Quick Beta Pet Skill & Talent Q&A
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.
56 Comments
Very nice easy to digest information here. I like the way you simplify things with out loosing important information or seem like you’re talking down to people.
Good write up. As always. Keep up the good work!
(( and keep an eye out for Wolverines!))
Thanks for all the info in the past few days, Mania! Hope you’ve had some time for sleep ;)
Sleep is for the weak! Hunters go for days with out sleep in pursuit of their prey (( In this case information))
Sleep when your dead!
As always, thank you for keeping us informed, Mania, its the next best thing to being in the beta.
Heh, I would have said the Cunning pets were likely to turn out to be the weakest PvP pets because they lack some of the survivability and self-healing talents that the other two trees have access to. Ah well, we’ll see how it pans out I guess.
As far as the 1 copper respecs go, that’s the case for player talent respecs in beta as well – Blizzard want to encourage people to experiment with different talent builds, and setting the price at a fixed 1 copper is the easiest way for them to do that.
Assuming the issue with newly tamed pets having an empty action bar is the same bug I’ve reported in the past, you should find that any pets you tame that auto-level to 5 levels below you start with an empty pet action bar, while those that are already close to your level start with a full action bar. In either case, all of the active skills are likely to be on auto-cast, so you really want to get in there and switch Cower off :)
Good advice, Nimizar! Thanks. And the 1 copper respecs really makes sense as an encouragement to experiment.
Cunnings all talent are made for arena relly, Mobility is great for chasing people in arena. Carrion feeder is nice in bg, where there are always corpses around. Owls focus is imba for areana, free petskill means you can pump out that extra “web” when you need it. Cornered increase damage reduction by 50% while in a bind making your pet survive the focus on it. Feeding frenzy is nice for pve but its always nice to be able to push out that last extra dps while your target is dying.
I dont have to tell you about how Bullheaded will help i pvp. Roar of recovery was propably implemented as a “PVP” skill, and Wolverine bite only sounds useful in duels against rogues…
I definately can see how Cunning will be used as a pvp tree. Don´t misake me now i wil mostly pve as a hunter in wotlk. I just wanted to argue about why cunning does hold pvp value.
ps.. i disconnected my keyboard last night so i wouldnt get stuck whole day here again. So i wrote this post with onscreen keyboard…
Wait, wait, wait..
I noticed something.
A talent in the cunning tree; “Mobility: 2/2 for 15/30 second reduction in Dash/Dive CD”
As it is now, dash/dive is on a 30sec CD. So.. are it gonna be more in Wotlk, or is this talent giving it no CD?
Are the old damage/armour/health bonuses unchanged for the various pet families?
If so, I can see some interesting arguments as to whether a dps pet/ferocity build is better or worse than a dps pet/cunning build for PvE raiding, depending on hunter spec of course.
My first “main” pet, Kiyo the Windserpent (blue, from WC) will of course be a keeper.
Probably keep Matilda the blue (notice a theme here?) RFK Boar as a tank.
But for the Ferocity pet, what to get? Cat or Raptor are the obvious choice, but will likely be very common.
Corbetti
What about pets from before Wotlk, will they be wiped clean?
Will they also learn 4 standard abilities?
why a cat it will have inferior dps since it has lousy stealth ability instead of a spammable skill.
Thanks for all the info !
Glad to see that my hyena is on the DPS tree ans has AT LAST a unique ability !
Your website answers most of my questions. As always.
All good points Phytor – I guess Cornered has more PvP talents than I thought (that’s the price I pay for not rechecking the trees before commenting).
Regarding Mobility, we’re a bit puzzled about that one. Dash has a 30 second cooldown, 15 second duration, so the second point in Mobility is pointless – with a 15 second duration, there is no real advantage in reducing the cooldown below 15 seconds.
Corbetti, see Mania’s previous blog post about pet stats.
any idea how auto-casting from the pet spell book will effect order priority compared to whats on the actual spellbar? in other words, will focus dumps in the spellbook be spamming and not leaving focus for the spellbar abilities? oh, and one random question. tallstrider family dust cloud ability. it says 30% reduced chance to hit. does that mean to hit the tallstrider specifically? or the mob is 30% likely to hit -anyone-? if it’s the second case,that sounds pretty nice.
Maybe they’re not sure about 15% reduction in cooldown time, or 15seconds? Either way it seems good at anyrate. I’m more happy about the fact all pets, if I’m not mistaken, now learn dash. That means alot of pets I overlooked on alts will get new life :D
The only thing I hate about all this, is Alice is losing her spam-screech :<
Thanks Mania! I was wondering what Cunning was for!
Corbetti — Blue moth maybe? I personaly would get a Tallstrider, just for the heck of it.
Not sure about a moth…will have to see how it looks beside my troll. Blue carrion bird is an option, though ideally I’d keep it to one flappy pet. Shame none of the hyenas are more blueish, since the hyena model is so much nicer than the wolf model and the snare looks a nice ability.
How good it is (like several of the new abilities) depends a lot on autocast AI: Will it spam every CD or only trigger on runners? Gorillas currently only stomp when there are multiple targets and turtles only pop their shield when they feel dangerously threatened. The short CD skills usually don’t have that kind of AI though.
