Hortus took some time today to personally investigate the problems that some hunters are reporting with their pets holding aggro, and then post what he discovered on the WoW Bug Report forum. I’m not going to quote the full thing here, but I will pull out the important bits (which, admittedly, is most of it).
MMO Champion is reporting that the amount of experience required to go from level 70 to level 71 has increased by about 50% in Patch 2.4, from 814,700 to 1,256,500. Of course you can’t actually level to 71 yet — not until Wrath of the Lich King launches. And MMO Champion theorizes that this is an early adjustment for WotLK, since it’s likely that the amount of XP per level will increase just as it did for Burning Crusade.
But for level 70 hunters, this does have the unfortunate effect of increasing the amount of experience that pets need to gain in order to raise their loyalty.
Tonight I took several hours and tamed one pet of each level. For each pet I recorded the base attributes, from strength to spirit and including power, armor, and health. I didn’t bother recording damage because I don’t know enough about the damage formulas to untangle the hunter’s contribution and calculate the base damage. But I now have an accurate table of pet stats as they stand right now.
Completely by accident, I happened to be doing some testing (on caster pets) just before Patch 2.4 launched — which among other things means that I obsessively recorded Mania’s stats both naked and fully clothed. Since I haven’t changed equipment since that earlier recording session, I expected my stats to be exactly the same now as they were then (except for mana regen, of course). But today I went ahead and took a look just to be sure.
And indeed, my hunter’s stats are the same as they were in Patch 2.3 (again, except for mana regen) … but some of the display has changed in subtle ways. I doubt that any of this is important, but since I just wasted a small bit of time checking out this random minutia I figured I’d tell you what I found!
So I’ve been hearing from a lot of you that your pet just doesn’t hold aggro like they did last week, and I’ve been seeing similar issues myself. I’ve also been hearing from others that their pet’s aggro is just fine or even better than it used to be. So let’s round-up what we know so far.
Znodis from The Mystic Hunter has honored me with a drinking game! It’s really great — I just love it.
Some of my favorite rules:
Also check out the great drinking games he created for hunters:
I wondered why I was running out of mana constantly while lackadaisically puttering around doing dailies today. Apparently there’s been an unintended (or at least unmentioned-in-the-patch-notes) change to mana regen that is affecting hunters. (Once I read about this and thought to look, I noticed that my own out-of-combat mana regen went from [edit: I was off by 5] 85 to 48.)
(Note: I try to avoid the more inflammatory and/or panicky hunter memes, but since I did honestly notice this change myself today, and since I was honestly puzzled about what was going on, it seems valuable to share.)
Patch 2.4 is now live and the servers are coming up as I write this. The major highlights of this patch include:
As usual, you can find full patch notes on Blizzard’s patch note page. I’ll copy the hunter bits (and other interesting bits) below.
Forgive me for the hit-and-run posting, but I wanted to share two things very quickly:
Putting these two things together: I beg your forbearance if it takes me a bit to get updated for Patch 2.4 tomorrow. Luckily, there’s only one new pet that I’m aware of at this point: the Razorthorn Ravager.
Technical details about my finagling follow. Feel free to skip them.
It’s Noblegarden! Don’t forget to spend way too much time tramping about the newbie areas searching for that elusive pink dress and accidentally slaughtering bunnies!
