Onyxie's Pet Guides: Battle Strategy

Pet Battle General Strategy!

Going First:

If there were only straight damage dealing abilities, going first wouldn’t matter much.  If your pet goes first and kills the other pet, then the other pet does not get to go (unless it is raised as undead or mechanical).  So going first might save one turn of damage.  But it IS important because of abilities that incapacitate a pet (stun, turn into a frog, etc) or stops attacks (like +100% dodge).  If your pets  goes first and stuns the opposing pet, then they miss that turn and also the next.  So those types of abilities are TWICE AS USEFUL to a pet that goes first.    Important exception: Critters’ special ability means they only lose one turn ever.  Two abilities always go first even though that’s not in their description: Reflection and Dark Similacrum.  That is because they target the other pet’s abilities.  Sum

Attacks:

                In general, an attack will do 20 + attack power damage.  So a level  1 with 10 power does 30 dmg with a basic attack, before account for being strong or weak against the attack.  An attack that also increases speed or decreases other pet’s damage or whatever will do less damage.   Depending on the situation, these may be worth it or not.  Abilities that do more than normal damage and usually also have another ability will have a cooldown.  Use those first and as often as you can (usually).  For example a 25% chance to stun is better used ASAP instead of trying to get a boost to the damage from another ability.  The main exception would be if you are going second and think  your opponent is going to use an ability to stop your attack (flying into air for example).

2-turn attacks:

Some 2-turn attacks move the attacker to a special place (in air or underground) first, then do more than one turn of damage.  This is worth it if you can make you opponent miss once butf they are doing healing (or something else not attacking you) will do more damage with two individual attacks.  Some things (like mechanical Gnome’s Turret ability) will still hit you when in other locations.    It may just be observational bias, but it seems these type of 2-turn attacks miss more often than other attcks.

Some 2 turn attacks leave the attackers in place (ex Graze) then do more than 2 turns of damage.  These are vulnerable to interruption but otherwise very strong.

Some 2-turn attacks take 2 individual actions and do more than 2 turns of damage.  These are nice because they aren’t interrupt-able like the other leave  in place ones and can wait until later if opponent puts up a defense.

Healing

Healing can be useful but not always.  If an ability just heals and it is about the same as the damage being done to you, it is essentially useless.  If an ability heals significantly more than you are being damaged, then it is worth using.  Abilities that both damage and heal are usually good.  If an ability heals from the damage dealt , the healing will be decreased if the dmg is decreased (or increased if increased) so that requires watching.  The Spider ability Leech Life does NOT vary with the damage dealt as long as at least 1 point hits.

Multiple-Attack Attacks

                Variable attacks (ex 1-2 attcks plus 1 if go first, or whatever) usually do more damage than one attack abilities but are vulnerable to damage reduction abilities (like -30 dmage from every attack) or triggered damage (like 20 dmg every time creature attacks).  Anytime an ability does extra damage (ex double if Burning, +20 if goes first) that also is an extra attack.