I went into patch 5.3 not really looking forward to the PVP aspect. At least there is a quest to do 10 PVP battles so any really trepidations person will ideally be able to get the pet in 25 weeks. I had to mix up my team just so it wouldn’t get boring and I’ve still had a really harsh loss ratio. Good luck to everybody else.

Originally I was taking the easy way out and just leveling the pets I caught in Pandaria. However, that wasn’t fair to all of my older pets. Now the real challenge is getting lower-level pets up to level 25.

Odds are you’ll have a favorite early. Pick a beast of some kind, or any pet with a Critter power ability. Once you get out to Valley of the Four Winds have your high level critter killer in slot two and whatever low level in one. Circle Halfhill and attack everything. The Bandicoons are critters and rarely will you run across an Otter, which is Aqua.

Get the first attack with the low level and switch it out for the rest of the fight. Easy XP.

1. Find a pet battle trainer in any major city, and learn the skills that they offer. There are two: pet battle and track pets. They both require level 5.

2. Once you have trained pet battling you can now go ahead and start forming your team. When battling in the wild, some types are better at fighting other types. If you see a Mouse, whip out a Beast to do double damage to the Critter type Mouse falls under.

3. You can have three pets on your team at one time, and the pet in the first slot is the default fighter. Only pets that compete in each fight get xp. Xp is shared between all pets that participate.

4.  You can change your team any time before you actually start the fight, but once you’ve clicked on a mob, the fight begins and your pet in slot one starts.

5.  If it’s a wild pet that is capturable then all you have to do (so far!) is click the Trap button.  If it fails, the mob attacks your mob (Or just stands there if no attacks had been put in for it yet, but that will change!) and you just rinse and repeat until you trap it.

6.  You unlock the second attack at level 3, third at level 5, then at level 10, 15 and 20 you unlock the secondary attack for each of the three.

7.  Each zone has one capturable wild pet and the rest are level fodder.  Ideally, it will act out like you were actually leveling, where the level 1 battle pets are in the starting zones and they move on from there.  Level 20 mobs show up in Northrend.  The Battlemasters aren’t in yet, so more info when those are available.