RFC: Birds of Prey and Snatch
RFC stands for “Request For Comments” — which basically means that I need your help (again!). I’m getting a lot of questions about the pros and cons of each pet family and in particular the pet family skills. But there’s no way that I really test all the pet families in every situation myself, so I want to hear about your experiences with them! (And yes, with 32 pet families this could take awhile.)
Today’s RFC: The Birds of Prey family and their Snatch skill.
The Bird of Prey family is new with Patch 3.0 — sort of. This family includes owls (which used to have their own separate Owl family) plus eagles, rocs, and most hawks. But even the pre-existing owls have changed considerably. Instead of that old standby skill Screech, Birds of Prey now use the family skill Snatch, which causes damage and disarms the target for 6 seconds.
Now Screech was a very popular pet skill in the old days, so I am very interested to see how Snatch — and Birds of Prey — stand up in the present. Birds of Prey are most certainly gorgeous creatures, but are they any good? Is Snatch worth it? What are Birds of Prey best at?
So please, if you’ve had any experience hunting with Birds of Prey in a post-Patch 3.0 world, take a moment to comment and let me know what you think. In particular, I’d like to know:
- What are the pros and cons of Birds of Prey in general?
- What are the pros and cons of Snatch in particular?
- Are Birds of Prey particularly good (or bad) for soloing, grouping, raiding, PvP, tanking, damage-dealing, etc?
- What talents do you suggest for Birds of Prey? Are there any required talents, or talents you should definitely skip?
- Do you know any clever strategies for hunting with Birds of Prey, or are there any particular gotchas to watch out for?
- Would you recommend a Bird of Prey?
(These are just guideline questions — you need’t try to address each one in turn. And yes, this post looks a lot like the other RFCs — after all I’m asking the same questions!)
I’m especially looking for input from people who have been hunting with Birds of Prey for the past couple of weeks (since Patch 3.0), but even if you haven’t, feel free to throw if your theorycrafting — just let us know whether your advice is based on experience or spreadsheets (or both)!
This post will remain here as a reference for the future, and additionally I’ll try to distill the basics down into a brief summary for use on Petopia.
As always, thanks for your help!
46 Comments
first comment! in your face first-whiners.
As for birds of prey, i’m a fan of snatch. When I fight humanoids in PvE it’s nice, and it’s always good in PvP. I don’t know about its cooldown but otherwise it’s a pretty good skill.
I need to look into this more, but I was playing my DK earlier today when a NPC snatched me. Most of my abilities greyed out for that time. This might be a great one to take a Bird into a BG and seek out Death Knights.
I used to have a beautiful snowy owl, Jadis, but I dumped her after 3.0 when Screech was moved out of the family. As much as I like the look of owls, there’s simply not much use for a disarm for a hunter like me, who mostly does PvE.
I miss you screech! You were so good at snap aggro :(
For PvE, I find snatch helpful in those (somewhat rare, admittedly) situations where you are being badly beaten by a group of Humanoids, and a brief respite damage wise can give you a little bit of extra healing. That did come in handy for levels 67-70. Netherstorm and Shadowmoon just LOVE to put you in situations like that (Ethereals & Broken Draenei, I’m looking at you.)
For PvP, I must admit to being too panicked most of the time to pay attention to such things, but 6 seconds of rendering a Warrior or Rogues abilities inaccessible has got to be useful.
With 3 points in the Beast Mastery talent Longevity, Snatch can be up often enough to make a difference. I’ve not used my owl, Ella, in PvP very much (mostly due to dinging 70 a couple of weeks before Wrath.. and then not being able to BG due to computer issues), but I’ve got her specced to have 2 points in Mobility, so that she has an almost permanent Dive effect, which allows her to zip about the place disarming enemies willy nilly.
And, while this isn’t a performance advantage, out of my three current pets (Snow Leopard, White Warp Stalker and Winterspring Owl), I think the owl is the most beautiful. As a whole, the bird of prey family is nice. Dark owls aren’t so pretty, but the light brown ones from Nagrand and the White ones in Winterspring are gorgeous, and Eagles look plain awesome.
