Pets, Pets, Pets!

The long, LONG, sunset of an expansion is my favorite time to revisit my stable and do some pet collecting. We get announcements that may make you want to pick up a pet you don't have for the next expansion, and if you're into collecting rares your competiton will almost certainly already have what they want. Some tames might even be a bit easier now before we lose some of our abilities. If you recently boosted a hunter, you probably have quite a bit of pet collecting to do in order to get all the various buffs. If nothing else, it's something to do during a content drought. And if you want to try for the MoP challenges, you can spend waste a LOT of time looking for those damn tracks. (Side note, why make a taming challenge and then use the same skin later for a regular tame? They did it in Cata and again in MoP. Pretty silly in my opinion.) I spent some time the other night dropping some unused pets (Why did I have 5 cats in there?) and taming the serpent pictured above to grab a buff I didn't have.  I couldn't resist naming him Whitesnake.

The biggest pet news we have gotten recently is that Heroism and Battle Res will no longer be exclusive to Beast Mastery in WoD. If you never play BM or just want to cover all your bases, get yourself a Nether Ray for Hero and either a Crane or Moth for B Res. As sombody who likes to play Survival whenever possible I couldn't be happier about this change. No longer will I be pressured to go BM just for Heroism!

While it's been well documented already, a pet post would be incomplete without running down which pets will bring which buffs and debuffs in WoD. If you run in a smaller sized raid, or like me just want to have the whole hunter arsenal in your stable, you'll want to have one pet from each group. The groups right now aren't distributed very well, and this is the development process so I anticipate some changes. Note that I am including BM only exotic pets here. I'll do my best to keep the list updated.

The Pet List as of September 9, 2014 (Beta):

Buffs: Any group size bigger than 10 will almost certainly have these covered already, but weird things can happen with group composition. You'll definately be able to use them in the new 5-mans and scenarios. And if you go petless, the current thinking is you can bring one of these as an aura. See my note below about the importance of a Multistrike pet for Survival Hunters.

• Stats
• Gorilla (One of my all-time favorites. Happy he is going to be useful!)
• Dogs
• Shale Spider
• Worm
• Stamina
• Bear
• Goat
• Hook Wasp
• Silithid
• Rylak
• Spell Power
• Serpent
• Silithid
• Water Strider
• Haste
• Sporebat (Nice to see we have some choice here. Lots of sporebats lately.)
• Wasp
• Hyena
• Hook Wasp
• Rylak
• Crit
• Wolf
• Raptor
• Devilsaur
• Quilen
• Shale Spider
• Water Strider
• Mastery
• Cat
• Tallstrider
• Hydra (You'll want to wait for WoD and get this one because Hydra!) 
• Spirit Beast
• Multistrike
• Basilisk
• Chimaera
• Clefthoof (Formerly called Rhinos)
• Core Hound
• Dragonhawk
• Fox
• Wind Serpent
• Versatility
• Bird of Prey
• Boar
• Porcupine
• Ravager
• Stag
• Clefthoof
• Worm

Debuffs: Not a lot to say here since so many debuffs have been removed. Make sure you have a Mortal Wounds pet at the very least.

• Mortal Wounds
• Devilsaur
• Scorpion
• Carrion Bird
• Riverbeast (WoD pet)
• Slow Movement
• Spider
• Warp Stalker
• Silithid
• Crocolisk
• Chimaera

The most important pet buff every SV hunter will need to have is Multistrike. Multistrike will proc Lock and Load after 6.0. It is going to be imperative for SV hunters to have the highest Multistrike possible. Make sure you have a Dragonhawk, Fox, or Wind Serpent before 6.0 drops if you're going to go Survival. As of this update, Lock and Load has been reverted to an older version.

 As always Petopia is your best resource for "shopping" for cool and rare pets. I also want to mention that Raid Checklist is my favorite add-on for figuring out which buff or debuff I should bring to the group. If you raid lead or don't know every class inside and out, I highly recommend it. What pets are you collecting right now? What's your favorite pet? Mine is Karkin.