This thread will be for questions and information about pets. How to spec them and how to choose them. There's a bunch of info in locked and general threads about this topic, so I will write a quick summary of the tidbits I've digested since 3.0, and then let you all run wild.

Tools:

Pet Calculator - Wowhead
Petopia: A complete guide to hunter pets in the World of Warcraft.

Introduction

The pets best suited to 25 man PVE DPS are ferocity pets. As of patch 3.1, top end DPS will always be gotten with a wolf for non BM hunters, and a Devilsaur for BM. If you're BM, you must take the 51 point talent to get 4 extra pet talents, which will open up a pet build that has all 4 points taken in both Shark attack and Wild hunt.

Here is the current best non BM ferocity build that uses one point in wild hunt, however if the spreadsheet shows more DPS for Shark Bite, take that instead:

Pet Calculator - Wowhead. **note: the point in great stamina could equally be placed in any other 1st tier talent

Here's the current best BM devilsaur build. There's a free point in here you can put anywhere. Also, Devilsaurs are a pain to manage, so if you're one of those BM hunters who uses another pet, feel free. I only used it because it's the most popular exotic at the moment:

Pet Calculator - Wowhead. **note: the point in great stamina could equally be placed in any other 1st tier talent

In 10 man or heroics, some argue that a cunning pet is viable because of the mana regen talent, however this needs to be tested. Since the primary purpose of cunning pets is PVP, I won't be including a build for them until see data that supports the PVE utility hypothesis.

General answers to FAQs:

• The pet special moves all cost 20 focus, the focus dump costs 25 focus, and growl/cower are both free. Growl and cower have their own cooldown. Every time a pet's global cooldown finishes, the pet will always cast the lowest cost ability that's not on cooldown.
• Some of your attack power is transferred to your pet.
• Your hit rating from gear is passed to your pet, but rounded down. As of 3.1, hit rating from FA is passed to your pet.
• Animal handler increases your pet's expertise, which reduces the boss's chance to dodge (not affected by hit rating, which determines the bosses chance to try to dodge).

Good post!

A couple of my own opinions:

I would move the 1 point from Greater Stamina to Dash. My thinking is that the faster your pet can get to the target, the faster it can start to do damage. And a cat will most likely do more damage than a devilsaur if your raid has a feral druid with mangle.

I agree, but it takes 30 focus which takes away from focus dumps. As I noted, though, that one point can be put anywhere in the first tree

I have a couple of questions and I believe this may be the best place to have them answered.

I am currently running a 53-18-0 spec and my only level 80 pet is the gorilla. I am working on leveling a devilsaur and have also been searching for the ever elusive spirit beast to tame. What is the point of having exotic pets if it is still higher DPS to go with a non-exotic pet and a less than 51-point BM spec?

When people say the cat or scorpid is the best DPS pet, which spec are they running? Obviously, when the devilsaur is used, it is at least a 51-point BM. But, what about cat or scorpid? Are people respec'ing to run the cat or other non-exotic pet?

Some hunters use the 51 point talent in the BM tree just for the 4 bonus pet skill points. It can drastically increase the survivability of a DPS pet. Also, Blizzard has indicated that a future patch will ensure that an exotic pet will have a 10% advantage over a non-exotic.

Awesome post, thank you.

I have a quick question about the scorpid pet that I'm hoping someone can answer. I read up on the subject of it and found out that the dot damage is determined by the pet/hunters AP at the time of the application.

That being said, would it be the best strategy for a hunter spec'd 50/21/0 to pop BW right away with AotB on and allow the poison to stack up to 5(if it is not stacked by the time BW is over, poping readyness and letting it stack more with a second BW) then go to AotH/Viper switching back to AotB if the poison fails to stack?

Also, i remember back before the scorpid's damage was nerfed; it was benefitial to disable claw so enough focus was always available to stack the poison. Is this still the case?

