Nakari

The most recent build included some additional exotic pets, among them worms wich include the Jormungars of Northrend and the "traditional" azerothian worms found in Silithus or Maraudon, but not "grubs" like Borelgore or the smaller versions found in EPL. Strangely enough, these seem to have different talent trees depending on which ones you tame. The Deep Borer from Maraudon uses the Tenacity Talents, while Jormungars have Ferocity. Their ability is called Acid Spit and is a ranged DoT similar to Serpent's Poison Spit, but with an added armor reduction effect, and it can stack up to 3 times.
Another interesting addition to Exotic Pets are Silithids, though only the Ambusher/"AQ-Mount"-variant seems to be tameable.

 

Mikari

Rank 2 is including the Rank 1 effect but working the old way, I'm hoping Rank 1 is bugged and that Rank 2 is how it's supposed to be.

 

Twelve

Silithid: (Cunning Tree) Eats Meat+Fungus +5% dmg, +5% armor, +5% HP
Comes with Claw
Special-
Venom Web Spray: Sprays toxic webs at the target, preventing movement for 4 seconds and causing nature damage over time. (Rank5 @ lvl 66)
80 Focus - 2 min CD - 20 yrd range - Instant

Tested @ lvl 66 - ~39-41 dmg /sec



Worm: (Tenacity Tree) Eats Cheese, Bread+Fungus +15% armor, +10% HP
Comes with Bite
Special-
Acid Spit: Your Worm spits acid at an enemy, causing 46-64 nature damage and reducing its armor for 30 sec. (Rank5 @ lvl 66)
40 Focus - 20 sec CD - 30 yrd range - Instant


I tamed both of these from silithus and i guess theres a higher rank of each spell

 

Bullshot

On a slightly different note, can someone who's in the beta make a post on the Beta forums asking whether Blizzard is going to implement having our ranged weapons on our backs rather than our melee weapons?

 

Trifle

The worm ability is neat, but seriously, what the hell? A 2 minute cooldown on a 4 second root? That really seems a bit overboard.

 

Twelve

As far as i know the cooldowns and focus cost of all abilities is currently being reviewed anyway so it might be changed in a later patch.

 

Trident

Could you provide a source for this please?

 

Varelse

Any chance of some tests to see if the armor reduction effect stacks with other such effects, like Sunder Armor and Fairy Fire? I've not seed much from Tenacity I fancy for raids yet, but this could shift things a little.

 

Conscience

Debuff of the highest Acid Spit rank ist shown on WoWHead doing the following:

[Apply Aura]: Mod Resistance (Physical)
Value: -785

I wonder whether that's for one stack or for all three. If it's 785 ArP per stack and stacking with everything else, then it's maybe a bit strong.

 

KraxisSingular

You know I was sort of expecting Silithids as Exotics. I like that idea. But I'm sorry they are Cunning and their special is PvP minded.

If it had been a viable raidpet it might have convinced me to get it over a Devilsaur. Not a chance now.

The Worm's special looks tasty. I'm more than willing to drop from personal DPS to boost Physical DPS that way.
Raid is heavily stacked on physicals tonight, I'm bringing my Worm. Tomorrow it is casters galore with a pallytank, I'll bring my Devilsaur. And I guess the Devilsaur would be my 'IDK yet' pet (depending on any sort of speedchanging pets). And one has got to love the fact that the Worm eats Bread. While food is hardly an issue for Ferocity pets, it will remain important for Tenacity, and Bread is just king of petfoods.

Kill Command. Noticed this on wowhead yesterday, but since rank 2 and 3 wasn't changed I put it away. But now that it appears to be in I'm slightly worried. I hope dearly that this isn't the awaited change, I mean what Rank 1 does, not any sort of combined version. Kill Command, even if buffed directly, would be a lot worse for certain pets. Those pets with weak damage specials (but with other aspects), it would feel rather wrong to waste the first 60% buff on a really bad special.
If however it could be combined with the Rank 2-3 Kill Commands it would end up as a nice tool. Imagine the 60% buff going off on a Kill Command under the effect of Cobra Strikes for a certain crit (does KC count as a pet special btw?) and Bestial Wrath (and in many cases a trinket of sorts). We are talking a rather powerful pet attack. Currently seeing KC crits of 1200 under BW is not uncommon, this would raise once such to 1920. Of course it would be hard to manage, and the occurance would not be that common, but the thought does leave me salivating.

