Patch 2.4: Hortus on Aggro
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).
Hortus starts by saying that:
First let me say that Growl and Charge interaction is not the same as it was in 2.3.3, this is being looked at separately by the developers.
This is very good news for boar owners — and quite possibly for the rest of us as well. Although Hortus does not give any more detail on what this changed ‘interaction’ between Growl and Charge consists of, my own suspicion is that it is related to the fact that Growl is no longer always the first auto-cast skill anymore. Note below that Hortus says he verified that Growl auto-casts consistently, but does not mention whether it is always the first attack. At any rate, I look forward to seeing a fix for this particular and possibly related problem.
Hortus continues:
I’m specifically looking at the reports that other pets are not not holding aggro as well in 2.4 as they did in 2.3.3.
Second let me remind you all that threat meter add-ons are not an accurate tool for testing threat. We have internal tools that can display exact threat numbers but those functions are not available to mods in any way.
(Aside: Man, I’d kill for access to the internal threat logging tool!)
He goes on to remind us of something I mentioned on Friday:
Third Growl does not appear in the combat log on the “self” filter by default. You must turn it on by selecting Spell Casting message types in the settings for that filter. You can always see Growl in the combat log if you use the “everything” filter.
Hortus then talks about how he tested Patch 2.3.3 and Patch 2.4 side-by-side with identical hunters copied from a live character who reported having problems with aggro. His findings:
I have been able to verify by side by side comparison that Growl auto-casts consistently when turned on and that it is doing the exact same amount of threat in 2.4 as it did in 2.3.3.
He sums up by saying:
There may be a bug with hunter pet aggro, but it is not caused by Growl. If anyone has more information or observations about threat they can post here and I’ll try to take a look at them.
Again, this is good news. Okay, okay, it would be even better if he had found the exact problem and it was already scheduled to be hotfixed, but still — this news shows that they are serious about investigating our reports. Plus, they have already eliminated one potential area of difference, which means they are that much closer to isolating the cause.
40 Comments
Interesting. oddly enough, I hadn’t enabled a threat meter (go figure) for this, but based it on gaining agro over my pet in the exact fights that before I never lost agro. Similar to Hortus testing, I sent pet in, waiting on agro, hit with arcane (8), then sting (9) and auto until arcane cools down. but, now, by this time I’ve gained agro and almost nothing gets them off me. I’ve used traps, and intimidate (usually gives me enough time to back out and let pet take another shot at critter).
before I *never* gained agro over the ghost saber. unless the critters was several levels higher than the pet, I could plug away. sometimes the critter would dance a bit like it wanted to come for me, but the pet nailed it again.
now, I never see that. I more often than not, get the critter in my face and now I’m a melee hunter :)
as I said before, I don’t have nice clean data (like some dev tools. mmmm). it will be interesting to see what it might be if it isn’t growl. it would mean we are generating more threat than before, methinks.
thanks mania. I’m *so* happy you read all this stuff for us :)
I’ve had issues with my level 70 owl pet not holding aggro as well, so I’ll definitely be following this discussion. I’m glad to know that whatever is causing it, Growl is not to blame - here’s hoping whatever it actually turns out to be is something easily hotfixable.
It’s good to see that they’ve heard we lowly hunters and are actually looking into the issue.
Well, this is embarassing: I went out tonight to test a few ideas I had that might indicate where the problem lies, and … I am no longer having any problems keeping aggro on my cat. Or perhaps I should say: I am not currently having any problems keeping aggro on my cat. In fact, if anything my cat seems able to hold aggro slightly better than I am used to.
*sigh* I guess I’ll just have to check back tomorrow and see if my problems magically re-appear …
*hides* I have been having the extra aggro problem the entire time…… but Manias post indicates that its not set, which is odd. Hortus could have found either problem, the to much or the to little. But still, they are listening, I am glad.
I’m of two minds about this one. On the one hand I have a deep skepticism because every time there’s a patch and someone has a resist it’s because ZOMG BLIZZ STEALTH NERFED IT (that’s not just hunters that jump to the conclusion, I hasten to add, it’s across the board). On the other hand Hortus didn’t address the specific problem of Growl not being autocast first [At least I think he didn't; come on boys, I can LOLcode with the best of them, but damn the forum's hard to read today]. I did do some extensive grinding with the combat log set to show Growl and found its sequence in the rotation was random; sometimes first, sometimes after the first melee attack, and sometimes not until several melee attacks had taken place.
