A semi-serious question about non standard pets.Follow

Is there a reason other than personal prefs or personal opinions on aesthetics to use non standard pets?
You have tank pets and dps pets that excel at their jobs and have an obvious roll to play.
Example of non standard: The commonly seen in the wild yet oft overlooked Crocolisk pet.

What would make the croc a viable pet?
From what I see it has no unique abilities.
Can the basic bite+growl provide the threat needed to tank and if not the DPS needed to remain useful? Does it matter in the end?

What would be a balanced pet?

I have been having a discussion with a friend about the croc, my side is that the species brings nothing to the table as a pet, its lack of additional skill hurting its standing even more. His side being in a nut shell no species is really that much ahead of another therefor a croc is not really any better than say a boar or cat or w/e and that it boils down to builds in the end.

I see his point about "its all about how you use your pet" but the discussion is about crocs, not pets in general.

All the info I seem to find about crocs as pets usually contains the term "huntard" or "annoying sound" in the same sentence.

So I stand confused. This is an obviously stat driven game, the croc from what I see just does not have the stats to make cut, I see it as mediocre or subpar given your options.


Personally I like my Boar-tank and the level of comfort he provides on my dial up connection. Sure he may not shred things like a cat but its nice to be alive when I come out of a 30 second lag bubble. I don't see a croc performing as well as my boar in a tank roll, and I choose my pet to tank.

Pettopia has no answers to my questions, TKA and so on I have looked for pro-croc info and failed.

As I said this spawns from a discussion with a friend about crocs, pettopia has very little to say in the crocs defense other than

"they do boast a unique six-legged appearance. Only in the World of Warcraft!"

Obviously some people choose to level with them, and group with them. My question is why if not for the aesthetics?

Do pet stats truely mean so little in the long run that a croc can be considered "just as good" as a boar or cat?

I have to admit I am one of the people who commonly plays with a "non-standard" pet. I use a crab which I have had since Westfall. He doesn't have any special skills but with his armor bonus he is able to tank like nobody's business. He has more armor than most warriors my level. Now granted I am only level 52 and have yet to try him out in the Outlands. But so far I have had no problems with him losing aggro (so long as I give him a couple ticks to build some threat).

I enjoy the diversity which "non-standard" pets bring to the game. I'm loyal to my crab and will hold on to him in the hopes that Blizz gives him a family skill. Maybe your friend with the croc feels the same way?

Did you check the stats comparison page? It gives the basic info needed to answer your overall question.

Crocolisk: +0% Damage, +10% Armor, -5% Health
Abilities(growl asside): Bite

In other words, they offer nothing, aside from aesthetics.

The only thing they have going for them is their Armour bonus. But their lack of abilities would turn off most hunters looking for a tanking pet. Especially considering Bite is not a good ability on it's own, since it has a 10 second cooldown, it needs to be paired with something like claw or gore.

Standard pets are standard for a reason. ;) They have the best combination of stats, and, more importantly, skills. That being said, as long as you are just soloing use whatever you want. You will have to wait longer for, say, a croc to gather up aggro, but if that is what you enjoy have at it. If you are grouping, or, even more importantly, raiding then you owe it to the other people involved to have a stronger pet.

This all boils down to one question: Why do you play this game? I expect the common answer would be to have fun. But then comes the all but impossible job of defining what fun is. For player A fun may be spending all day in PvP. For player B having a root canal might be more fun than a day of PvP. I tend to agree with player B. *smiles*

The same generally holds true for those of us who play hunters. Why do you play a hunter? I’m sure the people here could list a lot of reasons. But for me, it’s all about the pets. It’s more about the companionship than it is about stats or special abilities. That’s the reason I have so many hunter characters. I have different hunters so that I can have different pets. Sometimes those pets have good stats/skills and sometimes they don’t.

I have a few boar pets on various hunters, but not for their stats. My orc hunter had his armored boar long before boars were given any special abilities, other than their amazing diet. I think it’s the cute little butt wiggle that won me over. That and the black armored boars just look so damn cool. But I also have an albino crocolisk, a pink tallstrider and a couple of spiders.

The reason I have a crocolisk, a tallstrider and spiders is simple; they’re fun. My male dwarf was my first hunter back when WoW was new. He’d just hit level 20 when he encountered a female NE hunter in the tram with a huge white crocolisk name Sewerbeast. It was such an amazing looking creature. I sent her a tell to ask about it. She told me all about the Sewerbeast in the canals of Stormwind and then told me where I could get a level 19 albino croc of my very own. She even escorted me into the instance so that I could tame it. Farli and Brawny leveled all the way to the level cap together. He wasn’t the fastest pet out there, but he was both a gift and a friend.

