WotLK: Beta Pet Stats [Updated]
On Friday, thanks to Nimizar, we learned about the new Pet Talent Trees in the Wrath of the Lich King beta. And soon enough we figured out which pets use which trees.
But one question keeps popping up: How does this interact with the old family stat modifiers?
[Don't miss the update at the bottom.]
Have the stat modifiers changed in Wrath of the Lich King? And if not, why are pet families using the trees that they do? I mean, half of the pets that use the Cunning tree are pets we used to call DPS pets, and half of the pets that use the Ferocity tree are pets we used to call Well-Rounded pets. What’s going on?
But checking out the pet stats is fairly tedious, so it was pretty far down my list of things to investigate. But to mollify the curious, I posted on Flickr the beta screenshots I’d taken Friday showing the stats of 25 different pets across all the families. Unfortunately I maxed out the free account in one night and not all the screenshots made it, but I figured if anyone was bored enough they could parse through what was there and see what could be seen.
Much to my delighted surprise, someone took me up on that: a wonderful reader named Veyska. She turned the screenshots into a spreadsheet and immediately noticed a couple of important facts:
- Family modifiers have changed in a big way.
- The family bonus armor modifier and bonus health modifier both seem to be tied to the talent tree that the family uses.
- But the family damage modifier is, as she says, “all over the place”. They don’t correspond to the trees at all, and honestly don’t seem to make a lot of sense right now.
- Caster pets still have inferior base stats.
I took her spreadsheet, added the families that didn’t make it onto Flickr, and used my pet formula spreadsheets to derive mods for health and armor.
| Tree | Health Mod | Armor Mod |
|---|---|---|
| Cunning | +5% | +5% |
| Ferocity | +5% | +10% |
| Tenacity | +10% | +15% |
Looking at these numbers, I think it’s important to keep some things firmly in mind:
- This is beta — and only the very beginning of beta at that! — so everything we see here could easily change. Moreover, base stats are probably one of the easiest areas where Blizzard can adjust the balance of pets.
- Although we’ve labeled the trees as a DPS tree, a tanking tree, and a hybrid or utility tree, those descriptions are simplistic and don’t fit 100%. In particular, Ferocity and Cunning both have excellent damage potential with slightly different focuses.
- Finally, these modifiers by themselves are meaningless. Pets in WotLK get so many new skills and talents that are so much more significant … In order to draw conclusions, we have to look at how the stats interact with not just the pet talents but also the unqiue family skills. And that theorycrafting should keep us busy for the next two years at least.
I’m going to spend some more time today trying to make sense of the damage modifiers, and if I figure anything interesting out I’ll update this post.
Again, my everlasting thanks to Veyska for doing the annoying data-mining task to get us these numbers.
[Update] After working with the numbers are then retaming a couple of weird cases, I realized what was going on with DPS: My screenshots were bad!
For some reason, some of the pets didn’t reset their damage numbers properly when I first tamed them. About half did, but the other half … were all over the place. But this was just a display problem, and logging off and back on fixed it. I’d heard of this before — I seem to remember Znodis running into it a lot — but it didn’t occur to me to relog after each tame. (Whoops! I think it was actually Someone! Anyway!)
Anyway, once I realized this, I retamed almost all the families with a proper relog after each tame — and now the damage modifiers correspond to the pet talent trees! That leave our stat chart looking like so:
| Tree | Health Mod | Armor Mod | Damage Mod |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cunning | +5% | +5% | +0% |
| Ferocity | +5% | +10% | +10% |
| Tenacity | +10% | +15% | +0% |
Table of Contents for Series: WotLK Pet Stats
- WotLK: Beta Pet Stats [Updated]
- Cunning Pets Add 5% DPS
56 Comments
Hmmm interesting.
Yeah, I was gonna remark that Tenacity, Ferocity, and Cunning really don’t seem to be straight-up “tank, DPS, and utility”. They are much like their names imply–Tenacity pets will be able to hang in there the longest and have a lot of skills to keep them alive when the going gets tough, but they still deal enough damage to make them worthwhile when the heat’s not on them; Cunning pets have a lot of versatility without sacrificing much of their survivability or damage output; Ferocity pets have a lot of up-front damage output but also talents to keep them in the fight for longer, rather than letting them be the proverbial “glass cannons” that break as soon as they come under fire.
