Guardian pet
Guardian pets are one of three types of pets that can be summoned/created.
- They will enter into combat on their summoner's behalf, much as a combat pet will, but cannot be directly controlled. They react as a combat pet set on Aggressive and Follow.
- They are generally summoned on a temporary basis, unlike combat pets or Small Pets.
Most guardian pets "share a cooldown" with other guardian pets of 1 minute.
Most non-consumable items (of all varieties) that generate guardian pets have a longer cooldown period than 1 minute. For these items, it is more descriptive to say that they force a global "guardian pet item" cooldown of 1 minute.
This means that while you may not summon a second guardian within that 1 minute, you may use each of your pet summoning items in turn. For instance, once you've waited a minute after using your [Mithril Mechanical Dragonling], you can then use your
[Mechanical Dragonling] trinket.
Engineering guardians[]
Many guardian pets are created by and for engineers.
Some engineered guardian pets are consumable items, and can be used only once per item:
Other engineered guardian pets are reuseable. These generally take the form of trinkets. While these pet may be killed by damage, you simply wait for their cooldown and you can use them again. Their cooldowns range from 1/2 hour to one hour between uses.
[Mechanical Dragonling]
[Gnomish Battle Chicken]
[Goblin Bomb Dispenser]
[Mithril Mechanical Dragonling]
[Arcanite Dragonling]
Engineering pets scale with the Engineer's skill level, and their damage output increases. However, they have the same amount of hit points as the level they started as.
Guardian items[]
These are non-engineering items that summon Guardians:
Class abilities[]
Many of these guardians are summoned by talented abilities, while others are summoned by passive talents or regular abilities.
- The Balance Druid level 15 talent
[Force of Nature] summons three guardian treants.
- Fire Elementals, Earth Elementals, and Storm Elementals summoned by Shamans are guardians unless the Shaman has the talent
[Primal Elementalist], which causes them instead to be controllable pets.
- Warlocks can summon an Infernal, Darkglare, or a Demonic Tyrant as guardians, depending on the warlock's specialization.
- The Demonology specialization for Warlocks is heavily based around rapidly summoning short-lived demonic guardian minions:
- Paladins can summon a
[Guardian of Ancient Kings].
- Death Knights have a large variety of guardian pets available:
- Beast Mastery Hunters can summon guardian animals with the level 15 talent
[Dire Beast], the level 100 talent
[Spitting Cobra], and as a random chance when casting
[Kill Command] with the Azerite trait
[Dire Consequences].
- The Windwalker Monk ability
[Storm, Earth, and Fire] summons 2 guardian spirits, splitting the monk's damage between themself and the two uncontrollable spirits.