Basics of Pets & Hatching

Basics of pets/hatching

The example: Tasha the carnation pixie



The fist picture is what you might see in the hatchery. Under her name is her age/level and next to that is her pedigree. The game calculates your pedigree for you but here's what it means: in the second picture you can see her talents, whether she actually learned the talents or not. In the first slot is an epic talent and you can see a circle with 4 dots. Common gets 0 dots, Uncommon - 1, Rare - 2 and Ultra Rare - 3. When you add all the dots of all the talents and derby talents, that is your pedigree. As the pet ages and learns new talents, if you add all the dots of all the learned talents and derby talents, that is the number in parenthesis next to her pedigree.

Types of Talents

Selfish Talents

They are called attribute-boosting talents but most people call them selfish talents because they provide the wizard no immediate help. These talents boost the stats that are on the right of the picture, strength, intellect and so forth. There are no epic selfish talents but there are plenty of them out there and it takes some time to get them off your pets. While it might seem nice to add more to some boost to your stats with a particular selfish trait, you are taking up a slot that could be something really helpful. This is how I look at it: say I have Tasha and instead of Pain-giver I got Mighty; both are ultra-rare talents. Mighty gives +65 to strength which boosts a talent I already had, Spell-Proof. With the stats the way they are, I have 9% on my Spell-Proof. Doing the math, if I had 65 extra strength it would boost my Proof to 10%. Ok so is that a good enough trade, 1% resist versus another talent - in this case Pain-Giver on Tasha that gives 6 universal damage? I don't think it's worth it.

Card-Giving Talents

I think card-giving talents are a waste. That's just my opinion, everyone plays differently, but I would rather have a talent that boosts your wizards stats than a single card. There are some specific situations where it might be helpful. For instance a very low level pvp wizard that doesn't have much room in their deck and would like a feint might want the card Feint on their pet. But overall, there are better uses for your talents than a single card. This is not the same as the cards that come with the pets. As you can see with Tasha, there is a Dragonblade card next to her picture. That is a card that comes with the pet initially, not one she learned.

May-Cast Talents

There are a variety of may-cast talents. Heals such as sprite, fairy, unicorn, healing current or life bat, there are may cast charms like blades or plague/smokescreen/weakness, wards like shields or traps/windstorm, auras, dispels, global spells, freeze/stun, other utility spells like disarm/pierce/steal charm or ward/taunt/snow drift, and some damage spells like lightning strike/sandstorm/snow serpent and the "sword and shield" talent that does a random shield and random blade which may or may not be useful to you.
For some reason the may cast fairy and sprite have a much higher casting rate than any of the other talents. For this reason I prefer my pets to only ever have those may cast talents. At the moment it is still a mystery what exactly triggers the pets to cast the different things. Many times with blades, the pet will blade you immediately after you hit. Or shield you immediately after the enemy hits you. That's a waste of a talent slot if the pet is not working in your favor, or never even casts the thing at all. There are many people that swear by some of these talents like the auras or unicorn. I have seen recently many aura casting pets and it seems those have a bit higher cast rate than the charms and wards. As for may cast unicorn, I don't like it. I don't think it's reliable enough to use up a talent slot. I can go days of playing with a pet never casting Unicorn and then just the other day it casts 5 times in one mob battle. If you want all heals for a pvp pet or maybe you are a jadezilla tank/healer then unicorn wouldn't be such a bad idea.

More Useless Talents

There are talents for all your wizards' stats, like critical boosting, incoming heal boosting and so on. Recently the critical boosting talents have become popular. I don't care for it, but that's just me. Critical is still just a chance no matter how high your stat is. I've seen people with over 500 critical and go without any critical hits in a battle. It's still just a chance and plus the pet talents are like 25 critical. Some people have pets with 4 critical talents which totals to about 80-100 critical but then what all do you lose out on? Some of the talents like pierce or stun resist might sound cool but when you consider that the amount you get from the pet is very small and you can only have 5 talents. You're probably going to want at least 1 heal so that's down to 4 talents available and that's with a mega pet.

The Ideal Pet

In my opinion, the ideal pets are 1 heal (I prefer Fairy), Proof, Defy and 2 damage: your school's dealer + either your school's giver or Pain-giver. On an average pet, that will net you about 14 of your school's damage, 15 universal resist and a reliable heal. That's nearly as good as the coveted waterworks gear (1 item) plus a heal you don't have to waste a turn or pips on. Dexter has Sprite instead of Fairy and his s.a.p. isn't great but you get the idea.

