Best Hunter pet for leveling

Hey nafeth, couple things you might be interested in to help you answer your question.

What hunter pet are you going for? - this was a poll we had a while back with nearly 1000 votes, offensively Cat for the DPS and attack speed (https://tkasomething.com/attackspeeds.ph p">spell pushback is big in PvP) seemed the most popular option, shortly followed by the defensive option of Owls for https://classic.wowhead.com/spell=24423 ('Get a fucking Owl' post on reddit).

Hunter pets - another similar discussion topic on the same subject.

Bobo talents for pets - great for making pet builds as you level up (you can assign points per level, unlike wowhead and other sites).

Petopia over on Warcraft Tavern.

Teebling posted good stuff, I'd also add that people forget Gorilla have a great aoe threat spell, which I find is good to deal with accidentally pulled mobs.

In my experience (dwarf hunter many times) boars are the best ones: good healt/armor, pretty decent damage (you will deal the most of it after all) and they eat ANYTHING

ANYTHING
:D

For dungeon cleaving, take an owl for screech. For duo leveling, especially with a mage, take a boar (they can eat conjured food). For leveling ahead of the curb, keep your starter pet and pickup a brokentooth when level appropriate. For leveling with the main pack and on a PvP realm, take any cat for PvP or optionally a wind serpent.

Outside of this you have a ton of options but not many of them are good. Functionally you will always find high value in Cats, Boars and Owls. All 3 can dash/dive/charge to targets and open up on threat, which allows you to start auto-shotting faster.

Changing pets should not be a priority outside of grabbing brokentooth or a mid game cat for PvP. If I roll an Orc, I rock the boar for as long as it can carry me. If I stay ahead of the pack, I keep the boar. If I roll a Night Elf, I would rock an owl for as long as I stay ahead of the pack and optionally switch to a cat if I found myself fall back into the main group of levelers. As you level you'll want to take a look at your pet abilities and track what abilities you need to grab. Just like a hunters abilities, you wont need to go and get training for your pet or to tame other pets to learn new ranks of abilities all the time, this is something you will occasionally do when it is absolutely necessary.
Teebling posted good stuff, I'd also add that people forget Gorilla have a great aoe threat spell, which I find is good to deal with accidentally pulled mobs.

Avoid gorillas - they are always bad, even within the context of a cleave. If you pull adds you have plenty of tools to deal with it, you shouldn't destroy your dps by rocking a gorilla. Leveling a hunter as BM means that a lot of your DPS comes through the pet. The only low DPS pet that can generally be argued for, is a boar, which is typically only used if you are either ahead of the pack or if you are AE grinding with a mage where the boars high HP is important for rounding up packs. You can also use a boar within a dungeon to tank due to its desirable stats, but even in this circumstance you would be better off with a higher TPS pet. Gorillas are awful for tanking dungeons because they have low TPS and a hunter will typically turn off the AE (thunderstomp) anyways to avoid breaking CC (which will be used when a hunter is tanking). Gorillas are also awful for PvP and Gorillas are awful for soloing.

Just get an owl and maintain it. Trust me on this one, I made all the research.

The correct answer is raptor because dinosaurs are f**king awesome.

Usually I would recommend Wind Serpent but they kind of suck in Classic, not nearly as good as they were on pservers.

1) Do you want AoE threat on your pet?
2) Do you want damage or tankiness?

1) Yes: Owl/Bat/Carrion Bird; No: Cat/Raptor/Boar/Wolf
2) Damage: Owl/Bat/Cat/Raptor; Tankiness: Carrion Bird/Boar; Wolf is a nice middle between damage and tankiness

Owls and Bats are nearly identical. Bats get Bite instead of Claw but have the same combat stats and Screech, but have an annoying diet.
Cats and Raptors are the highest DPS pets. Raptors have better grinding stats (since armor > hp for grinding) but can't learn Dash (why the fuck Blizzard?...).
Carrion Birds are surprisingly tanky with their neat armor modifier and Screech.
Personally I would always go with the highest DPS pets, so Owl/Bat or Cat/Raptor.

Just get an owl and maintain it. Trust me on this one, I made all the research.

I used an owl on my last hunter, before classic. This time around I'm using broken tooth.

Would definitely say broken tooth > owl for leveling if you spec beastmaster.

Just gonna throw this out there, the only reason broken tooth is good is for the 1.0 attack speed for pvp pushback. There are a lot of other cats with a 1.2 attack speed, like some of the mountain lions in hillsbrad and 1k needles, which will still wreck casters in pvp and are much simpler to tame.

Definitely take an owl if you are looking to PVE effectively, but there are more to take into consideration here.
If you are playing a PVP realm there are better pet choices that can also PVE and PVP very well, it depends on your playstyle.
Look them up, see which one suits you best.

My recommendation would be a wolf.

in the past i was going owl/cat from the beginning. since i did not notice that much difference aoe threat wise and the hunter has the toolkit to handle multiple mobs even without an "OMG!1 toP ti3R Owl - g0 owl Or g0 H0m3" by simply kiting, feign deathing or trapping, wing clipping additional mobs i opted for boar.

the charge is very usefull in pvp, seems to speed up pulls when questing even if its just animation wise/it feels that way, and as others stated eats everything, even conjured food from mages.

wouldn't want to miss my silksnout. and you got a variety of boar colors to chose from

Just get an owl and maintain it. Trust me on this one, I made all the research.

I used an owl on my last hunter, before classic. This time around I'm using broken tooth.

Would definitely say broken tooth > owl for leveling if you spec beastmaster.

Broken Tooth might be an exception, but he's a rare with an 8 hour respawn timer. If you play on a highly populated server like I do, owl is still your go-to.

When you levelled your hunter, did you keep up with ranks in claw? Did you go to westfall to temporarily tame a carrion just to teach Screech to your owl? Did you then utilize Screech and it's defensive stats by pulling 2 mobs at a time? Did you manually manage Screech through keybind, as it has a low priority? That's what makes it strong.

I solo and started with a Pig but it didn't seem to hold aggro very well so I tried a cat and I'm not looking back. Big damage and good aggro. Makes me happy anyway.