Ghostcrawler posted on the Blizzard Damage Dealing forum this evening looking for some feedback specifically about the way that Defensive pets now behave:
We recently changed the way defensive stance works for pets. In the old design, the pet would not attack a target that you were attacking until it did something to generate threat – typically attacking you. In the new design, as soon as you attack a target, the pet will attack the target too. Our thinking was that this made defensive a little easier to use and you still have passive to override that behavior.
However, we have heard from some players (hunters mostly, though this isn’t just a hunter issue) that they prefer the old defensive stance. We wanted to get a little more feedback from players on the issue.
In order to keep this readable, please don’t stray into other hunter or pet issues that don’t directly affect this topic. Also please don’t attempt to redesign the feature (such as having four stances).
Personally I really like the new behavior and I’d be sad to see it changed back, but I know that not everyone feels the way I do. (I also don’t think that an option to toggle between the two behaviors really counts as ‘redesigning the feature’, but I know what GC is getting at with that.)
Anyway, if you have a moment you should definitely wander on over to the feedback thread and leave Ghostcrawler your feedback.
[update] The official feedback thread maxed out, but there appears to be an unofficial continuation thread that is gathering more feedback. If you haven’t yet gotten a chance to leave your feedback, I’d suggest posting it there — at least until they expand the original.
I saw it too late to reply on the Blizzard forum. I intensely dislike shooting at something to pull it and having my pet go charging in when I shoot. I hope they change it back.
If you like the new defensive mechanic because you attack and it sends your pet out to smack on whatever you just shot at, you’re doing it wrong.
You are also hereby forbidden to complain about pets not holding aggro.
The sequence for doing it right is you send your pet to your intended target, it engages your intended target, you wait for it to build up aggro, then you start shooting.
The sequence for doing it wrong is you start shooting with your pet on “new defensive”, it runs out after your first shot has landed to engage your intended target, it loses aggro, you go into melee and then QQ in the forums about how hunter pets should hold aggro better.
Either way, since I won’t be moving away from Passive any time soon and really couldn’t care less what’s going on with Defensive stance, could we please stop “fixing” this and for the love of Bob fix auto-prowl, auto-cower, and stop picking targets for me when my target dies?
Please?
To be honest, there needs to be a happy medium here. I do like the new methodology, but the old one was just plain easier to manage.
Jester and a few others have illustrated the need to swap between passive and defensive for simple farming safety, but my real issue has come from our main raid roll…. Misdirect.
If the entire concept of having the new defensive stance work the way it does is to eliminate the need to keep having to tell your pet to attack or have it easily change targets as you do during trash pulls, then, it needs to have a MD fix. Having to macro a pet stance change into an MD macro just for raiding is annoying as hell. Sure, we can micromanage, but honestly, id rather have to hit my pet attack macro as I change targets then have it go run off everytime I MD something and forget to change its stance, or forget to change its stance back.
Bah on the forum post limit.
I don’t like it much.
Often, in an instence or in Solo, I shoot an enemy to get it to run into a freezing trap. However, with Defensive, my pet will go crazy and attack (usualy growling too)the monster, keeping it from my trap. Same goes to Wyvern sting, and soon enough Freezing Arrow will have a problem too.
(Freezing arrow is like a 40-yard ranged freezing trap. It shoots an arrow at a target that places a freezing trap under it.)
I like what they have done with the stances. First off everyone should have their pet in passive mode when in any kind of raid or instance, even in bg you need to have your pet on passive, “omg im getting attacked, weres my pet?, omg its all the way over their attacking the lock/mob that dotted me and ran away, F!@#!, crap im dead lesson learnd” I like this for soloing, and I dont see were the stance dance people are talking about is coming from. I put gorial on passive, MD attack bunch of mobs they run to gorial, kill command/tunderstome, put gorila on defensive. aoe the f!@# out of the mobs, wipe my hands clean. Oh noes I got to click a buton twice, bad blizzard, wow is not for clicking buttons. BTW if you realy wanted to you can macro/keybinding passive and defensive stance it takes too long to scroll your mouse over a couple of centemeters to two buttons rigt beside each other.