Cashara was a bank alt until I needed a low level character to group with a friend. As she was dressed all in red leather I decided to tame the one and only pink tallstrider in game. I still have a screen shot of my friends and I just outside of Thunderbluff just after the tame, friends who no longer play the game. Cashara and Sweetpea leveled happily together until about level 32 when I headed into STV to learn dash. That’s when I met a female NE hunter who had just tamed her own pink tallstrider and was there leveling up her new pet. We talked and hit it off. We grouped together almost every day after that. We leveled to 60 with our two pink tallstriders kicking butt side by side. It was a sight to behold and an amazingly fun time. That friend has long since quite WoW, but I remember those times fondly. Cashara will always have Sweetpea as a pet.

So I prefer to choose my pets based upon how much enjoyment they give me rather than which ones have the best stats. However, I also realize that if I’m going to do end game instances I also need to have a pet that will benefit my group. And the bottom line is that as much fun as non-conventional pets can be for leveling and even normal instances, there are better pet choices for high end instance runs. I still have to like the pet I’m hunting with, but I’ve tried to choose pets that work better for “end game” instances. For example, Cashara has a tallstrider but she also has a green warpstalker. Farli has a crocolisk but he also has a swamp jaguar.

As much as I love hunting with my other pets, beasts with attacks like claw or gore simply do more damage now that we have focus regenerating skill options. Back in the day those didn’t exist so having a tallstrider vs. a cat wasn’t such a big deal. But until Blizzard decided to give the rest of the pet families unique abilities to compete with, some beasts are simply getting left out in the cold.

Kind bangladesh had incredible speed, my bad

Thanks Calabar and Lacks.

I agree also that in the end it is a matter of personal choice.
The discussion my friend and I had was based on performance and my challenging a comment "the croc is just as good as a boar or cat" stemming from a bad experience that was had in an instance with a croc using hunter.

My thought is that if you strip away all unique visuals, make all pets a grey box of equal size and look solely at stats there are several far superior options available for w/e range of function its needed in.

Wish I coulda been there for the variety. But I still like the pets anyways. I have a boar named Buster, very fun.

Don't know why they got rid of the variety, would seem to make the game less for the consumer.

While I’m a big advocate of choice, I rather agree with Blizzard’s decision. Blizzard actually “equalized” pets to create variety, as odd as that sounds. What happened when one pet had such an outstanding ability was that HUGE numbers of hunters would tame that one pet. For example, at one time there was a spider with an incredibly fast attack speed. Hunters started snatching up that particular spider for a pet like crazy. That lasted until the attack speed got nerfed to make the instance encounter it came from easier and that nerf spilled over to the tamed spiders. Each time one pet shone above all the others, that one pet became the majority of all the pets one would see at a hunter’s side.

So what Blizzard decided to do was to make all basic pet skills exactly the same, thus making every beast a viable pet. They started giving each pet family one or more special skills to make that pet a good choice in certain situations. In theory this is a good thing. Where it falls apart is the fact that Blizzard never finished the project. And I would personally like to see each beast family with access to a speed increasing skill such as dash/dive, charge or warp. Those are such fundamentally useful skills that they are sourly missed when absent.

No, it isn't. It's a FUN-driven game. If you're having fun, it works. Who cares if another animal gives you slightly better numbers. The numbers aren't enough to really matter.




Wrong. Petopia has all the answers to pet questions. Study petopia, analyze what you see there, and you can answer any pet question you might come up with.




It might help you to meditate upon the ancient, golden and mysterious words:

WAY WAYP WIY SAAH TAL

This begins the path to hunter enlightenment!

^^



The fun shtick is almost as played out as the "I pay my $14.95" one :P

Ninja edit hit post by accident.

Yup it does boil down to personal choice and the fun factor.
Trust me I used and abused pettopia, TKA, Alla etc. while discussing it and came here because they proved my point. The other guy insisted I was wrong and made very valid sounding arguments so I figured maybe there was something that I missed. Such as pet stats not making any difference etc.. and since that wasn't addressed I asked here.

I'm a new player so all I have to go on is what I dredge up, not a lot on the history of changes to the class and such that I could find.

Edited, Dec 5th 2007 10:25am by XylosolyX