Corbetti
PS I have a dwarf with the pink Tallstrider from Mulgore, which is taller than he is. He wears a pink mageweave shirt to match.
Thanks so much for all the info, Mania! I’ve got a lot to think about with regard to what I’ll do with my pets post-expansion, as does everyone else, I think!
The only thing I’m sure of is that I want a moth for PvP, regardless of the skills it can learn or how well it would do. Big red flappy inyerface with sparkly dust, raawwwr!! :) I would get endless amusement out of that.
Gurluas: Yes, my existing pets changed to have the skills that family has now and only those skills.
More Qs to A:
Where to pet talent points come from (how are they calculated)?
What is the max number of talent points?
How many talent points make up a tier? (I think you said 3 somewhere, but it should be in the Q&A. There’s 5 tiers correct?)
(Unrelated) What the heck is considered an exotic pet? I MUST KNOW!
Znodis: You’re joining us late. :> A lot of this info is scattered around at this point, although I am trying to get it all onto Petopia today so there’s a central source.
- Pets get their first talent point at level 20, and earn 1 talent point every 4 levels after that.
- At level 70, pets have 13 talent points. At level 80, they have 16.
- Each tier except the first one requires 3 additional points in the tree. There are different numbers of points you can spend at each tier, though — check the diagrams on Petopia’s WotLK Pet Talent page.
- We talked about exotic pets and got a partial answer in this previous thread.
(Sorry to point you all over. It just seems easier.)
I’ll be taming a SM Hyena when WotLK comes out, it’s my favorite pet in the game.
As far as we know, Znodis, exotic pets are beasts that are currently untameable. Thee only real one we know so far are the devilsaur, but thats got us off on the ‘untameable’ line of guess work. http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/articles/untameables.php Contains the current list of untameables and therefor possibilities.
So I was laying in bed last night, when suddenly, several things occured to me that made me laugh frighteningly similar to a mad man. It’s one of those moments when you finally put two and two together, and go “OH…. OH CRAP!” The new hunter talent Longevity ((Reduces the cooldown on beastial wrath, intimidation, and pet special abilities by 10/20/30%)) Is going to make certain pets absolutely insane. Sporebats will have a constant cloud of poison up, lowering armor and dealing nature damage to everything around them. Tallstriders will almost constantly keep peoples chance to hit down by 30%, with only small openings when they can see clearly. Nether rays will be shutting people up and dealing shadow damage every twenty seconds. There will only be a seven second wait between crabs pin ability, effectively giving people only a few seconds to move. Bears swipe every seven seconds. Crocs can ALWAYS be in bad attitude. And finally, the good news for boar fans….. boars gore will be on a seven second cooldown, AND, with only a single point to improve dash, will ALWAYS have a chance to deal triple damage.
Life as a hunter is about to be very, very gooooooddddddd.
Whoops, forgot the hyena love, and its one of the better ones! At a thirteen second cooldown and a six second duration, people are going to have a fun time waddling after you!
Bah, a triple, outdoing myself already.Correction, there will be five second periods where boars are not capable of doing triple damage with gore, but that is still nothing to sneeze about, especially since it works out that you won’t have gore up for those five seconds anyway. So boar users, don’t lose hope! ((Unless longevity doesn’t effect dash/dive, but I am pretty sure it will.))
@Palladiamors, I don’t think Longevity will affect dash/dive for 2 reasons.
1. Reduces the cooldown of your Bestial Wrath, Intimidation and “Pet Special Abilities”
I’m assuming this is for the unique family skill only.
2. dash/dive already has a an improved CD in the Cunning tree called mobility.
Pet special abilities are, as far as I can recall, anything that takes focus. There were a few other, vaguely worded things pointing in that direction. Also, thats just one tree. That being said, I think it IS implimented, so all we have to do is ask Mania and Nimizar. I am trying to give hope to the Sarge, Rudda!!
That still doesn’t decrease everything else that is about to make pets very, very interesting though, my friend. I am still very psyched about whats coming, and unless it goes through a series of crippling nerfs ((Always possible, we ARE hunters, after all.)) we are about to get a good deal more powerful through our pets. Even wolves furious howl is going to be seven seconds after longevity, which is a good deal more of a buff then it was before. My only real complaint is that the minute long cooldowns, even at roughly fourty seconds, and the higher ones all seem a bit steep, considering it is just our pets, but I suppose thats part of the price you pay for power. Not everything is going to be great all the time, but in those moments those skills will really shine.
Longevity affects the pet talent cooldowns (at least, it affects their tooltips). I know that because when I was originally doing up the talent list for Mania I was getting weird CD numbers like 4.2 minutes – I eventually realised that was because I had 3/3 Longevity. One off omission from Longevity is the new Master’s Call ability that replaced Bestial Swiftness in the hunter trees.
Err, off -> odd in my last comment.
OMG. I have a White Lion and a Ghost Wolf.
Dear god Blizzard just give us 1 more slot!!! I can’t drop them both and i want to get new pets! AAAARRRRGGGHHH
So its the pet talents they learn, and activated talents by the hunter. Now does that include pet family abilities Nimizar? Or are all my dreams for naught?
