In-between packing for my cross-country move and searching for my husband’s escaped hamster, I spent some time this weekend continuing my research on loyalty. I now feel that I have a basic handle on what it takes for a hunter pet to gain a level of loyalty, although a good bit of verification remains to be done.
Summary:
| To Get From … To … | XP Gain Required* | Time Required |
|---|---|---|
| Level 1 (Rebellious) –> Level 2 (Unruly) | 5% of hunter’s level | 0 minutes* |
| Level 2 (Unruly) –> Level 3 (Submissive) | 5% of hunter’s level | 30 minutes |
| Level 3 (Submissive) –> Level 4 (Dependable) | 5% of hunter’s level | 45 minutes |
| Level 4 (Dependable) –> Level 5 (Faithful) | 5% of hunter’s level | 60 minutes |
| Level 5 (Faithful) –> Level 6 (Best Friend) | 5% of hunter’s level | 90 minutes |
Notes:
‘XP Gain Required’ refers to how much experience the pet needs to gain before its loyalty will increase. However, if the pet is the same level as the hunter, then the pet doesn’t actually get to keep this experience. The pet still conceptually gains the XP, it just doesn’t get to keep it. So a pet the same level as the hunter can indeed still gain loyalty.
Also note that 5% of hunter’s level means 5% of the total experience it would take for the hunter to get from their current level to their next level. Being almost all the way through a level on your hunter does not speed up loyalty gain for your pet. :> Also, although hunters don’t gain XP at level 70, there is still a theoretical 70–>71 amount that is used for these calculations.
The times are not cumulative. You can’t sit around for 4 hours straight and then go out and get your pet 25% of your level in experience and catapult him to Best Friend.
You can’t actually get from Rebellious to Unruly in 0 minutes because it takes longer than that to earn the experience. But as fast as I was able to gain XP I never ran into a time constraint, so I’m assuming that the time here is 0 minutes. Certainly it is less than 3 minutes.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions here, such as:
- Does the pet need to be happy the entire time or can they be merely content? Does being content change the amount of time required?
- What happens when the hunter levels while the pet is working on the next level of loyalty? Does the pet need the old amount of experience, the new amount, or something in between?
- Does the experience and time requirements remain the same for higher level pets? I have evidence that the experience remains the same, but the time might well change.
- Is the time component a straight-forward limit, or do our pets gain loyalty at a particular rate and what I am actually seeing is the amount of time it takes for that rate to ‘fill up’ the loyalty pool to the next level? Or is it the experience gain that fills the pool?
- What happens when your pet loses a level of loyalty? Does it start over from the beginning with these requirements?
But I think this goes quite some way towards explaining what we’ve observed about loyalty gain. For example, it’s now clear why your pet will often gain a level of loyalty while you are sitting around in town (his time requirement has finally been met) but why you can’t just sit in town without hunting to gain loyalty.
Methodology:
I started with two assumptions:
- Assume loyalty gain requires both a time and an experience component. That is, assume that in order to reach the next level of loyalty, a pet must both gain a certain amount of experience and also be gaining loyalty (happy or content) for a certain period of time. (Note that I assumed content would work the same but I didn’t test it yet.)
- Assume that at low levels, the experience gain will be much faster than the time component and so the time component will generally be the limiting factor.
Then I took a low-level pet (a level 10 spider from Loch Modan) and a low-level hunter (a level 13 dwarf I had lying around) and ground out levels with a stopwatch in hand. Every time the spider gained a level of loyalty, I noted how long it had been since the last loyalty level was gained. Other than the first jump (from Rebellious to Unruly), all the other levels took a nicely rounded amount of time — which seemed to reinforce the idea that, with constant experience gain, the time was the limiting factor.
Once I had a baseline of times, I concentrated on experience. I started with another, identical level 10 spider. My dwarf was now level 15, but since I was looking at the pet’s experience gain that didn’t matter much. For each loyalty level, I sat around with the spider, keeping it happy but not earning any experience, until the same amount of time had passed as it took the first spider to reach the next loyalty level. Then I took this new spider out and killed low-level prey until his loyalty level increased, and noted the amount of experience that took. Then it was back to waiting for the next level!
Although the process took quite while, I am pleased with the results. Unfortunately, now I really should test it out on higher level pets and hunters — which is going to take forever! But I’ll deal with that after we finish with our move.
Wow. Just wow. Awesome research Mania, your contribution to hunters everywhere is simply amazing.
