Ghostcrawler’s Arcania: More on Pet Abilities
Ghostcrawler popped up on the WotLK Beta Hunter forum last night with some more comments about pet abilities. None of this is world-shaking, but it’s good to know that the work continues.
It’s not a game balance issue really. We wanted to make the tanking pets feel different from the DPS pets by having one Charge and one Intervene.
It might make sense to swap Dash / Dive with Charge / Swoop though for tanking pets. They might have to be on the same cooldown….
We’ll think about it.
I’m not sure why Furious Howl had such a low range. My suspicion is it just hadn’t been touched in a long time.
It’s 40 now.
We have been trying to find more uses for the once-a-fight abilities like Prowl and Warp. More discussion on this topic is really useful.
On the “Acid Spit Stutter Step”:
Would love to get this fixed.
And there is apparently a new patch coming for the beta this evening. Hopefully this will include many of the hunter and pet changes we’ve been hearing about.
(Aside: I lost power while I was typing this up earlier, or it would have been up sooner. Although my computers are both on an UPS, the router is not (yet). By the way, did I mention that we’re drowning? I live near Sanford, which as I type this is in the bright red 8″ rain band.)
19 Comments
I agree with swapping dash/dive for charge.
A tenacity pet needs to get in quick, and dash looks silly for some of the lumbering tenacity pets, and is all you really need it for.
Sanford? My mother in law lives there! The wife was visiting just last week.
That’s cool, Grimmtooth. I hope she’s not flooding. :/ We’re actually in Winter Springs, just south of Lake Jessup on the Oveido border, but it’s not labeled well on that map and Sanford is, so I went with that.
40 yards for wolves, finally!
About time to level that Spiritguide ghost wolf! :)
Ihlos, swaping them around is a BAD idea. It completely goes around the “all pets get Dash/Dive skills” theme. There’s other ways to give Tenacity pets Charge without completely destroying their 16 seconds increased movement speed buff.
Beside, when your pet is over the 25 yards range for Charge to activate (30 yards for Warp), you WANT it to be able to Dash/Dive, and then they will Charge/Swoop/Warp to their target. That is a LOT more effective then just Charge alone.
Right now on live Charge and Dash are on the same cooldown, so you can;t use both in combo. On beta they’re on their own cooldown. Just look at what GC said, “They might have to be on the same cooldown…”! This would revert everything back to what it’s like right now on live, and this is NOT something that should happen.
Dash/Dive going into Charge/Swoop/Warp is something that we NEED to keep.
on the Prowl/Warp issue: I don’t think the two are really comparable.
Warp, for starters, can be used in combat; it just does not autocast when your pet is meleeing it’s target (for mitigation purposes a simple double follow>warp macro gets around this, although it does require active use). It still casts normally when you retarget, and this mobility and the mitigation both enhance the Pet’s primary role, as a Tenacity pet: helping switch or intercept targets rapidly and avoiding damage. Granted perhaps the utility of the damage mitigation component could use a buff.
In contrast, Prowl is utterly useless in my experience, unless you are setting up a defensive ambush for solo cappers in BGs where it’s actually very good; for a *Night Elf*.
It is completely unusable in combat, the tiny damage you gain from the attack you more than lose in the travel time to the target, if you are playing in a group. The speed reduction makes it irritating to use solo and/or precast. In general PvP it provides minimal advantage, except where mentioned above. It is also allocated to a pet in the Ferocity tree, which is focused on dps, and supports it in no way at all.
I think the best suggestion made about it was on this forum: make Prowl a universal pet talent option and give Cats something new, with a competitive dps component.
Ok, I have one point about Dash looking silly on lumbering pets. CHARGE WILL LOOK JUST AS SILLY ON A LUMBERING PET!
Dash also lasts longer than charge. Charge gives your pet a single boost to speed and a single boost to damage. While Dash does not give any boost to damage, it lasts a heck of a lot longer AND if you kill fast enough to have the mob try to run, that speed boost is still there. There actually is a reason I prefered having Dash over Charge.
I do have to agree a bit about Prowl, though I’m not sure I would like it in all pets since not all animals hunt by stealth the same way. Some don’t even hunt. Others pack hunt and are less likely to prowl around. And then you have the very idea of a Devilsaur stealthing. Though, if you removed Prowl from Cats, I recomend Pounce which would be sort of like a Heroic leap.
Prowl needs help. Honestly… although I’d love to see less cats around, giving EVERY pet family some kind of offensive or defensive skill and then leaving cats with the orphan stepchild of Prowl kinda makes them undesirable in any real way. Why would you have one when ANYTHING in the same tree will be more effective?
Perhaps it could be a timered thing where -if- the pet is already in combat, it could do a sort of fade-out like rogues can, lowering its threat and… oh, hell, I dunno, that’s not that useful either.
The only bright spot is… with 5 pet slots, I can probably just have one for the pretty without sacrificing anything. :P
Nactwulf,
Maybe for certain pets, or all pets, really, a fade ability similar to what goes on with pets in reality.
Pounce could be used to replace Prowl on Cats. It’s something like Heroic Leap or Warp in that it is a fast way to close the distance and give some kind of buff.
Oy, I just realized that Pounce could be used to replace not only Prowl, but Charge lol.
Sort of off topic Mania, but i live here in the panhandle of Florida (Bay county to be exact) and i feel your pain. Its going to soak us this weekend. I just hope we don’t get any power outages.
Stonewulf: The Panhandle gets hit more often than we do. I hope this one is less wet when it gets to you.
Mania, you live in Winterspring?? That’s my favourite zone! Eh, kidding aside, I hope you (and everybody else on here that’s in the area or has family there) are ok. Sending positive thoughts!
Also, great news from GC! :o)
Yeah, I feel your pain Mania. I live like 2 minutes down 417 from you. It hasn’t stopped raining since Tuesday here.
Sanford? Surely then it’s all for the greater good…
I’d probably remove the slower movement speed from prowl and that’s it. seriously, i almost never use it with my cat. but still, cats are so popular, you probably wouldn’t have to buff them any more.
LoL, I know how you feel Mania. I live in Orlando, right near UCF. We’re not getting it quite as bad, but we’re still getting it pretty bad. Its calmed down a little now, but it was just terrible last night.
A friend of ours is down by Valencia and actually had to go get sandbags. But you’re only allowed a few free apparently, so he started using bags of flour. *shake head*
I doubt my cat will be my primary pet one LK hits (I picked it this time around mostly because I didn’t want cloned hunter pets on my two), but it’s been wonderful on several occasions to have stealth even if otherwhen I’d've loved a second cat-ty ability. I can’t shadowmeld next to it, but stealthing my cat and FDing has helped me skip nasty fights on numerous occasions (*cough* Dragonmaw Ascendant *cough*).
That being said, Prowl in LK could use some help. Ditching the speed penalty and giving it some sort of in-combat use (even just usable in-combat for some token energy cost for bonus damage or somesuch) would be nifty. I’d still probably use another pet for primary but that’s because nether rays and chimaeras look awesome.
@ Seidouyumi
Actually, now that we have charge, i have to say it doesnt look silly on my bear, while dash really did. My rhino and turtle also look great with charge. I’m really happy they implemented this, and I hope it doesnt get reverted, although i doubt it will.
Leave a Reply