Sproutie

Just a quick heads-up for hunters curious about the pet-unique skills.

Go Crocolisk - Pet Skills - World of Warcraft and hoover your mouse over the Crocolisk on the top of ur screen (behind Database). There you can select the pet-family and see its unique skill.

Some are really cool (the spore cloud, -30% chance to hit, I seriously hope the bosses are immune to this tho, providing -35% chance to hit could well give some classes 102.5%+ avoidance), we get spiders who can entangle people in their webs, stuns, bears can swipe like ferals, etc etc.

 

Æthien

I checked the talents, and there is quite some PvP potential there.
I havent seen the new top dps pet though... Maybe it'll be raptor, or once again the wind serpent because those seem to be the only 2 pets that have a dps ability as special.

 

Shandara

There doesn't seem to be an upgrade to Lightning Breath though (nor to Gore). Bite/Claw do get new ranks and Bite has its cooldown removed, giving a focus dump to every pet.

Since all the new 'unique' abilities seem to have a CD so far, it's safe to assume to majority of pet dps will still be white + claw/bite damage (or LB/gore in the case of a wind serpent/ravager).

 

Æthien

I assumed that that is simply because they havent been implemented yet.
Because there is still so much missing, would be quite bad if we wouldnt get new ranks for all those right?

 

Shandara

That has happened before (Furious Howl for instance...).

On one hand I can only applaud Blizzard's intention of providing baseline abilities for every pet regardless of family with customization possible through the talents, but on the other hand they do have a habit of forgetting to update older abilities and leaving them behind.

(or pets for that matter, will there be new gorillas in Northrend I wonder?)

 

Lord Loom

to be fair, apart from flavour or RP reasons, with their new "pets level up to 5 below the hunter" system there's no real need to provide "updated" pets in higher level content as opposed to the "if you want a new bear at 70 have fun levelling one up 10 levels at least" issue right now

 

Gleithan

According to wowhead, ravagers don't get gore anymore, they get Bite and Ravage which has a stun and is on a 1 minute cooldown. Not sure how useful they will be in raids anymore (for max DPS), especially since it seems they have the utility tree, not the DPS tree.

I guess we also need to know if the pet family DPS modifiers are still in place, or if they have been changed before people can figure out what is going to be the best raid pet.

 

Shandara

Newer, higher level, versions of pets are required to have somewhere to tame new ranks off though.

 

Trifle

Nope, pets will autolevel their skills, there's no such thing as beast training anymore.

 

wokky

Petopia: Wrath of the Lich King - Hunter Pet Talents

 

Mikari

Anyone worked out how much a difference it would make only have 2 points in Cobra Strikes? If it's not much of a difference in proc rate I think I'll use a build similar to the following

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Unless Longevity is shown to be a must have talent for boosting DPS.

 

Lord Loom

ah yes, forgot about that (for current content/pets) but as Trifle says this won't be an issue in Wrath with
which will also open the 3rd stable slot for a permanent pet without fear that we'll have to abandon it at some point to learn new pet skills

 

Æthien

Wait... Tallstriders, Hyenas and Carrion birds are now dps pets? oO




I guess we'll be running with Raptors for max dps.
Edit: not that I'm complaining, I kind of like raptor looks but never saw a real reason to tame one.

Oh and "but if I use my mouse to turn, how do I click my raptors rend?"

 

Dafeaz

I have a feeling that the pet stats themselves are going to be normalized.

Depending on if they add new ranks, Wolves may return as a top-tier raiding pet for not only their (hopefully) high damage but the buffs they'll provide to a physical DPS team.

Some people think they can outsmart me. Maybe.

Maybe.

I've yet to meet one who can outsmart bullet.

 

Shandara

And can we put more abilities on the pet bar? The current limit of 4 will be hard to work around.

 

• Intermission

I think most of the new important pet abilities would be bound to macros anyway. For example I can imagine a macro that does this:

/disable autocast on bite or claw
/attempt to cast "important pet ability that needs 60+ focus"
/[when holding shift/alt/ctrl] turns autocast back on bite or claw

 

Æthien

The problem is more that it is currently not possible for a pet to have more than 4 active abilities.
So macro or not, 4 is still 4.
And with 51pt BM being able to get 3 extra active abilities Blizzard can better show up with some extra buttons or they're going to shoot themselves in the foot right from the start.

edit: probkem isnt a word...

 

Zurai

It's possible in WotLK. All pets have 4 automatically that you can't even do anything about - Growl, Cower, <focus dump>, <species unique>. Then there's the talent tree specials...

 

Mikari

The talented abilities probably don't go on the pet bar, it will most likely be like Kill Command, stuff that the Hunter Triggers.

 

Zurai

No. I'm in the beta (just got in last night). The talented abilities are pet attacks/abilities that go on the pet bar. They'd use mana instead of focus if they were hunter abilities, anyhow.

 

Arcazua

Aethien's point was that you literally can only train 4 skills now. Cats can currently use growl, cower, dash, claw, bite, and prowl. You can only ever train four of these. Not put four on your bar. You can only actually even give your cat 4 of these skills. Cower's easy to ignore, but some folks have asked in the past whether prowl is worth dropping bite. In the expansion, there will be enough stuff to choose from that only 4 ability slots won't be enough to go around.



I also agree with some of the statements going on right now about pets being left out. Let's face it, most of us here will be min/max'ing most aspects of our characters. If there's a decision to be made that isn't really a decision except for aesthetics, I think most readers of these boards will take the more powerful choice.

As far as actual pet skills go, most of the abilities look like they have no raid viability at all, or are likely underwhelming when you consider bosses are immune to stuns and usually disarms and the like. The only ones to look at besides raw damage options are:

Demoralizing Screech is only carrion bird now. My owl's going to miss this, I think. Especially when carrion birds aren't tanking pets according to our pet-tree breakdown. (Not that owls are either.) -210 AP is nice, but there are other, better options available that don't make a ton of noise.
Dust Cloud (Tallstrider) is 30% damage negation. Others have already talked about that, so I won't beat a dead horse. Only thing worth mentioning is that it's 8 seconds out of 20, max.
Spore Cloud (Spore Bat) reduces armor by a bit. Can be up 9 seconds out of 10, which is pretty good. A Beast Master could keep it up constantly if they wanted.

What remains to be seen if any of the DPS options will be good enough to outweigh the utility benefits. We're apparently talking about pets that are cunning, ferocity, and cunning respectively. Somehow I doubt Tallstriders will have the DPS impact we're looking for..../shrug

 

Zurai

You can turn autocast on and off from the pet's spellbook page. You don't need growl, prowl, dash/dive, or cower on the hotbar.

 

Trifle

Is there any point at all to raising mobility to 2/2 ? Dash/dive are 15 second duration, 30 second cooldown. 1/2 Mobility drops it to 15 second cooldown, enough for 100% uptime. 2/2 Mobility just seems redundant ...

 

Gokey

I was a little curious about that myself. Obviously it's beta and there's bound to be discrepancies. For my POV, I'm not sure it's even worth putting 1 point in that talent at the moment. With all pets getting Boar's Speed and Dash/Dive, your pet should never have a problem closing distance on players in PvP.

That being said, a permanent 100% increase to speed may be useful in some situations.

 

Zurai

Interesting factoid: Pets aren't immune to forced movement (knockback, knockdown, pull) any more.