What's the deal with you (Blizzard) insisting that hunters need to even level a pet? Yeah, thanks for buffing it the past time, but still we should just go out and pick whatever the hell kind of pet we want. What it comes down to, this game should be fun. I don't see spending a whole week on leveling a stupid pet 5 levels fun for anyone, especially when you find out that pet isn't right for your play style.

Just cut out the bull crap and just give us a pet that's our level upon taming. What is the exact reasoning of having to level them the 5 levels when I should be spending time doing other things than watching a stupid pet attack things and hoping to god he would level faster. Is this the whole point of the class is to spend time with your cute and cuddly new pet and bond with it? If I wanted to do this, I'd buy a real pet or one of those stupid digital pocket animals.

In summary, I'm not having fun at all leveling a pet and finding out I hate using it, and having to level another pet just to be effective.

Firstly, I admit I LOLed about the digital pocket pet thing.

Secondly, I feel the same way about weapon skill training in general, it was increasingly frustrating training my 2h sword skill only 50 LEVELS which took more than 7 hours, until I find out I could /afk gillax the corrupted or whatever.

Yeah, pet leveling is lame. Warlocks don't have to do it, DKs don't have to do it. At the very least battlegrounds should give pets experience -- PvP kills should be the same pet experience as a mob.

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Yeah, pet leveling is lame. Warlocks don't have to do it, DKs don't have to do it. At the very least battlegrounds should give pets experience -- PvP kills should be the same pet experience as a mob.

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^^ This would have a decent impact with regards to fixing the lvling issue. Not a bad idea at all.

Thankfully (but unfortunately in this case)...they gave us the 5 lvl thing which is leaps and bounds ahead of what we had. So we are not likely to see improvement soon. =\

Yeah, pet leveling really doesn't serve ANY purpose that I can discern. It's just extra grinding for no reason, and even doing 25 dailies a day you don't see enough combat to level a pet in a reasonable amount of time. For players at level 80, there's no reason to XP anymore, and lord knows we've already done enough XPing, so leveling the pet just amounts to pure busywork.

It's not like the mechanic is that "all pets are tamed 5 levels lower than your level." It's entirely possible to tame a level 80 pet and have it be level 80. It doesn't make any sense to make you grind 5 levels just to have the skin you want.

I would also like to see either a buff to exotic pets, or a nerf to non-exotic pets. It seems odd that if you take the last talent in the BM tree and tame an exotic pet, that ends up doing less DPS then a cat or scorpid. I know cat and scorpid are getting nerfed, but I saw some ptr playtesting that still supported them being higher dps then devilsaur and spirit beast.

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I would also like to see either a buff to exotic pets, or a nerf to non-exotic pets. It seems odd that if you take the last talent in the BM tree and tame an exotic pet, that ends up doing less DPS then a cat or scorpid. I know cat and scorpid are getting nerfed, but I saw some ptr playtesting that still supported them being higher dps then devilsaur and spirit beast.

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Please stop asking for nerfs on your own damn class. We're being nerfed hard enough as it is. The exotic pets need buffing, along with the craptastic talent that is the BM 51 pt talent. The non-exotic pets are being nerfed anyway, and will probably be on par with the exotics by the time they're done. Leave it alone.

The reason for the pet leveling is because, yes, hunters are supposed to have an attachment to their pets. Pets are not intended to be something that you tame and abandon based on whims or whatever your raid thinks you should have at the moment. If you could go out and tame any beast and have it instantly be as powerful as a pet you've had from day 1, what would the point of even having stable slots be? Just go out and tame whatever the flavor of the day is and you're ready to go.

I don't know if you're new, but the starting-five-levels-below-you thing is actually fairly new. Before 3.0 you didn't even get that much, you had to level them from whatever level they were at before you tamed them. That was changed as a concession to people who felt that was just too much.

At least, that's the developers' logic. You will never, ever have pets that instantly jump up to your level and require no investment, because that's not part of the developers' vision for the class. With that said, I agree that taking a pet from 75 -> 80 is a lot of work, and it's not interesting work -- just grinding. I think it'd be great if there was a more interesting mechanic for hunters to bond with their pets, but I don't have any ideas.

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The reason for the pet leveling is because, yes, hunters are supposed to have an attachment to their pets. Pets are not intended to be something that you tame and abandon based on whims or whatever your raid thinks you should have at the moment. If you could go out and tame any beast and have it instantly be as powerful as a pet you've had from day 1, what would the point of even having stable slots be? Just go out and tame whatever the flavor of the day is and you're ready to go.

I don't know if you're new, but the starting-five-levels-below-you thing is actually fairly new. Before 3.0 you didn't even get that much, you had to level them from whatever level they were at before you tamed them. That was changed as a concession to people who felt that was just too much.

At least, that's the developers' logic. You will never, ever have pets that instantly jump up to your level and require no investment, because that's not part of the developers' vision for the class. With that said, I agree that taking a pet from 75 -> 80 is a lot of work, and it's not interesting work -- just grinding. I think it'd be great if there was a more interesting mechanic for hunters to bond with their pets, but I don't have any ideas.