It would be nice if they made pets smarter so that they dont break traps/stings, but thats a pet brian problem not a stance problem. remeber they still have to fix icetrap so that it has a chance to break on dmg, so that your pet wont attack it! I think this bug has carryed over into normal icetrap when they changed pets brians.
they made this new defencive stance so that pets can tank mobs we are aoe’ing with out us having to maualy tell the pet to keep attacking each mob in the group when one dies, the old way the pet would run back everytime a mob was killed so we could not aoe, isent that nice of them
LOL passive soves all your problems. “I intensely dislike shooting at something to pull it and having my pet go charging in when I shoot. I hope they change it back.”
Bad Blizzard for not making redundent stances.
Passive, he wont attack unless you tell him to! Use it and stop fixing things that arn’t broke.
If you dident have your pet on passive 90% of the time pre 3.0, then you were just a bad hunter. Leave the stances alone and fix more important things like hunters pvp range/los issues.
or even fix the damn exotic pets, my damn cat is out dpsing my devilsar wtf?
yes they are the same lvl and talent spec. target dummys dont lie.
@Sybok-before level 70, a regular pet will ALWAYS outdps a devilsaur. Speccing into beast mastery means sacrificing Go For the Throat in the marks tree. Without that talent, ol’ chompy is stuck using regular attacks instead of it’s specials.
*Before level 71 for my double.
Just so you know, I’ve updated the post:
[update] The official feedback thread maxed out, but there appears to be an unofficial continuation thread that is gathering more feedback. If you haven’t yet gotten a chance to leave your feedback, I’d suggest posting it there — at least until they expand the original.
Palladiamors said: … “so many classes, ours included, have serious issues that need looking into, and they target THIS?!”
And yet, from the response I would say that this change has affected an awful lot of hunters — possibly even more than those ‘serious issues’ that people are constantly telling me about, and which have absolutely no effect on me at all. I’m not trying to downplay the issues that affect you — I just think that for many hunters, the issues are elsewhere … like here. :>
M&G said: “If you like the new defensive mechanic because you attack and it sends your pet out to smack on whatever you just shot at, you’re doing it wrong.”
Not on this blog you’re not! *grin*
@M&G:
Actually. That’s exactly how I play my Hunter: I shoot first and let my pet run in after I have the mob’s attention. I know it doesn’t hold aggro very well, its why I carry a decent two-hander and some bandages at all time. No big.
The bigger question is “Why?” Why would one send their pet in knowing it won’t hold aggro. (For those of us that do know this, and trust me– there’s at least (AT LEAST) a couple hundred of us that know this.)
I can gather by your tone that you’ll laugh at this but I bet if you ask those of us that knowingly use a more inferior tactic, more then “I’m lazy”, you’ll get the response of: “I don’t like seeing my pet die.”
That’s the reason I do it. Shadow’s (black wolf) mortality shot way up, even with mend pets and the like, when he tried to hold the aggro. He’s my companion, my partner. I wouldn’t leave another party member to die to aggro intentionally and so I hold the same philosophy with my pet.
Its silly. Its childish. Its not quite as effective and means I have to think on my feet more if I want to live. But I offer no apologies. I’m not sorry. This is my story, and this is how I tell it.
:)
*Chuckles* Point, Mania, and I wasn’t trying to say it isn’t an issue. Just that it seems like they ought to be worrying about other things, like ((For me at least)) fixing Holy paladins. At the very least, for the love of all that is holy ((Har har)) stop nerfing them just to hit Retris.
M&G, I gotta ask, have you even kind of paid attention to pet aggro generation at the moment? There is a good chance I can let my level seventy tenacity pet get a good ten second head start on me, and still pull aggro off of him. Not everyone is beast master, either. Everyone offs things in different ways, at different speeds. And really, with hunter damage, disengage, and feign death, its not like anything should live long enough for it to matter.
Defensive stance is ultimately for you wanting your pet to attack your enemies you are in combat with, without rushing off and attacking anything and everything else. Both systems fulfill this.
The only difference is that on the new system after you start attacking, your pet will go and get aggro before the enemy reaches you, whereas with the old system by the time the enemy reaches you they are in melee range and the pet has a lot of threat to make to get aggro.
