*Updated* Ultimate Pet Guide

Well, not that it's anything new, but I can confirm that the Hearty/Dire/Elder evolutions DO make a difference in the health total of your pet.

A group of guildies and I took 3 level 20 pets into the desert, all of us spec'ed to 12 BM, one Elder Black Widow, one Hearty Black Widow, and one Dire Black Widow. We sic'ed all three of them on a Sand Drake, who proceeded to use Aftershock. A fixed-damage point blank AE makes a great health test for pets, and we found:

The Dire Pet lost roughly 20% of his hitpoint total.
The Elder Pet lost roughly 18% of his hitpoint total.
The Hearty Pet lost roughly 5-8% of his hitpoint total.

It was easy for us to run this test several times, just zoning in and out (the Sand Drake is the first creature just outside Elona Reach). Every time we got these exact same results....The Hearty Pet REALLY seemed to take the beating, even better than we had expected. We did not use any spells, calls, pet attacks, etc, and didn't bring any henchman...so we're certain that all three pets were subjected to the exact same amount of damage at the exact same time.

I'm speculating that perhaps the Hearty pet has a higher armor rating, because it makes no sense that an Aftershock would deal 20% damage to a Dire, and only 5-8% to a Hearty, even with the difference of 120 hitpoints between them. However, we didn't have any way to determine exactly how much damage, or exactly what % of their current health was lost, so the test is plenty flawed.

More tests to come in the near future, I'd love to find the exact hitpoint totals of each pet evolution. If anyone has any ideas or advice as to how to better test the pet evolution differences, post or PM me and let me know IGN: Aubree Wild.

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Edit: Tested the Aftershock damage against different Armor Ratings. The Aftershock *should* have dealt 74 damage to each pet, if it were true that they all have the same armor rating. And if their hitpoint totals were as speculated, we should have seen:

The Dire Pet lost 16.8% of his hitpoint total.
The Elder Pet lost roughly 14.8% of his hitpoint total.
The Hearty Pet lost roughly 13.2% of his hitpoint total.

But the hearty pet didn't lose anywhere near that amount of health, and the Dire lost significantly more than 17%. When the aftershock hit, the dire and elder pets were always VERY close in health, only 2-3% difference tops. The Hearty was always extremely far from each of them. The spread in the hitpoint totals of the pets was far more than 4%, which the math would suggest.

I think this further proves that the pets may have different armor ratings, and possibly not different hitpoint totals. I'll try to run a test using healing spells after the aftershock to see exactly how much healing it takes to repair the damage after the aftershock, and therefore see how much each pet is really taking >_>

I believe the hit point tests were calucated by timing how long a full-health pet could stand in poison before dying. The very steady and predictable damage from poison, when combined with a reliable timing method and multiple tries, will give very accurate results for pet HP.

While the idea that the different evolutions may have diffferent armor ratings is interesting and should definitely be explored, I don't think throwing out the idea of differing HP levels is appropriate. The poison example completely ignores any armor, and the pets have been seen to last for differing lengths of time.

I will note, however, that I haven't used the poison method myself. I've merely read others' accounts of it.

Thanks Jenosavel, I appreciate the idea! Poison tests would be a great idea to calculate hitpoints.

I don't intend to throw out the idea of pets having different hitpoint totals, though I will do some poison tests and try to estimate their hitpoint totals on my own, since I take everything I read around here with a grain of salt

However, like I said, the damage on the hearty seemed to be far less than it should have been, even with the increased hitpoint total, leading me to believe that armor rating may vary between pets.

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Edit: First poison test done, and I can confirm that the Elder Black Widow has exactly 500 health. I need to wait for my buddies with Hearty and Dire spiders to log on, I'll edit this message when I get a chance to test them >_>

yeah... poison is how the tests were done in the past

look forward to seeing ur results... thx

Why not a set percentage sacrafice and Grenth's Balance?

Let's say for the sake of example that-

You have 480 health.
Base pet health is also 480.

Hearty pet has 540 health
Dire pet has 420 health.

You sacrafice 17% to one of the many 17% sacs. You now have 399 health.

You use Grenth's Balance on Hearty pet;
It takes 71 damage, you are healed for 70, both of you have 469 health.

Now, assume we didn't know the initial Hearty pet's health, so we take your current health, add the damage dealt to the Hearty pet, 71, and we get 540.

Then to Dire;

yadda yadda, 399 health for you.
Grenth's Balance-
11 damage ,10 healing for you, both of you have 409 health.

Add the damage dealt to Dire pet to your current health, and we get 420.