Making the Most of Your Talents

Many people prefer double resist pets for 2 of their talents, that is the epic trait Spell-Proof (that Tasha has) and the rare trait Spell-Defying, or Proof and Defy as most people call them. Proof and Defy provide resist to all schools, Proof as an epic trait provides a higher amount of maximum resist up to 14 universal resist although 9 or 10 resist is most commonly seen. Defy as a rare trait has a lower maximum amount of universal resist at 7 but 5 or 6 resist is most common.
Because damage and resist talents are the most common and the most desired, I'll focus on those. When your pet learns a talent like Proof, when you mouse over the talent in your book, it says how much resist your pet currently has. For resistance talents, the amount of resistance is determined by how high your strength and agility bar is. As you train the pet, and those 2 bars go up, the amount of resistance will go up as well. The same goes for damage talents except that damage is determined by strength and will.

What's So Great About S.A.P.

S.A.P. is the acronym for Strength, Agility and Power. These 3 stats are great for resist talents. The higher the max S.A.P. stats are, the higher the resist is going to be if you get Proof or Defy or some other resist talent. If you want your damage talents to be higher, it is Str, Will and Power, so it's not always all about the S.A.P. In fact it takes so much Strength, Agility and Power to get to 10% resist, you need over 250 for each of them (or a combination of 750 for all 3) to get 10 resist for Proof. That's a lot! And think of the traits you might lose in hatching with pets that have that high of stats but might have traits you don't want. It can be done, I've seen pets that are that good, but it takes a lot of work.

This is the formula for Spell-Proof or any school Proof:
(2*Strength + 2*Agility + Power)/125
And the formula for Spell-Defy or any school Defy:
(2*Strength + 2*Agility + Power)/250

The School-Specific Damage talents:
Dealer:
(2*Strength + 2*Will + Power)x3/400
Giver:
(2*Strength + 2*Will + Power)/200

And Universal Damage:
Pain-Giver:
(2*Strength + 2*Will + Power)/200
Pain-Bringer (this one is pretty much useless):
(2*Strength + 2*Will + Power)/400

The Games People Play

There are lots of games to choose from, including the browser-based Grub Guardian. My theory on the games is choose the game that you do best and do the fastest. With a few exceptions, there are enough varieties within each game as far as which stats they boost that you can do almost any game and focus on certain stats.

Some Pet Training Myths

I call it a myth just because maybe it works maybe it doesn't. So far, it has worked for me with just a few exceptions. Say you know from what talents the 2 parents had that your pet will have Proof and Pain and you want your new baby pet to learn those 2 talents. Proof being a resist talent and Pain being a damage talent, you want to take off all your gear, or go get some gear that does not have any resist or damage to any school. I like to find things that boost everything else under the sun except resist and damage. The theory is that as you train your pet, the game evaluates what your wizard is lacking and if it has a choice between a health boost talent and a resist talent it looks at which you need most. So if your training gear has no resist but tons of health, it will give you the resist talent rather than the health talent.
*Just a disclaimer, this only works if the pet has this particular talent available on the list of talents. Like that old expression you can't get blood from a turnip? Well you can't get your pet to learn Proof if it just isn't there to begin with.

Other pet training myths have to do with only raising certain stats first. Because most people want damage and/or resist traits and intellect is the only one that does not raise either of those, many people believe that you should work on the other stats and not raise intellect at all until Ancient or so. Others believe you should work on strength and agility exclusively, by doing a game that only gives those 2 and feeding the pet snacks that only have those 2 which would be really hard to find since many snacks have power. This tactic has worked for me somewhat.

Overall, these tactics don't really hurt anything, you aren't wasting crowns or wasting your time too much by doing these different things. I feel like, it can't hurt, right?

Tricks To Make a Pet Trigger

There are many many things that people do to try to get their pet to trigger a may cast in battle. I think we as a wizard society have pretty much moved on past the "Good Boy" age. Many people believe it doesn't help at all to "praise" your pet with the good boy or good girl chat phrases. Some believe it makes them cast less.

Feeding the Pet

When you open your backpack, you can select items like gear, housing items or seeds and choose to feed it to your pet instead of selling it or using it. I have found that a lot of no auction items, or items that say 'crowns only' work the best. I have several King Parsley plants that I keep just for the extra seeds they drop which are crowns only. I feed those seeds to my pet until the box pops up saying that the pet has gained experience.

Training the Pet

Training the pet for 2-3 games can help wake up the pet, especially if you just logged on and haven't fought any battles yet.

Using the Pet's Card in Battle

If you don't have time to train or just don't want to, and you don't have anything to feed your pet, do a few battles using your pet's card. That's the card that comes with the pet, not a learned card talent. I do this a lot. I will use the blade that's on a pet, or the storm beetle card in a few consecutive battles and my pet starts healing me.


A lot of this is thanks to 3 "Pet Guru" friends of mine: Catherine SoulHunter, Angela LifeWhisper and Rachel FireRider and of course Sabrina WildHeart.