I can't answer your question about DPS but my experience with a Cunning pet is that it isn't worth Roar of Recovery for one reason; happiness. They have no way of recovering happiness in combat short of eating a corpse, which is incredibly awkward to do even on fights where you have adds to eat, and if they die you can't get their happiness back up. The extra mana was nice but the damage gained by not having to switch to Viper as much was probably evened out by my pet's lowered damage after happiness randomly going down or if it was killed.

I've been rocking out a Dragonhawk for the last week, mostly just do to the fact that I love the creatures so much (huge Spyro fan). In fact, one of the things that convinced me to go survival from BM was the fact that I could justify a suboptimal DPS pet when my pet wasn't doing 50% of my DPS.

Some of the DPS talents are intriguing (Feeding Frenzy), and it seems they have a lot of skills that compliment non-BM hunters (Wolverine Bite to make up for lack of Animal Handler, Owl's Focus to make up for lack of 2/2 GftT). Plus we've got Roar of Recovery.

I was a little trepidations about bringing my dragonhawk for the first time in Naxx--I almost chickened out and brought my gorilla just for Guard Dog's happiness restoring capabilities. But I decided to stick with it, and I was quite surprised at how small a problem it actually was. Provided your raids are stuffed with as much smart heals as mine are (JoL, CH, CoH, WG all present), you'll notice your little cunning pet taking a huge amount of heals to cope with Avoidance-buffered raid damage. Pet deaths are inevitable (although it only happened to me once through the Spider, Death Knight, and Abomination wings) of course. However, if you bring food and keep your pet overstocked on happiness when you're out of combat, you can get your pet out of the yellow threshold and back into the green with just a handful of Glyphed Mend Pets in combat.

In spite of this general favorable review of potential problems, it's the less-than-favorable effectiveness of potential benefits that have started giving me buyer's remorse about my dragonhawk. Namely, Roar of Recovery. That's the biggest pull for survival pet by far, yet in practice the 6-minute cooldown makes it horribly prohibitive to use. I've got it macro'd in to cast as soon as I switch to Viper and I still find myself capable of experiencing multiple viper sessions per fights of any reasonable length. It's basically a free discount for one viper session out of every four. I can't help but get the feeling that I wouldn't miss it at all if I lost it.

Ironically, RoR feels really underpowered without Longevity from deep BM; but it's the non-BMs that are most interested in Cunning.

Overall, I give Cunning pets a B rating for non-BM hunters in a raiding environment. They're decent, but you could get a lot more bang for your buck with ferocity and even cunning in certain situations. I would only really recommend a cunning pet if you confine yourself to 10-mans without a druid and need the minor armor debuff from a Sporebat for utility's sake.

Thanks everyone for their responses. I did about an hour or so of math based on the spreed sheet, and come to the conclusion that my own dps gain (by having the 30% mana gain, avoiding viper, and extra procs of ImpAotH), would fall short from lets say a scorpion over encounters less than 6 minutes. If the encounter lasts over 7 minutes, the difference goes the other way, with roar of recovery giving you more dps from about the 7 to 8 minutes span, then it falls behind again, and so forth, with the difference further increasing.

This was done based on my spec (15/51/5) with 4 points into Unleashed Fury. Since the window is rather small, I came to the conclusion that cunning pets may be the best pet to use in heroics, to avoid going into viper at all.

I will continue to work things out, if anyone has done the math, and have a different stance, I would love to hear it, since this is my first time really getting into theorycrafting of any sort.

I do have one question, does Call of the wild get calculate from the total present atk pwr (buffs and trinket procs/use), or is it based on the hunter's gear + talents? I ask as I am trying to figure out if having a ferocity pet to stack attack power for serpent sting dots + chimera shots is a greater form of dps than just a plain scorpion.

The current changes to the Mend Glyph on the PTR should make this part a bit better, at least. It will restore health on every tick so you don't have to spam it.

It gets calculated from your current AP, buffs included.

I recently tamed my first Gorilla pet. I had read that they would be good for instances. Thunderstomp Volley combo. My concern here is whether or not the thunderstomp would interfere with the tanks ability to maintain agro.