In case the pets have less health than how much you sacrafice to, it may be best to use a more expensive sacrafice, such as Verata's Aura for 33%.

Alright, poison tests were done, and I can confirm exactly what was already posted here:

Dire Black Widow: 440 Health. (Averaged 55 seconds to die in poison)
Elder Black Widow: 500 Health. (Averaged 63 seconds to die in poison)
Hearty Black Widow: 560 Health. (Averaged 70 seconds to die in poison)

I'm going to use this information to test the pets for possible AL differences, since I don't think this has been explored yet.

Edit: Media Reign tested the pet ALs by sic'ing them on Sand Drakes outside Elona Reach. After the Aftershock, we'd use Comfort Animal, Orision of Healing, etc - until we pinpointed the amount of damage each pet took (and thus the healing needed to reach full). We concluded that:

Elder Black Widow takes exactly 74 damage from Aftershock. (80 AL)
Dire Black Widow takes exactly 74 damage from Aftershock. (80 AL)
Hearty Black Widow takes exactly 74 damage from Aftershock. (80 AL)

I determined that 80 AL was required to take 74 damage from the aftershock by running an Elementalist (60 AL) with Armor of Mist at +20 AL. She took 74 damage each time.

Sooooo we still have yet to disprove any of what's in this thread, just providing some further evidence. Damage tests to come.

wow...with so much information about pets and updates and stuff you would think that Anet would actually try to make them effective in battle other than tanking. or maybe im just being a negative nancy.

do u guys think a ranger with a pet with 2nd profession elements is good? since the bow is pretty much useless? if so how should i distribute my points?

What you've said here is half wrong and half right. The bow is an extremely useful tool for a pet-reliant build, because it is often beneficial to be able to sic your pet on a target from a great distance. Also, the steady damage from having a high marksmanship score can compliment the pet damage very well. However, if you'd like to run an Elementalist secondary, you could certainly make that work. The low-cost pet elite "Ferocious Strike" would make an excellent source of both damage and energy for you, which would be essential as a R/E due to your fairly low energy cap. You'll want to avoid exhaustion, so I'd recommend the Air or Water lines for your Elementalist spells. Some quick ideas for you would be to try running a high Beastmastery/Air build with a combo of pet attacks, call of haste, and some lightning spikes. An even better idea would be to go with a 4-attribute build balanced between Expertise, Water Magic, Beast Mastery, and Marksmanship and use those lovely snare hexes, along with the aforementioned Elite pet attack...making your arrows unavoidable, your pet inescapable, and your energy quite manageable.

Not that those builds are terribly viable as I've posted them, but that should get you started in the right direction.

You'd only gain 7 or 8 energy with each ferocius strike though. Ele spell cost isn't reduced by Expertise, so energy gained is gone after one or two spells have been cast... unlike non-spell skills, of which you'd be able to use three or five before you've used up the energy you gained.

Is it just me or is it not possible to cap the Elder Wolves? I approach them and they are green but by the time I get closer their name changes to "Pet - Elder Wolf" I assume the Stone Summit charms them. Is there anyway to get to them before the Stone Summit? And Black Bears are on the way to the Elder Wolves.

Actually, you should gain ~9 energy per Ferocious Strike (at 12 Beastmastery), and each strike should cost you 3 energy. Assuming that you use it every time it refreshes (every 8 seconds), that's 6 energy every 8 seconds, which comes to about 2.25 energy every 3 seconds....i.e. about 2 arrows of energy regen.

Any secondary other than warrior is going to cause this problem. Keep in mind that Rangers and Warriors are the only two classes that heavily use "skills", "attack skills", "shouts", "preparations", and "traps", which are the only things reduced by expertise. There are some odds and ends among other classes, such as some Necro touches and the like, but honestly you're dealing with spells 99% of the time among non-ranger/warriors.

This is obviously not the *best* route to go, but he did ask for a ranger pet user / ele secondary build. If he just wanted to make a Ranger/Ele, I'd have told him to go with something like Marksman's Wager perhaps.

I was assuming 16 BM, net gain would be 7 or 8 depending on expertise level...
I just don't think FS is a very good idea unless you're going to be a 'rangerist'.

I only suggested FS because as a Ranger Beastmaster who intends to use a secondary profession (he wanted to mix in Elementalist skills), his attributes would very likely be stretched thin. At best, if he focused on ONE element, he'd have to stretch his attributes between that element, expertise, beastmastery, and marksmanship (if he decided to use a bow). Since he is primarily a pet user, his beastmastery would likely the be his highest attribute, making the Elite pet attack a viable means of dealing damage and gaining energy for his build.