The time limit makes sense. That was the thing I really couldn’t get my head around, how loyalty could be xp dependent, and yet my pet would love me better after an hour of fishing…
Of course there are all these questions you mention, but I think this is a big step towards understanding the loyalty issue.
So, if you kill the required number of mobs for the next loyalty level in 10 minutes, then skip out to town for a little AH trolling, your pet could ding after the required time interval. Very well done!
I think that we can answer the question about whether the pet will gain loyalty if you don’t feed it. The answer is no. Read the tooltip when the pet is content or happy. It says, “gaining loyalty” I think that we can assume this to mean that it is counting time and adding kill exp to it’s loyalty calculator. If the pet is unhappy, then it is losing loyalty.
I wish I’d noted how much XP I had, at level 68, when I tamed my level 67 Wind Serpent. I didn’t notice exactly when he went to Unruly, but I was at about 44-45% of my next level, which means I should have been at about 20% when I tamed him.
But man…at this level, it SURE takes more than 30 minutes! *grin* (And a LOT of bagels for the Wind Serpent!)
Excellent! That *has* to be the explanation for pets gaining while you are sitting around – that has bugged me for the longest time. I never let a pet stay hungry beyond my noticing it, so they are almost always happy. When I tame the first time, I feed till happy (2 feed sessions) and THEN go hunt with them. That seems to be a good technique and I’ve never had issues with it.
It also explains why that lvl 63 ravager I got after my hunter hit 70 is taking soooooo long. I have him to loyalty 4 so far, but not a single level has he gained. And we have done some grinding – almost entirely 68-70 mobs. But, I blame you Mania, because you pointed out the changing skin on that ravager, when I had been so happy with my lvl 70 black and purple one. ::sigh::
great work. I, for one, am in your debt.
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Thanks, everyone. I’m sure there are still nuances that this doesn’t cover, but I am pleased to be able to add some understanding at least.
To a few posters above… Lord Darkhallow, may I guess?
But, anyways, awesome research Mania!
And you say that I’m crazier than you? :)
Excellent work!
Well, at least I didn’t write a plug-in to gather the data …
Although if you can get loyalty/happiness data from the game client via plug-ins, I’m going to have to. My timing methods just aren’t precise enough to figure out ral gain/loss over time numbers for loyalty and happiness.
Yay! Hard data finally! Excellent work on both your methodology and conclusions (and this is coming from a math PhD 8-)). Thank you for taking the time to do the tests and sharing the results. I’m sure you have made many a curious hunter happy.
Dimo
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You noted that times are not cumulative, but is the XP? For example could you quickly grind out the total 25% xp and then wait the allotted time for the loyalty levels to increase?
Makros: Good question. I don’t believe the XP is cumulative — it wouldn’t make sense to me that it was — but I didn’t test that directly.
I have bad news for you mania!
Events:
UNIT_HAPPINESS: Fired when the Pet Happiness changes.
UNIT_PET_EXPERIENCE: Fired when the pet’s experience changes.
Functions:
GetPetHappiness: Returns the pet’s happiness, damage percentage, and loyalty gain rate.
GetPetExperience: Returns the pet’s current XP total, and the XP total required for the next level.
GetPetLoyalty: Returns pet loyalty flavor text (i.e. “(Loyalty Level 6) Best Friend”).
GetGameTime: Returns the current server time in hours and minutes.
GetTime: Returns the system uptime of your computer in seconds, with millisecond precision.
(Hope I get all links right as there’s no comment preview here!)
So you can get your hands dirty! :)
Eheh! Typical! It had to be on the last one that I forgot/mistyped the closing! ;)
That’s okay — because of the links it got put into moderation anyway, so I closed your tag before I approved it.
Otherwise: Ack! Now I really do have to learn Lua. *sigh* But after the move. Not today.
(And thanks. :>)
This post has confirmed IMHO, that you are a truly and utter geek! But it’s also made me subscribe to your RSS feed (even though I’ve been meaning to do it for some time now)!
Thanks for all the hard work!
Leveled a scorpid from 69-70 (at least 5 hrs) – After leveling it was still only Loyalty Level 5
Perhaps this only works for lower levels
Wonderful stuff, Mania. It makes a very simple explanation for something I realise now I’ve noticed before. Pets tamed later in the game tend to take a longer time increasing their loyalty.
*wonders if he should play around with Someone’s thingies and add an “Estimate time till next loyalty level” to PetInfoFu…*
Amazing work! I’d been wanting to do something similar to this, but hadn’t taken the time to actually think too hard about the starting assumptions. As I’m in the process of leveling/taming a pair of new pets (sigh, RIP scorpids), I’ll try to gather some meaningful data on taming at level 70.
