First the whole pet battle system is similar to Rock Paper Scissors, except it’s 8 pet groups… meaning a certain group is weak, average, or strong against another group of pets. Ideally against the real fights, you need a strong group.
Your basic pet stables, you want at least 3 of each pet group, to take advantage of the Rock Paper Scissors setup. No real advantage in having a bunch of flying pets, when only 3 can fight.
A big trick, for the cage, there is an achievement, Pro Pet Crew, where you level a number of pets to 25, you get an exquisite cage… so using that 25 stone is not the best method, better to use a lesser stone, getting them to 23 or 24, then hit 25 in a battle.
It’s a toon ability, to heal and resurrect pets… I suggest you keybind it, and use it after every fight… better than bandaids or paying pet trainers.
A dead pet gets no experience., a pet has to do damage, to get experience… best to swap them out as needed.
Seems like in the biginning, you did have to fight em to get experience, Can’t say I remember, and it doesn’t matter what was when, just what’s true now.
Bottomline, it’s a pretty time consuming grind to build a decent stable from scratch.
I still maintain that pet levels are an obsolete and out-moded part of the pet battle system. Only useful when there was at most 100 pets in the game. Seriously. No one likes grinding the garrison event to level up 500 - 1000 pets. Sub level 25 pets are irrelevant to any of the achievements/pvp events/dungeons. About the only reason anyone likes a level 1 pet is because they use level 1’s to cheese pet battle WQ’s. Well guess what. If you have to cheese a pet battle WQ then those WQs aren’t for you in the first place. Same way non-pvpers don’t do pvp WQs.
There’s a reason why pet max level hasn’t moved beyond 25 in years. Imagine if blizz bumped the max pet level by 5 every expac. People would go nuts due to the sheer number of pets there are and how their collections would basically become obsolete every time. Imagine having to grind 5 levels on 1500+ pets every expac.
You need a Terrible Turnip pet. They are amazing at capturing as they have an attack that can’t kill the pet they are attacking (it can’t reduce them to less than one hit point).
I use a Molten Corgi to do capturing. (Like Terrible Turnip it has an ability to not take an opponent below one health.)
When I first started battling, I leveled up several pets. However, I find I use less than ten. My favorite is the Iron Starlette. Ashmaw Cub, Tiny Snowman and Ikky are up there.
I highly recommend Dust Bunny, which you can get from the Legion Dalaran.
Darkmoon Faire has several great pets you can earn. When I first started doing pet battles, I had my paladin do everything in DF and bought the Tonk. (Since then I’ve bought them all, but still haven’t won Syd the Squid in two years!)
As an aside, I leveled my Shaman from 60-65 doing nothing but pet battles, trying to do all the quest chains.
Also note that opponents don’t always scale to your pets, like with VonFeasel. I keep alot of level 1 pets for those which do scale. (And there’s Rotgut on Maldraxxus that I’ve still yet to beat, though haven’t tried in about a year. One problem is I leveled my good pets!)
PS. I now level mostly with charms; I have several thousand. BfA wasn’t as generous with charms, but still handed out alot. If you have BfA and are short on charms, go to Mechagon. The pet trainer there is close to pet opponents, so you can get heals very quickly. (The trick is to get two level 25 pets and have your low level pet do one round and then swap in your heavy hitters.)
This is a wild critter pet battle in pandaria? Get a cat. There is a house just outside stormwind in elwyn foreat that has a lady that sells cats. Get the one called Cornish Rex cat. Use your stone to make it 25. I imagine you could capture a wild critter in pandaria with that one pet. Might have to try a few times if you get unlucky on what secondary pets show up.
That’s alright! It means that character already has the training and that’s in important part. Too bad she no longer gives you any little in game tutorial text…
If you just want the one I’d still just grab three cheap 25s off the AH and just head over to Pandaland.
When you capture a wild one they will lose a few levels but that won’t be too much trouble and you’ll have that companion on all of your characters.
I think getting into it wouldn’t be terrible though, it can be fun content. I enjoy catching all the wild ones soon as a new area opens.
Iron Starlette is great. I use it all the time. Unborn Valkyr + Zandalari Kneebiter/Ikky is a great and very often used combo. I personally love using moths. I use the Arcane Eye for magic a lot of the time. Darkmoon Cub as my beast a lot – a lot of the cats have Devour which heals them when they kill the pet. Lil Bling is a decent mechanical pet. Anubisath Idol is also good to have.
That’s a Great place to start on getting advice on pet battles.
If you have a garrison, the pet arena there is also a good place to get practice and level pets.
Tip: Any Yellow pet paw on the map is a pet battler that will level the pet with your pets, so if you have level 1s, their pets will be level ones.
If you’re alliance, pet battling outside Stormwind is a great place to level and get practice for 1-5 around. If you’re Horde, it’s not as convenient, but also can be done.
