Pet breed question

[Furby]

Does it matter what breed they are? Is there a preferred breed for battling? Thanks I am new to all of this but totally hooke.

[Paladance]

Welcome to pet battling!
For a variety of cases, breeds are as important as rarity, if not more.
There can be one or two preferred breeds for particular pets, depending on the abilities in use and the opponents it faces.

As it is a very extensive subject I'd like you to ask more questions. I tend to go very TL;DR here and now I can't even decide which approach should I take.

[Furby]

Is there any where to read up on it? so many questions lol so if a pet is s/p does the order matter at all? so is a s/p better or worse than a p/s? I have just been farming all the rares I can working on my zookeeper achieve but want to make sure that I am not throwing away any ones with good stats.

[Quintessence]

Here's a general guide to Pet Breeds: https://www.warcraftpets.com/wow-pet-battles/breeds/
Discodoggy's more in-depth guide on Pet Breeds: http://pvppetbattles.com/breeds/

Determining "best breed" depends on the pet, its moveset, what you intend to use that pet for (PVE? Pet PVP?), and general player preference.

Here are a few very general concepts to start with (but keep in mind that these won't fit all pets):

• Power is preferred for pets with healing/shielding abilities, as this stat impacts how much they heal/shield for.
• Power Health is good for Humanoids because this increases their passive slightly (when they land an attack, they self-heal). (Thanks for the correction Paladance!)
• Speed is preferred for pets with dodge, evasion or "bonus hit when first" abilities.
• Health is great for Mechanical pets because they resurrect with a bit more health.
• Slow speed is good for Undead because it allows you to better utilize their one resurrected round.
• Since Flying pets already have a passive speed bonus, most battlers prefer Power or Health stats.
• B/B is usually not a very desirable breed, but not in all situations.

There's more, but this is just to get you started. If you have questions about the breeds of specific pets, there are more than a few knowledgeable veteran battlers here to help!

[Paladance]

S/P and P/S are the same, just the S/P spelling is rarely used. The usual seen H/P, P/S or H/S perhaps stem from a way the stats in the pet journal are displayed: Health first, then power, then speed.

Maybe it'd be nice to show which of your pets are the ones you ponder about. Each has their own pool of breeds available and there is a difference between choosing from 2 or from 10.

✑
Basic theory: https://www.warcraftpets.com/wow-pet-battles/breeds
A more complex one: https://www.warcraftpets.com/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15582#p123610 and later posts

Some threads or posts focused on particular pets suggesting what is important while making a decision:

• [url=https://www.warcraftpets.com/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16248]Breeds for Legion Pets[/url]
• [url=https://www.warcraftpets.com/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16350]Raiding With Leashes IV breeds[/url]
• [url=https://www.warcraftpets.com/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16882]Cavern Moccasin and Young Venomfang breeds[/url]
• [url=https://www.warcraftpets.com/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=15911#p127113]Bone Serpent -- factorised![/url]

A bit biased, because this is just what I can keep in mind (or bookmarks ), but I'm sure the other people have their own worthy tips.

EDIT: Ah outrun! But the humanoids' self-heal is based on a health percentage, not power. I get what this could come from though!
EDIT2: No problem. ^^

[Furby]

I am currently trying to get all the pets use to farm the battle masters I found on wow pet guide website I will read all these thanks so much guys!

[Gráinne]

https://www.warcraftpets.com/wow-pet-battles/breeds/

takes you around the arithmetic of breeds, but doesn't tell you which breed for which pet, which is what you are asking.

S/P would be the same as P/S, but as a convention we always put them in the order H, P, S, B.

Since a pet gets a bonus for putting all its points into one breed, there is a bonus for the pure breeds H/H, P/P, S/S. And even mixed breeds like H/P will have more than the even more mixed "B" breeds like H/B or B/B.

How to know which breed of a pet is best, for what purpose, gets pretty advanced, and it can be a close call anyhow.