Does this mean that you could go out, get 25% of a level in 60 mins (theoretically) and sit in town for 90 mins and be sitting at level 6?
“*wonders if he should play around with Someone’s thingies”
Hmmm… I’m not sure I like the sound of that! :)
@JayHawk: I did try your Fubar_PetInfoFu and it works standalone after two changes: removing Fubar from dependencies and removing LoadOnDemand. But I found it to be way toooooooooooo (let me make it more clear: tooooooooooooooooo) much stuff!
I mean, what I’d like, and will probably get my hands dirty on that someday, is a simple bar always visible that displays for each of your 3 possible pets a minimum of info, probably something along a mini-portrait (if not too hard to do!), level, and a currentXP/neededXPtolevel progress bar so that I can see at a glance how far behind my pets are falling, not only in level, but in XP in that level. Maybe add also the number of unspent TPs as well and that’s just about all. Your add-on, even though it’s VERY complete and does look very powerful, does too many things I don’t need and doesn’t provide an immediate visual feedback which is what I want…
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Pet hamster???
This is a good start, but can’t be correct. I had pets during my GM grind that I didn’t PvE with, only PvPed. They still gained loyalty, although at a poor rate.
Unles they’ve changed the mechanic since TBC, or honor gained counted like experience, it doesn’t make sense that this would happen.
Thanks for your hard work, Mania.
I expect the time requirement is happiness state dependent: I assume pet gains periodically certain amount of loyalty points based on happiness state. The period could be loyalty level dependent (that would explain raising time with loyalty level) and amount of loyalty points could be happiness state dependent (e.g. unhappy=loosing 20 loy. pts, content=gaining 10 loy. pts, happy=gaining 20 loy. pts).
Then simply if you reach certaing amount of loyalty pts and required exp, pet levels up in loyalty. On the other side, if you loose certaing amount of loyalty pts, your pet runs away.
It would be interesting to know how long it takes to get higher loyalty level if pet is in different happiness states or combined (e.g. 5 minutes unhappy then still happy…).
I feed pet and afk’d in OGR AH and my loyalty lvl increased. This topic needs a blue sticky on the forums…
There’s a discussion going on about this over on TKA Something: http://forums.tkasomething.com/showthread.php?t=10321
Thanks for the link, Adele. TKA Something has good forums.
I am interested what would happen if your xp req. is reached but you loose loyalty level (eg. from 5 to 4) and then if you try to reach again lvl 5 loyalty – would you need to xp again or does it stack?
Could anyone spend one hour to check if time counter is being reset after your pet becomes unhappy = take a new pet, start stop-watches, keep it happy for lets say 10 min then dismiss/call few times to make it unhappy, wait 5 min and feed to happy, wait until it gains loyalty level, stop stop-watches. I will appreciate it, thank you.
I have a lvl 56 hunter and found the ghost saber that you get from the cat figurines in Darkshore (which the cat is only lvl 20) I have been trying for two days now to raise his loyalty. I thought by killing beast close to his level would get him xp, however, it did not. I am now in Un’goro killing beast way too high for him, but he is getting xp, but the loyalty level has not increased. Not sure if or how this helps, just thought I would share my experience. Great work btw! Happy Hunting!
Level 70 hunter from Frostmane. I have noticed if you kill things right away they seem to get the first loyalty level faster but if you logout then come back on it seems to take longer even if they are the same pet and happy. I also raise low level pets up got a level 20 neon scorpid it didn’t get unruly till level 28. Happy Hunting
You’re right on! Thanks for the info!
Based on what I experienced during my own last 2 weeks investigation of loyalty:
-lets say we have some loyalty_points counter(or so called time req.) and loyalty_xp counter (xp req.)
-there are 3 happiness states: unhappy=red, content=yellow, happy=green
-then a model for loyalty gain/loss could be:
Periodically (lets say every 1 min) server runs a function for loyalty update and based on happiness state it adds/takes some points to/from loyalty_points (happy pet gains 20 points, content 5 pts and unhappy losses -10 pts).
E.g.: loyalty_pts = +20 +20 +20 (now pet turns to content) +5 +5 +5 …. (pet turns to red) -10 -10 ….
In paralell to this server adds xp to loyalty_xp, if pet gets some xp from combat.
During the loyalty update procedure server checks if loyalty_xp reached 5% of hunters level xp and if loyalty_points is greater than needed points for next loyalty level, if so, pet increases in loyalty level. OR when pet is unhappy it checks if loyalty_pts are lower than certain amount, if so, loyalty level gets decreased. If pet changes loyalty level, reset both counters.
