Pet Attributes Since Burning Crusade
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.
And then I compared my data with previous data from various points — and I was surprised. Apparently, there have been one or more small tweaks to pet attributes over the past couple of years. These tweaks were unannounced and they don’t have much of an effect (except to screw up my tables), but nevertheless, there they are.
First, let me outline my data sources:
- Prior to the launch of the Burning Crusade expansion, Petopia hosted a list of the base attributes all pets level 1-60. (That’s how I got started doing this, after all.) I thought I had lost that data somewhere, but tonight I managed to resurrect it out of Perforce with some difficulty.
- After the Burning Crusade launch, the chart on Petopia changed to a list of just base health and armor for pets level 1-69.
- A few months ago, Someone wrote a plugin to gather pet data and set out to tame all of WoW. Unfortunately he has since left us, but his data is still available for browsing.
- Just before Patch 2.4 launched, I started some testing on caster pets. The PTR was down so I was using the live realms. I gathered data on exactly two creatures — a level 43 Roc (a normal pet) and a level 43 Fire Roc (a caster), which isn’t enough data to do anything useful but does represent a single Patch 2.3 data point.
- And of course today I gathered fresh clean new data for all levels.
So what did I find?
- The amount of intellect and spirit that pets have changed sometime between Source #1 and Source #3 above. It was likely the Burning Crusade expansion that caused the change, but I don’t have intellect and spirit data from immediately afterwards to compare to. At any rate, pets lost an increasing amount of intellect and spirit as their level increased, to a maximum of 20 intellect and 5 spirit at level 60. (There is no 61-70 data pre-BC, of course.)
- Sometime between Source #3 and Source #4, pets lost some of their base agility and armor. The amount lost increased with level up to a maximum of 23 at level 60, then decreased abruptly, so that a level 70 pet today has the same base agility and armor they did when Someone tested pets a few months ago. I would have guessed that this change happened in Patch 2.4, but my solitary data point from pre-2.4 indicates that that isn’t so: the Roc I tested before 2.4 went live had already lost his 17 points. (Incidentally, I assume the armor loss is caused by the agility loss, even though the pet UI does not specifically say that pet agility affects pet armor.)
What effects do these changes have? Relatively little. Nowadays pet Intellect affects the pet’s Spell Crit Chance and pet Spirit affects the pet’s Health Regen, but there’s no evidence that these stats did the same things before Burning Crusade, so it’s very hard to compare directly. In addition, the Intellect and Spirit changes were pretty small in magnitude — and so long ago I doubt that anyone except me cares. *grin* (And I only care because I wonder what happened behind the scenes to prompt such a minor change to largely useless stats.)
The Agility and armor change is both more recent and more ominous, but in fact its only apparent impact is a very small change to armor. (Unlike hunters, pets get their attack power from strength and not from agility.) To give you an idea of how minor the change to armor was, a level 60 pet lost 23 armor — leaving it with a mere 3791 armor.
Again, my main interest here is sheer curiosity: Why such a small change? What did it accomplish? (And perhaps more to the point, will this happen again? Am I going to have to re-test all 70 levels of pet every patch?)
33 Comments
I think first of all this is probably based around complaints by users of other classes that feel a hunter pets are way too strong and thus need to be slightly nerfed. In essense what i think they have done is tried to offset the rise in crits and armor that pets get from talents primarily the bm talent section as well as the contributions that hunters give to their pets as they get into their highest levels. As a result, its probably slowly decreaseing how much of a role a pet will play in a hunter’s pvp/pve battles. This will be particularly apparent in the tournaments as many classes compete against each other with pets either balancing or unbalancing weaknesses in some teams. I would not be surprised if a hunter pet actually now are almost in line with the same levels as many summoned pets that most other classes will use from time to time. Thus pets now will actually be on equal footing which partly is good or bad for a hunter depending on how their equipped. As a result, bm hunters and their pets with good gear stats will probably have a strong chance of being on an equal footing with other classes that use summonings. This however means that marks and survival users may be in for a slight disadvantage since now the nerfing will thus decrease the overall performance of their pet thus making them less able to compete against other classes with summoned pets. This may seem irrelevent now but i feel partly this will be of major notice in the tournaments as hunters will truly have to square off on a even battlefield with other classes. That is when we will know for sure if in fact hunter pets were nerfed to make them equalized with other classes or if this is in fact the beginning of a more alarming trend, an open attempt to decrease hunter pets until their stats match that of hunters thus making hunters a far weaker class compared to other classes. Who can say for certain I just hope ol blizz does get too out of hand with the nerfing.