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This would be fine except YOU CAN TAME LEVEL 80 PETS, and they stay level 80. You can do this all day and night if you want. You absolutely, without question, CAN just go out and tame (for families with level 80 examples) the flavor of the day and go. Or, you can tame a level 79 or 78 and save yourself a good bit of time over a level 19 that becomes 75...all for -exactly the same pet-. You should not be penalized in having to grind 5 levels just for wanting a different skin. Your argument about the developers' logic is rendered moot by the fact that not all pets start 5 levels below you - only pets that were low level to begin with do.

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This would be fine except YOU CAN TAME LEVEL 80 PETS, and they stay level 80. You can do this all day and night if you want. You absolutely, without question, CAN just go out and tame (for families with level 80 examples) the flavor of the day and go. Or, you can tame a level 79 or 78 and save yourself a good bit of time over a level 19 that becomes 75...all for -exactly the same pet-. You should not be penalized in having to grind 5 levels just for wanting a different skin. Your argument about the developers' logic is rendered moot by the fact that not all pets start 5 levels below you - only pets that were low level to begin with do.

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I'm not sure why you're arguing with me. I'm not theorycrafting here -- the developers have stated this as their reason multiple times in the past, back during discussions about the 3.0 changes. I know that there are problems with it; the fact that you can tame higher level pets is one of them. That doesn't change the fact that you're not going to see pet leveling go away unless you can suggest some kind of better time sink. Same reason you're not going to get Camouflage -- because the devs say so.

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I'm not sure why you're arguing with me. I'm not theorycrafting here -- the developers have stated this as their reason multiple times in the past, back during discussions about the 3.0 changes. I know that there are problems with it; the fact that you can tame higher level pets is one of them. That doesn't change the fact that you're not going to see pet leveling go away unless you can suggest some kind of better time sink. Same reason you're not going to get Camouflage -- because the devs say so.

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I'm just pointing out that the way it currently works doesn't make any sense, and you repeating the litany of "I speak for the developers, and they will never change it" doesn't help. The fact that the developers said something a while ago also doesn't mean their minds can't be changed, or that they can't be asked to re-examine an issue. The fact that we don't necessarily have a solution off the top of our heads doesn't mean we shouldn't bring up an issue that causes us to hate an aspect of the game. GC explicitly said "I'm not having fun because..." feedback is acceptable. I'm hoping to encourage the development team to think about this problem again, rather than just accepting the "devs said a while back that it's not going away" condition.

With the talent system they have in place, having a pet from day one doesn't make it any stronger than something you tamed last week. This is kind of a bother to have to grind my pets five levels just to test them out at 80.

Also I don't understand why in the earlier post we're supposed to have an attachment to a pile of code with a shiny skin on top? Pets are fun, but they are mostly tools to help hunters play their class. I don't think they should completely take away leveling pets, but I don't think anyone who grinded to 80 should have to start with a lower lvl pet.

Anyone below 80 should do the five levels, and if you tame anything after 80 I think you should be able to have that pet at 80 as well.

Honestly, it takes way too long to level a pet from 75-80. When I leveled my scorpid from 78-80 I felt like dying from all of the boring grinding. Now with scorpids being so useless compared to a crab, I'll probably have to level another pet.

Hey Ghostcrawler, where you at man? This is some serious business here.

At the very least, pets should "remember" the highest level you attained with them, like trained talents.

So, for example, if I abandon a level 80 wind serpent to make room for a scorpid, and later discover that I hate the scorpid, I should have a level 80 wind serpent if I tame another one.

Those last five levels are not fun, they do not add to the flavor of our class, if anything it makes our dps gimp and makes us an easy target in PvP. It is another outdated mechanic the Hunter class has to deal with.

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^^ This would have a decent impact with regards to fixing the lvling issue. Not a bad idea at all.

Thankfully (but unfortunately in this case)...they gave us the 5 lvl thing which is leaps and bounds ahead of what we had. So we are not likely to see improvement soon. =\

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So when you tame any pet it auto levels to be 5 levels lower than you? Wow, wish they would have had that when I played a hunter. lol

I don't see a problem with removing pet leveling all together though, keep them at same level as the hunter imo.

Blizz designed this game for you to spend time on it to acomplish tasks, thus them making it able for you to tame a pet then it becomes your level would be destructive to them, you can't get anywhere in this game unless you spend thousands of hours on it, welcome to world of warcraft

if my crab could do more dps, I could take him into 5 mans and get him leveled faster.

Sadly, he gimps me so much, people go "wtf" when I bring my crab. So he tanks stuff in Storm Peaks doing dailys and is still lvl 78 and 1/2 lol.

I wouldn't mind leveling my pet, if say, the rate at which it gains exp off of kills was increased. If I could quantify it in terms of hours, than I'd say that if each level took an hour with moderate up time of dps (like 75% dps up time) it would fix this mechanic of pet leveling. The hunter would still have to level the pet, but it wouldn't be a huge time sink. Hunters wouldn't be able to run out and tame flavor of the day pets, but it wouldn't take a week. I'd have a lot more fun as a hunter if I could try out different pets without having to always spend weeks leveling them pets.

No decent hunter worth their salt is going to say the enjoyed grinding out 5 pet levels.

Hearing hunters complain about levelling pets make me twitch - I spent a LOT more time farming shards on my lock than a hunter will spend levelling a stable full of pets.

Run some non-heroic 5 mans - I'm sure the lvl 75-79's going would love to have an 80 along, and maybe you can pick up some Stone Keepers Shards or rep via tabard or something.