However, I really have not seen any difference in aggro pre- and post-patch. It never occurred to me to check Growl casts before this, so I don’t know if the random effect was always in place (or if it’s a random combat log effect where Growl is simply not showing every time it’s cast). Anecdotes aren’t data, alas.
One person who posted here and on the bug forum noted that it seemed to be almost server specific (I passed this on to Hortus since I couldn’t find a post where it was mentioned on the Bug forum). Even though Growl seems random, I haven’t had any problems with it.
I did a bit of testing on Igor (my carrion bird). I turned off Growl and found that he could hold aggro without it. It was very odd.
Well it IS interesting to note that they are including a hotpatch in today’s maintenance. Mine just hit patch version 2.4.1 after a 4.93MB download.
Does not seem to be much hunter related, but it does mention “Tranquilizing shot no longer incorrectly restricts use of other Hunter abilities in ’specific situations.’”
They did tweak the combat log looks like.
Now:
only stores last 300 entries, filter settings will now save properly, and zoning will no longer reload the entire log.
As of Sunday night, there was definitely a pet aggro problem on Thunderhorn. Even though I’m a MM42/Surv19 PvP spec, I didn’t have many aggro problems grinding pre-2.4 with just Steady, Auto, and Kill Command (specials were risky). Doing dailies on Sunwell though, I was sometimes pulling aggro on my first shot, even if I waited a few seconds for my pet to build threat.
I have heard some folks saying that it may make a difference where Growl is positioned on one’s pet bar. If I’m still having trouble after today’s minipatch, I’ll confirm whether order on the bar makes any difference.
I’ve definitely noticed a change in the way my pet holds aggro - namely, he doesn’t. Before the patch, it was damn near impossible for me to get aggro off of Chester (ravager), but now? I seem to be able to pull things off with white damage alone. If i do a single arcane shot, nothing short of feign death will make the mob go off me and go back to Chester.
I figured i’d test another pet, see if maybe it was a ravager issue (this was before i saw your post). But after three days of playing with a new pet? Not a single loyalty level.
Also: i’m on Area 52, and i’ve always made sure that Growl is the first skill on my pet’s toolbar.
I had been using the Kurenai rep grind of killing ogres for warbeads to level my Kitty, who had been left at level 63 for a bit while I got to 70. He hit 70 two patches before 2.4 (Sorry I don’t know the exact one). I decided to finish up with Kurenai this past weekend, and noticed that I kept pulling aggro from him. I checked his growl and it was only rank 7; a quick training session to rank 8 seemed to “fix” the problem, but I definitely noticed a change after 2.4 hit.
My normal PVE pet is a wolf (Growl, Bite, Dash, Furious Howl); I haven’t noticed any difference with him (He has been max ranked in his abilities since October). The only real difference I can think of is that the wolf uses Bite while the cat doesn’t, since I have trained it for PVP use mostly (Dash, Prowl, Claw, & Growl). Admittedly the two aren’t very comparable, but the wolf hits a lot harder per whack; just something I noticed :)
I have been a little confused with the combat log this past week; I’ll have to experiment later today after the maintenance.
I don’t use growl at all, as I had read somewhere that it wasn’t very usefup, I may have to rethink that though, but after patch 2.4, I have been pulling agro off my lvl 65 Frostsaber Pride Watcher, whom before aggro’d beautifully, and I never was able to pull the mob off of him. He just received bite 9 last night, but had claw 9, and everything maxed out for his level. It is strange, my hubby has a level 65 Grovestalker Lynx, and even the two of them at times have trouble holding aggro, when they never did before. I do know that Hubby’s Lynx came with Cower 7, which I think was going to be removed, and I am sure was turned off. I really hope the new patch fix, helps. We sure seem to need to heal, and even resurect our pets way more now, when we didn’t before. Not to mention these guys are always hungry, seems we have to feed them all the time, where before we didn’t as much.