Anyone have any experience in this area?

Cheers
Yoshinkai

On the rare occasions where I have used a gorilla in instances, the tank hasn't had any problems keeping aggro over it.

Don't sign your posts.

Gorilla's are great as TANKING pets, so if you want to farm lower level instances for OCD points or Enchanting mats go for it. They do decent DPS against multiple mobs, because of their AOE, but that's more useful against trash than bosses. They are also great for soloing/farming.

In answer to the question - the AOE is quite high threat so you could have issues with warrior/druid tanks on very high number of mob pulls, as the gorilla will thunderstomp straight away when you send them in, if it's a problem the simplest solution would just be to give the tank a few more seconds to get agg on all the mobs.

However - for Raiding/Heroics you (normally) want a Pet to do decent single target DPS for bosses.

Some of the answers regarding a gorilla pet go beyond what Yoshi was asking, which is whether people have actually experienced threat issues when using a gorilla in instances. I can say that I actually used one (with a warrior main tank) and the tank didn't have problems keeping aggro over it. Obviously it can steal aggro if you send it in before the tank, but that's a given.

Single target dps for a gorilla isn't terrible (it's probably second-highest among tenacity pets), and once you take cats/scorpids out of the equation, the gap between the rest of the pets isn't that pronounced. And while there are dps reasons to prefer another pet, there are non-dps reasons to want a tenacity pet, particularly for 5-man instances (which is what Yoshi was asking about). We aren't talking about maxxing dps on Patchwerk here.

So with that said, if you are using Volley a lot in whatever instances you are doing (another component of the actual question) then a gorilla will complement that style of play. There are reasons not to use that style, of course, but that again goes beyond the question, and even if that were the question we'd have to consider the reasons to use that style as well. There is a lot of AoE going on in instances, and you spend more time fighting the trash than the bosses, so there's something to be said for making that easier. Plus, not every "boss" is a single target zergfest. Several of them involve adds (I can think of one 5-man encounter that is nothing but adds, which incidentally is where I used a gorilla instead of my usual cat).

The Gorilla is actually a pretty remarkable single target DPS pet as Trevvy says. It is Tenacity so it will never top the big four (Scorpid, Cat, Devilsaur, Raptor) quite possibly not most Ferocity pets either. But the fact remains that the reason it is good for AoE is actually the reason it is good for single target DPS. It can hold aggro on AoE while we pump massively OP Volleys into the targets because Thunderstomp hits like a truck. Which other ability can match the damage? Rake and Scorpid Poison. Rake wins because it is attached to a Ferocity pet, so it doesn't need to be all that much greater. Scorpid Poison is just scaling with the wrong power (AP). When solo (which is in fact all my experience with my Gorilla) TS can crit for more than 1100, while Smack is somewhere around 600. With buffs that is bound to change upwards. Of course Smack has the 200% crits so that's an advantage it has. But still, in 10-mans with the 13% spelldamage it should hit pretty well.

That said, it shouldn't be a raiding pet.

Ive been reading threads for days and I dont see many, if any at all, talk about the Core Hound. The Scorpid and Cat seem to take the nod when it comes to DPS. Ive been a Cat lover for a long time and now have a Core Hound. The DPS with the CH is sick. Add the LB that has a 50% caster speed reduction and you have a formitable companion. When 3.0.8 is introduced (and I cant stand the "nerf" language. Its more a correction to an overachieving class) this topic of highest BM DPS pet might need adjusting. Im a hunter all the way and its my favorite class, but when I out DPS everyone in any 5 man Heroic something is off. Sorry for the tangent. Is there an opinion or a mild discussion on the Core Hound as a pet. I would like to hear some expert hunters opinions on the matter.

"First, master the fundamentals"

The Core Hound is Ferocity so it's DPS shouldn't be bad, but it can't match the more pure DPS pets. Just like Wasps Core Hounds have part of the DPS potential lowered due to the utility potion of it's breath. Compared to abilities like Rake and Monstrous Bite it isn't up to speed.

