I'm thinking of going through the pain-in-the-ass of lvling a gorilla for my third pet to use when I am soloing (I already have a pvp and raid pet). I am a BM spec. The reason I am interested in a gorilla is their aoe special attack (I think is called thunderstomp). My thought is that this special attack will allow the gorilla to be an excellent tank since he can agro any mob within 8 yards and focus aggro the mob he is attacking allowing me to focus dps on what he is attacking without having to worry about the adds coming to me in a multi-mob pull.

Since the highest rank gorilla is lvl 55, I'll have to endure the time and effort gettign him to 70. I've never seen a gorilla pet above lvl 55 and there must be a reason for that? Before I go through that trouble, I was wondering 2 things:

1) Will his aoe thunderstomp break crowd control (sheep, sleep, trap, etc) if the crowd controlled mob is within the 8 yards?

2) Is the threat generated by thunderstomp significant enough to hold aggro over the adds when I cast a mend pet on the gorilla?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Yes, and should be, but Thunderstomp has a length cooldown.

I don't think it's a good idea. In exchange for a single AoE attack every 3 pulls or so, you lose major pet DPS because gorillas have no claw/gore focus dump! You may be better off with a pet that can screech. The threat from Screech builds slowly but if you mis-time the ability you aren't SOL for the next minute.

http://www.thottbot.com/s26188

1 Minute of Cooldown and only a decent amount of threat, there are only 3 ranks of this spell (highest level 50) out there.

http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/ht...l#thunderstomp

I didn't know about the one minute cooldown on thunderstomp, that definitely stinks and changes my plan. Yet another broken pet Blizzard, (like turtles) great job.

This is definitely not worth the effort of leveling, so I'll probably be looking for something level 70 with screech for my solo pet.

These replies and this topic made me think of some other questions:

When leveling low level pets I know that the pet only gains experience for kills that would give you experience (if you could gain exp at lvl 70). This of course is what makes it a pain in the rear to level low level pets as it forces you to melee until the pet gets close to your level (a lvl 23 pet wont survive long against a lvl 70 mob, much less hold aggro). Melee + hunter equals slow slow slow kills. On the other hand, from what I can tell, pets do not suffer from reduced experience gains while in parties (and maybe raids?)? Is this true? (What I mean is the pet gets the same expereince off every mob killed regardless of whether you kill it while in a party, raid or solo.)

If so, in theory, the fastest way to level a low level pet would then be to run 5 man's or possibly 10 or 25 mans. As a BM spec this would definitely hurt my DPS, but if I could convince the group to let me it would make my pet level a lot faster, or would it?

Also, does the pet actually have to participate in the kill to get experience or can it simply stay in passive mode by my side and level?

It also seems that a pet does not get exp for a kill if the pet actually dies before the mob. Is that true too?

Sorry for so many questions, but I've not been able to find a good site or thread that actually discusses the mechanics of pet experience gains.

Back when I was leveling that rare spawn scorp (him lvl 14, I lvl 30), I was trapping and not meleeing the mobs. More specific: I placed Freezing Trap, then max range Aimed Shot, squeeze as many shots as possible, trap the mob, run to max range, Aimed Shot and other shots again, dead mob. Dunno if mob HP / shot damage ratio is the same in TBC to make this viable, but you should try it.

As for raids, they come with an XP penalty for players. Parties actually give decent XP/hour due to XP bonus. Probably this carries on to pet XP, but I don't know of any tests. All I've seen is as many pet dings as player dings (considering that more parties have under 70 players than unleveled pets) while in a party. Still, it can't hurt to bring newbie pet to a farm raid to just tag along and soak XP.

Thanks I will... as a result I will end up with these three pets:

Cat for PVP (I like using prowl dash and claw)
Owl for solo grind (I think i will like the aoe tank ability and AP reduction)
Scorpid for Instancing and Raiding (The Scorpid poision ticks +claw for a BM hunter, when Scorpid poision is initially applied while TBWin is active, is pretty sweet)

What are others of you using for your pets?