And sorry for asking so many questions!
Mania and Nimizar,
What Palladiamors wants to know is that what’s the definition of “pet’s special ability” in the Longeity talent? Does the cooldown of Growl, Cower, family abilities be reduced by Longeity?
I am eager to know the fact. Would you check these out?
Yes, that. Thank you, Stranger, I probably wasn’t making myself very clear.
I understood the quest but I hadn’t had a chance to look until tonight. Mania put three points into Longevity, and her cat Cloud now has the following cooldowns:
Growl: 5 sec
Cower: 20 sec
Dash: 21 sec
Prowl: 7 sec
So it looks like Longevity applies to both family skills and talents, but not Growl or Cower for some reason.
Something else odd I just noticed — my pet now automatically assists when I attack something and it is set to Defensive.
Then the Sarge DOES have hope! Yay! He seemed so down about boars losing charge that I was looking for an upside. Now his boar will be doing triple damage instead of double since it will stay almost constantly in dash. That says a lot, I think. Thank you very much for clarify, Mania.
The Growl cooldown not getting adjusted by Longevity is annoying though – may need to follow that up on the beta forums to see if it is a bug.
Doesn’t the fact that we get the main pet abilities without needing to tame and train mean WE CAN HAVE 3 KEEPER PETS?
So we no longer need to keep the 2nd Stable slot free?
Clarifying* It would be a second less, and that’d allow us to get it off every time the cooldown was up without having to wait for focus. It doesn’t tend to happen often, mind you, but it can throw you off to have your pet miss a growl.
Yes, Giftaz, that does effectively mean we no longer need to have a training stable slot open. However, they just upped the ante when they gave all pet families abilities, and new trees. Some people just want to be able to take along one more furball for the ride. Personally, with the level adjustment, I don’t see it being as big a deal anymore. I know thats still five levels you’d have to tame a pet, but that is a breeze compared to up to seventy nine levels worth of pet leveling.
I was going through the untameable beast page and noticed an oversight, the pythons from WC and NE Shadowmoon Valley aren’t listed.
Just one moment. Do I understand it right, that as a beastmaster, you can pretty much only have a dps pet? Since you need points in the survival tree for a gorilla for example. Or that you need 30 points in marksmanship to get full advantage of your pvp pet?
Er, no, Wolf68, what gave you that idea? Each pet has its own unique talent tree that lets it do ferocity, cunning, and tenacity reguardless of your spec. Now if you mean will certain talent specs for the hunter enhance their pets in certain ways, then yes, but unarguably beast masters are going to come out ahead on that. I am going to assume that by 30 marksman you mean down to trueshot aura, which is a nice passive buff for your pet, but can’t beat beastial wrath every wrath every two minutes.
I wandered for a sec there, sorry. No my friend, we are not going to be bound by certain pets depending on our talent trees, no worries.
wolf68- are you getting this from war-tools’ pet talent calculator? i think they just used the hunter-talent format and pictures to save time. i dont think tenacity overlaying the survival background pic really means anything. their setup, last i checked, makes you put 5 points in to move tiers, but it should be 3.
my question- with so many pet abilities, my question would be what gets cast-priority? the ones on the pet spellbar or the spellbook? as in.. will we have to make cast sequence macros for our pets now to ensure there is focus for the big-cost abilities? if you put an 100focus long-cooldown ability first, wouldnt it “save” all the focus for it and not allow your focus dumps to cast at all? could make for some complicated macro testing to get the order correct for best focus use.
To expan on Noba’s question, will pets use their fifth tier abilities willy nilly? Are we going to need to turn them off of autocast and put them visibly on the pet bar so that we can activate it ourselves?
I asked that question on the beta forums Palla, but haven’t received an answer yet:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8202604009&sid=2000
I have an idea for hunter player being able to manage his pet’s active abilities to work as he needs.
I would propose “auto-cast priority list”, which may be implanted in the pet spell book. You can put those auto-casting abilities in the list, and they will be casted in order. If the prior ability is usable (not in CD, and meet certain casting criteria), it will wait the focus regenerating to enough amount for casting and the latter abilities will not be casted. And four slots on pet control bar will be left for “non-autocast skills” for player to control manually. The manually-controlled abilities, when activated, are always the first priority.
How about this idea? Could someone help me submit this to the WotLK-beta forum?
IT says on your page that pets will no longer be able to learn both Claw, and Bite. If you have a pet with both of those will I be forced to loose one? And if by some luck of grace I am able to keep both will i be able to lvl both up, or is it going cause an in-game error?
Phew, thanks for explanation. And Noba is right, I indeed had that information from the calculator here:
http://www.war-tools.com/t56268.html
And regarding the pet skill bar. Dear Mania, please report back in the betatest, that 4 slots are not enough for the new pet skills and for our convenience there should be developed a larger bar. :)
Junglefever, now all pet families have one or the other, but not both, and they have those upon taming. This will change whats in your pets spellbook as well. But now bite, and the new counterpart smack, both work exactly like claw, so all pet families have a focus dump.
@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.
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