This weekend I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my back so have been taking it easy. Which means a lot of time in WoW. This week’s bonus event is one of my favourites, the Pet Battle Bonus. It’s a brilliant opportunity to level up some of your pets very quickly. I have two pet related items on my pre-Legion bucket list. One is to get the pet battle monument by completing 2000 (argh) pet battles in Draenor. The other is an equally stupid goal of my own to get all of my pets to 25. So why not kill 2 birds with one stone while also levelling up one of my toons at the same time?

One of the best places to level up pets nice and quickly is actually right outside the Horde garrison. There are loads of little Icespine Hatchlings that respawn very quickly. That and with my little team below, they are perfect for levelling pets very quickly from level 1.

Here’s my team:

Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling
Breath
Thunderbolt
Decoy
(note: Decoy is really the only ability you need from this pet, so if you have another with Decoy that you would rather use, go for it. Just make sure your other 2 abilities will be useful in the rare event that Xu-Fu will go down). 

Xu-Fu, Cub of Xuen
Bite
Feed
Prowl

Levelling pet – any pet that you want to level, even level 1

The strategy:

1. open with Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling and drop Decoy
2. switch to your levelling pet. Don’t do any abilities – the decoy will take the hit so your low level pet doesn’t take any damage
3. switch to Xu-Fu and take the hit
4. do prowl
5. do feed – generally this should bring you right back up to full health

From here it’s a straight forward rotation of doing bite until prowl is available again, then doing prowl, feed and repeat. Xu-Fu does most of the hard work here, but he’s a brilliant little pet. His self healing is what makes this so easy to get through. I work it so that the last hit on the opposing team is Feed which usually bring Xu-Fu back to full health, ready for his next team to fight. It means you don’t spend a lot of time having to heal up your pets outside of the battles. Also, if you’re very lucky, you’ll get 2 critters on the opposing team – each can be taken down with just 2 hits from Xu-fu (sometimes even just 1 if he crits well!).

Sometimes you will get unlucky and Xu-Fu will go down, especially if the other 2 pets are Twilight Wasps (flying), but following the above I’ve only ever had that happen on the 3rd opposing pet, and the mechanical dragonling does just fine to finish off the battle (drop decoy, thunderbolt and breath and you should be done).

You can make the pet levelling process WAY faster if you wear our Safari hat, and use both a Lesser Pet Treat (25% pet exp. bonus) AND the Pet Treat (50% pet exp. bonus) – both will treats will stack, so with everything combined with the pet battle bonus experience, you’re looking at 275% pet experience bonus. VERY nice. 😀

It’s quick and easy. My priest dinged 100 today having essentially the very basics in Frostfire Ridge to give her a garrison, and from then on she did pet battles. It’s definitely a slow levelling process, that’s for sure, but it was something different, and is another alt to cross off my list to have to max level before Legion.

If you try this team out, let me know how you go. Hope it works well for you, too 🙂