Personally I like that family DPS modifiers are all over the place. That means that you can have two Cunning pets–one primarily for DPS, like a windserpent, and one primarily for PvP utility, like a spider. And not all Tenacity pets will have to rely purely on their talents to generate threat; many of them will be able to put out enough white (or yellow) damage to keep up on threat without needing Growl every CD.
Remember also that you don’t get enough talent points, even with the 51-point BM talent, to take every talent available to your pet. The fifth tier pet talents DO look really awesome, but you may find yourself skipping them to put more points elsewhere. I’m a 41/20/0 hunter myself, but I function a lot differently than most others with the “cookie cutter” raiding spec because I went for the survivability talents in BM over pure damage. Same with pets.
Hey Mania….
I saw Kaet on the beta forum the other day
I know this is kinda offtopic for this entry but i think you should post a forum suggesting that the bottom talent of the Beast Mastery tree. Include an “extra stable slot” for exotic pets, that way if we respecc we don’t have to lose one of our normal pets. And it also makes sense because the talent itself is kind of not worth a 51-point invesment if you ask me
BTW so that means I can use a crab and still be able to deal damage!? AGHH it just gets harder to pick a pet.
Man oh man, this just sounds awesome still to me. My wolf and I can’t wait to get out there and try this out ourselves. Here’s hoping when the US beta opens I get in <3
Thanks for the help Mania, AND Veyska for the spreadsheet info.
Indeed this is interesting – much tedium Mania, appreciated. the screenshots are handy to parse.
I have had this problem since the beginning of the game, that is, equating the animal with characteristics that animal might have in ‘real life’. A croc is VERY armored and has about the nastiest bite of all creatures. Turtles about the best armor of critters and so on, but this, it turns out, has little or nothing to do with the WoW environment and the critters that live there. Much to easy I guess to say I’ll tame me a huge muscular dinosaur type with some wicked kicking claws, only to find out that the dog you passed up is just as good, or better :)
ah well. and now we have WoLK that will once again redefine the critters. If anything it keeps us thinking :)
It blows my mind whenever I see a fellow Hunter comment that the 51 point talent for Beast Mastery is not “worth it”. Sure. If you’re insane. Five extra talent points is an *amazing* buff to pets. All pets. At max level, you only get 16 talent points for your pet. An extra five brings the total to 21. This is an *enormous* difference allowing so much more potential in the pet that it is most definitely an excellent and worthwhile investment of a talent point.
As a raiding hunter, I am a little annoyed to see low health modifiers given to the trees likely to be on raiding pets. Armor might as well be zero since pets usually only encounter aoe magical damage (which can often 2 shot them, thanks IC). On top of this, I am not sure how the new approach to avoidance will work. Of course, all of this could change. However, it is important to remember to consider factors that will keep your pet alive for raiding, not just how to increase its damage. A dead pet procs no FI. Regardless of this, thanks for the information. I am interested in seeing how the species specials will effect pet damage (please let me use a moth and optimize dps).
Hmmmm, it seems like Tenacity will make a really beefy pet. I think I should get one of those pets….
I’m wondering now what will happen to stabled low-level pets (well, that and the obvious question of what are exotic pets, and will they fix caster stats…). One of my hunters has a mid-50s ghost wolf she sits around in cities with, and that’s likely going to become her main pet come LK. Mind you, if ghost wolves (SFK) become tameable as exotics (I unfortunately suspect otherwise) this won’t be an issue, but if not it would be super if I could just catch Zria up 5 levels instead of almost 20… >->
@Mania – Not a problem! Glad I could help.
There seem to be plenty of skills and abilities to spread about. What I want to know is if we get some way to have 2 specs as was suggested at the WWI will our pets get 2 specs. I guess this concept hasn’t made it to beta but it’s something to think about.