 

Twelve

So theres some interesting bugs ingame atm.
A mob affected by Serpent Sting takes alot more dmg from all attacks.

I've been playing around with the Chimaera and Froststorm Breath is doing ~1600 dmg non crit in my gear and ~3500 dmg with serpent sting up

Decided to see how high i could get it and the result was over 35k :>

ImageShack - Hosting :: balancedcz1.jpg


Edit:
Good news about the Worm.. theres Worms in Dragonblight which have the Ferocity tree instead of Tenacity so they'll be much nicer for raid dps :>
They look really cool aswell!

 

Kaejin

I was actually expecting Silithid to be more of the wildcard type since they have so many different model types to choose from (ended up completely wrong on that assumption, too), but I'll accept the Northrend worms as Ferocity and old world worms as Tenacity. It would be an interesting distinction to keep in the game, but I do get the feeling it's unintended.

Cunning pets are all leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth. They all tend to have the best PvP abilities (Venom Web, stuns, disarms) but still get the short end of the stick on stat bonuses, talents, cooldowns, and focus costs. I have a hard time wanting to use them in PvP for any other reason than the specials, but the cooldowns on them make me cringe.


Twelve, what did you do to get such a retardedly high crit?


Edit: Forgot to mention I'm not so happy with the change to pet resists. 80 resist per school at level 80.

 

Twelve

Well as my previous post states the damage it does by default plus the serpent sting bug..
Then you add Trnket + BW which is 50% dmg
Then theres the pet talents.. Cornered which adds 50% dmg when pet is below 35% hp and Feeding Frenzy which adds 40% dmg when target is below 20% hp.

And finally the new Kill Command which adds 60% dmg to the first special attack of the pet.
Then it just needs to crit which is guaranteed by Cobra Strikes

edit:

Tamed a few Worms now that i heard were DPS tree but all come out as tanking :<

 

MetallicaRulez0

I tamed one of those Jormungars (or however you spell it) last night and it was definitely a Tenacity pet. Are there other tameable worms in Dragonblight other than the elites?

Edit: I also think some of the new pet attacks are scaling WAY too well, as evidenced by that 35k Froststorm breath and my Worms 1k+ Acid Spit normal hits.

 

Twelve

Ice Heart Jormungar Feeder.

Not elites tho.. their in the passage joining Crystalsong to Dragonblight.

Seems the info was wrong about DPS tree then.. maybe the guy who told me doesnt know the difference :<

 

◊ Lactose

Volley:
(Rank 4): Damage seems to scale by ~7.9% of RAP per tick, ~47.4% in terms of total damage.


Serpent Sting:
Ranks increase damage taken by target.
For a Level 70 Hunter (no idea if this scales):
Rank 5 and below: No damage increase.
Rank 6: 2% damage increase.
Rank 7: 21% damage increase.
Rank 8: 25% damage increase.
Rank 9: 42% damage increase.
Rank 10: 45% damage increase.

No clue if this is bugged, guessing it is.


EDIT:
Master Marksman:
Never saw any real testing on this, so here goes:
Master Marksman does not affect RAP gain from debuffs on the target (e.g. Hunter's Mark).

Look, Lactose, we'd rather you didn't eradicate the whole human race.
- Sam & Max

 

Steelfleece

I must say I'm rather impressed with how they're handling exotic pets so far.

Except silithids. Their ability seems rather weak, it's the same as the spider one with a small dot, isn't it?

affect –verb (used with object) 1. to act on; produce an effect or change in
effect –noun 1. something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence
Know the difference.

 

Bullshot

Could this be the change Blizzard mentioned about making Serpent Sting more useful for hunters so they actually use it? Obviously it'd have to be tuned a lot going by the screenshot a couple of posts above, but if it somehow does remain as a side-effect of keeping the sting up, then Serpent Sting as well as Chimera Shot would become so much more attractive. Now if only Chimera Shot would renew all Serpent Stings on the target rather than just your own ala Crusader Strike....but I'm probably sketching out scenarios of having the cake and eating it too. (The cake isn't a lie.)

