Pets with "Caster" Attributes

Do they exist in BC Classic?

Short answer: Not really. You don't need to worry about this bug in BC Classic!

Longer answer: Pets that had weaker combat stats (and mana bars before taming) in original "Vanilla" WoW and the Burning Crusade don't seem to display the same bug on BC or original Classic servers. While some quirks from Vanilla were deliberately, painstakingly reproduced in Classic, the developers apparently decided it was not in the best interest of the game, or at least the Hunter class, to reproduce this one. Which is a good thing, since it rendered a number of great pets almost unusable in most situations.

It's possible there's still a very small dps difference, but it amounts to maybe 2 dps less at level 50 - definitely nothing you should worry about. For more information, see this discussion thread.

For more information on what pets with "caster stats" were, read on. The information below is provided purely for historical interest.

Almost all pets of the same level have the same base attributes. But back in original ("Vanilla") WoW and the Burning Crusade some rare pets had inferior attributes. Because these pets had very high intelligence and spirit, as well as a mana bar on their NPC portrait before taming, we called them "caster" pets. Unfortunately, intelligence and spirit are not useful attributes for a pet. And all of the other attributes -- including health, armor, and DPS -- were lower for "casters" than for normal pets. So "casters" really were inferior creatures.

Pets with "caster" attributes could be identified in two ways:

1. Before you tamed the pet, the wild version of a "caster" had a mana bar whereas normal pets did not. Some "casters" initially started with an empty mana bar and would drain your mana to fill theirs up.
2. After you tamed the pet, you could check its attributes against those of a normal and those of known "casters" (below).

But how bad were they, really?

After a good bit of research, it was apparent that the only real difference between "casters" and normal pets was their base attributes. "Casters" benefited from scaling, talents and abilities in exactly the same way that normal pets did. So it was at least theoretically possible to make up for "caster" attributes and end up with a pet that you could live with. It's not so easy, though. If you compare the base attributes in the table below with that of normal pets, you can see the following trends:

• "Casters" had between 80% and 83% of the base armor of a normal pet.
  • At level 10, this was a difference of less than 100 armor and could be easily made up with 5 TP in the Natural Armor passive ability.
  • Even at high levels, you could make up the difference with Natural Armor, but it would cost you a lot of Training Points.
• "Casters" had about 95% of the base health of a normal pet at low levels, but this ramped down to only 80% of normal base health at high levels.
  • Missing out on 50 base health at level 20 is no big deal. Once again, you could easily make this up with 10 TP in the Great Stamina passive ability.
  • But at higher levels it's a lot harder to keep up. A level 43 Fire Roc needed an extra 343 health to match the base health of a normal level 43 pet. That would require Great Stamina (Rank 9), which costs 150 TP and isn't available until level 54 anyway.
• While we don't have exact figures, the base DPS of a "caster" pet was again only about 80% of normal base DPS at high levels.

So pets with "caster" attributes were fairly viable at low levels where the differences in their base attributes were relatively small. And a hunter could help make up for their faults for a number of levels just by keeping up with the passive pet abilities Natural Armor and Great Stamina. But at higher levels, they'd have to spend all of their Training Points on these abilities and they'd still fall short. So if a hunter really, absolutely wanted that very special "caster" pet, they might give it a try -- but it would be a huge challenge.

Comparing armor and health between regular pets and those that had "caster" attributes: