Sad Gorillas, Happy Crabs

Wow, is there some crazy stuff coming out of the PTR. Some crazy crazy hunter pet stuff. As always, keep in mind that this is always subject to change at any given moment. If you don't like something that you hear then don't hold your breath, it will probably change in a day or two.

Okay so this came out on MMO Champion and I quote:

Thuderstomp (Gorilla) has been removed as a pet skill and replaced by Pummel - Pummel the target, interrupting spellcasting and preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 4 sec. (20 Focus, 5 yd range, Instant, 10 sec cooldown)

Thunderstomp is now a pet talent available to any Tenacity pet. Now your bears, crocs or ESPECIALLY CRABS can join in the AE tanking fun.

Savage Rend (Raptor) now temporarily boost the raptor's damage by 10% for 30 seconds.

Furious Howl(Wolf) now only affects the wolf and its master, duration increased from 10 to 20 seconds.

Wow, so all tenacity pets can have Thunderstomp! This is absolutely huge! (sad for the once popular tanking gorillas out there). But think of the possibilities....

crocadine, bearadine, wormadine, and my favorite (a said by stopableforce) bacondine. Oh, and all the other tenacity pets there too. Now you can actually have a viable tenacity pet that isn't a gorilla. I'll still hold on to Mungula for awhile, he's so cute and cuddle, but he does smell a little bad sometimes.

Duel spec news regarding Hunters

Just read an interview with Ghostcrawler where he tells us all about duel specing (Talent Spec Q&A). Interesting stuff.

This is what GC had to say about hunters in regards to duel-specing:

Nethaera: What about hunters? Often their pet talents are set up to match the talents of the hunter. Will they be able to switch their pet specs as well?
Ghostcrawler: We will wipe the pet talents. However we are going to remove the respec cost for pet talents so that players won’t feel like they need to jump through an additional hoop to respec their pet. In addition, we are going to provide hunters a new core ability to let them remotely access their stable on a long cooldown. This way if their exotic pet heads off to the stable, they will be able to get a different pet. We hope to be able to discuss this new spell in more detail when we get a little further along.

Sounds like you are going to have to respec your pet every time, but for free. Pain in the butt to have to do that constantly, but more flexibility. I would have liked to see a way that you could save at least 2 different specs for your pets where all you have to do is hit a button to switch.

As for this new ability to remotely get your pets from the stables? That is awesome, no longer will Locks be able to tease me with their summon demon spell. Too bad it has a long cool down time. It would be nice to be able to pull out the Gorilla when ever you happened to need an off tank in an instance. I don't know how many times this would have been useful in the past.

One other thing:

Nethaera: Will players be confined to only setting up two specs?
Ghostcrawler: We will be launching the feature with just two specs, but depending on how we feel it works out, we might consider additional specs in the future.

More than 2 specs in the future??? Are you serious? Part of me thinks that would be cool, but then another part of me thinks it sucks. Why, because we're losing our individuality of we can every spec we ever dreamed of. Even with that said, I'm excited to have 2 specs. That way I can stay a BM hunter and do some trap dancing to boot! So, I may be losing my uniqueness, but I'll fun in the process.

Dave's Huntering Guide - Pet Management

Okay Dave, now that you've chosen a pet of sorts (remember you can have up to 5 now), its time to learn how to use him (or her - if your pet is a girl).

With the new expansion several things have changed. All pets now have a growl (which they could have before unless you were being really silly and didn't train it). All pets have a fear, they all have a focus dump (what else would you do with all of that focus coming out your ears), and last but certainly not least, they have their nifty talent based on their pet family.

You'll also get several pet abilities when use up your pets talents in his (or her) given pet tree. Your tenacity pets will have lots of cool stuff that will help them hold aggro better, like taunt. They also have some intervening abilities that can save your tank, or a clothie's butt if needs be. Ferocity pets have some neat things that will help them stay alive longer, like Lick Your Wounds, and a spell that will Rez them with full health (Heart of the Phoenix) which currently seems to be bugged.

Speaking of bugs, sometimes your pet will automatically turn on the abilities. You know when their spell glows, that means its suppose to go off whenever the cool down is up and your pet has enough focus. Well, some abilities were not meant to go together. For example: the pet's fear spell was not meant to be put up the same time as growl. You have an ability that increases your pet's aggro and one that decreases your pet's aggro. What generally happens is that the mob gets so confused as to weather or not he wants to attack your pet that he gets extra angry and he takes it out on you. If you have this problem generally you be thinking your pet is stupid and can't seem to hold the aggro to save your life. Your pet is not stupid, he just doesn't know what to do, he needs you to tell him.

