Pet Levelling - a Long Term Project

[Silverthorn]

I find that even for a WoW intensive player as myself, and even with time efficient pet leveling, say 1-2 hours per pet per day, it will take more than a year to reach 25 with all of them. By then, presumably there will be a new expansion and a new level cap, both for characters... and pets.

I've leveled most of the pets used in the various Tamer daily guides and now I'm not sure what would be the most effective approach to leveling the rest of my 400+ pets. I've raised everything to at least L5 and I'm being careful not to level non-rares past L15, of course. The only L1's I have right now are the pets I play to cage and trade at some point in the future.

Specifically, I'm looking to increase my average pet level the most for the least effort, should I focus on pushing the L5's to L10, say, rather than increasing the L20-24's to L25?

Thanks,
Silverthorn

[Kpb321]

If you want to increase your average pet level it is much easier to level the lower level pets quickly. A pair of 25's and a level 5 pet vs level 24 or 25 wild pets will get the level 5 pet a couple levels in my experience. It varies a little bit based on the level and quality of the pets you fight, any modifiers you have (hat/food) and exactly where your level 5 pet is in their current level. The only way to get that kinda increase in levels from a single fight for a level 20+ pet is with a tamer.

If you are looking to increase your score on this site however increasing your average pet level is going to be slow going. You get 4 X your average pet level in your score for a max possible of 100 points. With out even trying you seem to end up with a average pet level of around 10-12 which means there is really only 50-60 points available from leveling your pets. Since you have 545 pets to raise the average level of your pets by one point you'd need to get 545 levels combined. That would mean raising 109 pets from level 5 to 10.

You'll end up getting more points upgrading your 111 uncommon pets to rares. Glancing at them a lot were ones that would require a stone but you did have some wild pets left.

I'd say that it shouldn't take 2 hours to level one pet up to 25 with tamers. Personally, I've got alts logged at the three lower level tamers that give bags so I can quickly run a level one pet through those three and have them up to lvl 14. From there it's a few pandara tamers to lvl 24/25ish again depending on the specifics. No more than half an hour to do the pandara tamers needed to get that pet up and I haven't finished them all so I can start on a second or third pet. Lately I've been leaving pets at 23/24/25 as I still have a lot of wild pets to finish catching as rares so I can use that to finish off leveling pets instead of tamers.

[Gilneas]

Takes me about an hour per day to do 3 pets via the Pandaria tamers (plus a few extra wild battles). Leveling a pet from 1 to 25 in the wild doesn't even take an hour either. Your first ones can often take a while but once you've got more and get used to it, it goes much faster. I'm sitting at 375 now, and I do about 100+ pets a month now. I didn't really start leveling a lot of pets till December, and there have been stretches of time when I've not done it at all. So, I don't see it really taking a year to get all of my 552 pets to 25, even with the 30+ coming soon in 5.4. I'm guessing I'll be over 400 before it even comes. I expect to have them all at 25 before 6.0.

[NathKnave]

If you are looking to increase your score on this site however increasing your average pet level is going to be slow going. You get 4 X your average pet level in your score for a max possible of 100 points. With out even trying you seem to end up with a average pet level of around 10-12 which means there is really only 50-60 points available from leveling your pets.

This is true more than anything. It's easy enough to get a whole lot of pets to around level 15, after that increasing your average pet level slows to a crawl. If you plan on continuing further than that, I would suggest focusing on five to ten pets at a time, leveling them completely to 25 before choosing a new group of pets to level. While it doesn't actually count towards your Pet Score, you'll see your number of pets at max level increase. Seeing my average pet score go up by 0.1 or 0.2 after a day of battling made me feel like I was making very little progress, while seeing 20 or 30 more pets at max level after the same amount of time felt much more rewarding.

[Azrile]

I really don´t think it will take as long as you are saying. I have like 200 pets at lvl 25 and I only started doing pet battles in the spring ( one week after the owl stopped spawning). Probably 180 of them got to 25 just from doing daily quests. Almost all of the hardcore grinding I have done was getting pets from 1 to 10.

There are two things to do. First is as others mentioned, do your lowest pets first and team them with 2x25s. With the 25% food and the hat, you will go from 1 to 5, and then 5 to 8, and then 8 to 10 in 3 fights each, you will have all your low level pets to 10.