One final note to Nirvana : Love the choice of name for your Owl, shame you had to let her go.
I loved my owl before Wrath, because screech was perfect for my way of leveling/grinding.
Snatch is nice, but totally lacks the qualities I loved owls for – I find myself kind of frustrated leveling with my owl now. I have to admit: I left her in the stable.
Haven’t done any PvP yet, besides some duells: There snatch really turned out to be quite handy.
So I guess: Snatch is great for PvP. And while you certainly still can do PvE with an owl, screech was way way better.
I miss screech big time. I was looking forward to see the new content with my beloved white owl Shanti again and am sad that I don’t want to take her any longer.
Note that it may be due to crazy respawn rates of mobs at the moment, that I desperately feel like needing some aoe ability in my leveling pet of choice. I’ll have to wait and see how the “new” owl feels once things cool down a bit and targeting and pulling really only brings those mobs you intended to aggro. ;)
It turns out that snatch attempts to disarm your target. So it has a chance to fail. And dueling my pally buddy, who has that nice weapon chain so he cant be disarmed meant my pet did squat. So if this was a 100% disarm on your target no matter what enchant/ability that stops you from getting disarmed then this would be a great hunter pet for pvp. But right now because of anti disarming mechanics, snatch will hardly do anything noticeable. You don’t have to tame a bop to figure this out, just spec chimera shot and you will see how often you can disarm a melee class with all the anti-disarm out there.
Unless this is a 100% guarantee that snatch will disarm, and it cant be stoped by the anti-disarm crap then this would be a great pvp pet. But for now pass it and go for something that actually has 100% chance of doing something to your target that can help you.
It would have been nice to have snatch and chimera shot for a nice 12sec disarm, but blizz will never let us have it. That would give us a chance in pvp with melees, they cant let that happen
i love it for the most part but its just waisting focus if tis like a elemental or mabe even machines. its great for huminoids and mabe even soem dragonkin but besides that theres not more use for it.
brown eagles FTW
My five cents:
Snatch is, for me, basically a PvP only talent. And the fact that it’s only “an attempt” + a long cd makes it almost worthless (worked one time out of 4 attempts). Sorry. I admire the intent and the theory behind this new fun ability but in game it’s far behind Screetch. I stopped using my Owl and now she’s dust covered in my stables. :(
thanks for this RFC.
I tamed one of those howling fjord sea eagles last week (named him ‘Barackus’ – something between this president guy you’ll get an good old BA from A-Team ;-) ), always liked eagles…
Anyway – have to say that i didn’t like the long cooldown of snatch (MM specced) and didn’t want to care for another button to manualy smash – so i left him in the stable :(
Maybe he’ll come back when its 80s-Arena-time…
your five cents are right on the money Pepp.
If it was a guaranteed disarm that would make all the difference. It could even be an anti dismantle tool. Honestly they never should have let rogues have it. What is a hunter without his bow/gun, a corpse.
I had a chance to tame one of the Duskwing Eagles from the Howling Fjord the other day and I have to say that they are gorgeous pets. I could watch mine fly about all day. They’re a quiet pet for those worried about flappy sounds, but they have the owl noises when they attack… which doesn’t sound right for an eagle.
As for snatch… well as most people pointed out already it’s definately more of a PvP thing. I can see it being useful in some PvE situations, such as dungeons with a lot of humanoid mobs. You’d just have to be selective as to which places you’d take your Bird to.
One thing that people haven’t mentioned yet is that snatch will go off whether you’re fighting a mob with a weapon or not. So unless you turn it off and on when you need it you’ll end up wasting a lot of focus.
As much as I like my Eagle, I’m more than likely going to be filling his stable slot with another pet when I find one. Don’t get me wrong, Birds of Prey are good pets but they’re also very specialized pets. Any situation other than what they were designed to be good at, they fall behind all the others. Ultimately unless you love your feathered friend, I’d recommend using another pet to level.
