Isn't that exactly what Mortal Strike and Wound Poison do? Make a healing class exactly 50% less efficient? (Not suggesting people don't whine about Mortal Strike) Also, I can't speak to warlocks, but when I arena on my hunter, draining down another players mana when 3/4 healing classes can remove my sting (that has a 15 second cooldown) isn't exactly a no-effort proposition.

I'd like to add that keeping a pet up with no resilience and sub 6k health is not exactly a simple feat. With arena specs, the rez takes 10 seconds, brings the pet back with ~10% health, costs close to half our mana, and has lower happiness. Even if he does get it back up, a second death will force the hunter into a tough decision: ressurect the pet again and risk having it leave with no happiness mid-fight, or leave it dead and deal with it. If you do not like having to cleanse a stack of scorpid poison, have your teammate burn the thing out of the fight.

Killing the pet is a pretty easy way to avoid having to use any "exploits" to get around dealing with it. Not to mention it neuters BM hunters pretty well, and even MM hunters are going to have a tough time without their pet.

This is very true. Even if you dont kill it, the amount of mana it takes to keep up a pet with 0 resilience and somewhat low armor/health really strains their healer (usually a priest) and forces him into trying to keep it up instead of assisting with the mana burns. I almost always start out on the pet, my druid tries to cyclone the priest so he can't heal it, and it drops very quickly. From then on the game is pretty much over since my druid can drink a lot more easily while I wear down the priest.

For the players who were wondering if this was condoned behavior, I'm 100% sure it isn't. I know people who have received up to 3 day bans for using the /sit macro to drink while under attack. Furthermore I have reported people for using it in rated arena matches myself, and I even have had GMs respond mid match and message players using this exploit with warnings.

While your particular mileage with a match or GM may vary, I know at least one GM in BG9 who has actively done something about it with surprisingly quick and effective (for a WoW GM) results.

Quite sad that German GMs don't care anymore about cheaters and exploiters on my realm. I remember the "Warsong Climbers" days as if it was yesterday when we opened about 1mil tickets and not a single horde player got banned at all. Anyways, it's ok to do so, people trying to compete in such a way deserve no other handling.

Uh, you are aware that on an average 2v2/3v3 match, espescially if a Mage or Warlock or Druid is involved, I will drop combat anywhere from 7-15 times depending how often I am cc'd? Every polymorph is a potential 1000+ mana gained due to dropping combat after 6s with sithack, or at the least 1-2 ticks if you sip without sithack. Every cyclone is a GUARANTEED drink, if your partners aren't in any danger of dying, you can drink and /sithack after EVERY cc (blind, poly, cyclone, fear if the pet isn't on you.)

This adds up to alot of mana. As much as I hate CC and the classes associated with it - espescially druids, you shouldn't be punishing them for using CC. Normal drinking is fine, sipping here and there I can understand. But when an affliction or SL/SL lock is trying to prevent you from sithack, what can they do really? Waste DC? recast fear? You still got at least 2 ticks off.


Or if you have a survivable partner (i.e warrior) and the hunter or warlock is hamstrung, more often or not you can just run off and actually despawn the pet. Either way you force the pet owner to recall the pet or have it possibly be desummoned. In 2's/3's we try to force the fight in their starting area, just so we can utilize this. This needs to be fixed, at least for arena - they only have to increase the range by like 10 or 15 yards.

Nope, this got fixed.
Also, you can't go behind the pillars in BEM arena anymore (no more exploiting of pets not being able to attack you).

Yes, I'm so happy that they fixed these bugs.

Do you know if people can still bug out pets to make them despawn in Ruins?

Its not a bug. If you go too far away from your pet, it despawns. This is a mechanic of the game in every situation, instanced or not.

If your pet despawns in arena it is your fault. Maybe they should just teleport the pet next to you or something but I definitely don't see it being the same priority to fix as ones like pets not following through the pillars on BEM.

Granted. I shouldn't have referred to it as a bug: more of an annoyance. I do think, however, that no arena area should be so large that your pet can despawn or at least they should remove it from PvP. The whole idea of despawning, and the reason that Blizzard put it into the game, was for PvE situations and not PvP situations. I bet they will re-work it so that pets do not despawn in arenas in the future; bug or not.

Seemed to still work this last week when I was doing 2v2 and 3v3 as a Druid and SL/SL warlock. My team refuses to use this exploit and there were at least 3-4 other teams using it, one even did a yell "SIT MACRO FTW" while my felhunter was trying to attack him underneith the pillar im BEM arena.

You can get them out of the pillar pretty easily when they're visible. Put your pet on passive and move beside it. It will pop out when you're beside it. It's possible when it's deep into the pillar, but takes longer and may or may not work. Hope they fix this issue.