Caster Pets Get More Spell Crits?
I got an interesting e-mail today from a reader who let me know that my standard response about how pets with “caster” stats are just all-around inferior is no longer correct. If you hover your mouse over the Intellect stat on the pet panel, he said, you will see that caster pets get extra Spell Critical Hit out of their higher Intellect. And indeed, this seems to be the case. Hovering over the Intellect of various creatures (with their actual Intellect shown in parens) gave me these results:
- Level 67 Raptor (32): Increases Spell Critical Hit by 0.00%
- Level 5 Dragonhawk (22): Increases Spell Critical Hit by 5.00%
- Level 70 Nether Ray (133): Increases Spell Critical Hit by 5.00%
The dragonhawk and the nether ray have caster stats; the raptor does not. But it doesn’t look look like more Intellect benefits the casters so much as their status as casters does — the actual Intellect score seems to be immaterial.
And I do have some doubts yet about whether or not the Spell Critical Hit is actually increased or whether it’s just a display thing. (If anyone knows a nice way to test this out scientifically, please let me know.) The last time I looked at the stats on the pet panel in depth, only a few had tooltips and some of the tooltips were obviously wrong. Stamina, for instance, would say that it increased your pet’s health by something like 6000 even when your pet only had 3000 health total.
But somewhere in there it looks like these problems got worked out. Here’s a roundup of the stat tooltips for pets now:
- The tooltip on Strength now says “Increases Attack Power by X” and that X conveniently equals the base attack power of the pet. Now we know exactly where that base attack power comes from for pets!
- The tooltip on Agility now says “Increases Critical Hit chance by X%”. It may have said this before, I don’t remember. But keep in mind that pets do not get any of the hunter’s agility directly — instead they get some of the hunter’s Ranged Attack Power added to their own attack power. Agility scrolls might raise crit %, though — I’ll have to test that.
- The tooltip on Stamina now says “Increases Health by X” and this X is actually lower than the pet’s total health. I’ll have to dig up my calculations on pet health to see how this fits in with what I calculated before, but at least on the surface it looks more accurate than it did.
- The tooltip on Intellect now says “Increases Spell Critical Hit by X%”. The only two values I have seen so far are 0% and 5%, but I’ve barely begun testing.
- The tooltip on Spirit now says “Increases Health Regeneration by X Per Second while not in combat”. This is another one I’d really like to test, although I haven’t had a chance to yet. And if it is accurate, do caster pets get more regen?
- The tooltips on Power, Damage, Spell Bonus, and Armor all appear to be the same as before. In particular, the Spell Bonus tooltip still shows that casters and non-casters both get the same bonus damage to spell attacks.
So … I have a lot to test out! Unfortunately it will have to wait while I finish up getting a mostly-CSS version of Petopia ready to launch, but I’ll try to get to it before the 2.2.0 PTR clases down. On the other hand, if you have any information about these questions, please do drop me a comment or an e-mail and let me know what you know!
13 Comments
Now that is interesting. I’d like to see what’s classified as a “spell”, though; the abilities that come to mind are those specifically tagged as doing spellschool damage (i.e. Nature damage from Lightning Breath or Thunderstomp, Fire damage from Fire Breath). I wonder if poisons come under this heading too?
Yeah … It looks like I might have to start investigating log parsers or something to figure this out. :>
The stamina part isn’t really hard to test. Next time you respec (maybe PTR?) just undress your character, don’t learn any talent yet and take a pet thats got a 0% health modifier. The check the values - Base stamina of the hunter isn’t really that high and the scaling value is well known. But I’d think without testing just by checking my pet pane right now, that it’ll be pretty exact nowadays.
Directly on topic - right now the only creature that comes to my mind that would benefit from 5% crit would be a caster stat wind serpent. I have yet to see a Fire Breath crit and Rays have no “spell” whatsoever.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I’ll have a run on the PTR tomorrow, maybe I can help find some info.
The scorpid poison does get the the spell damage i had noticed that as well and checked it out…even thou the skill say 40 ever 2 sec when stacked to 5. The log said it was doing i think 155 or so a tick at the time my pet was 64 or so using rank 4 i believe the last one with 10 secs to do it damage
DarkRaider, 12.5% of our AP goes into the spell damage of the Pet.
this has nothing to do with the caster stat that some pet have.
I have tested for one hour straight - I have not gotten Fire Breath to crit, even though I am BM specced and such have an even higher crit chance or my pet. So I guess the increased crit would only be good for a casterstat windserpent.
I don’t have time to help testing pets, nor do I have a 70 hunter yet. However, if you want help testing the new CSS layout, you can contact me.
Haha, I hope. I really want to justify using my little http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/mobs/mob_netherskate.shtml
. I love his model so much, but alas, I can only use him while ganking or goofing off in towns.
Thanks for testing Fire Breath crits, Tiiaa. It’s a pity it doesn’t seem to crit.
Damage over Time spells (like Fire Breath or Scorpid Poison) never crit.
Ah, I didn’t realize that.
Would spell crit affect the damage portion of screech? Admittedly it’s pretty minimal damage, but it’d be interesting to see if it helps.
Hehe. So i wrote a ticket to a GM, where asked if those caster stats was intentional. Turns out they didn’t knew about them at all.
Proves that Blizzard doesn’t read the hunter forums…
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