With festival right around the corner, I wanted to make a guide so as to help users learn how to actually capture pets when they have to do it themselves (yay for automated systems in quests) and also to share my method of going about capturing as I find it rather effective and it minimizes my chance of accidentally killing what I am after. Note: Nothing can eliminate the chance of the sylesti running away aside from using a masterful snare trap but at 500 diamonds each, that is not very feasible to use on every pet you want to take home.
Step 1
First, of course, you have to find a pet you want to catch. I ran across this gorgeous guy during my daily quests. 
Step 2
There is technically no need to lower the health of a pet as it does not increase the chance of catching it by much but I personally find it takes me a lot more snares and I lose a lot more pets by going after it at 100%. Now, when you go about weakening it, you do NOT want to use the attacks unlocked at 5 or 10 proficiency points as they do considerable damage which is not a good thing when trying to take something home. Instead, use quick attack or focused attack as they do not do nearly as much damage. 
Once they are around 50% health, have your two damage pets start blocking and only use the focused or quick attack of your tank who does the least damage. This provides a bit of a buffer against critical hits and especially keeps you from getting the kind of damage a critical hit from a pet made to inflict damage can bring. If you only have two pets in your team, have the on who does more damage block and you will have to have them both block sooner than you would with three in your party.
Note: You can use a snare at any health, I just tend to get it low.
Step 3
Once it is at a health where you are comfortable to start trying to catch it or, more often, low enough that you are worried about killing it, have your entire team block and start throwing snares at it. Snares are accessible during battle via the inventory (the satchel-looking icon in the far right. Once you have inventory open, select the kind of snare you want to use and the pet you want to use it on. The snare will be highlighted in green and there will be an icon above the pet once the snare is directed at it. From there, close the inventory tab and go about your turn, remembering to only block.
Step 4
At every trap throw, there are 3 options. 1: the snare does not work but the pet does not flee, 2: the pet is captured or, sadly, 3: the pet flees. Keep throwing snares until 2 or 3 occurs or, of course, you sadly run out. The pet can be captured on any of the snares. Just because it has thrown off (or eaten as I like to call it) 4 or 5 snares does not mean you are not going to get it. Of course, you can cut your losses at any time if the cost of those snares is greater to you than the value of having that pet. At the top of the battle log, it will show the result of your throw. Hopefully you will eventually see a notice like this. 
And here is the gorgeous boy, all mine now 
Things to Keep in Mind
~Block is learned at Level 15 so outside of a festival zone so you cannot use it if your pets are below that. In this case, start using snares from the beginning. Sadly, this means you have a limited number of turns that you can try to catch the pet in. Within the festival zones, however, you can use block from the beginning.
~The color of a snare either has to match or be greater than the color of the stars of a pet you want to catch so lesser (green) snares can only catch common and uncommon sylestis, standard (blue) can catch common, uncommon, and rare sylestis, and strong (purple) can catch common, uncommon, rare, and epic sylestis. Masterful snare traps can catch any rarity of sylesti and are the only snares that can catch legendary (orange stars) and mythical (red stars) sylestis.
~Make sure to keep a sizable collection of snares on you at any time as there is absolutely no way to catch any pet without a snare. Instead of having to go buy a big batch of them, try buying a few here and there as you can afford them until your collection builds.
~*~ This is a matter of how I go about capturing pets and is not the way it absolutely has to be done ~*~
Happy hunting! |
