I spent all night building this spreadsheet detailing pet abilities, to hopefully allow hunters to make very precise decisions about which pet they want for every situation! Malazee did a similar set of spreadsheets that can be found here but they didn't offer me what I was looking for exactly, so I made my own. Feel free to go look around there if you want though.
The goal of this was to be able to see the details of the ferocity, cunning, and tenacity talents as well as the special pet abilities each pet family has to easily mix & match which talents & special abilities you want to utilize together. Because as we all know, at the end of the day what makes our pet selection so interesting is how these special family abilities synergize with their family talent trees.
Because of decisions like the above, I really wanted to be able to cross reference easily which pets have similar abilities across all families easily. For example, say I really like my spider because of its special ability Web, but I am interested in the talents available in the ferocity or tenacity trees, rather than cunning. Now I can easily go look up the spider family, and check the 'Pets with Similar Abilities' column to see if there are pets with similar abilities in the other families (ferocity/tenacity) which would offer a different set of talents. If there are pets with similar abilities from the other talent trees, I can hop over to look at those talent trees on this same page and see if the talents in those trees offer something special I'd like to pair with Web.
Now, a disclaimer: The 'Pets with Similar Abilities' column does not indicate abilities are necessarily 100% alike. A few are, but most have some differences. Like for example, some have a shorter duration and/or cooldown, but produce the same effect. It's worth noting that I did not weigh down this already huge thread with the fine print math on the abilities like cooldown, cast time, range, etc. so if you really want to compare two pet's abilities specifically, you should still look them up on petopia or wowhead to see the gritty details. Consider this a reference to just send you on your way to do the min-max decision-making.
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Anyway, sorry for rambling, here you go:
Click to enlarge.
Last but not least, please please please double check what I've done if you know your stuff! I have checked it a bunch of times myself but I really don't want the information to be inaccurate, and I'm sure there's a few things that could be touched up here and there. I wanted to also go through the different tree's talents and note which talents are available in the other specs, and which are unique to each spec, but this took so long I was up practically all night and I need to eat, take a shower, and pass out before I lose it. I may add the other info in later. I'm sorry for people with lower resolution monitors. I went through a lot of hassle to try to size it down because I kinda failed at thinking ahead of time and made it extraordinarily huge and not so great for a web browser, but hopefully you can read it for the most part.
-Sookie