Overlord Pet Talents 2017

For this project, I took screenshots of 307 overlords and their pets in November and December 2017. The main thing that interests me of this data is the prevalence of ward pets versus other types of pets. I want to take a look at exactly how common ward talents are in 2017.

In 2016, I took a look at which pet jewels were the most common. You can go read that post here. For my 2017 data, I don’t think there’s a need to look at the jewels separately. I think people have gotten used to jewels to the extent that they mostly see them as part of the pet, rather than an addition.

The data

Since I didn’t find equal amounts of overlords for every level range, we will focus on the most common level ranges in this article. This makes the most sense when you know I found only one novice overlord (probably a booster) and one Promethean overlord. The level ranges with the most overlords were the following:

1. Champion (lvl 120): 67 overlords
2. Legendary (lvl 60): 66 overlords
3. Grandmaster (lvl 50): 45 overlords
4. Magus (lvl 30): 31 overlords
5. Exalted (lvl 100): 25 overlords

When it comes to which schools I found more overlords of, these are the results:

1. Ice: 77 overlords
2. Balance: 66 overlords
3. Fire: 41 overlords
4. Life: 35 overlords
5. Death: 33 overlords
6. Storm: 27 overlords
7. Myth: 27 overlords

Firstly, I divided my data into three large groups: defensive pets, mixed pets and offensive pets. After that, I divided each group into smaller groups. As a result, I have four different defensive kinds of pets, four offensive kinds of pets and two mixed kinds.

 

Schools and Levels

School by school

Not unexpectedly, when we look at these pets school by school, Storms clearly have more offensive pets (74 % of Storm pets were offensive). Fire comes in second, with 51 % offensive pets. Likewise, Ices (65 %), Lifes (63 %) and Deaths (55 %) have more defensive pets. The other schools are less pronounced in their preference for clear offense or defence.

Level by level

When we divide the pets by level group, there is a clear preference for defensive pets at Champion, with 70 % of their pets being defensive. I didn’t expect that! Grandmasters are the second most pronounced group, with 62 % defensive pets. Legendary is slightly more offensive, with 45 % of their pets being offensive pets. The other level groups don’t have a clear preference, or I don’t have enough overlords of the specific level range to warrant drawing any conclusions.

Different Types of Pets

Subtypes of Pet Types

Defensive Pets

Out of all 307 pets I took screenshots of in November and December, 150 got labeled as “defensive“, so that’s about 49 % of the total.

Ward pets

I was most interested in ward pets when looking at the defensive pet category. I had the idea that ward pets have been on the rise for a long time and that they’re everywhere now. I wasn’t far off. While the data of 2016 contained only 16 % ward pets, this year we’re dealing with 40 % ward pets (at least 2 ward talents). Of all pets, 209 (68 %) have at least one ward talent. Having one or two wards is very common.

 

Last year, the small amount of ward pets didn’t warrant splitting the ward pets into groups, but this year I did. Thus, we have “full ward pets” and regular “ward pets” this year. A full ward pet, as mentioned earlier, is a pet with at least three ward talents. Full ward pets are the most common amongst Death wizards. Of all the Death overlords I took a screenshot of, 27 % use a full ward pet. Ice comes in second, with 25 % full ward pets.

Which wards are used?

The most common wards are Balance, Fire and Ice. Of all pets with at least one ward, 61 % have Balance-Ward, 57 % Ice-Ward and 46 % Fire-Ward. Pets which have all three of these wards combined account for 16 % of all pets with wards. Life-Ward is clearly the least popular, with two overlords sporting a pet with it.

 

Fortify and Enfeeble on Defensive Pets

In addition to the wards, many of these defensive pets also have may cast Fortify and/or Enfeeble. Fortify is found on a total of 75 pets (24 %), all either defensive or mixed pets. A total of 80 pets (26 % of all pets) had may cast Enfeeble. While Fortify isn’t found on any offensive pets, enfeeble is found on seven offensive pets. Of my 307 pets, 46 (or 15 %) had both Enfeeble and Fortify.