If the changes were just enough to destabalize things, or there was an error in the code (which does happen every so often), then it might explain the problems we’ve been seeing with pets taking too much damage. It might also make it hard to find that error too.
Mania, you’ve got way too much time on your hands ;)
Possibly they are preparing for scaling pets up to L80 without them getting too imbalanced at that stage, your 23 points at L60 could turn into a chunk a lot bigger at L80, which would get people complain even more about imba pets.
I’m not sure if you can draw any curves from the data you gathered at these occasions and plot them up to 80?
Hmmm, all this discussion (from day one it seems) about balance. One class overpowering another – out comes a ‘fix’ (or nerf, depending on your viewpoint) and the imbalance dance continues.
There will never be pure balance. as long as there are different classes with differnt modes of combat. There will never be balance if there are different types of fighting (PvP, PvE, Arena/Tourney, Raids). So, when we have a ‘fix’ that attempts to balance (silly idea) a class in arena, that class gets borked in other areas.
Some of us don’t care to do anything but solo PvE. This affects us everytime there is a ‘fix’. This really makes the game unstable and untrusted from day to day for us, and reluctant to spend the hours and days building up and playing our characters. We log in and suddenly the methods we used for the last 6 months are hosed. Now we have to rethink our strategy on how we do battle. Respec gets very expensive the higher your level.
Suddenly I just want to fish. no combat, no nuthin. I don’t care if my pet is balanced in respect to a Voidwalker (funny, I don’t have the option to pull out specialty pets at will – got to find that stable master and gee, all the pets are pretty much the same anyway), I just wanna explore and grind my same old way. I don’t raid or do instances or pvp – I just like to muck about with my pet and see what I haven’t seen before, or try out a quest I may have skipped before.
bah and humbug.
I think they go down an untenable path to try to achieve a perfect balance. If you want to balance between arena, pvp and so on , then have those be separate. I don’t play WoW to gank other players, or tourney – I play a very different game it seems. Guess I’m in the minority. They don’t Role Play on many of the RP servers either, so what did I expect :)
::sigh::
Blizz – please stop ‘fixing’ my pets! just give me more stable slots and lemme be!
Shibumi, you are not alone. I loathe pvp and have never set foot in an arena. All I want is PvE.
Right now, Warhammer Online has been delayed again because of balance and RvR issues. WAR is based around PvP for the majority of its play, and this lack of balance is going to hurt it majorly.
World of Warcraft is unique in that it tried very hard to balance PvP, PvE, and Arenas. Unfortunately, they can’t balance them all. There is a solution to this, though, but it would mean rewriting the game’s structure from the ground up to encoporate all the things that have been learned in the last four years.
For instance, PvP and Arena characters would not be your PvE character. Instead, characters with stock equipment (that can be upgraded) that fit into certain molds (tank, dps, caster) would be sent into an arena or a PvP zone in order to fight on behalf of your House or Clan. The competing zones would be based upon the highest level character one has on a given server, and the rewards would benifit the characters in the family instead of just one character. This would eliminate both twinking and problems with balance since the different characters could be balanced off each other.
I have a ton of ideas, but I have gotten so tired of posting on the forums because most of them get riddiculed due to the fact that there are people who love bullying and have no idea of fair play.
Seidouyumi
agreed – separate games is the idea, but noone are going to back that. there are interim steps, such as arena play could be without any pets, as it was probably imagined to be.
But for balance – it’s impossible. If there was true balance, there would only be one class, and all things would be equal. To try to do the juggling act to balance out intended differences is rediculous.
You are right, there are many folks that *enjoy* the ability to pester and bully. This we will probably always have, since they are a reflection of Real Life :) I can’t think of an instance (no pun) or game that has achieved this mysterious ‘balance’. Why bother. Oh wait, they are trying to be all things to all players, and will respond to the loudest voices (read: $$) when necessary.