Some people have set up macros to turn off the pet's fear ability, but I find if I just drag the pet spell down to the his ability bar that I can keep an eye on it and make sure that its off when I want it to be off, and on when I want it to be on.

Basic rule of thumb, if you are soloing and you want your pet to take the beating, then turn your pet's fear off, leave your growl on. If you are in an instance/raid, do the opposite. I know most people are thinking, duh. Well, I'm trying to state the obvious... just in case.

Now when do you want to use use passive/defensive/aggressive. Well, when you are in an instance you will almost always want your pet on passive. You get yourself into all sorts of trouble with your pet on defensive and especially on aggressive. If your goal is to wipe your instance/raid then by all means put your pet on aggressive. You're pet will get all excited an pull every mob in a two mile radius. When you realize your mishap your pet will come running all excited lolling his/her tongue all over the place (with about 20 mobs following). If you have your pet on defensive anything that attacks you with range will get your pets attention, usually also a bad idea. Best to be on passive for those situations. Now when I'm leveling I like to keep my pet on defensive so I don't have to tell him everything to do. And my pet reacts quicker than I do. Now there are only a few times that I would actually put my pet on aggressive. The best is if you are fighting rogues. Your pet can find rogues quicker than you can and he can help you sniff them out. Sometimes I leave them on aggressive if I want to clean out an area in a low zone while I'm farming. Oh, and also when I'm mad and want to cause a wipe for my raid (okay, I've never actually done that, but if I were mad I know how I could get everybody killed quickly, then you just feign death - this doesn't win friends or influence people, but if you are pissed at a pug it might be entertaining).

Well, that's all for now. Let me know if I missed anything.

What kind of pet is right for you?

Sorry, I've had to re-post this a couple of times to fix a couple of things, So, if you have this on RSS then you are probably thinking I'm a little crazy, and you wouldn't be far from the truth...


This is my first installment of Dave's Hunter guide. The first thing I'm going to talk about is pets. What is a hunter without a pet? Well, really pathetic, that's what we are. So, you get to make a big decision. What pet do you want to have? This really depends on your play style and what you want to do in the game. There is a great article on how to choose a pet on Petopia. This is a wonderful resource, everything you need or want to know in regards to hunter pets is over there. Technically, you could just go over there are stop reading this post if you would like.

Okay, since Wrath has started the way hunter pets work has dramatically changed. We use to have the lamest system where you would have to tame pets you didn't want just to learn their talent so you could teach it to your own pet. Some of us hated this and never got the latest rank of Bite, or Swipe, or whatever. But now, we have talent trees for pets. Yes Dave, if you haven't already noticed, there is a tab on the right of the talent trees that's marked "Pet". If you click that you'll see one of 3 talent trees for pets.

Now there are 3 talent trees and each pet family is assigned to one of them.

Tenacity: This talent tree is for tanking pets. These pets will be your best pets to level with. They will hold aggro the best and they have the best armor. When you are out and about soloing in the world of Azeroth, you best have one of these. These include Gorillas, Bears, Boars, Turtles, Crocolisks, Crabs, Worms (yes Dave, you can have a worm for a pet), Rhinos, Scorpids, and Warp Stalkers.

Ferocity: These are pets meant to do lots of damage. This is the main dps tree for hunter pets. They are especially good for instances and raids, when you don't need to keep the aggro. You see, hopefully you already have a tank to do that for you. These pets include cats, devilsaurs, core hounds, hyenas, moths, raptors, spirit beasts, tallstriders, wasps, and wolves.

Cunning: At first glance you'll be thinking, what are these pets for? Well, I like to think of this as the utility tree. These pets are still really good at dps in their own way, but they have a few other tricks up their sleeves. Some argue that these are good for PvP. I have one, but haven't used him at all. These pets include bats, birds of prey, chimaeras, dragonhawks, nether rays, ravagers, serpents, silithids, spiders, spore bats, and wind serpents.

Now, you may have noticed that you have 4 spots available at the pet stable. That means that you can have 5 pets!!! You can have a pet for leveling, and another for instances/raids, and if you really like PvP you can have one for that. You can keep an old favorite pet for sentimental value and one that looks really cool.

Bear in mind when you are picking a pet that each pet family has a different talent/ability. For instance, Gorillas have a cool Thunderstomp and is an AoE aggro pull. Wolves do this howl thing (Furious Howl) that is a raid wide Attack Power buff.

