WoW Forever Hunter Pets Guide

Hunter pets in WoW Forever still run on the loop Classic players remember: loyalty, happiness, Beast Training and the hunt for a beast that already knows the ability you want. Almost everything around that loop has changed, though. Pets scale with your gear and no longer take party buffs, each of the 18 families has an ability no other family can learn, owls are now Birds of Prey, and foxes join as a new family with Trickster's Dance. The family you tame matters far more than it did in Classic.

Below, we walk through your first tame at level 10, loyalty and training points, every family and its unique ability, and which beasts teach each one. We also cover how attack speed and gear scaling shape your pet's damage, the rare beasts worth camping, and the best pet for leveling, dungeons and PvP.

How Hunter Pets Work in WoW Forever

Your pet in WoW Forever is a stat-scaling companion rather than a fixed-strength beast. It now draws stats from your gear, so every upgrade you equip makes the pet stronger too. In return, buffs from other players that raise its stats no longer land on it, so a Blessing of Kings or a scroll does nothing for your cat.

The pet copies your critical strike chance, using whichever is higher, melee or ranged, and it benefits from Expertise. Its Focus refills in a smooth stream rather than in the old ticks.

The bigger change is the families themselves. In Classic, six families (bears, crabs, crocolisks, hyenas, spiders and tallstriders) had nothing of their own, while bats, owls and carrion birds all shared Screech. In Forever, every family has one ability that no other family can learn, Screech is gone, owls are renamed Birds of Prey, and foxes are added as an 18th family. Every family can also learn Bite or Claw, some both, plus either Dash or Dive.

The table sums up what is different from the Classic pet system.

The rest of the Classic loop is intact: you still tame beasts to learn their abilities, earn loyalty, keep your pet happy with food and spend training points in Beast Training. Aggressive Mode is back on the pet tab of the spellbook as well.

Pets are only one part of the class rework, and our WoW Forever Hunter guide covers the new shots, traps, Aspects and specs.

How to Get Your First Pet in WoW Forever

Hunters get their first pet at level 10 through a class quest chain from the hunter trainer in their starting area. The trainer hands you a Taming Rod and asks you to tame three local beasts one after another. A rod tame stays with you for 10 minutes and exists to teach you the process. Once all three are done, Training the Beast sends you on to unlock Beast Training, and from then on you can tame any beast you like.

Here is how the chain looks for two of the starting areas.

The Skyborne chain includes a fox, the Vuldren Alpha, a winged fox from Zephras Isle, so a Skyborne Hunter gets to try the new family at level 10.

Taming Rules

A few rules decide whether a tame works at all.

• You can only tame a beast at or below your own level.
• You cannot tame while you already have a pet, even a dismissed one. Put your current pet in the stable or release it first.
• Tame Beast is a 20-second channel that costs 60% of your base Mana and reduces your armor by 100% while you channel.
• The tame fails if the beast loses its attention on you, so anything that makes it switch targets breaks the channel.
• A freshly tamed pet starts out unhappy and disloyal, so feed it right away.

The stable holds two pets next to the one at your side. Many players keep one stable slot free for the beasts they tame only to learn an ability.

Taming Tips for Hunters in WoW Forever

The 20-second channel is the dangerous part of every tame, because you stand there with no armor while the beast chews on you. These habits make it much safer, especially on elites and rares.

1. Switch to Aspect of the Monkey before you start. The extra dodge means fewer hits land during the channel.
2. Drop a Freezing Trap at your feet, hit the beast with Concussive Shot from max range, and start Tame Beast while it runs in. It reaches the trap, freezes, and only gets a few hits on you before the tame completes.
3. Clear your target right after Concussive Shot, or Auto Shot keeps firing and can kill the beast you wanted.
4. Feed the new pet straight away, so its happiness does not crash if it dies in the first fight.

Finding the beast is often harder than taming it. Use Eagle Eye to scout a spawn point from a distance, and keep a target macro with the beast's name on your bar. It finds the beast even when it is hidden behind terrain:

/tar The Rake

Before you tame anything for damage, check its attack speed. Target the beast and run this script, which prints the time between its attacks in chat:

/run mainSpeed, offSpeed = UnitAttackSpeed("target") print(format("%s: attack speed = %.2f", GetUnitName("target"), mainSpeed))

Rare beasts on long timers are easiest at off-peak hours. Players camping them also log out just before a server restart and run to the spawn as soon as the realm comes back.

Pet Loyalty, Happiness and Feeding

Loyalty and happiness are two separate meters, and both matter. Happiness is your pet's mood right now and directly changes how hard it hits. Loyalty is the long-term bond, and it decides how many training points your pet has to spend on abilities.