I am not big on fantasy play, nor on cartoony things (as I’ve mentioned before) but I admire the efforts (mostly successful) that Bliz has done for the actual gaming interface, the merge between me sitting at my system and the game being played in front of me. Getting that line to blur is very hard – similar to a good movie is one where you are so drawn into the movie you forget that’s it’s a display on a screen in front of you). This is very very hard, both with the attempt to please 8 million players and their differing desires, and with the mechanics of doing this without isolating old hardware (and therefore people), but still able to take on the newest trends (code has to be flexible enough to support years of change). Not an enviable task. Particularly when a single tiny change has a cascade effect that percolates through a massive structure.
I’d venture that few at Bliz have the conceptual oversight to understand what a small code change does, they depend a lot of PTR and players to pick up on these anre report them. However, there’s one major flaw in bandaid reactions to this – when you bolt on a fix for a fix, it is unending. You will eventually topple the infrastructure. At times (and these would be during expansions and major upgrades) you have to revamp, back up a bit and strip out the kruft. Ain’t easy, and with something the size and complexity of WoW, an unenviable task, for sure.
history has shown that at some point a company has to make the decision to change. To stop carrying the bloat and slim down the coded. Planning for that, and implementing it is very hard – some group will always be the victim, for within that bloat there are folks that have adapted.
Mac is a good example, at one point, Apple said, we cannot continue to support all the hardware in our code, so after the next upgrade (I think it was version 7?) you will have to run old code, or buy new hardware. tough decision from a business point of view, but a necessity. All major companies go through that. At some point Bliz will as well. I’d do it slightly differently, along the lines you suggest – split into more than one environement – with a way to ‘travel’ between them. They have the character data, they can populate the different game servers easily enough. That way you could ‘gate’ from one game environment to another, rather like ‘zoning’ is. You adapt to the differences, such as in arena or PvP and you have the player environment you desire. They certainly have the resources (human and financially) to go this direction. they could start with how the separate game mechanics will operate then work on the gateway mechanics.
I encourage Bliz to grow with their population of players, and work to the next level of gaming. They have the foundation, the player base and certainly a huge bank of knowledgable people out there willing to support, and test it.
Sorry about being long winded – is an irksome subject
shibumi
Shibumi, I’m actually pleased to see someone who understands it. Most of the time, I try to explain things to people on the WoW forum about how hard it is to get things just right to please everyone and I get yelled at. A lot of the other MMORPG’s never really changed how they did things. In fact, it’s why there was a major dust up between the people who created Everquest I and their parent company. It’s why they went off to create Vanguard, which crashed badly.
I sometimes think the biggest problem with WoW is the human element. The PTR was a great idea, but it’s become a platform for the ‘I want a free lvl 70 with epics’ realm. Too many people want it easy, and not just the supposed casual players.
And, Mania, I’m sorry we took this thread over a little. We’ll try to stick to the actual topic at hand. I have some great ideas for Hunter pets though, if anyone ever wants to hear them.
By all means, take it over! *grin* This is a throwaway post on a fairly pointless topic, and you are having an interesting discussion!
now I’m ‘throwaway’ and ‘pointless’ ::sigh::
:)
how about free blogage space for a topic without resolution? no that’s not as catchy as pointless and throwaway.
looking back I didn’t realize I had written so much. dang these fingers! and I am curious about the point of this discussion too – the experimenting that you did Mania, it’s the little changes that cascade into big effects.
I’m interested too, and if you want, I’ll go ahead and post my ideas for Hunter Pets. I just have to warn you, my tendency is to write a lot, and to have bad spelling lol.
A while back, I made a forum post about Caster pets. The idea was simple- make caster pets Casters. They would hold back in the same way that an Imp does for a Warlock and fight by casting spells instead of engaging in melee combat. Some families would fit nicely into this model, such as Dragonhawks, Nether Rays and Sporebats (more would have to be added obviously). They would still use focus instead of mana, though.
The reason why I mentioned those three families is because they are all dominated by Caster stat mobs. Each type of Caster would have a favored type of magic that they would use such as Nature, Fire, Ice or Shadow (I couldn’t really think of a way to use Holy), and have multiple ‘spells’ which would be used.
This would not prevent other pets from having special ‘spell’ abilities, like Wind Serpents, but would allow for some pet families to have a greater role in the game.