The main issue with the current system is when you are grinding (thus pet on defensive) but when you pull an enemy from afar, your pet rushes in and aggroes more mobs than intended. Hunters may sure find it annoying to put pet on passive or push ctrl+2 every odd pull just for a few seconds.
An idea would be to make your pet only charge when the target reached (x) yards away. This way the pet doesn’t always aggro too many mobs and can intercept before the target reaches you. Of course this may not solve anything, possibly make it worse. But its just an idea that may be worth at least a test.
I really dont like the new stance. I cant pull stuff to me, and trying to damage a low lvl mob for the quests achievement is almost impossible without my monkey thunderstomping it into the ground…
Defensive is NOT defensive if it means your pet attacks :/
I hate the new stance. In a lot of situations, I would pull the mob and time my pet to intercept it exactly where I wanted, AND if anything attacked me my pet would get in there and attack it next.
Now I have to keep my pet on Passive, and spend more time micro-managing what my pet is attacking.
All anyone who didn’t like having to click a button to send their pet in to fight had to do was to make a /petattack macro. Done. Over. This change is needless and annoying.
Inzeen put your pet on passive. lol. Passive solves every problem that has been brought up so far on this page.
I don’t know how you hunters lvled to 70 without using passive. I don’t see how the new defencive stance is bring up all these problems. defencive is for fighting more than one mob so your pet is aways attacking something. passive is for pulling, trapping, etc…
shame on you if you ever instanced/raided with your pet on defencive. you guys are the reason y hunters get called huntards. its not that hard to control a pet.
-”Hey why is your [petname] attacking that group over their?
-I don’t know I never sent it over there.
-Is your pet on defensive?
-Oh yea.
-Put it on passive we don’t want to wipe every pull.
-sorry.”
This sort of thing happened all the time pre 3.0, and its happening more often post 3.0 just because your pet now goes out to attack anything you hit. PASSIVE solves all your problems. Its not a hard concept. stop giving players ammunition to call us huntards.
I don’t know what else to say, just use passive.
I hope their are hunters out there that agree with me. I just don’t understand how you guys got this far without passive.
I know there’s a lot of anger both ways, but I’d like to point out my Sentinel idea would make both sides happy ^_^
/Cast Distracting post
Mythan has aquired aggro!
/cast Feign Death
*scampers off*
‘I don’t know what else to say, just use passive.’
I don’t like passive. I don’t use passive, not for BG and not for world PVE content [aka anything outside instances], mostly as that mounting glitch seems to happen more to me, when I have my pet on passive. And I don’t have macros, never used them, and when I did figure out I was never really interested as it made me feel like a bot lol.
Anyways I really don’t like it, they should have left defensive as DEFENSIVE. This sounds more like AGRESSIVE; and would have been a good change to it. Pet attacks anything you target, instead of randomly omnomming everything in sight.
And yeah in the end I just don’t like it; but it explains why my pets were always pinging around even when I never hit Attack.
I LOVE the new way of doing things. Mainly, because it makes my pet attack everything I’ve attacked, not just things that have attacked the pet or myself. So, I can send it in, volley, and it’ll then try to kill all the mobs that were hit with volley. I find this very useful in groups, where few of the mobs ever hit me or the pet.
I also like just being able to right click on a mob while farming, and my pet immediately charges it. I often can’t be bothered to use Hunter’s Mark, especially not on lowlevel mobs, so it does save me a click because I usually don’t use the mark/petattack macro on lowbies. I can just run around, right click and loot.
So in short, I love it and would be annoyed if they changed it back. They could do an extra stance then, if people really want the old way back. I personally like this change.
@ Sybok relax young hunter. Folks have used the old way (defensive) for a little over 4 years and out of the clear blue sky (well, for some of us, we still have blue skies) it is changed. Old habits are hard to change, but they will. And I can understand the fustrations folks are plain having. I know I was shocked when it happened to me the first few times. Heh, I thought it was a bug.
And I depended on the defensive (old style) stance to protect me when I wasn’t paying attention. When a mob attacked me from behind, Fodo would attack them. I would run away and live to die another day. Now, I have to pay more attention and that is hard to do sometimes.
Please excuse me Mania and others if I have overstepped my bounds.
@ Mythan ROFL
“Also please don’t attempt to redesign the feature (such as having four stances).”
No, origional thought is BAD, GC. Sigh.
