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.

pet sounds

Here’s news for Hunters:  Blizz has added your pets and their talents to your character talent page in the armoury.

That will give us a lot of new insight into the types of creatures that make the most popular pets, and how players spend pet talent points. The XML is straightforward and contains no quirks and so I’m cranking up the SQL editor as we speak.

I’ll try and have the new reports ready before the next refresh of my data. As to when that will be, well, about a week after Patch 3.2 drops. As to when that will be… well…