I'm rather new to the game, came back after a decade hiatus, am I'm wondering what pet I should keep. I have a total of 9 pets, some from packs and some from boss drops and 1 from questing. I don't know how pets work in the game, newer did before and not now. I have looked up guide on train my pets, but all they go into is how to train your pet to Mega and what are the most efficient ways to. I'm not looking for that. I'm wanting to know which pet to keep/train and how to spot a good vs bad pet in the future, ie I want to know Pets101 and Pet Training 101. Can anyone fill me in on how pets work, the mechanics, and what the different number of a pet means. I have read FinalBastion's article "A Beginner’s Guide to Wizard101 Pets" but it doesn't answer many of my question. Is someone on this forum willing to take me through the steps of Pet101?
Pets largely depend on both cards (the body) and talents (what stat boosts they provide). People generally decide what body they want, and they try to breed on the talents that they're looking for.
If you want to use a pet that you already have, I'd recommend choosing one that has a card you like using, so that you have an immediate bonus to your deck. Otherwise, I'd take a look at this guide to choosing a pet to start out with. Most of them can be found and bred with in the hatchmaking kiosk, which costs gold but is fairly convenient.
Now, good pet are rarely first generation pet so any pet can be the good choice the idea is to choose which pet fit the best for you in term of look and spell given. Then train it to adult and hatch with a pet with the talents you want. That will fail so 2 choice -you get the same pet so you apply the same strat until you get all wanted talent -you get another pet so you choose to continue with this new pet or you retry with the first one.
That could be very long so don't lose hope
The pedigree (numbers) is the total value of all talent that can be unlocked (1=common/2=uncommon/3=rare/4=ultra rare/5=epic) it go from 20 to 100.
Pet can help you by many way they can give stats bonuses/exclusive spells/cast spell to help you in fight/give you bonus content from chests/cast spells at your demand directly after you for happiness or give to themselves bonus stats to maybe increase bonus given by a stat talent.
For hatching you have the kiosk that allow you to hatch with a big diversity of pet or the purreau labs to hatch 2 of your own pet or with another plyer directly
The lab give to both an egg while the kiosk give to the other an hatch pepper
My favorite pet is the Enchanted Armament. This is because it grants sharpen blade item cards. These are sun (astral) spells granted by your pet, which modify a blade to increase it's bonus 10%. 10% doesn't matter a lot, the big deal is the modified blades stack with regular blades. So if you know your school blade and the balance tri-blade your school can use, two of these sharpen blade item cards will effectively give you two more blades to stack. which is a BIG help defeating high hit point bosses.
And the best part is any wizard can use sharpen blade regardless of school, so if you tire of your wizard and want to play another school, you can pass the pet to another wizard on the same account without having to go to all the trouble of developing a new pet.
Enchanted Armament gives one sharpen blade card when hatched, a second when trained to ancient, and a third when trained to mega. Training to mega is an awful slog, but in my opinion training to ancient to get a second sharpen blade is very worthwhile.
You can acquire a new Enchanted Armament by defeating Gladiator Dimachaerus in Mount Olympus. Or you can just hatch with someone who already has one, of course. Pet hatching is a complex topic I don't want to go into here. But if you want more detail ask another question about it on the forum.