Hunters have had 5 ‘active’ pet slots in the Cataclysm beta for several weeks now, but until yesterday (build 12759) we didn’t have any way to call them to use without using a Stable Master.
Call Pet, our one and only way to .. err … call a pet, would only ever call the pet in the first active slot. And Call Stabled Pet did not actually let us move pets around.
Call Pet 1-5
But build 12759 introduced five new abilities for hunters, inventively named Call Pet 1 through Call Pet 5.
This is in addition to Call Pet, which has become a type of uber-ability that pops out a Call Pet mini-bar. (We’ll talk about that in a minute.)
New hunters start the game already knowing Call Pet and Call Pet 1, and existing characters will already know those as well.
I was hoping that Call Stabled Pet would be converted to Call Pet 2 for characters that knew it, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Call Pet 2 isn’t likely to be expensive, though. (All these skills currently cost 8 copper on the beta realms, but you can expect that to change.)
Let’s take a look at the current level requirements for the Call Pet abilities. Make sure you read the big caveat afterwards, though!
| Ability | Required Level |
|---|---|
| Call Pet | 0 |
| Call Pet 1 | 0 |
| Call Pet 2 | 18 |
| Call Pet 3 | 42 |
| Call Pet 4 | 62 |
| Call Pet 5 | 82 |
Levels may change!
Ghostcrawler posted in the Blizzard beta forums today to explain how Call Pet works. I’m not going to quote the entire thing (since he’s just explaining what I am telling you in more detail in this post), but I wanted to call out an important sentence:
We are discussing just giving you Call Pet 2-5 at the same level, to make this a little less confusing. Getting the ability to swap from a fourth to a fifth pet isn’t nearly as exciting as getting the ability to call a second one.
Personally, I would very much like to see that change!
Call Who Now?
There is one very interesting behavior to note with all the Call Pet 1-5 abilities: they rename themselves based on the name of the pet that you have in the corresponding active pet slot.
In other words, if you have a wolf named Bob in the first active pet slot, Call Pet 1 shows up as Call Bob on your action bars and in your spellbook – even if you don’t have the ability yet!
In addition, the icon for the ability changes to show the family of the pet in that slot. For example, if you have a crocolisk in the first slot, Call Pet 1 will use the icon of the crocolisk family.
In the image to the right, I have not yet learned the new Call Pet skills. I have a crocolisk (that for some unknown reason I named Lover) in my second active pet slot, and a fox in the third. The fox is named Wolf because when I tamed him he was in the Wolf family, and I have not yet named him.
If you have 5 named pets of different families, this feature is quite handy. If, on the other hand, you’ve tamed 5 boars and not named them yet, you end up with 5 Call Boar abilities, all with a boar icon, each of which calls a different boar.
Thankfully, none of this happens at the Hunter Trainer. At the trainer you will always be learning Call Pet 3, for instance, with the whistle icon, instead of Call Cookie.
[Aside: This being beta, there are some bugs with the Call Pet abilities. Some of them are quite amusing.]
Call Pet Flyout
Okay, so that’s Call Pet 1 -5, now what about Call Pet itself?
I mentioned above that the base ability Call Pet acts as a kind of uber-ability that pops out a Call Pet mini-bar. Here’s how Ghostcrawler explains it:
The Call Pet button is a flyout. You can put this button on your bar and expand it to pick a particular pet. In this way, you only sacrifice one button to calling all your pets. If you like having all your pets separately, then you can either drag the individual pets to your bar. You can even drag them from the Call Pet flyout.
It wasn’t immediately clear to me how that would actually work, so of course I jumped in-game and got some screenshots.
The flyout, as Ghostcrawler calls it, opens to whichever side has room – so it opens up if you put it on a bottom action bar and to the left if you put it on a right-hand action bar.
You open the flyout by clicking on Call Pet, and you can close it by clicking it again if you change your mind.
When the flyout is open, it shows you icons for the pets that you can call – and only the pets that you can actually call. In other words if you have 5 active pets but only know Call Pet 1 and 2, you see icons for your first two pets. If you know Call Pet 1-5 but you only have three active pets (in any slot) then you will see icons for those three pets.
The icon for Call Pet itself remains as a whistle, but the icons in the flyout will always be the family of each pet. When you mouse over each icon in the flyout, you’ll see a tooltip with the name of the pet.
Calling a Pet
In order to call a pet, you must not have a pet out standing beside you. If you do, you will see the error message:
“You already control a summoned creature.”
All you need to do, however, is use Dismiss Pet to dismiss your current pet. Dismiss Pet no longer reduces your pet’s happiness and its cast time has been reduced as well – Blizzard expects us to be using it quite often.
Calling a pet also works fine when the pet has been implicitly dismissed – for example if it’s gotten too far away and disappeared.
Once you pet is dismissed, just click on Call Pet and choose a pet to summon.
You can summon a pet as soon as you tame it, assuming that you know the Call Pet # ability for the active slot that the pet tamed into.