So, now you are thinking, what talent points do I use for my pets. That is another discussion, one that I don't want to go over because Pike did such a good job at that at Aspect of the Hare. She gives us several different pet talent builds that work for different circumstances. My suggestion is to get your self a good tenacity pet while you are leveling. I personally like the gorilla, but everybody does that so, do what you would like. When you hit level 80 then you probably would go more for a ferocity pet and focus on kicking butt.

Dave if you have any questions, email me or post something on my facebook page or something. If anybody else has questions, comments, suggestions, corrections, or anything else. Let me know, either by commenting on below or by emailing me at aoirselvar@gmail.com.

Kitty Saves the Day

Okay, story time! So, my story takes place back in the BC days when we were just barely starting to run ZA. We were working on the bear boss, it was our first night on trying ZA and we had already wiped on this boss 2 times. We were going to try it again one more time.

 

Wow, my memory is fuzzy on this one, lets see what I can remember… So, we're finally getting him down and when he has about 15% health left our Main Tank goes down. Oh cr@p! So, this was the way we started our wipes previously, DPS starts going crazy (not that we weren't going crazy previous to this). Then I'm a little unsure what happened at this point, but I think we started losing healers and our Off Tank goes down. /wipe. Yeah, but the bear boss was down to like 6% health left (around there somewhere). We have pretty much only dps left. At this point the bear is going around finishing off the party. You know all of those clothies wearing their pajamas are getting taken down in one hit.

 

What do us hunters do when everything looks like its going sour? Well, we keep a finger hovering over the feign death button. Yes, like h3ll we are going to spend the extra money on repair if we don't have to. So, I have my kitty, ShereKahn wailing a way on the boss and I'm just getting ready to FD.

 

Mage down, Lock down, then the bear looks towards me for a meal. 1% health left. I then pretend to die (what a wuss). Who is still trying to help us take out the boss? Why my cat, that's who. The bear boss, content that I'm already dead, then turns on my cat, but … tah duh, my cat had something else for duh bear. My cat hits the final blow and the bear goes down.

 

We finally got the boss down, and ShereKahn was our hero. Never before was there a more popular pet in the world … of warcraft. There was talk about giving ShereKahn officer status in the guild. People wanted to give him presents and invite him to parties. I was such a proud pet owner.

 

Of course the day came when I started spending more time with my Gorilla, ShereKahn was spending a lot of time in the stables. He was getting restless. He wasn't meant to be caged. So, finally I took him back to the old world and let him loose. He's now having a good old time in dark shore where he's like 65 levels above everything else, so he's pretty much king. So, if you see a high level mountain lion in dark shore, let him be, for he was our bear killer, and could mess you up.

hunter pets - What's in your stable?

So,
As a hunter with new stable slots I got all giddy with excitement. What new wild and crazy pets will I get. Well, this is what's in my stable at the moment:

level 70 cat (mountain lion from southshore) ShereKahn
level 71 gorilla Munula
level 70 Devilsaur Kharon
level 69 Rhino (unnamed)
level 67 Slithid Twitch

Now, the gorilla is by far my favorite pet. My wife agrees, she can actually not die from doing AOE spells. That's doesn't mean that the gorilla can always keep the aggro away from my sexy fire mage of a wife, but he does a better job than anything else out there.

I'm holding on to the Devilsaur for raiding, but I'm not liking him too much lately. I think its just because of the fact that we're questing not doing instances right now. I'm iffy on the size, I love how cool it looks, but I hate it when I can't see anything but dinosaur butt.

The Cat is an old friend, but truthfully, its such a boring skin. However, you can't just kick out the family pet can you? He's been with me since level 35 or so. And he's cute. We've had many a good times, so I can't let him go (he wouldn't know what to do without me anyways).

The Rhino is just cool, but I can't see any practicality for him outside of PvP. And since I suck and PvP and my wife hates it, I don't know if he'll see much action. I would love to send him on the bridge in AV and make those hordies fly. he he, for that reason alone, I'll keep him around.

The slithid, well, I wanted a cunning pet and he looks cool (even if he is duped up on too much caffiene). But I don't like playing with him. I'm tempted to get rid of him as well. I'm not that attached to him anyway. I'll just take him back to his home in Tanaris and he'll be fine (I probably shouldn't abandon him in Northrend, the bug will probably end of freezing to death and I can't have that on my conscience).

So, I want to replace the bug, but with what?