I noticed the aggro change in 2.4 immediately. I would pull aggro away from my pig or cat withing three shots after they gained aggro. The mobs would turn their attention on me and start stomping me flat. WTF! To get around this I would drop my snake trap and stop fighting long enough for the snakes and pet to establish aggro again. I worked around the aggro pull by making sure I had cower and prowl turning off. I then turned off Aspect of the Hawk and used a less powerful gun and ammo. This reduced my DPS but the pet keeps aggro.
After a bit of testing last night and a close look at the combat log I found that growl is the first cast after charge or dash, then comes claw or gore. I have a bit more testing to do before I make a definite conclusion. I use one single macro to start the pet: /petattack bound to F2.
But still, this ain’t right.
I’ve been following in a round about way the various discussions on pet aggro, or lack there of.
The very first day of the patch I decided to go do some grinding for my lvl66 boar, and noted right off the bat that he didnt generate threat like he used, something every hunter with a boar has noticed by now. By turning off charge he generates the sae intial threat as my two raid pets, 70 owl and 70 ravager, but comparing his aggro holding vs my owl the owl surpasses the boar in threat gen. My thinking is it might be the location of growl and the other active autocast pet skills in the pet tool bar. I have growl first, what ever focus dumping attack 2nd and in either 3rd or 4th what ever movement increasing skill the pet can learn, dash, dive or charge. The only real difference ive noticed is while my pets dont hold aggro quite like they used to my toon has been substantially upgraded and hits much harder than she used to, but I also recall being able to tear aggro from my pets with just steady/auto if I tried to pre-patch.
i dont know how much tis helps or if just adds to the legion of hunters who are sad that boars are no longer the uber single target tanking pet.
Eyu,
Hortus stated that they are looking into this problem between Charge and Growl. Something got horribly screwed up in there. Please be patient. A game the size of WoW, which is housed on at least seven servers per realm, has an imense amount of code to sift through in order to find the issue.
I havent noticed any problems with my Ravager keeping aggro. We have been grinding ogres in Nagrand post-patch and in about 40-50 kills, I got aggro once. For the majority of my grinding, my pet was 66 and I was 68. Maybe I should test other pets, like my owl, but as she is level 65 and I am soon-to-be 69, I think I know what the outcome will be…
I had the same problems with my cat, Spot, keeping aggro when 2.4 hit. A couple non-crit auto shots and he’d never get aggro back, but then the problems suddenly disappeared Sunday, and he’s been holding aggro normally ever since. I’m kinda curious who screwed up what on the server backend…
Between attack from behind, mana regen and agro issues - the class has certainly changed recently. Not all for the better.
Speaking of ‘not all for the better’, have thot and wowhead merged or is it an April Fool’s Joke?
speaking of mergers - take a look at wow insider - or, as they are known now (hee hee) Hello Kitty Online :)
Growl is firing off right after charge,and it’s still not holding aggro(yes I tweaked the combat log to indicate growl and that is what it shows,I’m not an idiot).Also I have tested non-dps pets to compare to the cats that won’t hold aggro.Only screech seems to be holding any aggro,and that is tenuous since growl does not seem to be working with it.
So despite what Hortus may say,growl has problems.Not everywhere,not with everyone but it DOES have problems.
As I have said many times now.This from all indications does not seem to be effecting some realms.The ones not effected seem to be the realms that were delayed on patch day.
If someone has a list of those realms somewhere,I’ll make a hunter on those and see if there are no issues on them.Not that my testing efforts will do any good,as I am ignored repeatedly.I should get paid for this,Blizzard hire me as a QC tester pronto!
Comparing things on a seperate server than the realms having the troubles is pointless and shows nothing.It’s like comparing how fast paint dries in the desert and in the jungle,and expecting them to be the same.Two vastly different enviroments will not show the same data.This is common sense.
actually comparing all data points is good practice. deciding that it’s realm specific has to come from determining a problem, then comparing realms for diffs. if it’s a cross-realm code issue, then it will not make a difference from realm to realm. it’s ALL good data gathering.
Oh and thank you so much Blizzard for banning my forum account for “Spamming and trolling” “Inappropriate posts in the PTR forum.” (when I have never posted there)trying to help your people fix this.Thanks a bundle!
On second thought heck with it!Fix it your own selves!See if I try to help by posting the requested data!
Well this is certainly interesting. It’s good to see they’re looking into it though.