Also I think its a bit much to ask pets to be great at everything and try to spec them into extremes. Sure the ‘tank’ tree has some classic tanking abilities but in a raid environment the best ones would be those that give extra help or protection rather than generating treat. On the other hand in a 5 man the pet may be a valuable off tank.
I solo a lot so I want a tank pet, and I love the 51 point BM talent as it might give us some very special pets but the extra pet talent points is going to be massive not just for utility for tanking for me but also a PvP DPS pet would get a serious boost from 5 extra points, that I am sure will have people crying nerf. Don’t forget those 5 extra points go hand in hand with Bestial Wrath which could make a very big nasty DPS killing machine.
For those of you checking the comments, I’ve updated the post to include damage mods now.
Veyska: At the moment in the beta, the level 61 ghost saber I had in the stable is still level 61. I pulled her out to see if that would auto-level her, but it did not.
Thank you, Zaidae, I was going to say that myself. Daz, keep in mind that on top of avoidance and a talent to decrease magic damage taken, pets also get every resistance, free of charge, and it levels up automatically. I believe Nimizar said his was at around 130 at seventy, for all resistances. That being said, Blizzards comment, that they wanted players in PvP to be able to burst down a pet if they wanted to, still has me a bit concerned. Why should another play be able to burst down a fully tenacity specced pet? It has me less worried for PvP speculation ((For some reason lazy players who don’t notice what they are targeting tend to end up on my pets fairly often)) and more worried for PvE reasons. Am I saying my tenacity specced turtle should be able to outlive a protection warrior? Heck no. Am I saying that same pet should be able to out live a mage? Heck yea. Not in a one on one fight, mind you, but under focused fire. Guess we shall have to wait and see.
Avoidance is going up to 75% damage mitigation from AEs.
*75%*. I can already heal through my pet staying in on Sonic Boom on Murmur and then getting Murmur’s attention when the tank is slow about getting back. 75% damage mitigation from the number-1 raid pet killer = awesome.
I just realized…… we’ll be getting a buff to our pets right out of the box, so to speak. Those added percentages up there include NO negative numbers, which many pets have now, and all around increased percentages. That is….. just amazing.
A double post! From me! Who’d have thunk it?
@Daz: Mate, have you looked at the talent trees? Regardless of tree, you can put 3 points in Greater Stamina for +12% health, 3 points in Avoidance for 75% reduced AoE damage, 3 points in Greater Resistances for 9% reduced non-Holy magic damage (on top of the +120 resist all your pet will get for free).
In Ferocity (highest DPS -> most likely 25-man raiding tree) you can also choose to put 2 points in Improved Cower (20% damage reduction at the cost of focus), 2 points in Loyalty to regain health and happiness just from attacking, Heart of the Phoenix for an automatic pet self-res (although the pet needs to return with a bigger health percentage or it is just going to die again), and Lick Your Wounds for a pet channeled self-heal.
Interesting to see those DPS modifiers – I suspect it may come back to what Ghostcrawler said about balancing differences in the damage output of pet specials by having different underlying modifiers. So cats with Prowl, for instance, are made Ferocious for the +10% damage modifier, while Ravagers are made Cunning so they can to get more of their damage from Ravage (and before you go “but that costs 80 focus”, take another look at the Owl’s Focus talent in the Cunning tree).
(Hmm, it would be interesting to see a chart listing the cost of family special attacks and which category the respective pet family is in)
Regardless, I am definitely getting the impression that both the Cunning and Ferocious pets are intended to be viable in a raid setting, with a slight tendency towards the Ferocious pets as being lower maintenance for the hunter.
Nimizar said: “Hmm, it would be interesting to see a chart listing the cost of family special attacks and which category the respective pet family is in.”
Toss it in a spreadsheet and e-mail it to me, and I’ll turn it into HTML and put it somewhere. *grin*
Unfortunately I still have 10 hours of work to do for my contract before Monday morning … so I’m out for a bit.
Nimizar, without 51BM you’ll have to miss out on the chance to take certain abilities to get that 3/3 avoidance, though. And I disagree that Ferocity is necessarily best raiding tree btw :P
Roar of Recovery, especially for non-BM hunters, is pretty huge.
