Pet Training Grind

Pet Level	Experience Gain	Energy Cost
Baby to Teen	125 exp	2 energy/game
Teen to Adult	250 exp	4 energy/game
Adult to Ancient	500 exp	6 energy/game
Ancient to Epic	1000 exp	8 energy/game

I made up this table, which shows the training progression of pets in Wizard101. I love my pets, I enjoy seeing them progress. If one could train a pet and get just what they wanted in a pet, then I could accept the amount of effort that goes into training. I am happy that pet hatching costs have gone way down since they were first instituted. I still find a cost of 40,000 gold quite a bit for hatching a pet, though. If the success of creating a great pet were more frequent, I could see that 40,000 gold might be a justifiable price - still, I could buy two homes for the same price.

That brings me to the amount of time, energy and experience needed to level a pet. Isn't it enough that the experience needed to get from one level to the next DOUBLES? That in itself is enough of a challenge, in my opinion. To keep increasing the energy needed by 2 for each level is uncalled for, and way too much to ask.

I have hatched 12 pets so far, and of those pets, I have leveled 6 to Epic, and 6 to Ancient. Only 2 of the 6 that I leveled to Epic really had a good pet talent mix. Now I have 4 useless pets just wandering around my homes, never being of use, except for looks. The other 6 Ancient pets might get Spritely, and that is what I hatched them for mainly. Would it be worth it to get them to Epic?

I might never know, because the task seems just too daunting.

With a maximum energy level of 70, and an energy cost of 8 for each game, I can play 9 games (8 times 9 is 72, but you gain 2 more energy while playing the previous games). If I get the top experience of 4 for the game, and then 6 experience for a pet snack, I can gain 10 experience per game. 10 experience times 9 games gives me 90 experience per training session.

Now, this is at level 70! If I had the time to get into the game once in the early morning to train my pet, and then once again in the evening, I would gain 180 experience for my pet. I don't get into the game even once a day lately, never mind trying to get there twice a day. Buying crowns so that I can play another session is not an option I am going to consider, either.

So - at 90 points a day, it will take me 11 days, with one session more to get me to 1000 experience.

Yes, if I wanted to take more costly measures, I could log on twice a day, I could buy mega snacks for crowns, I could spend a lot of time and resources making higher level pet snacks, and I could use crowns to purchase more energy to have more training sessions available.

I have not even touched upon my dissatisfaction with the cost and availability of pet snacks. Suitable pet snacks should give at least 6 experience; they are costly enough in themselves whether you buy or make them, and are sometimes difficult - if not impossible - to get, as not all schools have ALL the snack types at higher levels. Availability of reagents for making pet snack is yet another part of Wizard101 which needs serious reworking. Anyone who attempts to gather reagents knows exactly what I am talking about. I am not even going to discuss mega snacks, because they are just way too costly for a normal game budget to consider having or using on a regular basis.

I don't think that we get back all the effort that we put into pet training to warrant that we spend even more than normal time and effort - that is, one session a day with a pet snack that gives 6 experience when fed to the pet.

And for these reasons, I think that Wizard101 should strongly consider restructuring their pet leveling model.