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.

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.

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.

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.