The one reply I got on this subject was that the guy would love it because he could have a pet that would be able to group/raid without getting seriously in the way.
Well, I need to head out. I’ll catch you all later, and have fun :)
Most of the comments were TL;DR, so this may have been said before, but I figure I’d put in my two bits anyway in the most concise way possible.
Personally, I’d guess this change was to offset how pet stats suddenly scaled with hunter stats post-BC. Just a shot in the dark.
Mania, you forever remain a Goddess to all Hunters! /bow /kissfeet /grovel
Very nice work. Hats off!
I know it sounds sill, but have you ever considered trying to genderize the different pet skins? You know, separate the hees from the shees. o_0
ah, tl;dr hmmm? guess I should cut back.too bad the subject matter isn’t as simple. if it was simple we’d be discussing a different game :)
though I *could* reduce the mind drool I put to page
Messyah,
LOL, I posted a thread on the WoW forums about that. I’m female, and have nine female characters and one male character. I was sitting there wondering ‘what is the most Masculine pet out there?” Some whole families I think of as being ‘female’ while others, it’s a particular look. In game, some pets are actually structured to be male or female (Cats). Any Cat with a mane is male. Well, at least any lion. Tigers and Bears are a different story.
But, well, Tonton is a girl, Demon is a boy, Nibbler a boy, Kazekage is a boy, and Igor’s a boy. (Boar, Ravager, Raptor, Wind Serpent, Carrion Bird).
Lu and Kiera are female, and Ealiar is male. My pets tend to be predominantly female, for some reason, even though I am male. Lu’s actually fits in with my hunters storyline.
Nooowwwww, as for balance. How long has everyone been around? If you’ve been around WoW for….. year and a half, maybe two, you’ll remember a time when Blizzard went through great pains to tweak classes, to be more fair in one on one, standard weakness’s not withstanding. If you’ll recall, the theme at the time was “We want to balance the PvP system for 1v1 as much as possible!”
Skip to present day. OR, actually, to the start of arena. Suddenly, its no longer 1v1. They have now stated, several times, that the balance is no longer 1v1….. *sighs* I just hate the way they go back on themselves.
Now, here’s the problem with hunter ‘balance’. A half brain dead hunter can take out nearly any caster. A good hunter will pause briefly to bury said casters quickly. A well played, well tweaked hunter can wipe the floor with anything short of good warriors, rogues, and enhancement shaman. That being said, that formula goes for ANY class. The ‘problem’ is that Blizzard, as a whole, tends to baby its casters. You don’t even want me to go through the list of casters buffs that have come down through the years.
With that in mind, I have one serious, serious gripe with the lack of hunter attention based on our so called ‘overpowered’ness. Warriors. I don’t mean this as a ‘the vice of hunters’ complaint. On the contrary, we do need a certain balance. No, my problem is an even moderately well geared arms warrior is the anti-everything. I have multiple seventies, and at this point, any fight with a warrior is three fourths luck, and one fourth prayer. Used to, my paladin was the anti-warrior/rogue. And that was as holy. Now I get into this really bizzare, really scary dance fight. Casters, the counter to warriors? Have it almost worse. Priests and warlocks are countered with death wish, and at that point there goes a warlocks main defense, fear. Casters in general are to squishy to chew through a warriors hit point pool before the warrior eats them alive. Just blaugh.
……dang you Mania, and distracting me with your blog!! I have a book to finish writing!!
I used to try reading the official Blizzard forums but every time I went there I took a RL -80 int debuff. I don’t risk it these days.
I’d be inclined to think that the pet changes, being so small, were not deliberate. They may be a side effect of some way the pets are classified with such-and-such a group (such as in-game where hunter pets are considered Warriors for the purposes of paladin buffs, and receive whatever group buff is assigned to the warriors) and deliberate changes made to that category-of-item had a trickle-down-effect to the pets. Certainly there is no reason to sit around spending coding time to reduce something’s level 60 armor by 23. GAME BREAKING ZOMG. It’d be interesting to see if there’s any similar change to warlock pets or shadowdorks, but I’m not sure where the data could come from.
Although I have little to add to this conversation, a while back Seidouyumi said that some people out their are happy being bullies. Boy do I agree with you… I post a slightly miss-spelled or wrong grammered add up in Trade and all I get are ridicuels. So sad!
