Technically, to be a Q&A I would have had to write Questions and Answers. Instead, I just jotted down notes. But close enough!
- Every pet comes with four active skills (plus the passive resistances) when they are tamed. Sometimes these skills immediately filled in the four skill slots on the pet bar and sometimes they didn’t. All of the skills, active and passive, and in the pet’s Spellbook though.
- When you use pet talent points to buy a pet talent, the talent shows up in your pet’s Spellbook as well.
- Just like before, you can train as many passive skills as you want. (Well, as many as you can afford.)
- There used to be a limit of four active pet skills, but that is no longer the case. Now you can train as many active spells as you want. (Well, again, as many as you can afford.)
- Only four active skills will fit on the pet bar right now. I don’t know if that’s going to change.
- You can turn pet skills on autocast without having them on your pet bar, so even if you have more than four active skills you could just leave the autocast ones off the bar.
- You cannot place pet skills directly on your own action bars, but you can easily set up a macro to cast any pet skill (just as if it were one of your own skills), and those macros can go on your action bar. That’s probably your best bet if you want to manually control all your pet’s active skills.
- The Pet Trainer will untrain your pets talents. The text you get when you ask her to do this is just like the text you used to get when unlearning pet skills, except with ‘talent’ in place of ‘skill’ — so I assume that the price is meant to go up each time you do it. For the moment, however, it always cost me 1 copper to unlearn my pet’s talents no matter how many times I did it.
- The Pet Trainer now also has text about how pets work. (Finally!) According to the Pet Trainer, Cunning pets are particularly useful in Battleground and Arenas.
@Stranger: Amelas suggested basically that idea in the beta forum thread I linked above.
Question about the interaction between Growl and Longevity added to the beta forums (also /bugged in game):
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8202387495&sid=2000
Oh, I also checked whether anything had been done to make focus management easier, and the answer is no – if the pet doesn’t have enough focus to do something you click manually it will just give a “not enough focus” error, and currently the only way to get high focus cost abilities to be used is via Go for the Throat (and presumably Owl’s Focus in the Cunning tree).
in case they dont implement any priority casting list.. can macros help? would it be possible to make a cast sequence of several pet abilities to go off in a certain order, by one click rather than button spamming? ex, Savage rend, claw, claw, claw, pause, call of the wild, pause, savage rend… and so on. actually, i dont think a pause is possible. but would a list of abilities be?
Blaurgh. Originally I had intended to not put the focus dump one the cast bar and leave it on autocast, but it looks like for bigger focus cost abilities I will have to use a bit more thought and tact with mah focus dump. Still, I can’t say I am whining about having more options that I need to juggle. Just wish there was a better way to juggle’em.
The 50 focus burst from GffT is enough to get the 50/60 focus abilities triggering reasonably well since the “use the highest focus cost ability available” prioritisation still appears to work fine. It’s the 80/100 focus abilities that are a problem – outside of the Owl’s Focus ability for Cunning pets, I don’t currently see a way to trigger those other than switching off the focus dump for a short time. And for abilities that require careful timing (i.e. using a ravager, bat or nether ray to interrupt spell casting), then it will be necessary to leave the focus dump switched off whenever the stun or interrupt ability is off cooldown to ensure you have adequate focus when you need to trigger it.