the menagerie
July 13, 2009
Allrighty then… hunter pets. I’ve built a little test database with about 10K level 80 hunters – just big enough to test the reports that I want to develop. Let’s have a poke around in there and see what we can see.
Most hunters have three or four pets:
| Number of Pets | Count |
| 5 | 1507 |
| 4 | 2582 |
| 3 | 2853 |
| 2 | 1746 |
| 1 | 676 |
As to the popularity of the available pet families, we have this:
| Family | Count |
| Cat | 9507 |
| Wolf | 5014 |
| Gorilla | 2178 |
| Devilsaur | 2037 |
| Core Hound | 1897 |
| Bear | 1625 |
| Raptor | 1011 |
| Spirit Beast | 980 |
| Bird of Prey | 909 |
| Ravager | 784 |
| Boar | 709 |
| Rhino | 696 |
| Crab | 691 |
| Scorpid | 678 |
| Wasp | 593 |
| Worm | 572 |
| Spider | 549 |
| Chimaera | 503 |
| Wind Serpent | 475 |
| Warp Stalker | 418 |
| Crocolisk | 360 |
| Turtle | 303 |
| Dragonhawk | 285 |
| Serpent | 234 |
| Silithid | 188 |
| Carrion Bird | 183 |
| Hyena | 160 |
| Moth | 127 |
| Bat | 108 |
| Tallstrider | 98 |
| Nether Ray | 70 |
| Sporebat | 43 |
Hunters do like their cats. The final report will have an analysis of the most popular creatures in each category, along with links out to Wowhead.
Next, I’ll be looking at pet talents. What surprised me greatly is that just under half of all the pets in the sample have no talent points assigned at all. This seems to be a problem caused by combining pet talents with dual specs. There are a couple of threads on the official forums complaining about this, along with a discussion over at Mania’s. A dual specced hunter will have all their pets’ talents reset every time they switch out of a BM spec – that’s my understanding of the issue.
That might become a tad annoying, to say the least. Talent respec shell shock seems to be setting in all over the place at the moment.
July 14, 2009 at 5:29 am
Interesting.
I guess the one that pops ‘up’ in the armory is the one they logged out with, but it would be interesting to know which is used the most.
I have a cat in the stables but rarely use it as an example.
I read something yesterday that mentioned for raiders to make sure to log out in pve gear if you’re guild hopping. I wouldn’t have thought of that before!
July 14, 2009 at 7:02 am
For what it’s worth, I think the way it is currently working (which is a bit different than it was at first) is that your pet’s talents reset only *when it is called out* again (relevant because it is auto-dismissed on talent spec swapping), and only if it had 20 points assigned (IE the hunter had Beast Mastery talent) and you switched to a spec that doesn’t have that talent. This isn’t too bad as long as you have multiple pets you use for different things. Swap specs, use Call Stabled Pet (or stable master), badda bing – done, no resetting.
Early on IIRC they were resetting even if you switched from say marks to BM, and even if you dismissed your pet before the swap. I’m sure someone will correct me if I am wrong about the details, but in my experience I haven’t had any inadvertance pet spec resets lately.
July 14, 2009 at 10:41 am
There doesn’t seem to be measure of “pet mileage” in the data. It would be very useful indeed to see which ones are being actively used.
July 15, 2009 at 5:01 am
It’s probably not possible to collect data on which pets are being actively used from the armory.
If only 43 out of over 10,000 hunters even have a sporebat, it’s pretty safe to assume that most hunters don’t use them.
July 16, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Hey, I don’t know if you do requests or not, but I’d like to make a suggestion to set your mining machine on, if you get the time: the number (exact, or at least a pretty good idea) of Ancient Grimtotem Spirit Guides owned (that’s the ghost wolf that got put in and taken back out a year and a half ago). It’s for a pretty selfish reason… I have one, and I’d be really thrilled to have a number to attach to how many are still around (also, to give a number to the rarity of the pet in case I ever decide to sell my account
)
Rasta – Twisting Nether (US)
July 16, 2009 at 10:45 pm
That’s an easy one. I’ll get the count tomorrow; I’m away from the database at the moment. Unfortunately, because my sample is so small, we may not see many, or even any… but who knows.
You’re welcome to remind me about this when you see me updating the site for patch 3.2. I’ll have a much larger sample size then, which should help when tracking down the rare beasties.
July 17, 2009 at 12:07 am
I notice on your next post Rak’Shiri does not show up at all under cats. I know I’ve seen him quite a bit, not as much as the generic purple one. Did Rak’shiri show up differently in the database and it’s just so low it didn’t make the cut into the table?