Anti-disarm things are meant to keep people from disarming. Hunter pets are not meant to be the be-all and end-all in a PVP battle. They do *not* need to have ‘unbeatable disarms’. Having a disarm at all is more than most hunters have. QQ’ing about the fact that it can actually be *gasp* PARRIED BY ANTI-DISARM STUFF! seems to me like you’re wishing we could be absolutely unbalanced.
In the theory of ‘Eagles as pets’, I would suggest that for PVE, they aren’t utterly useless. There are a lot of humanoid enemies, and Disarming them can make a considerable difference in their damage. Disarm can even work against bosses at times; ask any Warrior who’s thrown a Disarm at Huntsman.
That said, there are better abilities. Unless you are focusing on humanoid-grinding, you’re probably better served getting the stable slot filled by a pet with abilities that are more flexible in use. What that pet is depends on what you’re looking for, obviously, but I would say ‘Eagle’ is definitely not it.
In PVP, there are a lot of anti-disarm abilities, yes. However, those people that don’t have them will quickly find that your Bird Of Prey is going to be the bane of their existance. Warriors, Rogues, Death Knights, Enhance Shammies… basically, any class who relies on their weapon to do something, and has spent their points on things more ‘useful’ than an anti-disarm. One minute might be a longer CD than many people want to see, considering it only lasts for six seconds, but those six seconds can be an eternity in a pitched battle.
If you solely do PVP, a Bird Of Prey might be worth giving a try to, to see if it makes the difference for you. I especially would suggest it for people who can lower the CD as much as possible. Plus, Birds Of Prey are actually Cunning creatures, which means that they have quite a few PVP-useful abilities in the first place; a plus that can’t be ignored.
All that said, I, myself, would probably look to other creatures for PVP before I grabbed the eagle. :) A real pity, considering how absolutely gorgeous these creatures are.
Birds of prey… definately lackluster if you ask me.
Snatch IS nice.. but that’s about it :<
IMO.
I find Birds of Prey good at both PvE and PvP. (Well, I have to admit that I’m not PvP’ing much ;))
But ofc, the Snatch skill can be pretty useless at times – I mean, of you fight a caster mob, or a beast mob, or some kind of other mob with no weapons. But then, Snatch DOES give damage… Maybe not much, but it does :)
I’m not a pvp hunter, but I do occasionally wander into a battleground just for the fun (and frenzy) of trying to kill something with a brain. Anyway, I tamed a took an eagle (this despite my loathing of flying pets) and I have to say that I was surprised at how effective Snatch was. It seems that very few of my targets were Disarm Proof. I actually had the sheer joy of watching a shaman get disarmed and try to run away from me!
Outside of pvp, the eagle is an ordinary cunning pet, and slightly less useful than some others because PvE humanoids don’t live long enough for the disarm to make a difference.
One note: I REALLY wish that the birds would land on the corpse while using Carrion Feeder. How nice would that be?
I think your next RFC should be for carrion birds, to see if they got the better end of the deal. I remember pre 3.0 people always said owls were one of the best leveling pets, and I agree, but I never had screech on them. The sound on screech was just too annoying for me to tolerate. Do carrion birds or bats still have that sound? If so I’ll never get one.
Boarwood: Yes, they still have that sound.
I haven’t found my owl’s dps, while solo leveling, to shout ‘I DO LESS DAMAGE!’. Not that I test numbers, but it didnt feel to be extremely lacking. One situation I could find a use for snatch, was in instances. Often certain mobs, typically ones that are found alone, will do extra huge damage to the tank. I found having my owl disarm them helped temporarily ease the dmg and help the healer catch up. It also helped slightly for mobs that bounce around and hit randomly, so the wild hits wouldn’t hurt squishies that much. I bet it’d be annoying if used against you in a 1 on 1 pvp situation as well. (though i must admit, id rather have just keep screech. i actually miss its obnoxious sounds.)
I think taking Screech away from 2/3rds of the flying pets was a terrible idea. That is like splitting Cats into Jungle Cats, Forest Cats, and Mountain Cats, and only giving one of them the Rake ability.
