April 22, 2020 August 16, 2020

A Beginner’s Guide to Wizard101 Pets

Most wizards farm for some of the best gear in the Spiral. They put countless hours into Darkmoor, Waterworks, Aquila…. I could go on for a while. However, there’s always one piece of the puzzle that a lot forget about – Pets. Having a good pet can be an absolute game changer for you. Wizard101 pets can give damage boosts, critical, resist, and so many other handy stats and talents. Welcome to the Beginner’s ( or just everyone’s) basic guide to pets. This guide focuses on PvE/PvP pets. For derby pets, check out this other article.

Where do Wizard101 Pets come from?

There are too many different sources for pets in Wizard101 to even list. For starters, they can be bought through many vendors throughout the Spiral, in the Crown Shop and from seasonal vendors such as Eggbert or Felix Navidad (in the Shopping District). For specific information about pet vendors, click here.

Pets can also be dropped from certain bosses, or be rewarded from quests. While questing you will encounter several quests that provide you with pets. As part of a new tutorial update, you will get a starter pet from a quest in Olde Town. Then, your primary school professors will provide you with a pet quest at level 48, level 58, level 78, level 98, and level 118.

In addition to the above methods, wizards can hatch their own pets with other wizards’ pets in order to obtain either of the hatched pets back or perhaps even a new hybrid pet. This can be done in-person or through the Hatchmaking Kiosk.

Pet Stages

A pet will always start as a baby. From there, it needs to gain 125 pet XP to become a teen. This goes on for all the different stages of the pet’s life. The stages are as follows:

Baby to Teen = 125 XP
Teen to Adult = 250 XP
Adult to Ancient = 525 XP
Ancient to Epic = 1050 XP
Epic to Mega = 2125 XP
Mega to Ultra = 2250 XP

Each time your pet levels up, except from Mega to Ultra, it will gain some form of talent. When leveled up to ultra, it is a little different. When you’re just starting out, you will certainly want to avoid leveling up to ultra. I’ll go over talents in more detail later on.

How to the Read the Pet Menu

Take a look and familiarize yourself with the image below to fully understand this next bit. You need to have a pet in your backpack to do this. Press “I” to pull up your pet menu. Click the button next to the snack icon that says “Full Talent View” in the lower right section of the menu. You will then see the below image. I took the liberty of marking up some of the features in this menu:

1. Pet Preview – shows pet’s appearance.
2. Pet Cards – any spell cards obtained from the pet (excluding card-giving talents). Certain pets will unlock more as they level up
3. Manifested Pedigree – the total value or power of all manifested (discovered) pet talents.
4. Total Pedigree – total value of all talents, manifested or not. This is basically showing how much potential this pet has.

Note: Ideally, you want both of these pedigree numbers as high as possible. Most good pets have total pedigree ranging from 75-90, and manifested pedigree of at least 40.

5. Talent Pool – shows the manifested pet talents and rarity of ones that are still locked. Generally, the rarer they are, the better they are. They range from common, uncommon, to rare, to ultra rare, to epic.
6. School and species of pet.
7. Experience Bar – shows stage of pet and required pet XP to next stage.
8. Pet Statistics – shown at max possible values. These are some of the most important attributes about your pet, as these determine how effective its talents are. More on those later.
9. Utility menu – Jewels, view, tome, etc

Understanding Pet Statistics

Pets have five main statistics that influence their talents – Strength, Intellect, Agility, Will, and Power. The higher each statistic is, the higher your pet’s talent skills will be. For instance, a pet with max stats, as shown above, will give more damage or resist in its manifested than a pet with the stats depicted below. This of course depends on the pet’s manifested talents. If the pet doesn’t have a resist talent, you cannot expect it to give you resist.

After your pet is fully trained, you’d ideally want your stats all maxed out, but if you’re still questing while training your pet, boost the stats that your pet’s talents rely on the most. For damage, boost your strength, will, and power. For critical, boost your Agility, Will, and Power. Resist relies on Strength, Agility, and Power.

These are the stats that will be affected by each attribute:

Strength is a stat you need to boost for more damage, power pip chance, resistance, outgoing healing, armor piercing, and stun resistance.
Intellect affects your mana, accuracy, power pip chance, incoming healing, armor piercing, and critical block rating.
Agility affects your health, accuracy, resistance, incoming healing, armor piercing, and critical rating.
Will affects health, mana, damage, outgoing healing, critical rating, as well as critical block rating.
Power affects most of your stats. It’s definitely worth having maxed out.

You will probably have notice that Pet Happiness was left out. This is a fairly new attribute added to pets that doesn’t affect stats per se. However, there are specific tasks and talents that rely on happiness, such as playing as your pet. Happiness is the total of all other stats combined and is used to perform these tasks / talents. It’s refilled by feeding pets.

How to Train your Pets

Pets can be trained by completing mini-games in Wizard City’s Pet Pavilion, accessed from the Commons. Each mini-game has the potential to give your pet up to 4 XP depending on how you performed.

Dance Game

The Dance game is a memory game using arrow key patterns. This game is particularly good for Agility, and is also the fastest game, so many wizards frequently fail at this intentionally to feed their pet snacks quickly.

Cannon Game

The Cannon Game lets you shoot your pet out of a cannon while calculating wind force to try to hit a bulls-eye on a target. It’s particularly good for training Will.

Grumpy Gobblers

Grumpy Gobblers is a game which combines Angry Birds and the Cannon Games. Using a pet cannon, wizards attempt to do as much destruction to a structure as possible while taking wind speeds into account. It’s particularly good at training agility and strength, giving 2 points for each.