About the seperating pets from boys to girls — I agree that it sounds like a usefull thing, although actualy what I personaly (I am self-centered sometimes. SOrry about that. =P) would recomend putting up would be a guide of pet colors. You know, group together the blue pets, brown pets.. As a tuaren with blue fur I like getting pets that match that, like my mount does, etc. However I wouldn’t really follow the skin name that Blizzard gave them, for instence “Boarskinblue” looks very black to me. (Also “windserpentskinblack” looks very blue. But maybe I just don’t have the eye that tells me whats “black” and whats “blue”?)
Question to Mania — what does Intellect do for pets, anyway? Any readers feel free to tell me I could just look “________” or something. Seriously, I am lazy and don’t know these things.
shibumi: You know what I meant! :>
Messyah: A number of people have asked me to include pet genders on Petopia, but I am not looking forward to testing all those pets …
Wolfington: Well, the pet UI *says* that pet Intellect increases their Spell Critical Hit. The numbers don’t seem to work out, though, except possibly on caster pets — which is actually why I was testing them just prior to 2.4. That’s on hold for the moment, though, while I poke into threat generation.
Pet genders? I don’t know but it’s a gut feeling in most cases. Exceptions are when the game lore tells me it’s a he or a she (quest mobs) and maned lions and boars are male by definition.
I have/had several wind serpents most of whom were female, but Arash-ethis was definitely male (in my mind). Most of the other beats tend to go 50/50 either way.
With regards to the double-S discussion ;)
I guess it’s indeed a problem of trying to please everyone all of the time, which we (sane people) all know doesn’t work. All in all, I think Blizzard manages to do a fair job most of the time, though.
WOW, SPAM that made it through… and in another language. Awesome!
Hi just my 2 cents on the issue.
As a hunter fan, with a 62 hunter as my main I have to admit people do think pets are a bit over powering my wolf has double most of my guilds warriors and pali’s armour rating (guild ranging upto 65 atm) But this is in sacrifice of HP. So I can see why people would compain they are to powerful. But what I think some newer players don’t realise is that pets have allready taken a major nerf when they were all made more a less equal, and the specials like Snarler and Lupos lost all their abilities.
One thing I have to admit I would love to see is for this to come back, and I think that Seidouyumi has a fantastic idea with the caster pets. Its allways made me wonder why we only had one type of melle based pets to attack when there are 3 trees that are pretty different from one an other. Also I would really like to have to search out rare spawn pets for somthing other than just looks like Uhk’loc or Cliff jumper.
Messyha: This blog, even with its relatively small readership, gets between 100 and 200 spam comments a day. A few of those get through, but I am usually able to clean them up pretty quickly. The ones you’ll notice most often are pingbacks from content-stealing blogs copying WoW Insider articles — because I don’t want to mess up the spam-watcher plugin on pingbacks, I deal with those myself.
Everyone else: Messyah isn’t insulting commenters above him, I just deleted the spam comment he was responding to. :>
Wow, I hadn’t even considered that this might be an accidental bug – I automatically assumed that it was the change of something else that effected pets somehow – but if an accidental bug we may be stuck with it unless it has such effects that a case can be made to change it back. Which does happen from time to time. But then, how can we actually be sure if this change is effecting us instead of the other issue with growl?
Meanwhile I learn more on this blog – including the conversational commentary! Always appreciate you folk taking the time to brainstorm here. :)
Ra,
I’ve wonder it too, that’s why I came up with this. And thank you for the compliment. :) I did have an idea about rare pets that may seem a bit odd. It isn’t that the rare pets would necessarily look better (though some do) or have better stats, but, rather, a rare/elite pet would have all the active skills available to that family on it.
So, say, Ressan the Needler would have Bite Rank 2, but Vultros, the rare Carrion Bird, would have Bite 4, Claw 4, and Screech 1. And so on. This means that a rare pet would be wanted for something more than look, but not make them more powerful than the others.
Batgirl-
I long ago learned that the simplest thing to do is not froth at the mouth and scream at Blizzard about a problem. Those in power, no matter where you are, will find a way to hit you over the head.