 

Steelfleece

I'm trying to figure out why Froststorm breath seems to do so much damage the more and more is added to it. I wonder if it's applying all bonuses to its damage twice since it has two separate damage types? That, combined with all the damage multipliers for pets could explain why it seems to do so much damage.

affect –verb (used with object) 1. to act on; produce an effect or change in
effect –noun 1. something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence
Know the difference.

 

Zurai

Yes. Ghostcrawler just posted that the fact that it deals two types of damage is making it scale crazily.

 

Steelfleece

That probably also explains why the damage seems to fluctuate very randomly.

affect –verb (used with object) 1. to act on; produce an effect or change in
effect –noun 1. something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence
Know the difference.

 

KraxisSingular

Well it's got two heads.

But I suppose it will get fixed to a single scaling (I'm expecting it is currently counted twice from spelldamage etc). But then what about certain buffs? CoE and Stormstrike, they add differently to spells, but somehow they need to be scaled. So would it then be 10% and 20%, or 2x10% and 20%... And which spellschool is then the primary. Seems to be complicated.

Maybe it should just be Frost and be over with it.

I have begun to wonder about our scalability in raids. With shouts, totems and UR going raidwide we seem to be the only ones lefts standing that don't scale very well with this. UR and Shouts only affect our pets, WF totem is not going to be much unless we are Surv or MM. Strength of Earth boosts our pets nicely, but we get limited value again compared to melee. As BM we provide very little to our raids in terms of synergy. We are becoming more and more like Rogues it seems, but with less ability as buffsponges because many buffs/debuffs don't apply to us, don't scale or only apply half to us. Even Bloodlust and drums are going to be worth rather little. Perhaps this is going to be the kicker fr MM as raiding spec over BM?

Blizzard is luckily working hard to keep raids at 2 of each class +5, but since we provide very little synergy going out or going in, it is not too unreasonal to think we might get outclasses at some point. Keep the one Surv and get another Shaman to make sure totems are spread out over a larger area to allow casters more freedom. That is just one possiblity.
My hope rides with Abomination's Might since it says nothing about melee AP specifically. But once more we are back to 20 yards... And who is to say any Blood DKs will come over say an Unholy for Ebon Plague?
It is still early, but I think it is worth mentioning, if only so you guys can present some arguments as to why I'm wrong.

Btw, I noticed the new metas. They appear to be weaker in comparison to our current metas. Relentless going from 12 Agi + 3% critdamage to 21 Agi and 3% critdamage. But at 80 we need 2.08 times the stats we do now (the meta is only 1.75). Can we then assume gear will be less potent than it is now? Or only the metas?
But I do like that there is a crit meta, not that I think I will get it, but it allows a bit of choice for us.

 

WarTotem

As far as the Chimera breath goes:
Mages have tested Frostfire Bolt extensively (double school as well) and have concluded that all buffs work per school and are multiplicative. CoE would then do 10% + 10% = 21% increase and Stormstrike would add another 20% or 45,2% total increase. Malediction, Misery, the new Imp. Scorch, ... would seriously overpower this pet.

Ofcourse this "double dipping" (taking double effect from a debuff boosting both schools) is not expected to see live, but if it would, BM will be the only viable raiding spec. :P

 

KraxisSingular

Sweet Lord... I can just imagine going in the /ra

"Hold back on Nature spells, Frostfire Breath is coming up." It would be a sort of evil righteous justice to the Elemental Shamans after all their bitching about WS pets. But obviously that can't last, nor should it. It's plain old silly this way.

 

Trident

I've seen some posts on the beta forum about how we have too many skills, and then saw this one. It made me think to myself, "well what if the GCD itself was changed?" I guess you see where I'm going with this.

What if our GCD was 1 second? The same as rogues and cat druids. This would increase our ability to PvP quite a bit due to the increased amount of abilities we could use, and it would also make haste a very good stat until... well, whatever the amount is that will bring Steady Shot below 1 second cast time.

Anyone have any thoughts/comments on this?