As some have posted already, I would LOVE to see the ‘new defensive stance’ become the ‘new agressive stance’, and get the old defensive back.
The current aggressive stance seems useless to me, and I wouldn’t mind if they dropped it alltogether.
@Maz: Ditto.
Though, having seen Ghost Crawler’s thoughts up to this point, I think it might be a coding thing. Redesigning the entire stance thing might be something that could take as long as some of the Beta features we had been drooling over.
I think what GC wants is something that can be done in a simple patch. Though maybe GC wasn’t expecting quite this much feedback…
I just got back from the Forums. I think there’s going to be one major issue here:
Apparently this effected the Warlock’s pets too. Now I think that Warlocks and Hunters have nothing in common. Warlocks would VERY MUCH benefit from this new defensive stance. They use their pets to keep things away from their squishy bodies while they cast spells and such. Of COURSE they would want their pet to go in right away.
But I see a few common posts that say:
Aggressive Stance: Change this to the CURRENT defensive stance. (Pet only attacks what I attack.*)
Defensive Stance: Change this to the OLD defensive stance. (Pet only attacks what attacks it, or what attacks me.)
Passive Stance: The pet doesn’t do a darn thing unless told, no matter what. Period.
*Note: It needs to be “WHAT [PLAYER] ATTACKS” and not “WHAT [PLAYER] TARGETS”. It would be a nightmare if the pet went after anything you targeted. I solo a lot, so I use it for assessing everything from levels to attack orders, to just seeing what the heck something is.
P.S. – If you can’t tell, I am not, nor have I ever reached level cap. If for some reason that would make a difference.
love it as it is, please don’t change it
‘The best defense is a good offense’
I think that the new change to defensive stance is an improvement, as I like my pet attacking simultaneously with me…. It makes it feel like we are more of a team (from a rp view). I have a raptor (ferocity pet) currently and rarely pull agro after it lays down a charge. I do agree though, I have never really found a use for agressive stance – other than level 19 warsong.
Aggressive Stance: Change this to the CURRENT defensive stance. (Pet only attacks what I attack.*)
Defensive Stance: Change this to the OLD defensive stance. (Pet only attacks what attacks it, or what attacks me.)
Passive Stance: The pet doesn’t do a darn thing unless told, no matter what. Period.
I fully endorse this. The current aggressive stance is practically unused [maybe arenas when your reaction time is slower than your pet at taking out in/out stealth's]
Sorry if it seem’s like I’m freaking out.
Well, looks like opinions are quite sharply divided, and regardless of whether Blizzard keeps the new behavior or reverts it back, a lot of players will be upset anyway.
However, it is not really that big deal, rather just minor annoyance. For those who like the old way, the solution is to replace the key binding for Attack and Follow commands (I have them bound to F1 and F2 respectfully) with these macros. For attacking your target:
For backing off:
Yes, you’ll need to remeber to hit F2 before pulling the mob without my pet attacking it. Yes, with old approach it did not require anything (if you like me, you get used to hit your “pet attack” button or had corresponding command added to your Hunter’s Mark button already). But it’s definitely not the end of the world, IMHO.
Having said that, I’ll definitely will love either one:
1) reverting the Defensive stance back,
2) adding interface option “pet attack your target while defensive”,
3) replacing Aggressive stance with new Defensive and restoring old Defensive,
4) adding 4th stance.
Anything will work better than it is now (for me, YMMV).
A quick note for those that feel this change was sprung on them notice: it was actually noticed really early on in the beta (possibly even the alpha – I don’t clearly remember which topics were covered where).
However, the consensus of the beta hunter community was that we either liked the change, or didn’t care either way. So the devs had a few months worth of feedback (or lack of feedback) on Wrath to suggest that the change was fine. Judging from GC’s post, it would seem they got deluged with totally unexpected negative reactions when the 3.0 patch came out, hence the post on the damage dealing forums.
The two major upsides of the new defensive stance appear to be the way it works much better for classes with summonable pets or guardians (frost elemental, ghoul, shadow fiend, spirit wolves, treants), and that it makes pets far more effective in dealing with AoE packs.
The major downside appears to impact those that frequently used Defensive stance as an element of tricky positioning maneuvers while pet tanking.