Just yesterday I played the Riverside mission with a bunch of people.
Two of use where lvl 17 rangers, me R/N and R/Mo another.

Both of us had Boars and both where at level 16.
I though is was funny and everyone was pretty happy because we had 3 tanks with the warrior and them there.

When we got to the poisoned water section of the mission, I noticed her boar was taking damage faster than mine from the poison.

She noticed it too.
_Both me and her reset our /petnames to see if one was playful or hearty.
_Both our boars where Hearty Warthogs......Wierd.......

Not all pets have the same health it seems.
Could their health be affected by Beastmastery as well?
I didn't ask her how much points in BM she put but I had 11 and I really used my boar alot in my build.

Do any of you have any clue as to why my boar has more health than hers?

No: My boar did not have mending or any enchantments on it.
No: There where not spirits summoned that could have augmented their healths.
No: I did not use any regen ability on my pet and neither had she.

The damage values listed are incorrect. I will finish with my testing then post corrected values. As an example, the damage for a lvl 14 pet is 13-21, based on 400 consecutive recorded strikes with a 0 BM pet vs. a cooperative 0 armour opponent. The distribution of values was approximately uniform, a chi-square test failed to detect any significant deviation from a uniform distribtuion. I'll do some testing on various pet levels and report them, but clearly the figures listed are incorrect. Once I have tested at most pet levels with a large pool of hits per level I'll post some more precise results.

Did either of your pets die during the excursion?
Do pets even suffer from DP? o_O

It's not mentioned anywhere in this guide.

As to the damage range of pets, who knows. If they can have varying healths with no discernable differences, perhaps the same holds true for damage.

That'd be crazy, if they were like weapons in that respect. "WTS Max damage pet!" (Nevermind that you can't trade them)

Possibly, but I doubt it - pets across my accounts seem all to hit for pretty much the same damage, so I assume that there is little to no variation between similarly evolved pets. Those numbers were pasted into a post about pets ages ago, most likely copied from a source like the Prima guide, and have not been tested in the least, thus the runs of hundred of strikes I am recording. Regardless, by not only posting results bu the manner in which they are gathered it will be more obvious if errors are made in testing, and the data can be viewed in the context of the testing process.

Several possible causes for this...

1. One of your pets was Agressive at level 11, then evolved to Hearty at level 16. This would leave them at 500 hitpoints, while the Playful > Hearty one would have the full 560 hitpoints.

2. Your pets accrued Death Penalty, yeah, pets get DP, but are always rezzed.

Hope that explains it for ya.

From the way I understand it, when a pet evolves into aggresive at 11 it cannot evolve into hearty afterwards. It can only go to either dire or elder depending on how you train it. Likewise, if it evolved into playful at first it can only evolve into hearty or elder later on.

I think the best explanation as to what happened would be one of them had more death penalty than the other. Or it could have been that the guy had just named his to hearty when it was really a dire or elder... because he liked the sound of hearty or something

You would be correct about the paths. A Playful pet cannot evolve into a Dire later, nor can an Aggressive turn Hearty. That, obviously, is not a possible explanation.

Also, I'd like to add in a correction to the above couple of posts in saying that pets do not take a death penalty, so that also is not a valid explanation. As anyone who has tested pet's health via poison can attest to, no matter how many times your pet dies, its health remains stable. The only decreases you will see fit well within a margin of error and become quite obvious when you repeatedly kill the pet. When I ran my own test, I killed the pet 18 times consecutively and the recorded time to death varied from 73.5 seconds down to 67.78 seconds with an average resting at 69.8 seconds.

I'm not sure what could have caused the health difference between the two boars. Are you certain the difference wasn't just a misperception? For instance, are you certain that the difference wasn't due to something like outside damage on one pet in addition to the poison, the use of Comfort Animal, Pretator's Pounce, Symbiotic Bond, or other things which would make one pet appear to be taking damage faster than the other? Hearty pets lose health extremely slowly in the poison, as you can tell from a level 20 one needing a full 70 seconds to die. It's quite difficult to simply eye up how fast their health is dropping, and if indeed you're certain the two pets had different levels of health, then some carefully controlled and documented information would be appreciated.

I have finished testing the lower pet levels from 2-8 (I haven't found a level 1 animal to test), but testing is slow - I'll try to do some mid-level pet testing soon, and will release all data once complete.

Most interesting so far is that the distributions of attack damage have not been uniform at the lower levels; they have with only 1 exception been rejected from uniformity using a chi-squre test (and the p-values are as small as 1E-07!). I suspect that they are originally from a uniform distribution at higher levels, but that the transformation and rounding to calclate the lower level damage results in tails on most lower level damage ranges.