For your purposes for now, remember that in principle there is no best breed for a pet. There is a best breed for a moveset with an intended use.

Consider Rabbits. There are a lot of Rabbits, all with the same moves.

If you use the moveset
[ability]Flurry[/ability]
[ability]Dodge[/ability]
[ability]Burrow[/ability]
then your stat priority will be Speed. Every one of those abilities relies on going first, which means you need to be faster than your opponent.

If you use the moveset
[ability]Scratch[/ability]
[ability]Adrenaline Rush[/ability]
[ability]Stampede[/ability]
then while Speed is always good, of course, your focus will be on Power to do more damage, or Health to survive longer.

However, for a lot of pets there is one moveset that is usually better for most situations, and the breed that is best for that moveset is overall best for the way you use that pet.

[Lordy]

In PvE its probably best to collect a variety of breeds for pets with similar ability sets or even the same pet to match the best stats with the various NPC opponents you might come across. In general though breed usually doesn't matter that much in PVE. Its more to do with choosing the best matched pets to counter the opposing team.

Speed is almost always best for pets in PVP as getting off that one extra attack before your opponent is often the difference between winning and losing and allows you to get the best out of avoidance and mitigation effects like dodge or survival. However when choosing a breed its also important to look at what actual stats the specific breed will get you.

You want to be faster than your opponent but you don't want to be too much faster or you will have wasted stats probably better spent in health or power. There are for example a lot of pets that have a speed of 189 and 125. Therefore if your pet has a speed of 205 for example it will be faster than a good many pets you will run up against but a speed of 122 will not really be much better as so few typical pets speeds fall in between. Similarly if even a speed breed will not bring up a pet's speed level with the current meta you might as well ignore it altogether and get the maximum benefit from health and or power instead. An extreme example are snails where even the fastest snail will be slower than the slowest opponent you are likely to meet.

[Gráinne]

I was up early, with nothing to do, so I did a breed survey. What do people choose?

When I was starting out, I kept looking up the rosters of people who knew more than I did, and had battled more than I had. So I wondered whether I could crowdsource a popular breeds list from active battlers' collections.

I picked 12 well-known battlers - posters, YouTubers and guide-makers. Two of them didn't have 600 Blue 25s, which I had set as a criterion, and at least one of those is inactive, so I picked another, and added my own collection as the twelfth (hubris, I know!).

I used the excellent petsear.ch to extract spreadsheets of the collections.

Method: all 12 collections were downloaded, and all pets other than Blue 25s were removed, leaving 10893 pets. These were analysed for breed. Each line in this text file shows
Species Name
Total Count of that Species (out of a possible maximum of 36, or 12)
The number of pets for each represented breed.

Interpretation Note 1: Some species have only one possible breed.

Interpretation Note 2: Many species have different breeds that are better in different situations. For example, a P/P Power breed of Ore Eater may be ideal for situations where its shield must mitigate a large hit, while an S/S Speed breed may be necessary to take the move advantage in others. Many of the excess pets may be collected to be available for different encounters.

Interpretation Note 3: Many groups of species, notably Rabbits, Snakes and Beetles, have the same battle characteristics of moveset, and may have the same or slightly different base stats. For example, there are several possible species of rabbit that provide a 357 speed, and are identical for battling purposes. In such cases, collectors may choose for example a 357-speed Spring Rabbit, and then not care what breed of Alpine Hare they have, or deliberately choose other, perhaps sub-optimal breeds for their other rabbits. If you are using this list to choose breeds for yourself on the basis of the most popular breed, be aware of any moveset duplicates and take them into account in your decision.


The resulting list is at https://pastebin.com/UE8TSGGs

[Paladance]

@Lordy, are you sure about the speed values, as in numbers? I have more than a feeling that some digits of the hundreds are shifted.
Other than that, a nice piece of advice.

