to watch the world burn)
It’s Sept 7 2024, it seems tonight that the AC has been replaced by a choice in the Talent tree? I hadn’t played my hunter for a while and then TWW launched and when I logged in, I had only 1 pet. But I got the 2nd back tonight by selecting something in the talent tree (my hunter is around lvl 40 rn). I’m wondering how to get more pets slotted and active?
You can only have two pets out at 100% of the time.
There are some talents like dire beast that will call other pets to temporarily fight for you.
Your talent choices were probably wiped, going into TWW. This being the reason why you only had one main pet on login. You get the second main pet by choosing the talent: Animal Companion, in your Beast Mastery spec talent tree.
You can select which pet you want as your second main(Animal Companion) by going to a city/settlement and talking to a ‘Stable Master’, to access your stables, where you can store all inactive pets that you don’t want to use at the time and, in general, manage any pets you have. This also includes choosing all your active pets. Since you’re not yet max level on your hunter, the number of active pets you can have is determined by how high level you are. I think, at level 40, you should be able to have 3/5 pets as active pets. The last two being unlocked at levels 41 and 48, unless they changed that.
Your second main pet(Animal Companion) is determined by what pet you’ve placed in the marked slot you see in the stable interface. The image linked below.
https://i.imgur.com/X6BrwYh.png