I used a bat or owl about 80% of the time in pre-WotLK, and now that Screech is gone, I dumped them both.
I personally am not to fond of the pet cooldown spells. On autocast it’s never used at the right time and manually casting they can be a pain. However coincidentally I am testing out Snatch/Ravage, etc with a ‘pet-special’ macro. Perhaps that will make these pets more usable to me.
Also forgot to add, the fact that Snatch still costs focus does make it sort of a pain to use manually. Wonder why snatch didn’t get the treatment Ravage/Sonic Blast, etc did.
Pre-3.0 I loved my purple Skettis owl for PVP. I would take him in to BG’s all the time for screech and for a flappy pet in the other players faces. Now? eh…not so good for me because the snatch ability is irrelevant vs. casters imo.
I also liked using her for PVE for the instant aggro generation of screech, as well. Unfortunately, my beautiful bird is stuck in the stables…can’t bring myself to get rid of it yet because the look is so awesome but…
And I’m now using a wolf…love the furious howl/call of the wild combo. Got it mainly for grouping and raids but have found it to be nice soloing as well ;)
I agree Carrion Feeder needs an animation of you pet eating the corpse. That would totally rock! Blood should splash a little and you should hear a tearing sound and eating noises, then when hes done a big roar :) that would be a happy pet.
lol I agree Carrion Feeder needs an animation of you pet eating the corpse. That would totally rock! Blood should splash a little and you should hear a tearing sound and eating noises, then when hes done a big roar :) that would be a happy pet.
sorry ditto comment browser f@#$ed up
I’ve been working with a bird of prey (bald eagle from howling fjord), she’s a great pet for soloing, although they do take quite a bit more damage seeing as they don’t have an “healing” talents, just keep mend pet up and once the fight is over, have it use carrion feeder to keep it happy and heal it. havn’t used mine in pvp yet, but her snatch is pretty cool against mobs who have weapons (hehe, gotta love making a murloc drop its spear).
I got my owl specifically for demoralizing screech, I was really disappointed to learn all the hard work I had done with him to level my owl up and train him in all the available abilities went to waste, now while I like snatch alright I don’t think its that special for pvp considering other pets with stunning, rooting, or knockback abilities are more valuable imo. My only problem is I hate the way the Carrion feeders look, I loved my owl he looked great flying next to me and was my leveling pet and battleground pet, I had planned to retire him and get one of the eagles to take his place as my pvp pet but I think Rhino has taken that job so I may tame one of the Daggercap hawks because they are the one Carrion feeder pet that you can tame that I don’t hate the look of (grrr). I’ll test it out and see if that will work for me or if I’ll just stick to the gorilladin for leveling, and go with the new standard devilsaur for instances.
Good thing: The lack of KEE KEE KEE KEE KEE KEE KEE KEE *murders pet*
Good thing: No sloppy AoE aggro (I’m one of those people that aggressively dislikes the oh-so-popular gorilla because I like knowing precisely where my aggro is going at all times)
Good thing: OMFG SO PRETTY
Bad thing: Snatch causes no aggro (that I can see)
Bad thing: BoP are Cunning and thus behind the dps curve
Bad thing: Don’t hold aggro for poo
Bad thing: Disarm only works on weapon-using humanoids
So basically, Birds of Prey have the same limitations almost all of the Cunning family have. They’re intended for PVP and PVP is what they’re good for, not PvE (whether instancing or soloing). I still have one amongst my hunters, and sometimes I’ll take it into humanoid-heavy instances (Ramps for example) but they’re no good on casters or beasts, so…Altair will probably fall by the wayside before much longer. Pity, ’cause he’s a handsome beast.