Gobbler Drop

Gobbler Drop is a 3D game which has your pet pick up as many snacks as possible. This specializes in Strength.

Maze Game

The Maze Game is a labyrinth where your pet has to collect as many snacks as possible while evading ghosts, all while under a timer. It’s similar to Pac-Man. The best stat to train here would be your intellect.

Way of the Ninja Pig

The Way of the Ninja Pig is an intense obstacle course with a time limit. Its probably the hardest, and most time-consuming, game in the Pavilion. This trains will better than any other stat.

Upon completing each game, you have the opportunity to feed your pet a pet snack. Choose wisely, for the right snack can make the most out of your pet’s talents. Additionally, once you complete a mini-game enough times you will gain the ability to skip the game in future instances and just feed the pet a snack. This is a new feature referred to as Pet Mastery, which will surely save a lot of time off pet training. However, do try the mini-games, as you can always unlock badges for completing them.

Snacking101
What snack is truly best for your pet?

Choosing the right pet snack can really impact how much your pet grows. Pick snacks that boost the stats that you feel will help your pet’s talents, and also give pet XP. The best snacks in the game give 50-60 EXP. These are a special type of snack called mega snacks. These can be obtained by crafting, defeating certain bosses, gardening, or by purchasing packs in the crown shop. Gardening is by far the best and most reliable method of getting mega snacks. Personally, I get at least 40 a week just from my gardens alone. Click here for information about the best plants to use for gardening.

Just like humans, pets have favorite foods. Snacks fall into certain categories: snacks, sweets, desserts, meals, or other. They’re also categorized by school Each pet has two specific types they like, one meal type and one school type.

Feeding a pet a regular snack won’t give you any bonuses. It just gives the XP and stat boosts from the snack.

If you feed your pet a snack that fulfills one of the types it prefers, your pet will “like the snack” and get an additional one XP and Power.

Should you feed a pet a snack that fulfills both the types, your pet will “love the snack” and gain an additional two XP and Power Points.

Talent Types

There are several types of Talents that a pet can manifest. Each first generation pet has a set of talents they are born with. A first generation pet is an unaltered pet that has never hatched with another pet before. Thus, the talents in its pool will always be the same as any other first gen pet of that species. Once a pet hatches with another pet, the talents of the new pet are mixed from both parents’ talent pool. The notable talent categories are:

Wizard Stat Boost Talents

These can give resist, damage, healing, power pip percentage, critical, or any other one of your character’s statistics. These are especially common among either tanks or heavy hitters to bolster their stats.

May Cast Talents

These can automatically cast a lot of different spells including global spells, charms, wards, auras, or even heals. The main appeal is that the may cast won’t chip away any of your wizard’s pips. Check out our full list of may cast talents in this article. These are popular among questing Wizards due to the benefit of having may cast heals. They are also very popular in Deckathalon events, as may cast talents are the only way a pet can help in these towers.

Selfish Talents

These talents boost the pet’s statistics. These are generally looked down upon because they don’t benefit the wizard as much, but some advanced pet trainers use them to improve the stats of other talents. For information about that, check out this article about how important selfish talents are!

Combat Talents aka Will Casts

These are extremely similar to may casts, but are actually cast on command. They are fairly new to the game, meaning that a lot of the talents are still unknown. However, a lot is already known such as the fact that they won’t chip away any of your wizard’s pips. Also, they cost happiness to cast while in combat, so make sure to feed your pet snacks!

Adventure Talents

These are talents that will be used while exploring the Spiral. Like combat talents, Each pet can only have one at a time. Their function is to be able to retrieve items, such as chests and reagents, and give the wizard an extra something besides the usual loot for collecting these items.

Wizard101 Pet Jewels

At Ancient, your pet gains a jewel socket, to which you can add a star jewel. These jewels give many different talents such as may-casts, energy, player stats and many other talents. So, if you level up a pet to mega and you don’t get that one talent you were hoping for, you still have a chance at socketing a jewel of that same talent to the pet. These can be crafted, gardened for, dropped by bosses, or even purchased from packs in the Crown Shop. For more information on how to get these jewels, check out this article by Cody Raventamer.

This is where the ultra pet level comes into play. As mentioned before, leveling up to ultra doesn’t give your pet a new talent. However, there are certain jewel talents, many of them very powerful (see below for some examples), that require your pet to be ultra. Thus, if you need one of these talents, level your pet to ultra. Otherwise, don’t bother.

Pet Hatching

Hatching is a method of passing along desirable talents. By hatching with other pets, the resulting pet may have talents you find more useful. Every time you hatch, the offspring pet will have a mixture of each parent’s talent pool. Thus, the more times you hatch with a specific pet, the higher chance you have of copying that pet’s traits. This process of obtaining the talents you want in your pet’s talent pool can be very time-consuming and expensive, so don’t be discouraged. It will often take a handful of attempts before you start seeing offspring pets that start to look like a desired pet.

You can either hatch with another wizard directly in the Pet Pavilion Hatchery, or find a desirable pet in the Hatchmaking Kiosk. For help with hatchmaking, check out this detailed article.

In Conclusion….

Pets are hard. There’s no doubt about that. However, the rewards that a good pet can give you are some of the most important ones in the game. Keep training your pets, and never be afraid to hatch again! Best of luck with your pets! If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments, and we’ll get to them as soon as possible!