I’d be interested in the % of horde hunters with ghost sabers. Or alliance with the pink strider. etc
July 17, 2009 at 5:04 am
“A dual specced hunter will have all their pets’ talents reset every time they switch out of a BM spec – that’s my understanding of the issue.”
Not exactly – one of my hunters is dual BM/MM and I’ve found you can avoid any pet talent reset if you follow these simple steps:
1) When you switch specs, your current pet is auto-dismissed – the thing to remember here is that he is protected from talent resets *as long as you don’t resummon him while in the new spec*
2) So, once you’ve switched specs, go straight to a stablemaster and swap your current pet for one that you *only* use with the current spec; he appears with his full set of talents and the one you stabled retains his talents since that doesn’t count as a “summon”.
3) This means you need to plan ahead and “reserve” some pets just for use with BM spec and only use the rest with your other spec – deviating from this *will* result in a pet talent reset.
4) As a side note, if you switch *to* BM spec and summon the same pet without stabling, I believe he will retain his talents; not 100% on this one but I do seem to recall it happening, however if you then switch back to non-BM and resummon that pet, his talents are then wiped – even if you hadn’t assigned the +4 BM pts.
5) and as you probably already know, this only matters if one of your specs is BM51, i.e. the Beastmastery talent is the thing that specifically causes the troubles.
Hope this helps.
July 17, 2009 at 5:08 am
Also, as a suggestion it might be helpful to filter between pets that have talents assigned and those that don’t, since the former are more likely to be the “primary” pets while the latter are more likely to be the “trophy” pets (like Garwal) or just pets the hunter rarely if ever gets around to playing
July 17, 2009 at 10:55 am
Rasta: There
is 1are 89 Ancient Grimtotem Spirit Guides in the sample of 44861 pets, which gives some rough idea of its rarity. Do remember that random sampling really is only accurate for the “big picture” and may not be so good for rare events and edge cases.Yunk: That’s a good suggestion on looking at horde and alliance with each other’s pets. I’ll add it to my ‘to do’ list. There are
zero427 Rak’shiris in the sample of 44861 pets.Scott: Yes, pets with no talents should be discounted but in the current sample nearly 50% don’t have talents which makes me a bit nervous about applying rules like that. I’ll have another look when I’ve got 3.2 data as the talent situation may be more “normal” by then.
Oops! Used the wrong query – counts are corrected now.
July 17, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Apologies for the stuff-up in my last reply. I just realized that I used the pet family key and not the creature key in the database query. D’Oh!. The counts are correct now.
July 17, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Interesting list! Thanks. Aside from the popularity of each npc tamed, it would have been interesting to analyse popularity by pet skin, since hunters are more often going for a particular look rather than a particular npc. The current list might give the impression that a certain skin is less popular if there are more varieties of tameable beasts that have it. But that would take a lot more work, as you’d have to fish the skins for each npc out of a database somewhere (“Wowhead?) and then add up all the ones with the same skin. I’m not sure how easy getting the skin info would be.
July 17, 2009 at 5:20 pm
“Skins” is an interesting one. Wowhead does have model and skin information but it would take some effort to relate that data to what I have here. A Google search isn’t turning up any simple list, but I’ll try and see what I can do.
July 17, 2009 at 5:50 pm
While I can’t find one huge table, you can go to this page:
http://www.wowhead.com/?pets
Then click on a family and it’ll bring up a full sortable table of tameable beasts of that family, and their skins.
There is a caveat to this, however. There are a small number of beasts in the game that can change skin colour each time they’re summoned by the hunter (usually because the wild beast can appear in multiple skins). So while Wowhead lists them as having one particular skin, it’s really not that simple. Petopia lists them under “Color Changers” on this page:
http://www.wow-petopia.com/html/browse/browse_qualities.html
Basically: Rip-Blade Ravager, Savage Worg, Sentry Worg, Cavedweller Worg, Deep Borer, Dredge Worm. They’d probably have to be assigned their own “color change” skin, but at least it’s only a few anomalies
July 17, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Yes, I’ve had a look at the Wowhead data. What we need is in there, but I’d need to parse it out and add stuff to my database in order to make things work. I’ll add it to my ‘to-do’ list – I can see from the discussion over at Mania’s that there is a real demand for this information.
July 18, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Cool
If you want me to fish and tabulate out any of the skin data for you, I’m more than happy to.
July 19, 2009 at 12:21 am
That would be great. I’ll have another look at the problem tomorrow (Sunday) and send you an email. A simple csv file with skins-to-npc-id should be all that’s needed.
July 20, 2009 at 11:16 am
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