Pet abilities

A hunter pet can have different abilities, depending on its pet family. Each pet family, or beast type, has one single special skill and belongs to one of the three pet classes Cunning/Ferocity/Tenacity, each of which gives access to a certain pet talent tree. In the pet talent tree the hunter can assign talent points for skills. Some are active combat abilities, used to improve combat effectiveness, or passive abilities.

A hunter can specialize his or her pets, to a large degree, by the choice of pet family, pet class, and talent build, for example to make a pet a more effective tank or a damage-dealer.

Damaging pet abilities scale with the pet's melee attack power or bonus spell damage. Physical abilities generally gain bonus damage equal to 7% of the pet's melee attack power, while spell abilities generally gain bonus damage equal to 1/3 of the pet's bonus spell damage. See the attack power coefficient article for further details.

Pet Skill Calculators
Just like the many Talent Build Calculators out there for classes, there are a few Hunter Pet Skill Calculators to help you plan how to spend your pets training points and minimize leftover unusable points.

These calculators are all third-party, not Blizzard's, and therefore can fall out of date with content patches. Current as of October 22, 2008:


 * http://www.wowhead.com/?petcalc

Other general non-talent abilities
Thees abilities are also known as focus dumps because they are often used to expend excess focus while more efficient or useful abilities are on cooldown. Each pet has one.

General talent abilities
All general active talent abilities are tier 1

Past changes
Originally, there were 6 basic pet abilities: Bite, Claw, Cower, Growl, Dash and Dive.
 * v1.8.0 added eight more
 * v1.9.0 added 3 more.
 * v2.1.0 added 2 more.
 * v3.0.2 removed all previous skill and replaced it with a pet talent system.