On another AGITATING note
Can Hortus actually post without using “lawl” “lol” “rofl” “roflmao” every. freaking. sentence!? Seriously, its annoying. “I tested side by side with a hunter lol”.
Makes me wonder why we wait for a response from the guy XD
@Cotytto
If you’ve really never been to the forum that you were banned from, that could mean your account has been compromised. Change your password ASAP from a clean computer.
The lolwut omg and whatever are part of the april fools deal. Each ‘.’ is being replaced with some script kiddie language.
I am generally appreciative of April Fools Day, but I rather wish that Blizzard’s forum prank this year didn’t make their information even harder than normal to get at! *sigh*
On another note, my own experience with aggro on my cat would seem to indicate to me that the problem is not server-specific, since I went from lower than normal pet aggro to higher than normal pet aggro on one world over two days. But … it’s hard to say. I just wish we could accurately measure threat!
Arides: I’ve had similar thoughts about what I call the “red taper factor” — that is, “I’m burning more red tapers since the patch!”. (Although in WoW a more appropriate name might be the “Onyxia deep-breathing factor”.) At any rate, I do try to control my own observations for that factor as much as possible, and I can only say that I did notice a significant change for a day or two, which is the best I can do without better tools. (Again, if only we could accurately measure threat! Alas, it is probably not even in an easy place to ship to the client even if they wanted to.)
Perhaps it was all weirdly lag-related and will calm down now, eh? Wouldn’t that be annoying.
Rikaku,
This is them doing their April Fools stuff for this year.
To Cotytto
I am sorry to hear that you were banned from the forums.
This is the first I’ve read of the boar issue - and since I have a boar I’m glad to know about it. Am having such a hard time narrowing down what in the heck is going on thanks to choosing a bad time to upgrade to a new weapon, and now that my dps is better threat is a different game anyway.
In light of future changes I’d love to read a post with suggestions on what tests we can run to measure our threat and get a set of numbers to keep and thus compare to in future. Not sure what of course, that’s where I need the advice! I’m going to start to try and see if I can time how much threat is gained via Omen - whenever I can get the meter to work for me again - but I’d love a way to do this in a quantitative manner, and one that we could all compare our mutual findings with. Otherwise I feel like I’m so subjective, and that it might just be my bad memory of the great aggro my pig used to have.
Any ideas?
batgrl: Unfortunately, Omen isn’t going to help you out here. So far as I can tell, actual threat numbers are never transmitted to the WoW client, so threat meters like Omen actually work on stock figures that have been laboriously worked out in the past with careful testing. For example, when your pet uses Growl Rank 1, Omen adds 50 threat to the pet’s bar. That 50 value comes from previous observation, but if the threat generated by Growl Rank 1 had changed, Omen won’t know it — not until someone works out the new value and Omen’s LUA is changed.
Of course, for damage and healing Omen uses actual reported numbers numbers run through a formula to turn it into threat — for instance, 1 damage = 1 threat or 1 healing = 0.5 threat. But again, those formulas also come from previous testing — if the formulas were to change, we’d have to work out how they changed and changed Omen’s code before Omen would show us the accurate threat numbers.
This is why Hortus reminded us that mods can’t really tell us what is happening with our threat right now — because the actual threat numbers are never transmitted to the client. Threat meters like Omen use numbers and formulas worked out by players through exhaustive testing in the past, so they cannot immediately and automatically adjust to changes in the game.
Ok, ty so much, I’ve never really understood that about threatmeters before - and now SO much makes sense, especially with the recent problems with Omen and the reason there are so many updates of that addon in the first place!!!
Am I having memory problems again or was there supposed to be a built in threatmeter in this or a future patch? Because it would be so great for us all to have numbers to look at on this. And there is nothing else I can really look at when I play, right? I was thinking of making a chart for my own pets along the lines of the ones you’ve gathered, just to try and keep an eye on things, and try to gague how I’m doing. But it’s not going to really be useful if I can’t trust my threat numbers. Sigh. Yes, I know, it’s a game, but darnit, I enjoy getting actual numbers for things - wish there was an easier way.
I have some good news to pass along. Despite all the issues getting into a server today, I got into Moonrunner, and here’s what I found.
