With 3.3 coming soon and the change to pet talents with Culling the Herd replacing Avoidance, I'm assuming that the best pet dps spec will be basically the same as current, with 3/3 in culling instead of 3/3 in Avoidance. Is this correct, or is the new talent not as great as it looks like?
I'm also curious how many people do 1/2 Bloodthirsty vs 2/2 and then take Heart of the Phoenix. I know it's a dps loss if the pet doesn't die, but for me it's so far been better to have the bonus insta-rez. Mostly that's because pets just die a lot in the later uld hard modes we've been doing (firefighter, freya, and yogg have all given me problems - of course, this isn't really an issue in ToC).
Avoidance was a talent we took for pets to begin with to get to Rabid. It wasn't necessarily that we wanted to take it, there just isn't really very many more offensive choices that we could take. So with the change to Culling the Herd, I don't see very many changes in how either BM or Non BM would spec their pets. The 2/2 bloodthirsty and leading into HotP is literally just as a precaution to keep your pet alive as you have done. I know it's stupid but I have seen some hunters keep their pet on passive and spec'd them fully defensive accept for the talents that would buff the hunter as well (I don't suggest this as I find it as a DPS loss no matter how well the pet is spec'd).
I would say if we were going along the lines of why many people use the glyph of killshot over some others, then by that standpoint, cunning pets would stand a chance. but i dont think they would stack up to ferocity pets in a raid atmosphere. just my opinion though. Although I guess there have been a couple fights where dps isnt really a neccesity till the later stages so a cunning pet would prove invaluable for those areas. with our Call Stabled Pet ability moving down to a 5 minute cooldown, it shouldn't be hard to have a pet for every occasion in any situation, so having a ferocity pet for those long fights and a cunning pet where dps counts more in the later stages would be a pretty good idea.
On the discussion of the new 3.3 pet talents, how do the new Cower skill and Improved Cower talent show their appeals? As an endgame-topper content (just like Naxx-60 and SWP), it's probably safe to expect that Icecrown heroic will have some nasty surprises towards pet survivability, just like ulduar hard modes fights. Is it good as an alternative to Bloodthirsty-HotP route that many hunters took during non-pet-friendly fights back then (firefighter, yogg)?
The cower changes look like they're intended for pvp. It doesn't make sense for blizzard to make Icecrown pet-unfriendly after going out of their way to give every pet aoe damage reduction in pve *and* prevent several boss' knockbacks from affecting pets.
It's called Bloodlust, not Heroism. What kind of pansy name is Heroism, anyway?
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12/13 [25] Heroic - Recruiting exceptional players.
The cower changes look like they're intended for pvp. It doesn't make sense for blizzard to make Icecrown pet-unfriendly after going out of their way to give every pet aoe damage reduction in pve *and* prevent several boss' knockbacks from affecting pets.
It does feel like a good thing that we will not have to watch out for our pets (no matter what class we are) in a raid setting. I know there are many lazy people or people that find it annoying to take care of your pet during the raid, but I always kind of liked it. It actually makes you feel as if you have to keep your pet alive in order to keep that extra bit of dps it could dish out.
Has anyone had a chance to test whether damage from pve boss mechanics that make a player "the bomb" in some fashion or another is no longer covered by avoidance? Technically Light Spark, etc, damage is "caused by another player" (to the point where it's attributed to that player in the combat log), which would seem to fall into the exception in the new wording for avoidance.
Going through the new 5 man instances on heroic, the only times my pet ever came close to death was when it was single targeted. So many mobs that the tank didn't have a chance to pick them up right away and my pet decided to take one for the team... Poor Rèzim... Anyways!!! There is so much AoE damage from all the bosses, that I would say the pet's new Avoidance works GREAT!!! From standing in the poison from Ick to getting hit by the Ice falling in the cave in PoS, nothing really ever hurt my pet ACCEPT when he decided to think he could tank. In which case, Cower is an AMAZING ability. The new modifications they made to pets are pretty much amazing for pet survivability. I only mention the new instance as a test because my pet never had ANY problems in any of the other instances. And never really in any raids either, but I was one of those people who skipped straight from Naxx to ToGC...
Does cower work on autocast now? I've been in 5-mans, raids, and solo since the patch and I've never seen it fire. Ironic that after all this time of being annoyed with it constantly getting reset to autocast, now when I want it to fire it won't.
Does cower work on autocast now? I've been in 5-mans, raids, and solo since the patch and I've never seen it fire. Ironic that after all this time of being annoyed with it constantly getting reset to autocast, now when I want it to fire it won't.
