gimme some skin

Thanks to everybody over at Mania’s who said nice things about my hunter pets report. One thing that I got from that discussion is that hunters care a lot about the look of their pets as well as their DPS.  To help with that, I can now present a report on the skins used on the various types of pets and how rare or not each skin is.

So, for example, we have this for bats:

Skin	Popularity
batskinwhite01	39.6%
batskinbrown01	31.9%
batskinviolet01	16.7%
batskin01	11.1%
Unknown	0.7%

You can jump from each skin name over to Petopia, where you can see the art, and find the creatures that you need to tame to get the look.

Special thanks go to Wayne, who not only gave me a bit of a prod to Just Do It, but gathered up all the pets-to-skins data that makes the report possible.

tenacious p

Or not… Ferocious, more than tenacious, it would seem. The next report in my series on hunter pets is up here. This one covers pet talents.

The most interesting numbers come from ignoring pet types and just consolidating the talent data across the three trees. For example, if we just get a count of each of tree we have this:

Ferocity	68%
Tenacity	22%
Cunning	9%

Of course this is a reflection of the popularity of the different creature types, but it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem – if hunters wanted the talents in the other trees they would just get different pets.

The thing I’m having a bit of trouble with is reporting on popular builds. For example, the most popular ferocity-based build is this one, which goes with cats, wolves and other non-flying ferocity-based pets. Part of its popularity comes from the fact that it can be applied to both cats and wolves – the two most common pet types.

But to link that build to either the Blizz or Wowhead calculators, I need to provide a specific pet family (I’ve set that link up for cats) even though I want to show consolidated build stats and not builds by each pet family.

My question to you is this: if I just set up all the links using just one pet type (one ground and one flying type, for each tree), would it be clear that this was consolidated data ?

cat on a hot tin roof

Mmmm… I’m lovin’ my Google App Engine site. So easy to update.

Here’s a consolidated list of the most popular hunter pets for each of the pet families.

the menagerie

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.