The Hunter's companions, the pets, have received a complete overhaul with Wrath of the Lich King. While you had to train pet skills from other pets in a very complicated way prior to Wrath in order to train your own pet, this whole system has been completely overhauled and replaced by a talent system, similar to the one the different classes have. Starting from level 20 on and from then every 4 levels the pet will receive a talent point. While there are 3 talent trees, similar to the class talents, you can not chose which talent tree is available to you, but each tree is assigned to a certain number of pet families.

The first tree is the "Tenacity" tree, belonging to pets like bears, gorillas or scorpids. This tree amplifies the pet's ability to act as a tank. There are several well known tanking talents like "Last Stand", which enables the pet to act as a tank in dungeons.

"Ferocity" is the talent tree for cats, raptors, wolves and other predators. These talents improve the damage dealing capabilities of those pets and are the first choice for raiding Hunters.

"Cunning" pets are somewhere in between the other two. Pets like Serpents, Dragonhawks or Spiders get this talent tree. Apart from the usual damage increasing talents this tree has several utility talents, like "Roar of Recovery" which recovers 30% of the Hunter's mana.

A level 80 Hunter with a level 80 pet will have 16 talent points at his disposal - plus 4 if he is specced into "Beast Mastery". Just like normal talents pet talents can be unlearned at any Hunter trainer.