Happiness and Pet Damage

A happy pet deals 125% damage, a content pet 100% and an unhappy one only 75%. The pet portrait shows the current state in green, yellow or red. Happiness drops when your pet dies and when you dismiss it, and Dismiss Pet alone costs 50 happiness, so leave the pet out and let it follow you instead. Outside of those two events, happiness drains slowly.

Feed Pet raises happiness, and food close to your pet's level works best. You cannot feed in combat, so top the pet up after a tame, after a death and after every dismissal.

Loyalty Levels

A newly tamed pet starts at the lowest of six loyalty levels and climbs as you fight together while it is happy. Mobs that give you no experience do not count. An unhappy pet loses loyalty instead.

1. Rebellious
2. Unruly
3. Submissive
4. Dependable
5. Faithful
6. Best Friend

Pet Diets by Family

Each family eats only certain kinds of food, and Feed Pet does nothing with the wrong kind. Bears and boars eat everything a vendor sells, which makes them the easiest pets to keep happy on the road. Foxes, the new family, eat meat only.

How Hunter Pets Learn Abilities

Your pet does not learn new abilities or ranks on its own as it levels. You learn an ability yourself from a beast that already knows it, then teach it to your pet through Beast Training using training points. The game explains little of this, and it is easy to reach level 20 with a pet that still knows only what it was tamed with.

Learning an Ability from a Wild Beast

Every family ability, Bite, Claw, Dash, Dive and Cower is learned this way.

1. Stable or release your current pet, so the pet slot is empty.
2. Tame a beast that knows the ability and rank you want.
3. Fight with it and let it use the ability until the chat says you have learned it. This can take a couple of minutes of repeated use.
4. Utility abilities such as slows are not always used on autocast, so click them on the pet bar yourself to speed things up.
5. Release or stable the teacher, call your real pet back and teach it the ability in Beast Training.

Once learned, the ability stays in your Beast Training list for good, and you can teach it to any future pet of a family that can use it. Ranks work the same way: every rank needs its own teacher, and your pet must be high enough level for that rank.

Not every beast of a family knows its family ability, and Beast Lore does not reliably show what a wild beast knows. The next sections list beasts that are known to teach each ability.

What the Pet Trainer Teaches

The pet trainer stands next to the hunter trainer in each capital and sells the passive skills that no wild beast teaches. Buying a skill only adds it to Beast Training, so open Beast Training afterwards and spend the points on it.

Training Points and the Four-Ability Limit

Training points come from loyalty: the pet earns more points with each loyalty level, and a level 60 pet at Best Friend has 300 to spend. A beast tamed at a high level starts at Rebellious with few points, and can even start below zero until its loyalty climbs. A pet can have four active abilities on its bar at once.

You can reset a pet's training at the pet trainer for a fee, which refunds every point. Be careful with that: in Forever a pet's attack speed counts as one of its abilities, so a reset also removes its Faster Attack passive and drops the pet back to the base 2.0 attack speed. That passive comes only with the beast you tamed, and no trainer can give it back.

All Hunter Pet Families and Their Abilities

WoW Forever has 18 hunter pet families, and each one has an ability no other family can learn. That unique ability is the real reason to pick one family over another: a crocolisk brings a healing debuff, a spider a ranged root, a wolf an Attack Power buff for the whole group. Every family also learns Bite, Claw or both for steady damage, plus Dash or Dive to keep up with you.

The values below are for the highest rank of each ability as of the October 15 beta build, and the level column shows when the first rank becomes available to your pet.

The October 15 beta build nerfed three of these abilities hard. Dismember went from 50% healing reduction for 10 seconds on a 6-second cooldown to 25% for 6 seconds on a 15-second cooldown. Sonic Blast went from 60% slower casting for 30 seconds every 30 seconds to 30% for 20 seconds every minute. Mine! lost a second of disarm and now has a 90-second cooldown instead of 60. Furious Howl had already lost 40% of its Attack Power bonus in the September 25 build.

On top of the family abilities, all pets share a few skills: Growl to hold threat, Cower to drop it, and the passive stamina, armor and resistance skills from the pet trainer.

Where to Learn Hunter Pet Abilities in WoW Forever

To teach your pet a family ability, you first need a beast that knows it. The table lists the teachers confirmed in beta testing for the abilities players chase most. The October 2 build corrected several beasts that knew ranks too high for their level, so if a beast stops teaching a rank, check one of the alternatives.