The other secret is to really maximize your dailies. Almost every daily has a 2-pet combination that will allow you to plug in a very low level pet. On my worst dailies, I can plug in a lvl 20 and still almost always win.. but for a lot of them, I can plug in pets as low as 8-12. If you are doing all the bag-giving dailies, that is a lot of really huge leaps for those pets. You will have to do some research to find which pets to use so you can use really low level pet in the 3rd slot.

[Simmias]

make sure you are using the 25%, 50% and helm when you are leveling for the added bonus. They all stack so your pets will be 25 in a few battles if you do so via tamers. Really fast lvling them in the val of the four winds vs critters as well. Get a power breed emp crab and go for gold.

[Worgenbait]

As an aside, I wouldn't use the trainers to level a level 23-24 pet, not if you are still looking for rares for some of your wild pets. Save the trainers for your lower level pets to maximize the xp gain, and use those 23-24 pets in rare hunting where they would still get xp, otherwise you could lose some of the potential xp gains when they hit 25.

[Beana]

It should be mentioned here too that for those... Richer wow players with busy jobs... There are people offering to level your pets for you. You can find many of their services on the pet trading US forums. I have had wonderful experiences. The downside is you lose time with your pet.. Meaning you don't learn their abilities or lack of abilities that way.

[Silverthorn]

I now have low level alts at most of the Tamer locations. A few are insecure enough they needed a higher level alt, but the majority of them are fine with L1 characters. Having alts stationed definitely speeds up my battles.

What are your favorite way(s) to win Battlestones?

Thanks,
Silverthorn

[Peanutty]

I now have low level alts at most of the Tamer locations. A few are insecure enough they needed a higher level alt, but the majority of them are fine with L1 characters. Having alts stationed definitely speeds up my battles.

What are your favorite way(s) to win Battlestones?

Doing all the trainers that give out bags every day, for sure (1 ea EK, Kalimdor, Outland, NR, Cata + all Pandaria + Pandaren spirits - I skip the beasts of fable but that gives you a bag as well). Not only will this net you a pretty good haul of stones over time (2 to 3 a day on average), it will speed the leveling of your pets along if you boost lower level pets with 25s. Once you get the routine down you will only need to spend a little over an hour a day to take out all the trainers and Pandaren spirits.

Other suggestion to get stones would be to trade for them, which really helped me speed up getting all rares.

If you're wondering about the efficiency of this, I'm sitting on maybe 100 stones now and will have all my pets at max level this week!

[Pinrut]

Another consideration is levelling your pets from level 1-20 in a safe place on an alt - I've levelled a number of toons from 85-90, one from about 72 to 90 and I'm levelling another from around 35-90 with pet battles. If you can find somewhere safe for them (like the phased Vale of Eternal Blossoms) it's the best bang for your buck - levelling an alt AND your pets at the same time!
It's also good because it gives me one place to send all of my bandages and xp buff food to.

I have a weird, ordered system for levelling my pets, if anyone wants me to type it out - I still have over 200 to level so I figured a system would help XD

[Tiggindy]

it will take more than a year to reach 25 with all of them.

Trust me, it doesn't.

Although it'll still take you months.

I've leveled most of the pets used in the various Tamer daily guides and now I'm not sure what would be the most effective approach to leveling the rest of my 400+ pets. I've raised everything to at least L5 and I'm being careful not to level non-rares past L15, of course.

That's a good start.

You want to do the dailies, then spend an hour or so stone hunting and leveling pets in wild battles.

If you haven't upgraded everything, then you want to do all the bag daily tamers each day. If you have alts you can park at each of the non-Pandaria tamers, that cuts down some time. Then there's the nice loop around Pandaria for the regular and spirit tamers. I wouldn't worry about the BoF since they give crappy exp, unless you don't have all the pandas and/or really want the extra stone chances.

Use the non-Pandaria tamers to bump up your low-level pets. Use Pandaria tamers to level to 25.

Once you have upgraded everything, then it's just Pandaria tamers dailies and wild fights to adjust pet levels.

Assuming you always wear your safari hat, there's certain points for efficient use of the Pandaria tamer XP. Level 10, level 15, level 19, level 21 and level 23.5. Each tamer fight will get you to the next point, and of course, a 23.5 pet will jump to 25 after a single fight. Aim to get your low level pets to one of those targets using the wild fights. You can level a 1 to 10 in 5 or 6 wild fights in Pandaria.

