Pet happiness decay rate

[siggboy]

Another thread is right now discussing pet loyalty gains (based on XP and time), which reminded me of a question that is nagging me for a while now: at which rate is pet happiness being consumed, and what is the maximum pet happiness level (as a number)?

Obviously the pets lose happiness a lot faster at lower loyalty levels, so the rate seems to be dependent on loyalty.

I've found that if I feed a loyalty 1 pet, I see it losing single points of happiness while it is still being fed (it goes something like +35 +35 ... +35 -1 -1 -1). So the feed pet effect takes it to the happiness cap, and keeps feeding into the cap while the pet is already losing happiness.
At higher loyalty levels this effect cannot be observed, so the decay rate is much slower.

Does anybody have numbers on this? It might be interesting to write an addon that does keep track of pet loyalty by simply recording time, in order to warn you in advance. I really hate it when the pet becomes "pleased" during a boss fight.

[Woodsong]

Interesting idea...the addon.
If someone gets me the numbers, I'll see if I can add them to PetInfoFu.

[Wiste]

I don't have anything to add except that I would absolutely love to have this. It's very irksome to me that the actual value of happiness is not exposed in any way in WoW. Even looking through the API they only give the values for the current level of happiness (1,2 or 3) and not the actual happiness.

[Raging Epistaxis]

Hmm. It should be possible to observe how many points it takes to get from one level to the next - for example, if you hit feed pet the instant it changes from green to yellow (happy to content?) then watch how many +35 ticks it takes to zero out at the high end.

I seem to remember seeing things like <feed pet> +35, +35, +35, +18, then no more - I assume that means that the last tick pegged the pet at maximum happiness. It would be harder to determine the other two cutoffs, since the happiness gain won't stop at the change level, but with feeding a lower quality food - smaller gain = more precision of exactly when the change occurs - we should be able to get reasonably close.

Also the time factor should be easy (but tedious) to determine - just set a timer at the high end of one level, and mark the time when it decays into the lower level.

It would be great if PetInfoFu could keep track internally of where within a happiness value range the pet was so the pet could be fed before a fight if it was near the cutoff to keep it from dropping below during the fight.

Neat concept. I'll see if I can determine any of the transition numbers in the next day or two and report back.

Hmm. I hope they are not level dependent... I don't think they are, as my impression is that it takes the same number of +35 ticks to get a low level pet from yellow to green as it does a high level pet.

[jinserai]

For a addon like that, we'd need to know a few different things:
1. Happiness decay per unit time
2. Happiness loss upon death (was there a number given in the UI somewhere? I thought I remembered there being one, but I can't remember what it is)
3. Total happiness capacity (from 0 to max) and cutoffs between Angry/content/Happy

Okay, I know what I am doing may seem like total common sense, but I've seen people (myself included) not think of simple testing procedures for questions we wanted answers to. I wish I had the time to do the data collection right now, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon (Yaay work). Hopefully with this laid out, it'll encourage a couple different people to go ahead and post a couple of different data sets?

Procedure to determine happiness decay per second
1. Feed pet to maximum happiness. (Combat log starts showing +0 +0)
2. Start timer
3. Click the feed pet button
4. Hover mouse over appropriate food.
5. At 30 seconds for the first trial set, (and 1 minute for the second, 2 minutes for the 3rd) click feed pet.
6. Write down how much happiness your pet gains before maxing out.
7. Divide to determine happiness decay per second.

Procedure to determine happiness loss upon death
1. Feed pet to maximum happiness
2. As soon as maximum happiness is reached, start timer.
3. Send pet after big nasty mob that is sure to kill it.
4. Feign death.
5. At pet death, stop timer.
6. Stand up, start casting revive pet. At pet resurrection, restart timer.
7. Feed pet to maximum happiness. At max, stop timer. Record happiness gain.
8. Calculate normal time-based happiness decay, subtract from recorded happiness gain.

Total Happiness capacity is easy, along with cutoffs, assuming you have an empty stable slot. Just tame a low level pet to minimize the expense in feeding, start a timer immediately upon feeding after taming and feed them to full. Ditch the pet after you've fed it up, stop the timer and adjust for normal decay. Even using max effective rank food, that should give us the cutoffs at an accuracy of +/-17? A second run using one rank below max would give us an accuracy of +/- 9ish? Using the intersection of the two datasets could potentially tighten that up a bit.

[Znodis]

For step 2 & 3 of the death stat, it probably would be easier to find a friend, start a duel, feed pet to max happiness, then have your friend kill it ASAP. That would minimize the normal happiness decay should anyone want to try it.

[jinserai]

Ooo, good thought. I never mess with duels, so I hadn't thought of that!

[Wiste]

You forgot dismissing your pet which is a straight 50 happiness. Also, doesn't happiness degrade faster with damage?

[jinserai]

Originally Posted by Wiste

You forgot dismissing your pet which is a straight 50 happiness. Also, doesn't happiness degrade faster with damage?

Huh, I hadn't heard that one (the damage thing, not the dismissal heh). Any idea where you saw/heard about that, or is it just how it feels sort of a thing? I'm not dismissing your assertion or anything, just wondering if something to that effect was documented somewhere and I just completely missed it somehow.

[Raging Epistaxis]

I was under that impression too - that happiness degrades a little faster when they are taking damage - but it could be something I made up, or unsubstantiated rumor I read once ages ago.
Simple enough to test for, using your decay rate protocol earlier, just do it once sitting in town, and again during lots and lots of combat. Unless healing affects happiness loss/gain rate. Ugh. One more thing to factor in.