Can anyone confirm? Does/can sonic blast hit multiple targets?

First off, I found out quickly that with a 1 minute cooldown and 2 second duration, this spell is useless with autocast turned on, so anyone who does want to try a bat should be prepared for some micro-managing.

Used manually, it’s not terrible – but at 2 seconds duration it’s basically just for the occasional spell interrupt or (maybe) for emergency escapes. And in PVE at least the ranged component seems pointless.

So in a nutshell: might give you that slight extra edge for PVP with casters, but otherwise go with something more useful like a hyena, crab or spider. Or dare I say it… a gorilla.

It made me sad to see my best friend perform so poorly, so I’m afraid to get any pet other than those in the cunning family, even though I don’t PvP much at all. I had a crab once and it ROCKED! So I got rid of it, because I knew I’d never touch my bat again with that thing.

Bats are PvP pets now. I hate that. I would recommend a bat only for hard-core PvPers. I also hate that. As a strict solo-RPer, it kills me to know that my favorite buddy is a PvP pet with a useless skill. So bats are not for PvE…

Over all, bats just aren’t what they used to be. :*(

I like most of what they did in 3.02 but as another poster mentioned in the Great Equalization Effort, some pets that had been holding their own, ended up a little less “equal” than others (methinks a high ranking blizzard Dev got a little over excited).

Choosing a bat over other Cunning pets means giving up the other Cunning family abilities. By choosing Sonic Blast you are forgoing:

– A 6 second disarm (birds of prey)
– Burst damage (dragonhawks and wind serpents)
– cast time debuffs (serpents)
– counterspells (nether rays)
– melee stuns (ravagers)
– 4 second webs (spiders and silithids)
– 5 second snares (chimeras)
– AoE armor reduction (sporebats)

Now, to be fair, for the most part these abilities either do more damage, have a longer lasting debuff, or have a shorter cooldown than Sonic Blast. However, none of them (I guess excepting the flat-out damage) has the versatility of a ranged stun. Disarms and webs are less effective against casters, casting debuffs and counterspells are all but useless against melee classes, and chimeras are exotic, which limits them to a select few, dedicated, beast masters. Sonic Blast, by comparison, shuts down any class at range for those few extra seconds.

The disadvantages of Sonic Blast are essentially its lowish damage (relative to other pet specials) and its relatively long cooldown. Its not burst damage, sorry people, and once you use it, you have to do the rest yourself. Beastmasters take note, however, with 3/3 Longevity, the cooldown is only 42 seconds.

There are a number of uses for Sonic Blast beyond making your opponent hate you for stunning him.

– Pseudo-cheap shot: Take control of the first 2 seconds of a fight
– Spell interrupts: stop a heal, frostbolt, whatever. pretty basic.
– Cooldown enhancer: 2 more seconds before you can use conc shot, scatter shot, freeze trap etc…? no problem, we can do that.
– Stop runners: because we all hate it when they get out of range with 5% hp
– Oh snap: last ditch effort to get away from that pesky rogue.
* Note that you can use Sonic Blast to stun a rogue even if you yourself are stunned. This might let you get off a disengage before the stunlock continues. This is also the case with Ravage, but Sonic Blast can’t be dodged, which makes it more reliable in this case.

Although Rank 2 of Sonic Blast still says it requires 80 focus, it appears to work without actually using any. Sooo… tooltip bug.

I really like the bat model but I think as a pet it is really lackluster for my interests in the game. I wish we had the choice to spec our favorite pets into our preferences (tenacity-ferocity-cunning), so that we could use any model/pet the way we prefer.

Just my opinion.

Each review was focussed on pve utility for the pet. Cunning pets and bats in particular are generally not much good for pve but of course thats not their strong area.

I personally liked bats when they had screech. SB just doesnt cut it for pve.

blog: WoWDecrypted its currently the most recent post.

Well now that that’s out of my system, here’s my thoughts on bats: They’re a decent pet, but at a certain point they’re just too big. you can get away with having one in the mid-levels but once you get up to 60 or so they just take up too much screen. As a troll hunter, I had a 70 bat for a little while and I couldn’t say that I enjoyed playing with it. Its wing sliced me in half and its run animation was glitched and was just a high-powered walk animation, which got on my nerves a bit. So basically, for mid-level players they’re an interesting and fun pet but high level players will probably have trouble tolerating them.