If it’s truly an either/or situation, then I expect pet tanking is going to lose out (since we’re considered a pure DPS class, despite having some ability to tank in certain situations – consider pet tanking to be in the same ballpark as rogue evasion tanking)
Oops. “…sprung on them without notice…”
Passive doesn’t solve the problem.
I’ll lay it out again for those that don’t seem to get it:
Pulling mobs TO YOU, away from danger, requires you to set the pet to passive first. Misdirect to pet. As mobs head towards pet you must then shift stance in order to get the auto attack feature of defensive so that pet will not drag all the mobs back to you after the first mob goes down. If you are fighting ONE mob, this isn’t a problem. If you are fighting two or more, it is. After all mobs are dead, you must then switch back to passive for the next pull and do it all over again.
This will come up when you want to pull multiple mobs, when you accidentally pull multiple mobs, when you want to grind rep/cloth/whatever in low level instances it is particularly annoying.
Is it hard? No. Does it add exponentially more work to what used to be a fairly simply operation? Yes. You save yourself a single button push at the beginning of a fight but gain three button pushes (or more) before the fight is over. They aren’t going to change it. It doesn’t matter. Just more buttons to push mid-combat amongst our 4000 other buttons we already have to wrangle. I’m gonna have extra arms grafted on. That should solve the issue.
This change really doesn’t affect me because I always use passive stance unless in PVP, where I use aggressive stance. For me it has always been more convenient to just press CTRL-1 when you want an attack on something and not have to worry about your pet aggroing an unnecessary amount of mobs. I think the only time I’ve ever used defensive stance is when I’m AFK and want some extra health in case something attacks me. Is it really so hard to press CTRL-1 when you switch to a new target? puhlease
@Sybok:
“Inzeen put your pet on passive. lol. Passive solves every problem that has been brought up so far on this page.”
No it doesn’t!
Go back to school and learn how to play nice! Don’t tell others they are too dumb to play, only because you don’t understand how to play the class!
The old Defensive had one major advantage above passive and the new defensive:
the pet started fighting when told, and once the pet was infight and there was an add, after killing the first target, it started attacking the add – that’s what the old defensive was made for!
Now I have to micro-manage: put pet on passive, send it to attack, put pet on “defensive” – 2 steps more than needed!
No one ever used the aggresive stance – it is a waste of resources!
To Blizzard: change aggressive to the new “defensive”, restore the old defensive and leave passive untouched – and give us more button space for all those new talents and abilities!
@Nimizar: “However, the consensus of the beta hunter community was that we either liked the change, or didn’t care either way.”
I believe, there is some correlation between how people like/dislike the change and their participation in Beta. You see, Beta was voluntary, so more conservative folks (who dislike the change) were less likely to opt in.
@vwarb: “This change really doesn’t affect me because I always use passive stance unless in PVP, where I use aggressive stance. [...] Is it really so hard to press CTRL-1 when you switch to a new target? puhlease”
If you never used Defensive stance, does it makes you not eligible to comment on the change, doesn’t it? ;)
Anyway, this stance is not about not pressing pet attack button (since hunters are not known for their mastery of close combat, you have to command pet to attack in defensive almost exactly the same as in passive), but mostly about added ability of pet to select his targets by himself. For some hunters it is quite important.
@Dworkin: no, one of the purposes of the change was to make it more useful to a wider spectrum of the hunter populace. Those that almost never used the old Defensive stance (since they saw it as basically useless in most situations), but will use the new one are precisely the target audience of the change.
What Blizz (and others, including me) appear to have underestimated is the number of people that actually bothered to try to get positioning right while using the old defensive stance. Those are the only group of people that are negatively impacted by the change.
Is the latter group larger or smaller than the former group? Dunno, but both groups are certainly very vocal. The last time we had this strong a split in community opinion with the merging of auto shot and auto attack we got an interface option (defaulting to the new behaviour) to allow people to restore the old behaviour if they preferred it – perhaps the same thing will be done this time.
I do not like this change at all. Sure, for raiding, it’s so much easier to not have to manually tab at each target. However, the problem is when you forget to put it on passive for certain situations. One situation comes to mind is in Zul’Aman, when you want to burn down the scout. If you forget to change stance to passive, your pet is going to go full-tilt and aggro the back behind the scout, either causing great irritation to your raid (or even possibly a wipe) and thus generating even more negativity to the class (huntards) … so no, I don’t like this change at all.
