Best pet activities and campaign/s?

[JonoMac]

Hi all, grateful for advice on how I should be using my pets as I'm attempting Baal v10 and up (generally rebirthing once every couple of days). I've currently got the first 5 pets (Mouse -> Rabbit). Their total growth ranges from 1,200 to 400, or just under 5k total.

I usually start a run by leveling them all up fighting clones, then send them on 8 hour level campaigns when I'm going AFK. Once I'm almost ready to rebith, I try to send them on a multiplier campaign as I understand this persists throughout rebirths.

Interested to know if there's a better use of my pets' time. For example:

1) Should I take the hit on clones and stick with fighting, rather than the level campaign?

2) How long should I spend levelling pets before switching to longer term goals?

3) At that point, what's the best campaign for long-term progress? Are items or growth better than multiplier?

Any tips or suggestions would be much appreciated.

[Kitsunegari]

It's definitely hard to see the usefulness of pets when their growth is still low, so focusing on that is a priority for now.

1) You should see where you can comfortably level your pets to for x amount of time before throwing them into campaigns. For a lot of people with more progress than you, that ends up being 10 - 20 million or so. This allows a jump start on campaigns because some use current pet stats as a multiplier.

2) This one depends on what pet multiplier you wish to cap at. With the growth you have, you may end up only doing 40k - 50k or so, maybe higher. If you are doing multiple day runs, then you can focus more on multiplier runs in order to make up for the smaller growth.

3) Growth is one campaign you will almost always be running (as you unlock more pets). At later stages in the game you'll be getting 600-1000 growth per 12 hour run, and use it to catch newly unlocked pets up to par with your top growth ones. (i.e. Answer pet had a total of 126 growth at unlock, but I got it to 10k in ~13 growth campaigns at 12 hours a piece)

Item campaigns have become even more necessary for dungeon evolution (fairy and snake, godly liquid and chakra pill), but you would be running into a brick wall in terms of effectiveness until you were at higher growth, multiplier threshold, and have finished your UPC's (ultimate pet challenges).

Multiplier campaigns offer a large boost to your base stats for the current run (or the best that can be expected at lower growth), but takes time to grow into fruition. When I was doing NRC runs (No rebirth challenges) I would have multiplier as my second auto campaign (growth being first) until I hit 200 million for the challenge. It made the difference of about 4-8 hours per run depending on how it had gone.

Divinity is also a necessary campaign at later stages.

tl;dr

Growth, divinity, multiplier, item, god power are the most important campaigns to me, and in that order. Feed your pets, don't shy away from growth campaigns once you have enough pets to run 2 campaigns or more (10+ pets), and use multiplier campaigns to boost the return for the rest of your campaigns. Using level campaigns is okay, but will eventually become an obsolete method once you either have more clones or more growth. And don't forget that multiplier campaigns will affect your campaign returns more-so than getting a higher level on pets (say I level to 10 million stat, and then only do level campaigns. I end up with 50 million stat after doing campaigns, when instead I could have 200 million from multiplier campaigns)

Finish your UPC's when you have enough pets and are strong enough to do so, as well as finishing your DPC (day pet challenge) in order to get greater returns on your pet food)

[Fel]

1) Fighting clones is nearly alays better when you can refill the clones and refresh their stats every now and then.
There is a point where level campaign migh give more levels but it would usually takes days before reaching that point.
Campaigns do work offline though, so it depends on your schedule.

2) It's not so much about length as it is about reaching certain amounts in stats and/or multiplier.
45,000% on each stat multiplier gives you the rebirth multiplier cap (from stats) of 999%
A lot of campaigns have "tiers" on how much each pet contributes, some depend only on growth (like the growth campaign), some only on stats (item campaign among others) and the multiplier campaign even takes both into account, but in every case it's all about reaching specific amounts.
I suggest the wiki page for the specific amounts for each campaign:
https://itrtg.fandom.com/wiki/Pets#Pet_Campaigns

I personally like to only let them level up for less than an hour, even 30 minutes might be when they start to level significantly slower but it somewhat depends on how you refresh the clone stats and how often you do it.