The dungeon teachers need a plan, because you cannot tame with a pet out. Bring a cheap pet you are happy to release, or tame a throwaway beast outside the entrance, and ask your group to wait while you tame. In Wailing Caverns, a common trick is to tame the Deviate Crocolisk only long enough to learn Dismember, then release it and tame a crocolisk closer to your level that already knows a higher rank of Bite.

We could not confirm a teacher for Web, Mine!, Pinch, Tendon Rip, Dust Cloud, Savage Rend or Trickster's Dance from beta testing, so check a beast's pet bar right after you tame it.

Bite and Claw Ranks While Leveling

Bite and Claw are your pet's main damage, and a pet a rank or two behind feels weak. These beasts carry the ranks that matter most from level 10 to 30.

Orcs and Trolls usually start with an Encrusted Surf Crawler for Claw 2 or an Elder Mottled Boar for Charge, then pick up Bite 2 from an Oasis Snapjaw in The Barrens at 15. Bite 4 at pet level 24 is one of the biggest early jumps in pet damage.

Pet Attack Speed and Faster Attack

Every pet in WoW Forever swings at a base speed of 2.0 seconds. A beast that attacks faster or slower in the wild carries a hidden passive, Faster Attack or Slower Attack, and keeps it once you tame it. You will see it in the pet's spellbook. No trainer sells these passives, so the only way to get a fast pet is to tame a fast beast, and the only way to lose that speed is to reset the pet's training.

There are seven Faster Attack ranks and two Slower Attack ranks. The last column shows the time between attacks each rank gives on top of the 2.0 base.

Beasts that already had a fast attack in Classic keep it in Forever. Broken Tooth in the Badlands is still the 1.0 cat, The Rake in Mulgore swings at 1.2, and common cats like the Savannah Patriarch in The Barrens and the Moonstalkers of Darkshore attack every 1.3 seconds. Many of the new beasts added in Forever swing at 2.0 or 2.5.

Does a Faster Pet Deal More Damage?

On the beta, yes. Pet hits in Forever do not shrink much when the pet attacks faster, so a fast pet pulls well ahead. In one beta test, a 1.3-speed cat did 35.1 damage per second against 23.5 for a 2.0-speed carrion bird at the same level, roughly 50% more. More hits also mean more crits per minute, which matters more now that pets copy your crit chance. Some players argue that pet damage is still normalized as in Classic and that the gap comes only from crits and procs, and Blizzard has not commented either way. Until that changes, a fast cat is the safe pick whenever raw damage is what you want.

Pet Scaling with Hunter Gear in WoW Forever

Your pet grows stronger with every piece of gear you equip, because it takes a share of your stats. Blizzard has confirmed which stats carry over but not the exact shares, so the numbers below come from beta testing and can still change.

Crit is the stat that carries over best, so anything that raises your crit raises your pet's too, including crit talents and crit gear. Attack Power carries over far more weakly, which is why the pet's own damage still matters so much. The character sheet does not show every bonus yet: Ferocity's extra pet crit, for example, works but does not appear on the pet's stats on the beta.

Buffs work differently. Stat buffs from other players, such as a Blessing of Kings, no longer land on your pet, so do not ask a group to buff it. Its only path to more stats is your own gear.

Family Damage, Armor and Health

On top of your gear, each family has hidden modifiers to damage, armor and health. Cats and raptors deal the most damage, at about 10% above the baseline, while boars and turtles deal about 10% less but take far less damage. Turtles and crabs carry the most armor of all. The gap between the hardest-hitting and the weakest families works out to roughly 22% more pet damage, so it is worth knowing even if the family ability decides most picks.

Rare and New Tameable Beasts in WoW Forever

Rare beasts are worth the detour for two reasons: many of them attack faster than the common beasts around them, and most have a look you cannot get anywhere else. Forever adds a set of new rares and elites on top of the Classic ones, several of them in low-level zones.

Some of these spawn on long timers. Humar, Coldrasp and Mystmane have all been camped for hours on the beta, while The Rake and Ghostfang tend to come back within half an hour. Mystmane also knocks you down every few seconds, so drop a Freezing Trap first and save enough Mana to restart the tame right after a knockdown.

Beasts in the New Zones

The four new zones bring their own tameable beasts, from Zephras Isle at the start of the game to Mount Hyjal near the level cap.

• Zephras Isle: Ursera bears, Shriekling raptors, Galestriders, Windsong Crawlers and the Prideclaw cats.
• Riverglades: Twilight Worgs, Plains Coyotes and Plains Prowlers, Paletusk boars, buzzards, crocolisks, duskbats and tallstriders, plus the elites Ghostmaw and Krek the Noxious.
• Shen'dralas: bears, Bristleback boars and Blind Screecher bats.
• Mount Hyjal: Hyjal Bears, Hyjal Owls, Nightsaber Guardians, and the Ghostfang Alpha wolf.

