Observations on Losing Loyalty
So let’s say that you are a level 70 hunter with a pet you tamed at low level, a pet that’s been your Best Friend (loyalty level 6) for a very long time. You ran out of food and your pet is unhappy, so you were headed back to town to grab him some grub when the unthinkable happens — you get disconnected but your character remains online. You can’t get back in, your character doesn’t seem inclined to log out, and your unhappy pet is standing there getting less loyal by the moment.
Question: How long do you have before your pet runs away?
Answer: About twelve hours.
I know that because I’ve been spending an incredibly boring week on the Public Test Realm finding out how long it takes for pets to lose loyalty levels. I’ll spare you the tedium and summarize my results:
- Pets will only run away when they reach loyalty level 0.
- A high-loyalty pet that is kept unhappy will gradually lose loyalty levels until he hits 0 and runs away.
- Pets only lose loyalty when they are unhappy.
- The only factor for loyalty loss seems to be time.*
- The table below shows how long it takes a pet to lose an entire level of loyalty.**
- A newly tamed pet starts at the top of loyalty level 1, which means that you always have 30 minutes before it runs away.
| Loyalty Level Change | Time |
|---|---|
| 6–>5 | 4 hr |
| 5–>4 | 3 hr |
| 4–>3 | 2 hr |
| 3–>2 | 1 hr 30 min |
| 2–>1 | 1 hr |
| 1–>0 | 30 min |
* Time is the only factor in loyalty loss. It doesn’t matter exactly how unhappy your pet is — all unhappy pets seem to lose loyalty at the same rate. And it doesn’t matter if you fight with your pet or just sit around in a city — the loyalty still dribbles away at the same rate.
One important side effect of this: You don’t need to be afraid of using Dismiss Pet on your unhappy pet or fighting with him and possibly getting him killed. Those actions can make him more unahppy, but they won’t make him run away any faster.
** The table only applies for entire levels of loyalty. If your pet has only been loyalty level 2 for just a few minutes, then he won’t get the full hour of time before he drops back to loyalty level 1. Instead, he’ll drop back after just a few minutes.
23 Comments
I’ve always wondered what happens when your pet runs away, as I have always been way overprotective of my pets and never let them get unhappy, permenent pet or temporary.
Do you get a message saying, ” has run away!” and your pet dissapears? Does your pet attack you?
Does your pet actualy look like it’s running away?
Sorry for bombarding you with questions, its great to know that dissmissing a unhappy pet WONT make it loose loyalty faster :-)
But keeping a pet dismissed will “pause” its loyalty and happiness loss, right?
Wolfington: You get a red error message on the screen (not in the chat box) that says “Your pet has run away” and the pet fades out.
Darkhallow: Correct. Pets don’t gain or lose loyalty while they are not by your side.
This was very informitive and useful. I was always curious just how long we had before we lost loyalty. I’ve never had a pet go into the red for more than a few seconds. Heck if he hits yellow I feed him RIGHT after what ever fight I’m in, but it’s good to know there’s a heck of a buffer zone when you get um well and truely loyal. 3 hours is a long time.
“So let’s say that you are a level 70 hunter with a pet you tamed at low level, a pet that’s been your Best Friend (loyalty level 6) for a very long time. You ran out of food and your pet is unhappy, so you were headed back to town to grab him some grub when the unthinkable happens — you get disconnected but your character remains online. You can’t get back in, your character doesn’t seem inclined to log out, and your unhappy pet is standing there getting less loyal by the moment.”
Just reading that paragraph put a queasy little pit in my stomach. Let’s hope that never happens to me. *hugs Tux*
I can confirm the thirty minutes runaway time on a freshly tamed pet. I had a string of awful luck when trying to learn Thunderstomp on my hunter in STV. I tamed the gorilla but had no food with me. Tstomp is one of the skills that can be activated outside of combat, so I just stood there on the road spamming the button every time its cooldown was up. Every minute. For an hour and 45 minutes!
At exactly 30 minutes, I got a “your pet has run away” message.. but worse, since I was standing only a few dozen yards away from where I initially tamed him, the ungrateful wretch did NOT despawn, instead he started attacking me.
I was onto my 4th stupid gorilla before I finally learned thunderstomp. I then abandoned the thing, grabbed a nearby cat and took out my frustrations by killing every gorilla in sight!
I had a similar issue on my initial taming quest on a brand new Tauren hunter. The neutral plainstrider ran away (as in, actually ran, not despawned) when I abandoned it. The Prairie stalker was next and he attacked me when I dismissed him. In both cases I was fairly close to their original spawn point when releasing them. The third temporary pet is a swoop (carrion bird). He also attacked me when I released him… but I tamed this one, and still have him!
So, it seems if you abandon a pet within fairly close range to where you grabbed him, he will NOT despawn, and may end up attacking you. If you abandon or have one run away in another zone they will despawn instead.
Having look into PetPersonality.dbc you find a record with following values (my comments in brackets):
333000 (unhappy to content happiness points)
666000 (content to happy happiness points)
0.75 (damage percentual mod for unhappy)
1 (damage mod pct mod for content)
1.25 (damage pct mod for happy)
-10 (loyalty tick for unhappy)
5 (loyalty tick for content)
20 (loyalty tick for happy)
There is probably some constant timer for loyalty ticks and for each loyalty level you need different amount of layalty points (and xp ofc). So assuming your pet is unhappy, it looses -20 loy. points every tick…and when total loyalty points fall under certain level, pet looses loyalty level…similar for loyalty gain. If your pet is totally at a bottom with loyalty points, it runs away.
Based on this eg. to loose certain loyalty level of unhappy pet it takes 4 times longer than to gain it for happy pet with enough gained xp.