I have had the Avian Warhawk as soon as I became 70. Me and WHO (My owl), did wonderfully in Battleground togehter. Then I read from Petopia that Birds of Prey will now have Snatch. This made me exstatic! When patch 3.0 came out I Fought a humanoid to disarm him. It was awesome! however the cooldown went too long. After I killed it, a beast aggroed me and WHO attacked that. It took 42 secs before he could use snatch again. I love my owl, however I rarely use him outside of BG’s now because of the long cooldown time. If they pushed it down to maybe even 30 seconds, then that would make him at the top of my Pet list again. apart from the cooldown, Snatch and Birds of Prey are great pets :)
Okay, here’s my input regarding Birds of Prey.
They are the cunning type of pet, which can be the most deadly type if put into the right situation. For PvE, I turn Disarm off and just let her slaughter with her Dump ability. I’m not a big fan of Single target pets. My Gorilladin has taken me to a new point of happiness. (Especially in Grizzly Hills…Oh the number of Horde NPCs I took out at the Logging Camp..). But I also like to level up my lesser pets, seeing as I’m attached to them. Anyway, Cunning pets have two awesome talents: Cornered and Feeding Frenzy. If you can manage to keep your pet below 35% health (Look into lower Mend Pet ranks to help) then the damage is astonishing. Not only did mine crit 1.3k five times in a row (lv 73 at the time), but after the mob reached below 35%, it crit that poor bear until it was in pieces. Then it picked up the remains so I could skin it with less guilt and blood on my hands.
As for PvP, Disarm isn’t too great for AV, unless the pet has Avoidance. With Avoidance, you can send the pet in to a pack of horde to take out that pesky Warrior or Rogue before they get to the 2 or 3 Alliance who are sitting there AFK (I hate Alliance in PvP) and keep them from stunning you long enough to Disengage off the bridge in Dun Baldar. I have to admit it’s fun, but oh so annoying.
With me, it’s the Lengevity, 51 point BM spec. Gorilladin tanks up to 10 mobs without trouble and I can avoid the Smack and growl Abilities without having trouble. and with Volley Glyph…they go down with ease!
Calx/Dalaran
Well, like most here Mania, I was so dis-hearten on losing demoralizing screech and seeing “snatch” in it’s place, I deleted my beloved “Gut Ripper”. Yes, I had tamed her – took a lot of tries, but now she is free to wander the wilderness again.
Calx above me says pretty much for me, too.
I have been soloing with my Olm the Wise, renamed Shiraha, since level 40-something – well before the patch. Pre-patch I found her to be an excellent companion. Post-patch, she had moved from pretty flappy thing in my screen to fierce dictator of weaponry. Yeah, Snatch is useful. It’s situational, but situations change on a dime even in PvE. As mentioned above, Snatch can be a lifesaver if your face is being bashed in. Snatch weapon, disengage, concussive shot, back in business. As a general rule, though, I leave Snatch off auto-cast and manually click it only when I need it.
Yeah, I miss the screech skill a bit too. I was so confused to pull Shiraha out of the stables only to find screech replaced with Snatch, but I think it’s an acceptable trade-off.
As for PvP, I don’t feel as though I have the experience to comment on it. I PvP on my hunter quite often, but I’m the half-panicked, button-mashing, running pell-mell, disorganized, wrong-button-hitting type of PvPer…. and I use my ravager for PvP anyway.
Would I recommend a bird of prey as a pet? Yes. Yes I would. They’re gorgeous creatures, all of them, easy to quest with in a PvE environment, and a decent addition to any raid.
I’ve never tamed a Bird of prey as of yet, and so far from what I’ve read, I dont think I will be. Since I am not much of a pvp player, I am more concerned with a pet that will dish out damage for faster solo play. Think I’ll stick with my Hyena and Worm for now.
Thal? 52. *Laughs* Olhm comes at 52, and no sooner. I know, I camped out looking for him many moons ago now.
Sig, that pains me to hear. Gutripper is a real pain to tame. Shame s/he had to go to waste.