3) Growth campaign comes first, overwhelmingly so as it gives a lot of growth to the weakest pet sent, item campaign is obviously very good, with free draws and consumables on top of pet stones that are very valuable, but you won't be able to bring all that much until you reach high stats, which requires high growth.
Depending on your pets, the god power campaign can als be a pretty nice complementary source of GP.

But with the dungeons and more importantly the blacksmith, you can also have some potent boosts even towards build speed (earth equipments) and creation speed (wind equipments), and classes like adventurer can greatly boost your campaign results (along with the "stick" weapons), so when you have over 20 pets you can start to have a lot more possibilities without hurting the growth and item campaigns.


With 5 pets though, growth campaign all the way, and you might want to look into getting the mole (you can usually get it among your first few pets even before you beat baal for the first time after all)

[JonoMac]

Wow two extremely helpful answers. That's exactly the information I was after and more. Much appreciated Kitsunegari and Fel!!!

[sfnhltb]

In general pet growth campaigns are better than running the level campaigns unless you have specific targets or needs for your pets to be a certain level. This is because pet growth carries over to the all future rebirths, whereas each rebirth your pet levels are all back to 1, especially as higher pet growths make most of the pet campaigns more productive, including the growth campaign itself.

Still, having pets at a higher level will increase the effect they have on your own stats, and it affects how effective your pets are in certain campaigns; it tells you in the tool tips of each - whether only growth is important, or pet stats (combination of growth and level), although neither help for the food campaign.

So depending on which campaigns you want to do you might find it worth doing more levelling of pets (from clones or level campaigns), but normally you would transition to do something else for the bulk of the rebirth to make those higher levels you spent time getting "pay off", rather than doing levelling for almost the entire rebirth - as with most things in the game levelling has diminishing returns, and the bonus it gives is additive, so spending lots of time on it in the same rebirth will have an ever reducing benefit to your progress.

How long changes over time (getting shorter generally, I rarely spend more than 30 minutes levelling pets even for long rebirths by this point), and also is affected by the breakpoints of certain campaigns you are planning to do - for example if doing an item campaign I believe the targets are 10k, 100k, 500k, 1M, etc (the highest is 100M). As each pet's total stats reaches these values the amount of pet stones and the chance of getting an item increases (if the difference isn't lost due to rounding to whole numbers for weaker pets).

As noted above though if you are planning to do the Growth campaign, there is no benefit to that campaign from increasing your pets levels, so in that situation you would tend to do the minimum amount of time levelling your pets just for their benefit to your own stats, and then start the growth campaign.

The multiplier campaign does have a carry over component into the next rebirth, but it isn't a permanent accumulation - you would have to do multiplier campaigns again in that next rebirth to keep the bonus for the following one, so it still is a temporary boost, just slightly less temporary than ones that affect the current rebirth only. So it is a campaign to use when you really need to push, but I wouldn't tend to spend much/any time on it during normal rebirth cycles.

You can see the pet multiplier and the effect of the multiplier campaign by looking at the tooltip on the bottom of the pet tab where it shows the effect they are having on your stats - the top line will show 100% with not multiplier campaigns done this rebirth, or a higher number if you have done some, so from that you can probably judge how much help that is towards possibly killing another god and whether it is worth it for that effect. The second line will list your regular accumulated pet rebirth multiplier, which is capped at 999%, and if you have done any multiplier campaigns how much they have increased this value by - so if it is +100% and you have the full 999% base value, your rebirth multipliers will be about 9-10% higher, or if they are giving you an extra 1000% or so your rebirth multipliers (and therefore your stats next rebirth) will be twice as much due to the multiplier campaigns.

For the vast majority of the time since campaigns were added I have mostly killed clones only to get their levels/stats up, then done Growth as first choice and Item campaigns with the remaining pets, eventually adding GP campaign once I got past 20 pets (especially useful for UBC and CBC where the extra GP makes a big difference, especially with FSM), and the third "team" swaps to multiplier for challenges like NRC, or Divinity for 1kBHCs and other things where divinity is the main bottleneck.