Someone give me some help, no one has been able to give a decent answer and i know myself and other hunters are eager to know.

-Thanks, and Happy Thanksgiving =)

Have you tested this poison damage/AP statement? Also, focus starvation shouldn't be a problem these days because the reapplication only costs 20 focus and will be cast before anything else is. Assuming you had just cast a focus dump when it became available and are out of focus, the only wait will be for the pet to regenerate 20 focus.

Ok thanks, So it would be best to let 4 stacks build up with AotB on-Pop BW and RF (5th stack applies); then go into a normal DPS rotation dipping back into Beast if a poison fails to apply because of a boss ability,death, ect...

(this is from another thread)
Okay I will try to get a screenshot of recount for the pet if I see it happen again.

I have experienced this behaviour with lvl 70 right after 3.0 while testing pet-dps on target dummies. Although i cannot verify the statement regarding "live-AP-scaling" the poison dot is definately using the current buffs of the pet. The idea during this tests was popping BW, then using Eye of the Beast (with Glyph) and start building up the poison stack. After BW had worn out and I clicked EotB away the poison was ticking for the same lower ammount it has always ticked when not using this stacking method. So I assume it works the same way regarding AP but a confirmation on this would indeed be nice.

Is there any conclusion when to use AotB over AotH? I am currently raiding with an 50-21-0 (3/3 Longlivety) spec with a raptor, which is doing roughly 45% of my total damage on single target fights like Patchwerk. Until I read about AotB on this board I've never thought about using it in a raid environment. Do you recommend to use it all the time (perhaps depending on AP?) or just for the BW phases?

And a few more questions regarding pet special abilities:
During the first Naxx-ID I left Rabid and Savage Rend on autocast. I think it would be much better to time Rabid with BW and Savage Rend with Cobra Strike procs. Do you have a good method to accomplish the later? I am currently at 30% crit raidbuffed and with 1/3 Cobra Strikes there are sometimes long periods without procs and when it procs you got only about 2sek to react and hit Savage Rend. My first idea to do this is a /toggleautocast macro but this seems rather cumbersomely.

Back to the scorpid: Do you leave Scorpid Poison on autocast once it has been fully stacked? With 3/3 Longlivety it has only 3sek CD on a 10sek DoT, so one is "wasting" 2 pet-GCD every 9 sek if it is used everytime the CD is up. Would it be better to replace the 3sek and 6sek recast with Claw and only cast Scorpid Poison every 9sek? Of course a miss an this cast would be a gread dps-loss. So there are two questions: Assuming hit-cap and 2/2 Animal Handler which method provides better sustained dps: Scorpid Poison every ~3sek or every ~9sek? And if the later wins, how would you do this ingame? Via a /castsequence macro?

How conditional can macros become? ie AotB when BW is popped, but after BW goes away, go back to AotH for example.

Am i the only one whos pet "bugs" during the Malygos fight half an time? I'm using Devilsaurus and half an time it just stands middle of the platform and does nothing (almost same as Brutallus bug) or am i doing something wrong?

After each cyclone, call your pet back and send it back in to attack.

You can't do that, Cyberbob. Macros are never conditional- the closest you can come to that is putting abilities you know will be on cooldown in the macro, and that trick will not help you here. You might be able to write a macro that had a castsequence, but you would still have to click/press it twice- once to start the BW/AotB, and once once it's done to reset it to AotDH.

Thrawn, rabid is a nice DPS boost on a 45 second cooldown. Having to wait until you use BW probably isn't worth it. Maybe timing it so that it's on for the first BW could be worth it because of the multiplicative nature of the BW bonuses, but I'd make sure that if it's off cooldown, it's being used whether you're under BW or not. As for the scorpid poison, I think that you might be able to get slightly more pet dps by only using focus every 9 seconds to refresh the whole stack. It becomes a question of micromanagement though... you'd have to have some sort of timer on screen that reminded you to manually cast it every 9 seconds, and this could easily interfere with the rest of your job and cost more dps.