You dont have to melee mobs. Go find ranged and dps them down or mobs that are kinda squishy. I lvled a 50 boar up from 50 to 66 in the eastern ogre cave in nagrand. Kurenai rep, consortium rep, and pet lvls all in one place

Our BM hunter prefers his Wind Serpent over scorpids. It has something to do with a 1.5s mana dump and Go for the Throat as well as a ranged nuke. Whatever the reason, his DPS backs it up

Meh, my main problem with WS's is that when they back up for lightning breath, its a waste of time for them to go back into melee range, and can be particularly annoying when trying to hit Kill Command. In any event, if you can get ur scorpid to keep up poison, it really is worth it in boss fights. For trash, claw spam is just as well. I'm too lazy to lvl a ravager from 63 after doing my boar, but i have no doubt that it would be better than a windserpert as Gore > LB because of the stupid WS pathing as well as the fact that ravagers have the +10 pet DPS modifier and WS's only have +7

Wind Serpent AI for Lightning Breath can be circumvented by disabling auto cast and adding /cast Lightning Breath (with parameters if wanted) to whatever button you spam.

WS is a good pet, but nothing can touch a Scorpid right now. The mechanics are just far too much in the Scorpid's favor. Until it's nerfed, Scorpids will be the number one raiding pet hands-down.

OP - If you are looking for a solo-ing pet, as you mentioned in a previous post, look at Boars. They generate more single-target aggro than any other pet thanks to Charge (my farming Boar generates around 4-5k aggro instantly with Charge/Growl). It doesn't have the multi-target aggro of some others, but it is far and away the best for single targets, which in my experience is the great majority of the soloing you encounter.

A Windserpent teamed with a survival hunter would be a great combo but nothing can touch a Scorpid's DPS right now.

My pets are:

Cat: PvE, PvP - all purpose
Boar: PvE Solo grinding, PvP
Scorpid: PvE raiding

I find boars to be the most useful pet as far as holding aggro goes.

Speaking of boars ,this seems like a reasonable place to discuss this:

My Boar has been doing very strange things with Charge lately - I want to say since Tuesday's patch in particular. I have Growl/Gore/Charge all on autocast. What happens is the boar will be meleeing a mob, and then decide to Charge a completely different mob, then run back to the target it was meleeing. This is kind of annoying. Sometimes, it decides to charge an trapped mob, which is a lot worse than just 'annoying'. My current theory is that the new AI that won't break CC isn't applied to charge. So the boar attacks A, target A gets CC'd, it goes on to B, but as soon as the charge cooldown is up it charges A again, then goes back to B.

Anyone else seen this? I guess I will have to turn off autocast on charge in instances, for the time being.

Those are my pets as well. If you're going to level a pet, grab a lvl 60 boar and work on that. Also, look at a lvl 63 ravager for raid dps after scorpids get nerfed.

Do you have it on Aggressive?

I've seen my Felguard do this too when I had Intercept on auto-cast. I think it's a general pet AI quirk.

I would like to add confirmation that if you're looking for a pet that has an aoe ability that builds aggro but doesn't break crowd control, you can't do better than a vulture/owl. They have level 70 versions in Skettis that work well and require no hassle to level up. Best of luck to you.

I ditched my boar because of its trap breaking the other day, had it since lvl 24

Anyway on topic, I have an owl and while screech isnt fantastic agro the owl with screech and growl on autoattack holds agro really well and while completely unscientific it seems to me that the -210 AP makes up if the lacking tanking stats on it since it takes a beating just fine.

Another thing you should keep in mind if you want it to tank multiples is missdirection. When I farmed aldor rep in deaths door I started using missd + multi shot on the 3 packs and that way they are usually glue to the pets face and you can kill them full DPS np.

My current pet project is a Ravager and I took it to a HFR heroic the other day ( was asked to join some friends while I was XPing it and forgot to change pet ), anyway in a full clear of ramparts it recieved 90k xp iirc, so around 50% of a level, and at lvl 65 its DPS was horrid since it basicly miss 70% of the hits it seems.

Are scorpids good for MM builds or is their DOT bug only really works for BM?

The reason Scorpids are good is because any damage buffs active when the Scorpid first uses it's poison keep affecting the poison's damage as long as the poison gets refreshed. Compare how many controllable percentage damage boosters you have for your pet with MM and BM, that should answer your question.

I don't even know what that means.