And to toot my own horn, here's a link to a thread.
http://www.warcraftpets.com/community/f ... f=3&t=3871

[Breehit]

I was using the same toon for all the tamers, under the assumption that this would improve the RNG for stones. Is this a wrong assumption? Does the "losing streak protection" that Blizzard introduced calculate your chances by account, or by toon? If its calculated by account, I am definitely going to switch to parking alts at the trainers to save time.

[Mystik_sok]

make sure you are using the 25%, 50% and helm when you are leveling for the added bonus. They all stack so your pets will be 25 in a few battles if you do so via tamers. Really fast lvling them in the val of the four winds vs critters as well. Get a power breed emp crab and go for gold.

25% is that sausage looking treat, where does the 50% come from?

[Kpb321]

make sure you are using the 25%, 50% and helm when you are leveling for the added bonus. They all stack so your pets will be 25 in a few battles if you do so via tamers. Really fast lvling them in the val of the four winds vs critters as well. Get a power breed emp crab and go for gold.

25% is that sausage looking treat, where does the 50% come from?

Weekly PVP quest for 10 wins.

[Kpb321]

I was using the same toon for all the tamers, under the assumption that this would improve the RNG for stones. Is this a wrong assumption? Does the "losing streak protection" that Blizzard introduced calculate your chances by account, or by toon? If its calculated by account, I am definitely going to switch to parking alts at the trainers to save time.

I don't think it has been established how it works. If it is by toon or account, if it is only per session or saved across multiple sessions, etc. Assuming it is saved across sessions then it shouldn't matter if it is per toon or account.

[Peanutty]

Assuming you always wear your safari hat, there's certain points for efficient use of the Pandaria tamer XP. Level 10, level 15, level 19, level 21 and level 23.5. Each tamer fight will get you to the next point, and of course, a 23.5 pet will jump to 25 after a single fight.

^ This. 23.5 is the magic number to jump to 25 on Pandaria tamers with the safari hat. The BC, NR, Cata master tamers are worth less but still worth doing; you will need approximately 24.5 to jump to 25.

Adding in the pet treats changes will lower the number by a bit of course. With 25% treat and safari hat, around 23.1 will jump to 25 on a Pandaria tamer. With 50% treat and hat, you're down in the high 22s. With 25% + 50% + hat (and I only learned last week that they stack) a 22.2 (or thereabouts) will jump to 25 in a single Panda tamer battle!

[Tiggindy]

I was using the same toon for all the tamers, under the assumption that this would improve the RNG for stones. Is this a wrong assumption?

I did all mine before the losing streak protection was put in, so I don't really know how little/much the losing streak protection actually affects things.

There's 16 bags you can get in a day. If you loop Pandaria, that's 11 of them on a single toon.

You have to ask yourself if you want to spend the extra travel time on the 5 non-Pandaria bags, or do you want to spend that time doing wild battles for (smaller) chances at stones you know you need rather than something that could turn out to be your 42nd undead stone?

[Ril]

honestly i don't make a fuss about it. even a new add on will never add the number of pet that's out already. currently, I spend maybe one day a week doing the tamer tour (starting in pandaria), and using both snacks and a hat, i finish all pandaria tamers and a bunch of other tamers (i go from newer to older expansion) by the time it runs out. that's enough to level a bunch of pets to 13 (or what was it?).

i just work through my list, priorising pets that i plan on using, good breed/quality combo, and level (starting from 1). i never do tamers with pets that are higher than 23.5, because that would be an xp waste.

tamer tours are very time consuming, as well as pet levelling, so i don't worry too much about it.

[Livingdeath]

It's an extremely long term project. I think it took me about 7 months, I finished last month. I pretty much did the Pandaria trainers and the Beast of Fables every single day. I took a month off for my sanity, but otherwise I just powered through. I've had a lot of long WoW projects over the years, but this has probably been the longest, most labor intensive and sometimes very mind numbing.

I saw some great tips here I have done myself. Beyond the normal tips like using pet modifiers... Never waste the pet xp. I liked to use wild battles against level 24-25s in Pandaria to get a lowbie pet to level 15 (like 3-4 battles?). After that, I use trainers to take the pet from 15 to 24ish, using wild battles to cap to 25.

I also highly suggest setting short term goals. That kept me sane. Like figuring out the best teams for the trainers. Or leveling all your level 1 pets to level 2. Or leveling all your level 2 to level 6 (in Pandaria). Leveling certain families. For example, I really like Mechs, so I used to always level those first. It also helps to make friends with other pet people. I think that has been my favorite thing about this all, I've made some really nice friends via WoW and Warcraftpets.