Fortune favors the prepared mind (Add-ons)

I'm not a historian but I'm pretty sure Louis Pasteur was talking about pet battles. Before diving into the individual pet tamers, I want to briefly mention the add-ons I use. Some are useful for collecting, others are useful for battling, and some are just for convenience.

Pet Battle Teams (http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/pet-battle-teams)

There are currently 16 pet tamers that reward bags that can contain the flawless battle-stones on a daily basis. You can also get one from the Darkmoon Faire tamer 8 times a month. Each of these tamers are different and most require a different set of pets. The default pet interface has no concept of pet "teams". This add-on brings that element to the interface, allowing you to create pre-defined sets of teams and give them names. As you can see in this picture, I have a team for every pet tamer. I don't have to remember which pets to use against a particular fight. I don't have to scroll through the list to find it or type its name to search for it. Since I am power leveling lower pets, the low level pet will change each time, but that is much simpler and most of the time can be any pet I want.

There's no"i" in team but there is in win.

Pet Tracker (http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/pettracker)

This add-on is fantastic for collecting capturable pets. As seen in the picture below, it will show a little icon on your map where each type of pet can be captured. Now by default most zones will look a bit ridiculous when showing all pets because just about every square inch of a zone can have some kind of pet.

There are two useful options that make this add-on great:

1. Show missing pets only
2. Show pets that are not maximized

One of the few pets I don't have a rare of

The first option will only show pets that you do not already have. The second option shows pets that you have no maximized, meaning pets that you do not have a rare version of.

One thing to note is that the icons are not precise locations and there are some icons that are incorrect. Over time I'm sure the add-on's database will get better.

The other useful feature of this addon is that it will display the enemy's abilities including their cooldowns. Knowing when the enemy cooldowns are wearing off will allow you to avoid taking damage from the high damage spells in many cases.

Battle Pet BreedID (http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/battle_pet_breedid)

Unless you have photographic memory and spend time looking through some database that shows the health/power/speed values for every breed of pet, you probably won't know what breed of pet you have. As far as power leveling goes breed does not make a huge difference, although I can think of a few fights where it can make the fight noticeably easier. This add-on shows the breed using letters instead of the meaningless 0-15 (Note: it allows you to switch to the numbers if you want).

• H = Health
• P = Power
• S = Speed
• B = Balanced

Each pet will have two values in parenthesis. Examples (H/H) (S/S) (P/S) (B/H), etc... You can see examples of this in the first screenshot of this post.

Each means that the pet has been given more of which ever stat was selected at the cost of other stats. In the case of B, it means that the stats are spread in a "balanced" way between all three stats which may or may not mean they are divided evenly between the stats (I don't really know or care).

The other nice aspect of this add-on is that it will tell you which breed are possible for each pet, so that you don't waste time trying to capture a breed that doesn't exist.

Auto Safari Hat (http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/auto-safari-hat)

Anyone planning to power level pets should be sure to get a Safari Hat. This is the reward from the Taming the World achievement. This add-on will automatically swap in your Safari hat whenever you start a pet battle, and swap it back with what you were wearing previously when the pet battle ends. This helps make sure you are getting your 10% bonus experience at all times, and keeps you from forgetting to put your real helm back on for when you are pvping or have to fight mobs. The only thing to keep in mind is that if you are put into combat while in a pet battle (ie attacked by a player), it will not be able to put your old helm back on due to being in combat.

The other great feature of this add-on is that it will auto accept and turn in the pet tamer quests. It is trivial and yet it is pretty convenient to not have to do those few extra useless clicks.

Pet Journal Enhanced (http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/pet-journal-enhanced)

I won't go into this all that much. It enhances the pet journal interface to provide more information and allows for more useful sort options and filtering by current zone.

Introduction

Battle pets were probably the best addition to World of Warcraft for casual gamers. Why? Well for me, the main reason is that there is no time commitment required. Most other facets of the game require that you are able to dedicate fixed periods of time to achieve anything meaningful.

The pet battles can be fun and often require thought. Collecting all of the available pets is somewhat addictive. Collecting rares of every pet provides a long term goal for some players to shoot for.

Leveling them all to 25? Well that is quite an undertaking. Many people felt that the patch that removed the ability to repeat tamers was a big nerf. While it was a nerf to not be able to farm Nishi over and over, the massive experience boost given to all of the Pandaria tamers coupled with the change to make level 25 pets not soak up experience has made power leveling pets easier than ever.

Every tamer in the game can be beaten by two lvl 25s and a third non level 25. Many of the pandaria tamers can even have the third non level 25 be a level 1. This blog will go over each tamer one by one, discussing my strategies that allow me to easily farm them all and power level multiple pets from 1 to 25 on a daily basis.