Finally a post today - mostly because my initial though for it didn't fit in a tweet ...
The topic is World of Warcraft Battle Pet levelling.
Introduction
It is probably well known to experienced pet wranglers that the most efficient way to level pets is to make a team of the pet to be levelled together with two level 25 pets. The key is that where normally the experience from a pet battle is spread across all surviving pets, any level 25 pets don't eat up any experience. The scientist in me wants to validate that claim though, so I did a little test.
Tests
For the test I went to hunt winterspring - an area with level 17-ish
wild pets. Level 17 is high enough to grant large amounts of experience
to low level pets, while at the same time not posing much risk to all
but the lowest level pets (beware the Alpine Chipmunks and their
"Woodchipper" bleed though)
Test 1
For the first test my team consisted of a level 11 Stunted Yeti, and two level 25 pets (an Electrified Razortooth, plus a third pet that didn't even come into action). I picked a fight against a wild level 17 Alpine Hare.
The Yeti gained 605 experience.
Test 2
For the second test, my team was a level 11 Snarly, a level 23 Golden Civet Kitten, and a level 23 Malayan Quillrat. Once again I bravely fought a level 17 Alpine Hare and his companions. I used all three of my pets (none of them died).
In this run the Snarly gained 220 experience, while the two level 23 pets didn't gain any experience.
Test 3
For the third test I brought a level 11 Sinister Squashling, and two level 25 pets. Different from test 1 I now made sure to use both level 25 pets during the battle.
The result was the same though - the Squashling gained 605 experience, just like in test 1.
Test 4
For the last test I brought a level 11 Nether Ray Fry, and the same two level 23 pets as in test 2. Different from test 2 I now only used the civet, the quillrat never came into play.
This time the Fry gained 323 experience
Analysis
Some observations:
- Winning a pet battle distributes the experience to all pets below level 25 that participated in the battle
- If a pet doesn't participate in a battle it does not gain experience
- On the flip side, if a pet doesn't participate in the battle, that means that pets that did participate gain a greater share of the experience.
- Pets below level 25 that participated in the battle but are too high level relative to the opponent get a reduction on the experience they gained. "Reduction" can go all the way down to "get no experience at all". In my tests (cases 2 and 4), the level 23 pets were way too high level, and this reduction removed all experience. Note that this reduction applies after the experience is shared across participants, so this really eats away experience from the whole team.
- Level 25 pets act different: they do not get a share of the experience. Instead they act just as if they did not participate at all, so they cannot eat it away for lower level pets.
- Pets that are much lower than the opponent gain a bonus on their share of the experience. This isn't obvious from the test results, but this effect can explain why the experiences gained (220, 323, 605) aren't exactly in a 1/3 : 1/2 : 1 ratio as you would expect.
Conclusions
Now for the reason why levelling a low level pet together with two level 25 pets works better than levelling a team of 3 equal-level pets:
Both cases gain about the same total experience per battle if all pets survive. In the "three equal level pet" case that experience is spread out over all pets, while in the "caried" case the one low level pet gets it all. However, the team with the high level carrying pets can finish fights much quicker, with less downtime, and against higher level opponents (triggering the experience bonus). The downtime is less because the lower level pet in that setup is likely to gain a level, implying a "free heal", while at the same time the level 25 pets can survive a few battles without a need to heal.