All this perfectly matches with Manias and later with my personal loyalty experiments…..
SB@L: What is PetPersonality.dbc? I just yesterday got numbers I was happy with for loyalty gain/loss per tick, and they match those you mention in relative values. But if this was already known … then I wasted some time. :>
Mania, does pet death factor into loyalty loss at all, or does it only affect happiness. There have been a few occasions where I would rez my pet, only to have it die again before I could feed it because I was in combat, and I’ve always been worried about him running away.
This is exactly why I always overdo it on the meat. I’d rather have four stacks of clefthoof ribs sucking up bag space than forget to carry anything and have something like that happen before I can refill.
DarkWolff: As far as I can tell, pet death only affects happiness — it doesn’t directly make you lose loyalty. (My poor test boar — I tamed him only to get him killed over and over, but he still hung out for a full 30 minutes.)
Personally, I always felt that instead of just running away, letting your pet loyalty go to 0 should be more dramatic.
“Your pet has reverted to the wild!”
Suddenly, you have a level 70 (or level whatever-it-was-before), fully-trained creature attacking you. Untameable, and it attacks until either you kill it, or it kills you (and despawns).
…. what? So I think the pets should get revenge on the hunters who mistreated them to the point they had to run away. Even my trash pets get a feeding or two until I’ve learned their skills and I release them back into the wild.
@ Mania - Thanks so much for once again tediously researching stuff. If I had half the passion you did concerning Hunter pets, my wife would leave me.
@ Cryptography - I’ve never seen a ‘runaway’ pet do something other then despawn, but I may test that one just to see. As to you experience involving the taming quest beasts, they’re never actaully your pet as you’re really just dominating them with a magic rod. When you release them they’re just as wild as when you first met them, with an aggresive stance towards you. This happens with any of the animals you ‘tame’ on the level 10 quest.
Mania: PetPersonality.dbc is a database file inside WoW client (packed in one of the mpq files). No, your time was not wasted, your first loyalty research was a big step ahead and provided much data about loyalty mechanics and was a significant bit to this mosaic. Also I am not 100% sure, but everything just perfectly fits…
See also my related comment here.
Kurasu: Yes, that would be really realistic, like the ones tamed by taming rods for lvl 10 quests.
Mania: Thanks for the toil — this is something I’ve often wondered, but never had the patience to test. It’s appreciated!
Cryptography: I had a similar experience in STV with the gorillas. Rather than simply despawn, the gorilla attacked me. That was a good two years ago.
Kurasu: That would be great if they were dramatic like that. Neglected pets should indeed take revenge (”You drug me away from my home and kin. You should have fed me. /chomp”).
That’s never going to happen, though, with Frohike (my beloved turtle); he’s utterly spoiled.
I’ve seen released pets go violent and attack during the level 10 taming quests, but never after that. It would make sense that they do that near their normal spawning grounds, though. Interesting!
Yeah, I found Thunderstomp to be one of the most frustrating pet skills to learn. Eventually I figured out that you can do it without being in combat, but oddly only if you have something (anything) selected. That made it slightly less annoying, but still didn’t exactly speed things up, what with that long cooldown.
During the taming quests, a formerly hostile creature (eg prairie stalker, swoop in my example), when released quite near its original spawning point, WILL attack.
If a formerly hostile creature is released far enough away from its start location, it will just despawn. I did both Tauren and Draenei training quests recently. On my tauren I was able to tame the swoop properly immediately after dismissing him from the taming quest. I still have him now. When I tried to tame the cat that is the last stage of the Draenei quest, I was too far from its spawn point and it despawned right in front of me.
On the Tauren, the formerly neutral plainstrider just ran off headed towards its original spawn point. I released him immediately south of the bridge north of Bloodhoof, and tamed him originally just near the t-junction where the fire festival tents were set up.
On previous hunters, I have let the 15 minute taming rod effect expire. I am usually far away from the original spawn point by then and the pet just despawns.
Now its time to go spend 31 minutes playing with the cats outside of XR to find if they do run, attack or despawn if not fed at all.
OK.. half an hour later.
Tamed a cat outside XR and stayed right in place exactly where I tamed it. 30 minutes later it despawned without attacking and I got a red “Your pet has run away” message.
So… either its faulty memory on the gorillas thing, or its been changed since then.
It would be about a year ago I was doing the gorillas.
So one question that doesn’t seem to have been answered yet. if the above is true, what would happen in this example:
A level 6 loyalty pet which had been a companion for many months, and had all of its training points spent on talents was left at unhappy for 4 hours and it’s loyalty went down to level 5. What would happen to the skills that it had? Does it unlearn these to account for the fewer training points? Does it go negative, like a pet from the wild would with a know skill that has just been tamed?
……..interesting.
Fengor: Ah, yes, I should have mentioned that. Yes, a pet that loses loyalty levels will lose unspent training points, but if it has spent the points then it won’t lose the skills — it just goes negative.
Awesome! I have never let any of my pets lose a loyalty level, and not wanting to let this occur to see what happens, I thank you for having tested it, Mania! Cheers.
Oh, excellent! I didn’t know whether or not pets could lose loyalty levels once they hit Best Friend, but wasn’t about to test it. :) This is a relief, at least–I’ll no longer worry about Nemesis running away after getting killed three or four times in the same Leotheras encounter.
Whirlwind bleed = bad for pets. OH so bad for pets. x_x;
I can’t imagine not feeding RL pets that as a hunter, I have to take as every bit of good care of my WOW pets as I do for Miss ALpha and Miss Omega (RL critters). The only difference between my WOW and RL pets is no Vet bill, lol.
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