I guess I missed the %’s on avoidance. However, I think this is the first time I have seen the “all pets get resistances” explained. Or maybe I missed that, too. It is a lot to take in. Remember that as we all level we require more resistance for it to help. Also, remember that increasing a pets health by a percentage is a poor way to do it because they have low base stats. While this might end up in an overall increase in health (like I have, what? 70 TPs to put in stam as the system stands?).
I am also not sure which tree will end up being the highest dps. They both (excluding tank) have ways to up damage and the utility tree can provide a mana battery. I guess that will depend on how much better we are at mana use (without viper), as it seems they have added more ways to restore mana in combat but moved efficiency further down the Marks tree.
While heals from pet damage seem nice (not gonna respond to imp cover, what are they thinking?), pets usually get two shotted in high end raids due to a lack of scaling (problem in pvp, too) and the large damage abilities found in these environments. As mentioned, if the pet just died, coming back with 10% health likely won’t help.
Not to sound like a downer, but I am just waiting to see how things pan out while remaining suspicious of upgrades to a system they haven’t flushed out after many years.
Awaiting the ability to feed pets in combat,
Daz
Tank gets a dps increase too, unless you don’t consider hit a dps boost. =P
Grace of the Mantis: 2/2 for 2/4% dodge and hit chance
it isnt only the pet heals though, you are looking at loyalty as well, the pet can potentially bring itself up from content to happy (25% more damage) and ferocity will keep all it’s damage modifiers up 100% of the time, while cunning will only work at 35% pet health (very low and risky) and 20% mob health (waiting 80% on a mob to finally be able to get the bonus is silly imo) ferocity will most likely, unless changed, be the best raiding tool for hunters, the spec for bm will keep our mana up easily (unless cooldowns are applied to the pet special attack crits)
@Mania
The numbers are alittle confusing, what is the base that your measuring against? For example your modifiers for health are +5%, +5%, +10%? What is the base if all of them are at least +5%? Should it not be 0%, 0%, 5% ??
Same for armour, you have +5,+10,+15? What is the base that the +5 is against? Should it not be 0,+5,+10?
Damage seems right, 0,+10, 0, so Ferocity pets have 10% more base damage than pets of the other trees. The Armour and Health percentages should similarly be described relative to some base.
@Daz: I’m not sure about your pet, but mine are very rarely two-shotted by AoEs in T6 content. This is with ~80 resistance for most of the common types of damage (shadow, fire, arcane) + MotW + Endurance Training on me and as many ranks of great stamina as I can buy.
You’re also assuming a “constant AE” scenario when you posit Heart of the Phoenix won’t be helpful. Aside from damage-aura fights, the last of which in TBC is…Netherspite, IIRC, you can safely pull a pet at 10% back to your side and fix them up before they can die again.
Sure, pets aren’t AS durable as players, but they’re a lot less fragile than people give them credit for, and I think pets in the Tenacity tree will be even better.
“Awaiting the ability to feed pets in combat”
Well the corpse-feed ability might be useable in combat, which is another point to the utility tree if so.
As for the stats…hm…are cunning pets getting another stat somewhere, or are they just losing out in the stat stakes?
@Aryzel – The % numbers for armor are Mania’s, but the ones for health mod are based on how many HP the bonus stamina the pet obtained through the hunter’s gear gave them. For the Ferocity and Cunning pets, it was 10.5HP per bonus stamina. For Tenacity, it was 11. That’s why not 0/0/5. :-)
This is something of a quibble I suppose, but Cunning pets seem to be at a disadvantage. The modifiers for Tenacity and Ferocity come out to +25% while for cunning it’s only +10%. I guess it’s not a huge deal, but it still seems to be kinda lame that they’re a little bit gimped compared to the other two thirds.
Thanks, Veyska. :> That’s actually true of armor as well — we can figure out the health and armor modifiers exactly by comparing how much benefit our pets get from the hunters contribution to how much they actually get.
For health, this is very easy: the pet panel now shows how many stamina points the pet gets from the hunter and how much health that adds. A point of stamina would normally give 10 points of health, so take the actual added health and divide by 10 times the hunter’s stamina contribution. Voila! There’s your mod.