Heals on Defensive Pets

Healing pets are very rare these days. There is a total of 37 pets (12 %) with at least one healing talent. Of these 37, 18 are defensive pets, 15 mixed pets and 4 offensive pets.

Damage on Defensive Pets

Defensive pets do have damage talents fairly often. I collected 62 defensive pets with one damage talent (41 % of all defensive pets). This damage talent is often a jewel rather than a manifested talent.

 

Offensive pets

Of the 307 pets I collected, 106 (so 35 %) were offensive pets. The school with the most offensive pets is Fire, quickly followed by Storm. However, within those groups, there’s a difference between the type of offensive pet preferred. Fire wizards prefer damage pets. A portion of 34 % of all fire pets are full damage pets, meaning they have 3 or more damage talents. Only 10 % of Fire wizards favored a pet with critical talents, and none opted for a pierce pet. Meanwhile, 37 % of Storm wizards prefer a damage and critical pet. Another 36 % of Storm wizards picked full damage pets and 11 % went for a damage and pierce option.

I marked 62 pets as full damage pets, meaning they have at least three damage talents. Among those 62, there were 39 pets with three damage talents (63 %), 18 pets with four damage talents (29 %) and 5 with five damage talents (8 %).

Critical and Pierce on Offensive Pets

If a pet had critical or pierce talents in addition to their damage talents, I moved them to the crit or pierce pet groups. This resulted in 24 pets with damage and critical, and 9 pets with damage and pierce. As said before, both critical and pierce were the most popular on Storm pets.

Infallible on Offensive Pets

Infallible is also a talent that semi-regularly is used. It only appears on one defensive pet, but is present on 26 % of offensive pets.

Wards on Offensive Pets

Having one or two wards is very common. This is true even for my 106 offensive pets: 25 % of these have one ward.

 

Mixed Pets

Of my 307 pets, there were 51 that were hard to classify as either offensive or defensive. There isn’t much to say about these pets. I might interest you to know that 13 pets were a total mix of offensive and defensive, with two wards and two damage talents.

The mixed pets group was also the group with the most healing pets: 15 pets had at least one heal. This is a lot, when you see that there are only 3 defensive pets with a heal and zero offensive pets with a heal. I am inclined to conclude that the mixed pets are old pets. Maybe these warlords didn’t feel the need to hop on the ward train or go full-out offensive.

 

May Casts

In this article, I have talked about may cast talents specifically on defensive or offensive pets. However, we can also find some interesting points by focusing on the level ranges. Firstly, when looking at the grand total, we can see Enfeeble and Fortify appear on about a quarter of overlords’ pets. Note that this grand total contains ALL level ranges, not just the ones in the table.

May casts are the least popular at Exalted, where overlords usually prefer full damage, damage and critical or full ward pets over may casts.

Enfeeble

As you can see may cast Enfeeble is extremely common at Magus and Grandmaster levels. More than 60 % of pets at this level have Enfeeble. Meanwhile, Enfeeble nearly doesn’t exist among Champion pets, with only 4 % of pets having this talent. I suppose this is because Champions don’t blade a lot, making Enfeeble a useless talent.

Fortify

Fortify is used most at Grandmaster level, with 56 % of Grandmaster pets having this talent. No other level range has that much of an appreciation for may cast Fortify.

Infallible and heals

May cast Infallible is the most common on Adept pets. I only have 14 Adept overlords, which is a very small sample to draw conclusions on. However, I decided to include them in this table because Adepts are the most likely to have pets with a healing talent. Adepts also are the biggest fans of Infallible, with 36% of Adept pets having may cast Infallible. Infallible is also common at Magus. While Magus overlords do like the defensive Enfeeble, they prefer Infallible (32 %) over Fortify (29 %). Enfeeble and Infallible are polar opposites, with one being defensive and the other offensive. As such, they never appear on the same pet in my data.

 

So there you have it, those are the things I found the most interesting while looking at my data. Is there anything you guys would like to know about pet talents which I neglected to mention? Please let me know in the comments and I might tell you!

Did anything surprise you?
Let us know in the comments!

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