*sobs on Gráinne's shoulder*

When it comes to duplicates, yes, some pets may be kept in two breeds and it doesn't mean they bear an identical "weight" when one wants to generalise it.
Also, I can see something that seems merely a trifle but isn't very good for statistics.
For example, if there are 9 specimina noticed, it won't tell you whether they belong each alone to 9 people, or 3 people happened to have 3 of these, or any other combination. I sense some people keep duplicates of one breed aswell, so it'd be difficult to deduce whether a particular one is preferred by a broader group of people.

Note #3 is very important aswell.
I see [pet]Frostfur Rat[/pet] as an interesting sample why, as the [pet]Blind Rat[/pet] introduction might have changed the perception (is this a pun yet? ) and therefore priorities. And yes, it is really complicated when you can have identical breeds and movesets but different base values. Compare [pet]Mongoose[/pet], [pet]Kuitan Mongoose[/pet] and [pet]Mongoose Pup[/pet] -- each has a different S/S case and only one of them has normal base health.

EDIT: [pet]Autumnal Sproutling[/pet] = RNG fest hasn't ended yet?

[Gráinne]

Paladance, yes I could have further broken down the distribution of breeds across collections, but the results were already long. I have described my method, so anyone interested can look these things up for themselves. It doesn't take long.

Reading down the list, I think it serves a purpose for anyone who wants to consult it.

Suppose a newcomer wants to know what breed to target for a pet.

Excluding the non-unique species like rabbits and snakes, if the newcomer hunts or buys the most popular spec for a pet in that list, I believe they will feel they have not wasted their time or their gold.

Yes, a long-time player may want multiple breeds of pets like Bone Serpent, Starlette, or Anklerender, but I do not think there is an example in that list where a new player choosing the most collected breed will later regret collecting it.

Anyway, I wasn't doing it for a guide; just because I was bored.

[Lordy]

@Lordy, are you sure about the speed values, as in numbers? I have more than a feeling that some digits of the hundreds are shifted.
Other than that, a nice piece of advice.

No problem. And yes your quite right I must have had a mind blank that day. I meant to type two very common speeds I run up against in PvP are 289 and 325 (Assuming lvl 25 Blue quality).

[Uduwudu]

Hi,

In general, my "basic" choices are power and speed, and the difference in these pets. As was mentioned, if I need speed for this fight, this and that gets taken and then ... and so it goes.

But I have some intentional doubles, that really show some differences, and yet, also show their effectiveness. The best examples are the Iron Starlettes, and then, the Unborn Val'kyr, both of which are worth having for their different stats. You can see the difference in the two Starlettes when fighting the two brothers in Stormheim, if you have 2 characters that are 110 (you don't yet? You gotta be kidding me!), and can swap which one foes first and you can easily see the difference. In the UV's case, there are, for example, a couple of strategies that the UV plugs the CoD and then pastes Haunt, and if you use the other UV, you can plug in a damage spell after the CoD and save the Haunt for when it dies, and she becomes much more serviceable and useful all around. The strat appears to have used the UV whose stype needs to be a bit more defensive, and she won't have to do much in the offensive series, and you can save her for another half round at the end, if needed.

It's an interesting thing, and it's the same if you use 2 (different) Fawns from Val'sharah, on the rather frustrating fight (at times) in Gorgrond. One of them makes it and the other doesn't. But the one that doesn't, is excellent in other conditions, where it's offensive ability couples well with its basic shield and slight heal.

It all simply goes to help you define your own style. I'm not convinced there is a right/wrong way of doing all this, and I take many of the suggestions here when trying many of the fights, and I like reading some of the comments here, and the attempts to make it a generalized point that it is how this is, and the case shows that there is no generalized point, and our speed and power strategies, in many cases, are being countered by Blizzard fighters that can double up their abilities with a mix that you can not have, which makes the fights harder. Then, it becomes a bit like PvP, I guess, in that you have to swap pets quickly, so you don't lose that round so fast that the fight is over!