So this is how I imagine the system of loyalty gain/loss and it perfectly fits to what I experienced in game.
And Manias time counters for each level are very accurate. Need to mention yet that pet starts with 15min time counter already, so thats why from loy 1 to 2 it takes just few minutes (which are needed for xp gain) but thats why pet runs away after 30min without food.
Other conclusions:
- to get higher loyalty level with content pet it gets 4 times longer than with fed (happy) pet
- to decrease pets loyalty level tekes 2 times more than to get that level with happy pet
Hope it helps.
What i have noticed is the following:
If you are rested, the Pet hast to gain 10% of Level-EP.
Cause your “rested experience” doesn’t count into the one from the pet.
I have been working on a 19 hunter and as this is my first hunter, have been experimenting with some of the pet machanics myself.
One of the other assumptions I have noticed in your results is that a pet gains a straight percentage of the XP that you gain. This isn’t quite actually accurate. At level 17 I was working to level two pets (one 15 and one 16) to match my level. After some online research, there did not seem to be any definitive information out there other than a gut level feeling that you should minimize your own XP and a pet would only gain XP if you did.
So I went out into Westfall to experiment with some green kills. At level 17, 12s were the lowest level greens for me. Sure enough level 10 and 11 creatures had no effect on my pets XP gains. At level 12, this of course changed. My exact numbers are at home (I am at work now), so I will approximate. For level 12s I was gaining a minimum of XP, I almost think it was in th 70 range. My pet gained around 80-90ish. When I moved it up to level 13s, I gained like 40-60 xp more and my pet only gained 10-20 Xp more. At this point I figured I just found out information everyone else already had and that my best bet was to grind on just level 12s, which is what I did.
I think the relevance of this is that the XP required for a loyalty gain may not be a straight percentage of the player’s xp. I am currently trying to move from loyalty 3-4 just with BGs, so I can let you know if I am successful or not.
Good luck and I can’t wait to see more information!
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Nice.. but if my pet is lvl70 will he still gain loyalty? or will he be at lvl1 all the time?.. my pet is just a lvl 63.. just tamed him
If its 5% of the hunters level, then why is it that a level 10 pet will go through all the loyalty levels ridiculously fast if being leveled by a lvl 70 hunter. I could get less than a bar of exp on my hunter and have my (then level 30+) pet be rank 4 loyalty or higher?
Is it 5% of the hunters exp if the hunter were the level of the pet or what? I’m confused :x
Ravenous86: As the article says, “If the pet is the same level as the hunter, then the pet doesn’t actually get to keep this experience. The pet still conceptually gains the XP, it just doesn’t get to keep it. So a pet the same level as the hunter can indeed still gain loyalty.” This applies at level 70 as well. So yes, your level 70 pet can gain loyalty.
Misty: When I did this test, it was very definitely 5% of the hunter’s XP to level. There may have been changes since then. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by your example — by ‘a bar’ do you mean one level? (Which is expected, because loyalty level 1 –> loyalty level 4 only takes 15% of a level if you don’t waste any.) Or one ‘bubble’, which is 5% of a level? Keep in mind that if the XP was based on the pet’s level, you would expect any pet to reach loyalty level 6 before they level up.
I dont believe you have to kill anything to get your pet to gain loyalty. I’m a 70, I tamed a 60 cat, I never killed anything as I had to go do a bunch of buying and selling in the AH, I kept my pet fed and happy and at the end of 3 or 4 hours he had gained a level of Loyalty. He is now at loyalty 4, but has only been out fighting for maybe 1 hour total. Mostly he is with me while I’m in the AH, cuz I need my other pet when raiding. Please explain.
Thank you for the *really, really, really, really* helpful information. This answers the question of why my newer pet didn’t level up it’s loyalty level as fast as my first pet.
-A
I know the post is old, but i have a question.
If you gain the 5% required to hit submissive, but you log out before the time, do you need to gain again the 5% exp in the next play session?
Thank you so much for this info!!! I was so perplexed as to why after spending 4 hours in Maruadon with my new snowy ape (Uhk’loc), he was still rebellious. 99% of the mobs in there are grey to me, so I never hit the 5%!
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The increase doesn’t seem too bad. Instead of 40k its about 63k for me at lvl 70. So by the time I get a pet from 60-63.5 it was at best friend. I was actually worried when I tamed Shy-Rotam that I’d end up giving up because of the increase. But He’s coming along nicely. (Now If I could just decide on a suitable name for him/her)