For armor, it’s a little more complicated because the armor modifier doesn’t affect the hunter’s contribution, and the pet panel displays the family bonus plus the hunter’s contribution as one undifferentiated bonus. But you can still figure it out by taking the pet’s total bonus armor (shown in green on the pet panel) and subtracting the hunter’s contribution (shown on the hunter’s character panel) to get the family mod bonus armor, then dividing that by the base armor (the white number on the pet panel) to get a percentage bonus.
(This gets a lot more complicated if you have other things going on, which is why I do this untalented and with no pasive skills (now pet talents) learned).)
The damage mod, on the other hand — well, I don’t know exactly how that works, so I am reduced to taking the lowest DPS number, calling that 100%, and then dividing the other DPSes by that number to get a ‘bonus’ mod. One day I’ll have to learn more about how the damage formula works.
(Darn it! I’m supposed to be working.)
Remember though, Cunning isn’t the Armor, HP, or Damage tree. It’s the “Tricks” tree.
Cunning should be good in ways that rely on skill, not on stats. At least that’s my impression.
For pets, there is also bonus armor from hunter’s gear. Maybe it’s how the armor modifier is calculated.
Between Owl’s Focus, Wolverine Bite, Feeding Frenzy and Roar of Recovery I think Cunning pets should be able to put out a decent amount of damage and easily justify their use in a raid environment. The main thing the Ferocious pets will bring to the table is their higher damage modifier and Call of the Wild.
However, I expect there are going to have to be some mechanic changes to make it practical to use the higher focus cost abilities while still having the pet’s focus dump running. I also need to check whether pet abilities can be dragged to normal action bar buttons or the 4-button limit is going to be an annoyance (macros will let us get around that limitation if necessary, but it would still be an unnecessary inconvenience).
Say I had a Raptor with the following abilities: Growl, Charge, Claw, and Savage Rend.
If my Tier 5 talent ability was Rabid (or even Lick Your Wounds), would I have to get rid of one of my existing abilities to use it?
Given what I understand, with the pet coming with three abilities automatically, I’m wondering if the current 4-ability limitation’s going flying out the window for LK. Precisely how this would work I don’t know, but…
“(not gonna respond to imp cover, what are they thinking?),”
I’m assuming you mean Improved Cower; sorry if I’m mistaken. They are probably thinking that when one’s pet pull aggro in an instance, one might want to avoid having it die, and reduced damage in addition to reduced threat can help. I predict, however, that not a lot of people will ever try the talent because they think they know how everything works without ever trying it.
If I had to wager, Veyska, I’d say they’d just extend the bar another couple of inches. *grins* Don’t hit me!
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea that even though I lvl’d up the flamingo as a goof – with the right talents, and that possible Dust Cloud skill – it could actually be a viable pet. Can’t wait to test that out…
(To Mania) Awwww you “maxed” out the “temporary” account? It has a timer? Or what? O_o lol
@Kristy – Too many pictures too fast, I think it was. Or perhaps just too many pictures. Not sure which…
Apparently a free Flickr account only displays the last 200 pictures, and I had something like 250. I also almost hit the monthly upload size allowed — I uploaded about 90MB of my 105MB for the month. But it was the picture count that got me. Who knew?
@ Tarjin
If your pet is pulling agro enough to justify having cower out AND specing imp cower you should probably look into the tank problem and how much your dps is having to hold back. As for boss agro drops, it will still be a better idea to call the pet out until that is over.
@Daz: 20 focus for 8 seconds of 20% reduced damage taken by the pet sounds fine to me. Use it before big boss AoE attacks or if your pet gets chosen as the target of a dot, or if your pet is off-tanking in a 5-man and only needs to stay ahead of the healer rather than the DPS. I’d prefer it as a separate ability rather than being linked to Cower’s threat reduction, but I can see why Blizz wouldn’t want to give such a big mitigation boost to Ferocious pets without some kind of penalty.
@batgrl: I tamed one of the terokkar tallstriders to use as a levelling pet in Northrend – I’ll report back here (or via Mania) how that goes.