Now, on to the question. Situational sums up Birds of prey nicely. Not that you’ll have problems soloing with any sort of pet now, but cunning in general do seem to be more PvP oriented, and this’n has the mother of all PvP abilities. Snatch can be very nice, but not as a self rear saver. It can work as that, but I find it to be more useful for helping out other people who are being wailed on. That and, with warriors having the ungodly blade storm ability, for staving off imminent doom for six more seconds. Trust me, you don’t want a warrior blade storming through a group of people, or even one or two. Like wise, it can be good for shutting down any weapon heavy class, with an emphasis on those who use two handers, since it almost totally eliminates their DPS. It may be a chance, but that chance can save you fairly often.
It greatly distresses me to hear of hunters abandoning their eagles/owls simply because of them losing screech. I have become greatly attached to my bald eagle, and considering I nearly DIED trying to get to a spot to tame one I’m not about to abandon her. Hagewashi (Japanese: bald eagle) holds aggro just fine, and disarm is very handy in instances and even soloing. I have all 5 stable slots full, though, and she is not my main pet, but I’m not about to abandon this beautiful bird…except to maybe replace her for the pure white one. She also did wonderfully in Nexus. The long cd does stink, though, but I honestly haven’t had an issue with the ability. I can aslo agree on it’s situational use, but that’s not gonna stop me from keeping/using my bird.
Well, sorry for my terrible english, but there it goes:
What are the pros and cons of Birds of Prey in general?
P: They’re very beautiful lol
C: Don’t hold aggro sufficiently sometimes…
What are the pros and cons of Snatch in particular?
P: a hunter disarm a rogue, that’s awesome!
C: long cooldown and useless against other classes when you would prefer more dps
Are Birds of Prey particularly good (or bad) for soloing, grouping, raiding, PvP, tanking, damage-dealing, etc?
Pvp: NO, they’re really useful only against rogue (notably) and warriors (they are a minor trouble) – paladin, overpowered, don’t make difference, you’ll only take a longer time to die hehehe
Tanking: in this times, when I can even tank Zul’farrak with just two more player with a cat (!), I can say yes!
Soloing: They’re good, but that famous thing about the wing… it really drives me mad, trying to click something, but only clicking in the bird…………
Damage-dealing: nothing compared to ferocity pets.
I guess i’m not able to aswer the other questions, but I recomend the bird as an option, not the main pet. Snatch is good, but limited. If you’re looking for cunning pets, i would recommend a Sillthid, cause his ability stops the enemy 4 sec, so i can run a lot and save or ranged attack him, dominate him sustaining the distance with concussive shot and make the enemy run away!
If you were gonna be a pvp hunter and not spec mm this would be the most viable pet imo, cause chimera shot (mm 51 point talent for those of you who may not know) dissarms for 10sec when used on a target afflicted with your scorpid sting, its basically the same cd as snatch cause it can only be used once per minute, and dissarm has saved me with quite a bit of trouble with warriors and spamstring and stuff, it also messes up a retadin
@Palla aye, pretty much realizing what I let go, but it is done /wipes a silent tear off my cheek. I have Nuramoc(lvl 70 Rare) Chimy that I tamed some time ago, and really enjoy hunting with her. But her neon 2 shades of purple has me looking at her as if she is made of plastic that I got from China. LOL, I nkow, I know, but it is how I view her. So last night I saw a Chimaerok Devouorer on Petopida and said to myself, “Self, that looks like like a live and breathing animal” (looks like my ferret too – the colours, darling, the colours!), so off to tame the dear. Little, LOL, that is an understatement. After all it was on an idland, I have never seen before next to a NE town. Got there, and travel the island the wrong direction, finally finding the trail into the interland. And preceeded to die, and died, and died, and died, and buff myself to 10,000 health and died, and died and died again. Finally learning a lesson in futility, I tamed a Chimaerok elite 61. That one became mine! So now I am going to toss a coin – the rare whose colours I don’t care for or the Chimaerok, who I have to level up? Oh the pain of it all.
I’m derailing this, sorry Mania! But Sig, and anyone else really, but there are a couple of good places to level up new level 65 pets. If you want to keep questing, either of the two new area’s in Northrend, Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra, are pitifully easy, even with 65s. Grinding spots in particular are the mine in Farshire, or the murloc area in the Northwest. Both feature easy to kill, fast respawning areas. The murlocs a are a bit easier, if for no other reason then the footmen in the cave can use mortal stroke. Er, strike.