Maybe one day Blizz will allow us to have fine grained control over our pets and force a delay on the casting of certain abilities while determining priority. Until then, I'd probably just leave it on autocast.

Concerning the Devilsaur: has a blue posted about their enormously oversized hit box? It seems that on certain fights like Heigan and Sartharion, there is just nothing I can do to keep Ole' Stompy alive through the AoE damage. He's essentially a walking tractor-trailer, with a 30-yard hit box for AoE calculations. He can be standing side-by-side with me and get hit by the lava wave or floor pulse anyways.

I was wondering what anyone thought about bringing a cunning pet to a raid. Are any of them good at dps at all (I don't expect them to come close to the cat/devilsaur/raptor/scorpid at the moment)? As a marks hunter, the ability that regenerates 30% of the hunters mana looks really, really sexy and seems like it would great to use in a raid setup.

I'll start off by saying that I don't have the time or energy to do a large sample of this but with a readiness spec on Patchwerk I would say that switching to AotB during BW's will provide a dps increase over AotD.

If anyone is willing to do ~40 sec dps bursts x ~50 or something with each aspect and come here with results it'd finally solve the suspicions. Problem with this is that you would need BoM/Battle shout, totem, int buff, consumables, debuffs, etc to make this accurate.

Next time we clear Naxx I will just start with AotB and switch to AotD after second BW is out and switch to AotB for every BW and see how that works out.

Hello, I was wondering if anyone has calcualted the added threat component value of Thunderstomp? I would be willing to run tests myself but am not the most knowledgeable on these sorts of tests. If I did wish to run a test to find the additional threat would I:

*Get Pet to Thunderstomp once with no other damage.
*Test to see how much damage I need to do (from melee range) to surpass the 10% threshold.
*Then take into account the actual damage dealt by Thunderstomp to calculate threat value.

I just wanted to add in on this topic from what I've read on other boards as well as what I've heard from discussing various BM builds with other hunters on my server.

From what I have read and been told, the other problem with some pets currently is their special ability with regards to longevity. The cooldown on the pets special 10 second cast ability is lowered to 7 seconds. This presents a problem though for pets like the spirit beast who's special "dot timer" doesn't become lower with longevity. So, what happens is you lose out on half of the spirit beasts special damage because you never have the 10 second tick go off, the buff just constantly becomes refreshed.

I have read that this is a known bug and should be fixed, however none of the posts stating this were blue, so it could very well be just wishful thinking that it will get fixed. If anyone can confirm with a blue post, I wouldn't mind seeing the post.

Just as a final note, I believe this same problem exists with cat pet's as well, and their dot special although not to the effect it hinders the spirit beast (cat loses 1/3 of its special damage I believe).

EDIT: I just took my cat out and had him use only his special (on auto cast) while attacking a targeting dummy myself and he did overwrite his rake cooldown. However, it would seem the overall damage lost from the special is only about 1/4 due to the dot ticking 3 times during a full duration of it, plus the initial hit. With longevity and the skill on auto cast, you will end up losing out on the final tick of the dot (or ~1/4 of the attacks damage).

That's a start, but unless several other people do this there just seem to be too many factors involved to come away with anything definitive. You have variation in auto and special shot ranges, as well as pet melee and specials, plus there's the matter of when your auto timer starts and finishes within those 18 seconds and when your pet's swing timer starts and ends. Then you have procs and perhaps other things. How do we eliminate the variance so that our only control is the aspect?

I tend to wonder if it is not more practical to use a model with a controlled environment (such as the spreadsheet) where we can just change the aspect. Live testing supplements this and provides insights into where our model may have missed some factor or attributed it an incorrect value.

My pet does not cast another rake untill the current one has dropped off. This is with 3/3 longevity.

The only thing i have seen is this from Ghostcrawler: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> GC: Why is Spirit Strike < Rake?