WOTLK: Talentos de las pets | conOsinSemilia - July 21st, 2008 @ 3:30 am UTC
[...] Jul Antes lo digo, antes que sale, y ya debian estar desde el [...]
@Keilden
As I can see, crabs will become a viable choice for a PvP pet.
I mean, 6sec immobilizing every 20secs. + They’ll get dash too.
T’s just sad for my ol’ boar, they nerfed him a great big deal.
Is it at all possible that Cunning pets are getting a % buff to some other stat that didn’t traditionally have pet modifiers to balance their poor showing on that table? Like perhaps increased resistances or max focus, or a new pet resilience stat for PvP? Just a thought.
Thanks for all the great Beta info!
Dhorvin: At this point, the pet panel doesn’t show any new stats that aren’t there on live, although that can certainly change. We recorded all the stats, but the rest were the same for all pets of the same level.
But again, the stats can easily change. And don’t forget the effect of the skills and talents.
Actually, I think that was Someone ( http://someonewowing.blogspot.com/ ) that had that issue. I was wondering if they’d leave stats alone to give diversity within the categories, but I guess not. They must figure that the family skills will give enough.
Kind of nice that they did it this way. Easy to narrow down choice of pets for newbs, and give equal opportunity with talents so they can min/max when the time comes. Meanwhile the more experience players can debate talent specs and family skills endlessly. Now where had I heard an Idea like that before…
:)
Znodis! Are you back now? We’ve missed you. :>
I think you’re right — I think it was Someone, and I apologize for getting you two confused.
Hmm. Even if there’s the grand 14% stamina bonus granted by the tanking tree, Greater Stamina’s 12% and Rhino Blood’s 2%, I still fear that tanking pets are going to end up pitifully frail as they are now?
Or would you be doubtful Blizzard would keep the scaling at 1 player stamina equating to 0.3 pet stamina? (Posted earlier than I planned, so I have to split up what I have to say.)
What exactly is the problem that causes caster stats and what does Blizzard need to do to fix it?
‘Tanking’, or tenacity pets, now get 1.5 stamina per point of stamina, though I am unaware if they have changed the amount they get from hunter stats. Paynegwynn, ‘caster’ stats refer to a pet generally has a mana bar before it is tamed. These pets have less armor, hit points, and DPS then normal pets, generally by a margin of 20% or so. Well, hit points are 95%, but its still less. The only theory we have for what causes it is that the pets in non-tamed form have stats to help them with their mana bars, so they lose stats in other areas. Sort of how hybrids have to focus on a lot more then two stats. Unfortunately when you tame them, they seem to retain that fondness for a now non-existant mana supply.
Blizz has already mentioned that pet scaling will be improved…to include resilience, in addition to greater stam+armor bonuses…. Hope that helps. I for one, think Tenacity pets will be much more viable tanks in a much greater range of situations.
Heh, my felguard and my wolf have both tanked all the way up to non-heroic Shadow Labs. ((Thats two seperate seventies, by the way. My hunter did not tame a felguard, promise.)) I am not saying its easy, in all honesty its a pain, doubly with my poor wolf, Lu, but it can be done. It got a lot easier once Lu hit 13,500 armor and 7,000 hit points, but it still requires a group that is willing to be understanding, and not immediately fly off into DPS fits. And misdirection. Lots of misdirection.
IF tenacity does get a greater amount of stamina and armor from the hunter, then that tree will be absolutely amazing single target tanking pets. Multi-target with some cunning use of the afore mentioned misdirection. It looks like with just a little thought that hunter pets will be able to quasi-effectively tank in Wrath, which is a great thing, since everyone is always looking for tanks. Which leaves the interesting question for me….. what pet family do I want to have tank for me?
Rethinking Marksmanship for Wrath of the Lich King « 35 Yards Out - July 22nd, 2008 @ 7:46 pm UTC
[...] when we increase it. I point you over to Petopia’s Pet Talents table and Mania’s information on modifiers to explore the three talent trees available for [...]
@Invader
Where do they mention they will include resilience in pet scaling? I cant seem to find it.
Thanks
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