(Pets tame into slots in order, so if you already have pets in slots 1 and 2 and you tame another, it will be in slot 3. If you know Call Pet 3 you can summon it, otherwise you can’t until you hit a Stable Master and move it into slots 1 or 2. Note, however, that you will keep the newly tamed pet with you until you need to use Call Pet.)
Beta testers, get the right Call Pet!
Right now in beta, if you had Call Pet on your ability bar before this patch, you now have the Call Pet 1 on your ability bar. But Call Pet 1 will only ever call the pet in your first active pet slot. So make sure you replace Call Pet 1 with Call Pet before – like me – you get terribly frustrated.
Dead Pets
Unfortunately there is one huge bug with calling a pet in the Cataclysm beta right now – dead pets.
If your pet dies, you can use Revive Pet to revive your pet as usual. Or you can use Call Pet to switch to another pet that is still alive.
But – and this is a big but – if you switch to a living pet instead of reviving your pet immediately, you will need to hit a Stable Master before you’ll be able to revive the dead pet.
That’s because you can’t currently use Call Pet to call a dead pet and you can only use Revive Pet on the pet that is currently with you.
Example: Pet #1 dies. You call Pet #2. Then you decide to switch back to Pet #1. You call Pet #1, but the call fails with the message “Your pet is dead.” because Pet #1 is dead. You try Revive Pet, but it fails with the message “Your pet is not dead.” because Call Pet failed and Pet #2 is not dead.
Even when you return to a Stable Master it’s not exactly easy to revive your dead pet. You need to:
- Call a living pet.
- Open the Stable Master.
- Move the living pet into the inactive slots, which causes it to despawn.
- Move the dead pet into the active slot that the living pet just occupied. This effectively summons the dead pet to you, although it is still dead and therefore not visible.
- Use Revive Pet.
I am absolutely certain that this bug will get fixed before Cataclysm launch, but for the moment beta testers should remember to revive a dead pet before they switch to another one.
Interesting heads up on the dead pet bit. I will be honest though, I do not think Blizzard had in mind being able to call a living pet to replace a dead one. That brings up a lot of huge game play and balance issues. Not only for PvP, but PvE as well. Part of the hunter design is having to take care of your pet during Boss encounters. They do not want fights to consist of Hunter’s sending their pet to attack and forgetting to Mend if the encounter warrants it. This does not even touch the fact that being able to call 5 separate pets instantly during a PvP encounter would make hunters a huge difference in strategy.
Look for Call Pet to only work if you do not have ANY pet, whether it be alive or dead.
Yeah, I’m with Jericho – I expect that a dead pet will block calling a new one by the time this goes live. Otherwise it will encourage stacking multiple slots with essentially the same pet to get 4 instant revive pets (or potentially more if their all Ferocity pets with Heart of the Phoenix).
Interesting to know how it is working currently though – sounds very cool!
*they’re… :P
Keep in mind, though, that Blizzard has said you won’t be able to call a new pet in combat. I would think that that handles a number of those cases you mention.
@Mania Not necessarily in PvP. Let’s say your pet dies while attacking a node. Reinforcements usually get there quickly but not instantly, and call pet gets you battle ready faster than revive pet would. In arenas, getting out of combat can be done for short periods as well, but you have to hurry before you get noticed. Even as is the advantage won’t be too overpowered. It will be limited to four instant revives since you have to revive your fifth pet normally, and usually in PvP you die before your pet does because most players will ignore the pet since killing it doesn’t give an HK or honor points. Not to mention that the spirit healer in battlegrounds will revive you and your pet when you both die.
Jesse: Gotcha – and thanks for the PvP explanation. I wasn’t even thinking about nodes.
Oh, just remembered feign death. Not sure if this still works, but I used to be able to feign death while my pet was attacking a mob, then use a mount while lying down to get away. Useful for mining ore surrounded by mobs, and could be useful to swap pets mid-battle.
Hmm, no Call Pet in combat? That would be horrible. “You forgot to summon your pet before the fight started, so no pet for you!”
Seems easier to just say that you can’t switch a dead pet for a different one – you have to revive and dismiss it first.
“Not to mention that the spirit healer in battlegrounds will revive you and your pet when you both die.” This doesn’t always work; it’s a bit buggy.
I started musing on warlocks already having access to multiple pets on the Petopia forums, but remembered a big difference that might balance things for hunters: warlocks can summon over an existing minion without dismissing the active one. Hunters can’t (and shouldn’t) be able to do that.
I don’t see any need to block call pet in combat. If Blizzard doesn’t want hunters swapping constantly in battle, lengthen the cast time on dismiss pet and possibly add a cast time on summon. These are pretty strict penalties – plus, the pets will be popping up without buffs. Considering that other pet classes aren’t as penalized for losing their pets (especially in PvP), I’d say this has been a long time in coming.
And if it’s too unbalanced for arena, just block the other four pets there – but seriously, they are our ACTIVE pets. We should have access to all of them now.
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