#0 - Feb. 8, 2007, 1:45 p.m.
What is pet loyalty:
Pet loyalty is a measure of how close a bond your Hunter has with its pet. It is measured in six levels: Rebellious, Unruly, Submissive, Dependable, Faithful and Best Friend (which takes the longest to obtain).
For each level of loyalty gained the pet will gain training points. Any other effects of pet loyalty is unknown. But if both your pets loyalty and happinesss is at its lowest your pet will leave you.
What is pet happiness:
Pet happiness is a measure of how happy your pet is... It is measured in three levels: Unhappy, Content, and Happy.
If your pet is Unhappy it will only do 75% of possible damage and it will loose loyalty, if it is content it will do 100% and not change loyalty, and if it is Happy it will do 125% damage and gain loyalty.
In order to increase happiness you must feed your pet. You can see which kinds of foods it likes through the character screen, on the Pet tab.
You can also see the state of the pets happiness next to it's portrait in the game field (just below your own). The small smiley-icon shows it.
What are training points:
Training points are like skillpoints, only for pets. Just as you can level skills on your hunter, you can level skills on your pet, only instead of learning by doing, you pay with training points.
Most pet skills come in several ranks, each more powerful than the last. Pets don't need to learn each rank, you can bypass some if you'd like.
As you learn the skills, the higher ranks get cheaper, or in other words, you end up spending the same amount of training points whether you buy each and every rank of a skill as you would if you bought the highest possible rank to start with. One thing to keep in mind when training your pet is that while it can learn many different passive skills (armor, stamina, resistances) it has a maximum of four active skills (bite, claw, rake).
If you want to change what you've taught your pet, you can unlearn all the training points you've spent at a pet trainer (just like you can unlearn the talent points you've spent on your hunter at your trainer) for an increasing fee.
You can respec your hunter without respeccing your pet, and you can respec your pet without respeccing your hunter.
The newly tamed pet:
Your pet may have negative training points if it knew a skill from before you tamed it, corresponding to the cost of learning that skill.
The higher level your pet is, the more training points it will get from gaining loyalty. If you tame a lower level pet it will get less points from loyalty but make up for it by getting the rest from levelling. So at level 60, with loyalty level 6 and nothing learned, your pet will always have 300 training points, regardless of when you aquired it.
Raising loyalty level:
Your pet will gain loyalty only if it is happy. It seems to come more quickly for lower level players than for higher levels.
How to get through the loyalty levels the fastest is a topic that seems to be much discussed. Most agree that from loyalty level 1 to loyalty level 2 you need to go hunting with it, for mobs that will give you xp (which are also the only mobs that will give your pet xp). From then on some say that you need to keep xp'ing, some say you should still go hunting, but taking it to the battlegrounds is good enough, and some say that you just need to keep it happy and spend time with it.
Getting your pet killed will seriously decrease its happiness and thus will slow down the loyalty levelling process.
A bit of math:
TrainingPoints = PetLevel * (LoyaltyLevel - 1)
A rule of thumb I found is that 5 bars of unrested and unquested xp = 1 pet level (when the pet is 1 level below you).
Pets of the same loyalty and level will have the same training points regardless of whether they were tamed at a low or high level.
Resources:
http://tkasomething.com/petskills.php
http://www.goodintentionsguild.info/hunters.html
http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/