I’m coming late…and I didn’t read all the comments. I say we add a range limit to the new behavior…if you’re attacking mobs at max range (20-25+ yards, like you typically do for pulling) the pet will stay at your side and not go charging in; just like the old defensive stance behavior. If the mob has aggro on you and gets close (<10 yards) the pet then charges in and growls to keep the mob from hitting you (similar to the new defensive stance behavior). I’d like to see it work when a mob aggros on you whether you auto-attacked or not, but I’m not hoping for too much.
I think they should have Assist be a toggle and not a stance in and of itself. That way you can have the old defensive stance and the new defensive stance at the same time without needing a new stance button for it.
DP: Apparently since I canceled my account with WoW I’m no longer allowed to post, so if someone else hasn’t already posted the above idea into that thread feel free to post it and take credit for it.
@Numuzar: Sorry, cannot agree with your first point – I think it’s very unlikely for people who used passive before will use new defensive, which is even more aggressive than before. And definitely cannot imaging aggressive being more popular than defensive. In addition, I read a lot of comments, and don’t remember seeing any significant number of new converts (those who did not used defensive, post mostly “we don’t care” comments).
Regarding people who like to position the pet “right” (and so were hurt by new mechanics) and the fact they are, most likely, a minority – yes, I think you’re correct. However, the question is still remains – why all these people were silent during beta. My theory was supposed to answer that, but yours doesn’t (even if “control freaks” are minority, they should be represented in beta as well, and it would not be a consensus then).
And, by the way, adding interface option was option (2) in my previous post. ;)
i like the new defense stance ..what i would like to see that would be a huge help is a buff that allows the hunter to shrink his pet. something similar to the curse spell but without the bad side effects. this would help hunters use their big and /or exotic pets in dungeons and raids without frustrating targeting problems and more effectively overall in tight situations.
When trying to position mobs on a difficult pull, set pet to passive.
Bind /petdefensive to the macro for your first offensive shot that you use, maybe one of your stings.
if pet is already in defensive, this makes no change. If he’s been manually set to passive, your shot macro will set him defensive.
This new way of defensive is a really hard blow to the tanking hunters out there. I completely hate the new way this works. As a tank it can be absolutely horrible to pull things in instances. Sometimes you want to pull a pack back, but as a tank you will always want to have the pet on defensive. So more often than not I have to switch stance over and over and over. And when tanking you have enough things to think of already. You’re playing both a tank and dps at the same time. I’d rather it be a switch. Just use the normal pet attack in the same way as growl or any other ability where you can right click it to have it cast automagically or not.
Too bad we Europeans can’t post on the US forums, and that all these kind of threads are always over there. =(
I’m a defensive addict myself– 4yrs running, and it’s been my default pet setting almost exclusively (And no. Fluffy’s *never* wiped a group. Me tabbing and firing off an errand shot into a distant pack like an idiot? Certainly. Fluffy running off and doing his own thing? Nope. I’ve never understood the big deal ).
I could go either way; I’d rather fluffy didn’t bolt off with my first shot, but I do like the effect with volley. All in all, I prefer the old defensive a mite more; pet attack has been bound to a mouse button for a looong time, and I’m pretty used to using it without having to think about it. In short, the new functionality doesn’t seem to be adding much for me; I usually preemptively (sp?) choose fluffy’s targets. Not a deal breaker though. on a scale of 1 to 10, for me it rates a ‘meh’ and a shrug.
I’m not crazy about the new Defensive. It makes it more difficult to manage the pet if I want to take a couple shots at a new target while the pet keeps the first one occupied.
One more problem with the new Defensive: quest object-mobs.
The plagued proto-dragon quests in Howling Fjord requires you to spray plague juice on these proto-dragon eggs. Since the AI takes the spraying to be an attack, it sends your pet in to “fight” the egg if you have it set to Defensive,. When your pet attacks the egg, it breaks the spray before it finishes channeling. So you have to put your pet on Passive, spray the egg, and set to Defensive while the newly-hatched mob is attacking you.