Any BM pet will seem like a flurry of furry power, but that doesn't make them any better than other pets.

All the pets are modeled in Shandara's sheet; a corehound isn't more DPS.

And even if you're playing the mana battery in a raid, I would by no means bring a Cunning pet. They're just plain not worth it.

By the way, the EJ mods might consider your "First, master the fundamentals" as post signing - and they issue infractions for that. Just a friendly warning.

Actually, at the moment. 50/21 is the most dps. I realize they're nerfing it, but it hasn't happened yet.


Also, does anyone find cats even holding a candle to scorpids? My dps jumped by close to 1k when i started using my scorpid in raids...

How do you spec your scoripd?

Pet Calculator - Wowhead

Is the spec I use for my scorpid. Everything is pretty standard; all the dps talents you can get, blood of the rhino tends to keep my MM hunter's scorpid alive far more often then our BM hunter's kitties. The only thing really iffy is guard dog and charge.

I really like charge for getting my pet in asap and it *feels* pretty good to charge in right after pulling you pet back to avoid an aoe and refreshing your 5 stack just a moment before it falls off... but boars speed would probably accomplish the same thing; except passively and less dramatically while also benefiting your pets retreat.

Guard dog is a good way to get happiness back on any fight, as your pet will usually have more focus then it can spend and sacrificing one claw to bring your pet back to full happiness is a far smaller trade off then a shot or two for mend pet spam. I would actually consider dropping a point in guard dog for intervene if I could figure out how to macro it and charge together properly.

When I was messing around with a core hound, it wasn't behaving well with it's breath attack, moving to range to use it. Treating it like an old wind serpent helped a bit, but it would still "stutter" badly on the way into combat. Have they addressed those issues?

On the Scorpid question, it is still the best raiding dps pet, as long as it's the only scorpid in the raid. If there are two or more of them then you need to negotiate with your fellow hunters.

Cobra Reflexes is always a DPS increase.

I've had the same problem with my D'saur in the lava waves. I just bring the wolf pet to Sarth.

The second point of Guard Dog is a wasted.

Guard Dog Rank 1 vs Guard Dog Rank 2 nets you no more happiness and 10% more threat generation, which could actually hinder your goal of dealing damage, should, say, a tank accidentally catch a spore on Loatheb right as your bug drops to yellow.

This pet build is what I run with. I sometimes move Boar's Speed over to a second point in BotR, depending on the ratio of raid damage to movement time to my caring about it on this kind of content.

-edit-
On the topic of Tenacity builds and travel times, has anybody experimented with Pet Intervene to minimize time spent moving back and forth? I've only given this a few idle thoughts, as it seems it would only be of any use on Obsidian Sanctum and I usually just drag the cat out for that because switching targets and letting a stack drop hurts me in the soul.

I wonder if there are GCD issues with its utilization, whether or not some godawful pet toggle off macro + self target and intervene macro is required. There must be some more elegant solution to use this talent out there. It's of no concern right now but would make for a nice addition to the toolbox should Ulduar have complex movement fights that our pets cannot simply sit through.

Perhaps this is the wrong thread to ask it in? Pet management to me suggested micromanaging the little bugger to get every last ounce of damage out of him midcombat, whereas most of the thread seems more focused on bringing the right bug with you with the right points invested and the proper abilities activated.

Has anyone found out when a tenacity pet casts Roar of Sacrifice when you put it on autocast? Used my scorpid in 5v5 arena, should be a great skill against any kind of burst, 12 sec duration, 30 sec cooldown, just great at all. But it just doesn't cast it. Teammembers went down to 70% hp, 50% hp, 30% hp and completely down, but the scorpid doesn't think of casting it. Sometimes, i casted it manual, but thats not really effective if you have to burst the other team at the same time.

I would be grateful for some tips.

Is it just me or does Kill Command not seem to work with the scorpid?

I have Clique installed because of the healing characters I play, so I just set it up to Roar of Sacrifice any friendly unit frame that I left click on. It works incredibly well for protecting some of the terrible tanks I PUG heroics with.