So, I figured this was accidental. It looks like it’s the XP values from back before 2.3, and it’s a minor inconvience over all to have to wait for the loyalty to ding upward.
If rare pets had higher skills, then my Araga would pawn big time. So of coarse I switched to a diseased wolf! (Not saying that I don’t still treasure my no-skilled rare kitty. She is a bueatiful kitty, I just got tierd of the.. Well, kitty part.) I must say, I would be rather unhappy if rare pets got great stats too. Some people stay in one place forever to get a pet that many people don’t like the looks of. For instence, Brokentooth is very plain in my eyes. Meanwhile, pets that are not “rare” but have unique or just plain nice looks, are high on my list of pets I want. But these beauties wouldn’t have the buffs, and that would irritate me.
(However, this has nothing to do with you or the idea of having rare pets with special traits, Seidouyumi. I really do like the idea and most of my pets would be on the high-powered list ^^ My brother, however, would go insane because he BG’s all day and already believes that hunters are “overpowered” so he would just blow up if pets where buffed, hehe)
“Wolfington: Well, the pet UI *says* that pet Intellect increases their Spell Critical Hit. The numbers don’t seem to work out, though, except possibly on caster pets — which is actually why I was testing them just prior to 2.4. That’s on hold for the moment, though, while I poke into threat generation.”
True, but I have dug a little deeper into this.
Normal pets are Warriors, they share their buffs with them as we have learned to hate. But the interesting thing is that Warriors (and Rogues) don’t gain ANY spellcrit whatsoever from Int. Hence our pets don’t either.
However, caster pets are Paladins, and as such they scale on Int like they do. 80 Int = 1% spellcrit (at base it is quite complicated and I suggest you look up wowwiki for it) like most casters.
Hence you can buff a caster pet’s Int to gain even more spellcrit, while you can’t with a normal pet.
The loss of Agi might also impact caster pets since like Paladins they gain more crit over normal pets. 25 agi = 1% crit for Pallies and 33 for Warriors. And in the end we can’t discount the effects from BoK overall.
Thank you for the answer to my question, Mania and Felandra! I was wondering just what intellect did ^^ now I know.
By the way, ignore the comment I had last time — I missread Seidouyumi’s post and thought he meant they would be more POWERFULL, not have more skills when tamed.
Wolfington-
Each of those I mentioned are rares that can learn those skills. My idea is that a Rare would have all the active trainable skills that they can learn for their level and family. This way, if you want to get all those skills, you don’t have to grab three pets and learn them anew, but just grab one rare pet and learn them from that one pet (or keep it if you want).
I have two pet Raptors (and a Ravager pet to eek out more DPS), one is a Bladespire Ravager (elite Raptor from Gruul’s Lair) and another is one of the Blue lv25-27 (I can’t recall exactly) Raptors from Wetlands which I’ve had since I started. Presently the wetlands raptor is stuck at lv67, and my Bladespire has been by my side through most of the BC content. When I initially trained the Bladespire I took some screencaps of the paper doll and compared them to my own raptor and at the same level, it looked like the Bladespire won out on damage by 25%.
I don’t know if the Raptor that I’d been using all the way from lv25 through 66 actually had ‘caster stats’ or if BC raptors truly are buffed by about 25%, but if possible, I’d like to know if anyone has done research to find out if that will have the same attributes at level 70. Do you have any idea?
Salty,
From what you said, I’ll have to assume that they were on the same hunter. Were both of them ‘well fed’? If that little button next to the pet’s bars is green and they are ‘well fed’, then they get a 25% damage buff. Basically- Red = 75% normal damage, yellow = 100% normal damage, green = 125% normal damage.
I know it’s a simple, stupid thing to ask, but my aunt use to be in tech service and she once fielded a call from someone who’s computer wouldn’t turn on. Her first question was- is it plugged in? It turns out, the computer wasn’t plugged in.
Yep, I’ll have to host the SS on photobucket and link it to you. The 25% value is what really calls that into question, but I’m sure I was keeping them both well fed for 1:1 comparison.
ugh = ( it’s true, he was only medium happy. I have neglected my very equal big blue lizard friend since lv26 since TBC came out. Somehow that’s very depressing.
Salty-
It’s possible that he slipped into yellow just when you took the shot and you missed it. It does happen :D So no worries. Take care.
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