Growl now casts first. Period. Unless you have a skill like Charge or Lightning Breath, Growl will cast first. What’s more, it seems very solid now. I miss shot a few times and hit before my pet and the pet was still able to grab the mob off me. When I tested this before, I had trouble getting the mob off me.
Thought I’d pass this along.
Okay, did some testing on Area52.
I know threat meters are somewhat borked, but i started out letting Chester (lvl 70, best friend Ravager) start out with a 1k threat lead before i started doing anything.
If growl was the only thing turned on, then he could mostly hold aggro. If i did more than one arcane shot, he lost it. If i just did autoshot, he lost aggro roughly half the time, but was occasionally able to get it back.
If growl was the only thing turned on, Chester would hit for melee attacks anywhere from 2-6 times before he growled.
I experimented with turning on growl and bite, then growl and gore. No real difference between the two, except that he would lose aggro after 1-2 arcane shots.
Then i tried pulling with autoshot.
- with just growl turned on, Chester could pull aggro off me after a few seconds, but could not reliably keep it.
- with growl & bite or growl & gore, he could not reliably pull aggro off of me.
- with grow & bite & gore turned on, he could not pull aggro off me at all.
P.S.: I started out each pull with Chester at full focus and am currently Beastmaster spec.
Server-Darkmoon fair
BM spec 41/20/0
Growl has a 5sec cooldown so for him to do 2 needs 10secs & would probably build up 2.5k threat, what im starting to think is other abillitys are not creating as much threat as they used to i.e bite,claw,gore,claw etc, everyone thinks it’s growl(including me at 1st) because it’s a threat issue but if growl has always had a 5 sec cool down ive never had to stand for 10sec’s to see 2.5k threat before patch 2.4.
& i noticed on the CHARGE tooltip it does’nt mention threat,so what created all the boars threat if not bite & gore if growl is working as intended.
hope you find out what’s wrong soon as my poor boar has’nt been out of the stables for a week now
Testing tonight, I was able to pull aggro on occasion with the first autoshot. This latest patch certainly didn’t fix it. (lvl 70 boar, growl and gore on)
[...] EDIT: Mania’s Arcania does a nice summary of this issue http://www.maniasarcania.com/2008/03/31/patch-24-hortus-on-aggro/#more-531 [...]
I’m glad to know it wasn’t my imagination. I was seriously concerned about my pets not being able to hold aggro for me anymore. I am used to having a little difficulty now and then, being mm spec, but it was getting ridiculous post patch. I did notice while leveling my owl that screech is holding significantly more aggro than damage and growl atm. I know my 67 wolf isn’t a high damage pet, but when my 60 owl holds aggro better on the ogres in Nagrand, there is a problem.
Hortus posted that the old buff to growl from charge was a bug in previous versions. Guess it’s time to retire my pig…
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5591269594&postId=57802683033&sid=1#134
Marks/Trapping Spec. No BM talents at all.
Lv 70 Ravager, lv 6 loyalty of course. And Happy.
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one that’s stopped and said “Wait - something’s not right. I’ve -never- had such an issue pulling aggro off my pet like this, and my pet not being able to regain aggro unless I’m nearly dead from refusing to hit back.” I had thought that they had changed growl without mentioning it anywhere, but apparently that’s not the issue? Did they change the rest of the threat system but leave our pets threat generators the same?
I’ve started refusing to shoot for a good 8 seconds, and still can’t use half of my “special” shots. By then my pet is half dead, I have to heal it, and there are times that my auto-shoot + healing my pet is enough to pull aggro. Until they fix whatever is causing this issue, survival spec is actually starting to look good for soloing o.o My repair and food bills are up, my pet’s happiness is down, and I can’t seem to find a correlation. I’ll watch my threat meter in association with when my pet growls, and I don’t see it’s threat jump up at all whenever it does. It seems to go up at random intervals, which has me questioning using growl at all.
After I geared up prior to 2.4, I noticed I started pulling aggro easier off my pet. So I did a little experimenting. I turned off all damage abilities of my pet, and just left growl on. I no longer pulled aggro off my pet, as I suppose its damage abilities would eat up its focus points so growl wouldn’t go off enough. My aggro issue ceased. I’ve tried doing the same experiments now in 2.4, and I can’t seem to find a solution to my new repair bills.
On the plus side, I’m using a lot less arrows? lol
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