For me, I do not have it set to autocast, I always used to watch my pets health before so I could Mend Pet. So making a neat little macro:
#showtooltip Mend Pet
/cast Cower
/cast Mend Pet
I just make sure to pay attention to my pet still and I can keep it alive even better now with Cower added in.
Pets have become fairly straight forward and pet management has taken a backseat with new pet friendly boss mechanics, but on the DPS wow forums a mage has brought up an interesting topic regarding demon and elemental pets.
1) Pets do not autocast as quickly as they're supposed to; an X second cast without a cooldown will actually cast every X + Y time, where Y seems to be quite variable.
2) Spamming the pet's casts in a macro improves pet casting rate.
3) Something is adding a lot of variability to Y, be it network latency, server load, or something entirely different.
Now I'll be without wow for a week taking care of business and plan to test when I get back but the general summery of the topic asks if latency in wow is reducing pet DPS. Most hunters here raid with a wolf who uses no "fireball" spell, but I am curious if a pets special abilities (bite in particular) or his melee attack are being lowered by latency? Another theory is the pet is waiting to make sure the ability hit the boss, then checks if it is dead, then attacks. Something worth looking into?
Wolf pet DPS with no macro: ~280
Wolf pet DPS with macro: ~320
About 40 DPS higher if I spam the macro
So, yes it seems to affect Hunter pets too, if somewhat less. Of course if you are BM then this is big news, and we are back to macroing all our shots.
Also, this appears to be an issue regarding latency, since some people who tested in low pop periods basically got no advantage our of the 'spam pet ability' while those that tested during peak hours got incredibly increased results.
Again, less of an issue for most Hunters since pet damage isn't too high, and Culling the Herd has a fairly high uptime already. But even so, perhaps 100DPS more for the pet and a few percent more uptime for CtH and the results should begin to become quite visible.
While this is negative news, I'm actually a little glad. Since it now affects a lot of people (Warlocks and Mages), there might actually be a fix on the horizon. Especially considering the fact that those that are hurting the most from this aren't exactly overpowered in raids.
I think this is good news, extra DPS we didn't know we had. What I'm wondering about are the pets with a no cool-down racial. Also, was that testing just for bite, or all the wolf's special abilities, and on top of that how does gftt play into this. I picked a rotten time to be away from wow.
It shouldn't affect Furious Howl in that you can just add that ahead of Bite on the same line you have Kill Command (if you have it). That way you won't force out the buff. In any case, personally I have just added this to my Steady Shot macro. It's beginning to look like a TBC macro again... The reason I don't do it for the other shots is that none of them we should technically press more than once. I know that I won't begin to spam Explosive Shot and Aimed when they are up. So the total benefit might be fairly small overall.
I was talking more about Rabid, it does have a 45 second cool-down so I can't see it doing anything, but I am not sure if all this is messing with abilities being used at the same time. Once again I can't test to find out. More importantly I was referring to pet race specific abilities. Fire breath, lighting breath, froststorm breath ect.
Furious Howl is a race specific ability, if it isn't adversely affected then others won't either. Just add in thier abilities instead.
Rabid is of the GCD isn't it? Even if it isn't, the thing is that you would have to pretty much spam Steady Shot to lock it out. Whenever you would use other abilities there would be an opening for it. If that isn't enough, then that too can be added whatever macro you would want to use for forcing the focusdump earlier.
But furious howl isn't an attack (i assume), the theory, and these are theories as no one really knows why this is so at the moment, is the pet could be performing these 3 step process (or something similar).
Pet uses ability
1. pet checks if ability hit boss
2. pet checks if boss is dead
3. pet uses ability
If this all turns out to be latency then we just throw it in the macro and forget about it till its fixed (if it can be fixed). If it isn't latency related then we should consider looking at other racial abilities previously ignored because they weren't used to full potential (BM hunters could benefit from this), and more importantly put us one step closer to getting the problem fixed. This isn't a huge deal, but other then smash our faces against people asking armor-pen or agility what else is there to look into.
Edit: I was looking through a few, but are there any pet abilities with a cast timer? The usefulness of macroing the ability in to spam is supposedly increased if the ability is a cast. I was pretty sure they were all instant so i checked them out and was right, none of our pets have cast timers
Quite a few Warlocks have reported similar benefits for their Fel Hunters as for their Imps. Obviously range doesn't appear to have much impact if at all.
12/02/09, 8:03 PM
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