Foxes are the one family that is new to the game. They live on Zephras Isle, where the Vuldren range from level 1 to 10, and higher-level Rustleaf Foxes appear in Mount Hyjal. On the beta, the Vuldren Alpha that Skyborne Hunters tame in their level 10 class quest is the only fox confirmed as tameable, so check that a fox shows as tameable before you plan a trip for one.

Best Hunter Pets for Leveling, Dungeons and PvP

There is no single best pet in WoW Forever, because the family ability decides what a pet is good at. A fast cat is the default whenever you want damage, and the other families earn their spot through utility. The October 15 nerfs to Dismember, Sonic Blast and Mine! pushed many players back toward cats for general play.

Leveling

For leveling, damage and safety pull in different directions. A fast cat kills mobs the quickest and is the usual pick if you play carefully. If you pull several mobs at once, a bear with Swipe or a carrion bird with Demoralizing Screech keeps them on the pet, and Demoralizing Screech also lowers the damage they deal. Any family can reach 60 with you as Beast Mastery, so the looks are a fair reason to choose as well. Your pet earns experience only from kills, so tame a beast close to your own level rather than one far below it.

The full route from level 1 to 60, with talents and pet swaps along the way, is in our WoW Forever Hunter leveling guide. If you would rather skip the climb, our WoW Forever leveling service takes a character to 60 for you.

Dungeons and Raids

In groups, your pet's damage matters most, so a fast cat is the safe choice. A wolf with Furious Howl becomes the better pick when your group is full of melee, since the howl buffs every party and raid member within 15 yards. A tallstrider fits groups that fight heavily armored bosses. Turn Growl off before every dungeon, or your pet will pull threat from the tank.

PvP

The crocolisk is the only pet that reduces healing, and Dismember keeps that role even at 25%. Spiders root from range with Web, which sets up traps and stops runners. Birds of prey disarm rogues and warriors with Mine!, bats slow casters with Sonic Blast, and wind serpents keep attacking from 20 yards when melee range is dangerous. Broken Tooth remains the classic choice if you simply want the fastest-hitting cat in the game.

Talents That Make Your Hunter Pet Stronger

Most pet talents live in the Beast Mastery tree, and several of them now also cover the new hawks from Summon Hawk. Two changes matter most for pet players: the old Thick Hide talent is folded into Endurance Training, and Marksmanship gets Lone Wolf for Hunters who would rather play without a pet.

Aspect of the Monkey also shares half of its dodge with your pet in Forever, so a pet tanking for you benefits from it even without talents. Because the pet copies your crit chance, crit talents in any tree make it hit harder as well. For the full point-by-point changes in all three trees, read our WoW Forever Hunter talents guide.

Pet Commands, Macros and Autocast Settings

Forever gives you more control over your pet than Classic did. Aggressive Mode is back on the pet tab of your spellbook, and a new Move To command sends the pet to any spot you click. With Move To you can park the pet out of a patrol's path, pull single mobs out of a camp, or keep a wind serpent at range.

Autocast Settings

Right-click an ability on the pet bar to turn its autocast on or off. A few settings save Focus and trouble.

• Keep Growl on autocast when you solo, so the pet grabs threat first, and turn it off before every group.
• Turn off autocast for Demoralizing Screech on single targets. The pet recasts it while the debuff is still up and wastes Focus that Claw or Bite would use better.
• Use abilities with long cooldowns, such as Trickster's Dance and Shell Shield, by hand when the fight needs them.
• Running Bite, Claw and a third ability all on autocast can leave the pet without Focus, so pick the two that matter most.

Useful Pet Macros

These macros keep your pet under control with one key each. The first sends the pet in, the second pulls it back and stops it from attacking, and the third moves it to wherever your cursor points.

/petattack

/petpassive
/petfollow

/petmoveto

Before you place a Freezing Trap on a mob that is fighting your pet, call the pet back in the same keypress, so it does not break the trap the moment it lands:

/petpassive
/petfollow
/cast Freezing Trap

Keep the pet within about 100 yards of you. If it runs further, it despawns and you have to call it again.

More WoW Forever Hunter Guides

These guides cover the rest of the Hunter, from talents to the fastest way to 60.

WoW Forever Hunter Pets FAQ

These are the questions players ask most often about hunter pets in WoW Forever.