Pet damage thus far is not a step function at certain spaced out levels, but progresses smoothly upward with pet level.

My testing so far is being done with 0 beast mastery vs 0 armor, as this gives identical results to 12 beastmastery and 60 armour (See the combat mechanics guide if explanation is needed) and is easily done, any class can take off all armour.

Nice guide except for one thing which bugged me:

That's completely wrong as having 16 in a weapon attribute (swords, hammer or axe) IS in fact very much worth it.

You have got to kidding.. Thats it pretty retarded. I guess it takes care of have an 'Uber Pet' but GW is very good at balancing. It seems like they could have made: movement speed, attack speed, AL, DL, & Damage Type all different and yet balanced. Wow.. that really takes a lot away from pets.

I'd just like to reiterate I've had an Elder Black Widow go to a Hearty Black Widow too.. odd!

As was asked before, when you captured the Elder Black Widow, were you able to verify that what you were capturing was in fact an Elder Black Widow (as in, was it unnamed or did you reset the name to verify what it was when you first captured it)?

I've seen many people believe that the only spider to be caught in the Underworld is an Elder Black Widow, and thus they capture a Hearty and when later they realize what it is, they're amazed at how it "evolved"... I'd just like to clarify whether or not this is a possibility in your scenario.

The spider I caught came out of the chest was as an enemy "Elder Black Widow", I have seen ones emerge as Dire and Hearty from there too. At the time, my pet was named so I can't confirm if it was randomly changed when it became my pet. I recently unnammed my pet to find it was miraculously now a hearty Black Widow.

could anyone tell me the difference in dmg or w/e between blunt, slashing, and peircing?

There are no differences. UNLESS, the reciever got a mod on his/her equip that defend against one of them (example: necro armor-> piercing armor), while some monsters in PvE are naturally built to be weaker against some dmg (example: [not verified] skeleton recieve more damage from blunt, and less from pierce)

ok thx

That example has been verified.

ya sry, i found it a while after i said thx

ive found this thread to be incredibly helpful. jsut wanted to thank everyone who actually bothered to put this much research into pets xD

ya it is great but...

i made another ranger a day ago, just to be a beast master. i charmed a warthog and got it to lvl 5 before i left pre-ascalon. I put most of my point into BM and had a minor BM and a BM helm. I also put my skill list as 6/8 of it are BM skills. My pet didnt take dmg or die very much, he mostly did dmg...but..when he got to lvl 11...he became playful, and i was trying to get aggresive, did i do something wrong? or did i just do the exact opposite of what i was supposed to do?

so would the normal wolf be a 'cool' pet cuz you can only get it in pre? or does everyone still love those spiders...?

Evolution is poorly understood... there are still many questions about pet evolution - the number of pet deaths is a factor it seems, as is damage output, but it's really tough to figure out. You could try again, charm a new Warthog in Kryta and repeat?

Attribute Level --------- Pet Damage Increase...
looks pretty much like the regular damage modifier:
=damage modifier for ANY classes right hand weapon depending on the classes weapons attribute.

=100*2^((5*[weapon attribute]-60)/40) if [weapon attribute]<13
=100*2^((5*[weapon attribute]-60-([weapon attribute]-12)*2,5)/50) if [weapon attribute] > 12

in case your numbers are approximated and "pets" are just a "weapon" that havs beast mastery as "weapon attribute" those numbers may be more accurate.

I think I saw someone with a drake type pet that I've never seen before...can anyone confirm if there is a Drake pet available, where it would be, starting lvl..etc?

there is no Drake pet in the game... u prolly just saw a Hearty Dune Lizard...

Alright thanks, probably right. Does anyone know if a Strider pet gets much bigger than a Moa bird, or are they around the same size. I kind of want a really BIG Hearty pet for kicks and giggles when I'm bored. I think a really huge bird would be hilarious following me around. Not that I could get a Strider anymore (only in pre-searing), but I may not do it if Strider's get a lot bigger. The biggest pet I'd assume would be a lvl 20 Hearty Black Bear? Can anyone show me exactly how big these guys get with a screen or in-game to show?

Also are we sure about this being the best way to make a Hearty pet? (capped Moa bird at lvl 3) And then let it die, 0 pts into BM, and run around getting exp? Does the dead pet have to be in a certain range to keep getting exp or what. I heard they'll even get experience from mission completions and such. I already completed my missions/bonuses so I'm assuming they can't get that even if they could, but it'd be nice to know for future reference. Thanks in advance for handling my questions, this thread alone has already taught me a ton.