[Bazzakrak]

Originally posted by JonoMac:

Wow two extremely helpful answers. That's exactly the information I was after and more. Much appreciated Kitsunegari and Fel!!!

Totally agree with you, very helpful answers I learned something as well that is for sure :)

One thing is for sure in this game and community, if you ask a 2 line question be ready to get a minor thesis paper returned to you as an answer, and I love the community for that :D

[feliscon]

Originally posted by Kitsunegari:

. And don't forget that multiplier campaigns will affect your campaign returns more-so than getting a higher level on pets (say I level to 10 million stat, and then only do level campaigns. I end up with 50 million stat after doing campaigns, when instead I could have 200 million from multiplier campaigns)

Pretty sure this is wrong? Multiplier campaigns just increase how the multiplier is calculated from stats, not the stat themselves and therefore have no effect on other campaigns...

[Fel]

It might be a mistake between "stats" and "stat multipliers".

[muljostpho]

Yeah, what you can accomplish in any certain amount of time with leveling the pets will change a lot as the pets get more growth. (Although the exact distribution between their three growths can change their leveling pace a bit as well.)

I have 750k total growth between 40 pets and I had them leveling for about 10 minutes in my current rebirth. That got my pet multipliers to about 1.8M% physical / 1.8M% mystic / 2.3M% battle.

Scanning through my pets (sorted by growth) and highlighting several of them for comparison:
* Shark: 25411 total growth, level 1450, 25.433M total stats
* Box: 19491 total growth, level 1126, 13.193M total stats
* FSM: 17061 total growth, level 646, 4.147M total stats (NOTE: very heavy on mystic, which slows down its leveling)
* Book: 15412 total growth, level 786, 5.389M total stats
* Cloud: 9575 total growth, level 470, 1.301M total stats
* Panda: 5201 total growth, level 259, 252793 total stats
* Eagle: 2041 total growth, level 117, 29180 total stats

All in the same 10 minutes of using clones to level. (Improved half stats set to 200/650/525. Pet xp overflow bought. Auto half stats NOT bought yet. I used to try to equalize pet stats with their feedings but lately I've been letting battle get emphasized for faster leveling.)

Growth campaign can seem weird with the benefit only going to one pet at a time, but the benefits get better and better over time as the pets involved in it cross into higher tiers (see the wiki link in Fel's post) and it's a bonus that the pet can gain on top of what they're getting from feedings. A lot of players go for a long-term strategy called a "growth chamber" where 10 specific pets will be picked to focus the growth campaign first until they're all (well, 9 of them at least) over 25k growth (which is where they get into the highest tier for growth campaign results) and then you can start getting all the other pets caught up to your 9 strongest pets at the fastest pace possible.

[Kitsunegari]

Originally posted by feliscon:

Originally posted by Kitsunegari:

. And don't forget that multiplier campaigns will affect your campaign returns more-so than getting a higher level on pets (say I level to 10 million stat, and then only do level campaigns. I end up with 50 million stat after doing campaigns, when instead I could have 200 million from multiplier campaigns)

Pretty sure this is wrong? Multiplier campaigns just increase how the multiplier is calculated from stats, not the stat themselves and therefore have no effect on other campaigns...

Originally posted by Fel:

It might be a mistake between "stats" and "stat multipliers".

As Fel said, it was a mistake because I was half awake. I apologize.

Originally posted by muljostpho:

All in the same 10 minutes of using clones to level. (Improved half stats set to 200/650/525. Pet xp overflow bought. Auto half stats NOT bought yet. I used to try to equalize pet stats with their feedings but lately I've been letting battle get emphasized for faster leveling.)

I've started going heavy on battle as well just to make leveling in the beginning of a rebirth less of a hassle. My next ChP purchase will be the auto half stats, so we will see how having ~5k higher battle on pets will do speed wise.