Count me as another owl lover who has shelved their owl in favor of another pet. My 29 dedicated PVP hunter still has one, however, and it’s pretty good for that. But I wouldn’t quest or solo with her.
I’m planning to try a Fjord Hawk for battlegrounds later on. There are probably better pets for PvP, but it’s good payback when a rogue dismantles you.
However, Snatch really needs its focus cost removed. If you have Claw on autocast, just hitting the button will give a “not enough focus” message and Snatch won’t cast. The only way to make it go off reliably is to turn Claw off, which will cut down your bird’s damage pretty severely.
I’m noticing a lot of comments about certain pets being “specialized” pets. THAT is why I’m thinking they gave us the extra pet slots and made leveling a lower pet not as tedious… Warlocks have quite a few specialized pets… why not hunters? Instance runs, Grinding/Soloing, PVP… Heck even RP can now have it’s own flavor pet. It makes a hunter MUCH more versatile without retraining a pet. Now if only we could summon them like Warlocks do on a whim… Perhaps with different whistles? I think I’d use one or several bag slots so I could summon ANY of my pets at any moment…
Snatch Pros:
It grays out a LOT of melee abilities, solidly gimping warriors, dks, and rogues for its duration.
It works no matter whether the pet is the one who has agro or not (the player/mob is pounding on *you* and the pet can still steal his weapon).
It works whether or not the pet is facing the mob/player (your pet can be behind the target and it works just fine).
The AI doesn’t seem to waste any focus points on it unless the pet is already in range to use it effectively, and also seems to tell (in pve) whether or not the mob even has a weapon to disarm (and casts or not accordingly). So if your pve mob is standing toe to toe with the pet but *casting* (not using melee), the pet won’t bother disarming it.
If *you* were the one getting pounded by the guy with the snatched weapon, the difference in dps poured onto your head can be what turns a close fight.
——
And now for the cons:
OMG the cooldown! Yeah yeah I have all the points in “make this pop faster” that I can have at 71 but still.
YOUR PET MUST BE IN MELEE RANGE TO THE TARGET (trust me, in battlegrounds this is an issue as it means you *cannot* use your pet to “pin” one target while dealing with another if you wish the disarm to help *you*)
That same AI that’s great for PVE blows hard in PVP because your pet disarms the dagger from that first poor gnome priest who healed his rogue buddy (mostly because the gnome will auto-attack with his weapon) — which is clearly MUCH more deadly than the nelf rogue who’se sticking knives in your organs in alphabetical order.
You can only snatch *one* player/mob’s weapon at a time. Yeah…you got the warrior’s pointy stick, good for you – mind that rogue’s dagger up your….
It does not disarm wands even though the manaless bastages can be fired at you when you’re toe to toe with a caster. Good you took the gnome’s knife – but he’s burning me to death with a *wand* BAH!
Overall I have to say that I’ve got other pets that I prefer to the bird of prey. He’s fine for pve and *great* in 1:1 pvp against melee heavy classes. But overall in those situations in the battleground where you and the pet are on different targets, or (hopefully) the target is on your pet and not you, it’s just not that impressive.
Had a bird a long time as pet, mostly because of screech. I mean, the skill did damage, reduced the damage the pet took, and it generated AOE aggro without taking anything out of crowd control. Now that was a great skill!
Snatch? It’s ok, for PvP. For PvE, it’s just too situational to be really worthwhile. I prefer pets whichs ability is nearly always of use.
Unbelievably useful for the dragon boss in utgarde Pinnacle. But other than that…eh.
I know this is an old RFC but I just had to comment.
I always got owned by Death Knights in PvP within seconds, particularly 1on1.
However, today I respecced SV and tamed one of these. Went into WSG and found myself alone in enemy flag room with a Death Knight. He got snatched and he didnt know what hit him. Between snatch and Wyvern, I totally owned him. Slowly, but Job Done easy.
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