Patch 3.0.8 hit the live servers this morning, and it’s a doozy. As always, you can find the latest patch notes on WoW’s patch notes page, but here’s some of the hunter-specific bits:
Hunters
- Hunter Aspects are now off the Global Cooldown again. They still have a shared 1 second cooldown.
- All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.
- Arcane Shot: Mana cost lowered to match the cost of Steady Shot.
- Aspect of the Wild – This aspect is now raid-wide.
- Call of the Wild: The benefit from this pet talent now applies to only the Hunter and their own pet.
- Deterrence: Design changed to grant 100% parry and 100% chance to “deflect” spells coming from the front, but prevents the Hunter from attacking. Lasts 5 seconds and has a 90 second cooldown.
- Explosive Shot: Damage increased substantially, and additional scaling added to compensate Survival Hunters for the decrease in power of Steady Shot. No longer deals damage to secondary targets.
- Ferocious Inspiration: This talent now also increase the damage the Hunter does with Arcane Shot by 3/6/9%.
- Improved Tracking(Survival): This talent has been slightly re-designed. Now reads: While tracking Beasts, Demons, Dragonkin, Elementals, Giants, Humanoids and Undead, all ranged damage done to those types is increased by 1/2/3/4/5%.
- Kill Shot – Cooldown reduced to 15 seconds, down from 35 sec.
- Kindred Spirits: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
- Lock and Load: Now has a 30 second cooldown.
- Readiness: No longer resets the cooldown on Bestial Wrath.
- Steady Shot: Now gains 10% of attack power as damage instead of 20%.
- Serpent’s Swiftness: This talent now grants only 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet. The hunter attack speed bonus is unchanged.
- Tranquilizing Shot (Hunter): Cooldown increased to 8 sec, up from 6. Mana cost reduced to 8%, down from 12%.
- Unleashed Fury: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
- Viper Sting: Now drains a percentage of maximum mana.
- Volley: The damage has been reduced on all ranks by approximately 30% (including attack power scaling).
Pets
- All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.
- The coefficient of Rake (Cat) and Scorpid Poison (Scorpid) has been lowered.
- Rake: This hunter pet ability has had its damage adjusted to prevent unreasonable scaling with attack power.
- Scorpid Poison: No longer stacks. The damage has been adjusted to prevent unreasonable scaling with attack power.
- Spirit Strike (hunter pet ability) now has an initial attack (which can crit) and then a single dot. Damage overall is higher.
Glyphs
- Glyph of Deterrence: Now -10 seconds instead of -20.
Bug Fixes
Hunters
- Aspects: All aspects now have a 1 second global cooldown.
- Aspect of the Beast: Will now increase Hunter pet attack power by the correct amount.
- Aspect of the Viper: Beast Lore, Scare Beast, and Tame Beast will no longer trigger mana regeneration from this ability.
- Call of the Wild: Now only works on the pet and their own master.
- Carrion Feeder: No longer causes extremely large amounts of threat when the pet gains happiness.
- Chimera Shot: The secondary effects of this shot will now still be triggered even when the target dies from the ability’s damage.
- Cower: Now longer shares a cooldown with Growl, but has its own separate cooldown.
- Dust Cloud: This pet ability will now be cast by the pet at the target instead of while they are moving toward the target.
- Marked for Death: Now works properly for Steady Shot and Glyph of Steady Shot.
- Master’s Call: Now makes the pet immune to roots and snares for the duration as well, allowing the pet to break roots on the target even when the pet is rooted.
- Nether Shock: Pets will now correctly use this ability on all targets, not just mana users.
- Noxious Stings: When this talent triggers Wyvern Sting, the Wyvern Sting will now last the proper duration.
- Owl’s Focus: Free abilities will no longer consume this effect.
- Prowl: This ability will no longer sometimes turn autocast on by itself.
- Sniper Training: Now increases the damage of Aimed Shot by the correct amount.
- Spirit Strike: This pet ability’s duration and period have both been reduced to 6 seconds.
- Spore Cloud: This ability will now work properly.
- Swipe: The tooltip has been adjusted.
- Tracking: Entering an arena no longer disables tracking types.
- Fixed a bug that allowed Viper’s Sting to target death knights. They are now invalid targets.
Items
- Gronstalker Set: The Aspect of Viper bonus from this set has been changed to work correctly with the redesigned Aspect of the Viper.
In addition, Vaneras posted yesterday to let us know that for the moment, there is a small hunter bug with aspects in 3.0.8:
When the next minor content patch is released players may notice three separate issues:
- The warlock spell Ritual of Summoning can only be used once every two minutes.
- There are some human female animation errors, specifically when using two-handed weapons or shooting with a ranged weapon.
- Some Hunter aspects behave as if they still have a global cooldown. The design is that Hunter Aspects should not be on the GCD.
We are addressing these issues and we try to get this fixed as soon as we can.
And finally, we also know there there are some unannounced changes to pets with this patch:
- Blue Flutterers and Royal Blue Flutterers — the low level blue moths of Bloodmyst Isle — can finally be tamed!
- The Sapphire Hive Queen can no longer be tamed.
- You can no longer tame the three Oracles spirits: the Spirit of Ha-Khalan (aka ghostly croc), the Spirit of Atha (aka ghostly hydra), or the Spirit of Koosu (aka slime). Already-tamed versions of the Spirits (and the Sapphire Hive Queen, for that matter) seem to be fine, though.
- Gezzarak the Huntress, the hard-to-tame black warp stalker with the impressive summoning effects, is apparently fixed. (She had been suffering from the same maladies that originally affected the Death Ravager — she couldn’t be buffed or healed other than via Mend Pet and wouldn’t attack other players in PvP.)
Egad that’s a lot of changes! And I’ve probably missed things … Feel free to drop me an e-mail or leave a comment to let me know what I forgot.
I haven’t had a chance to update Petopia is a bit so I’ve got a ton of work ahead of me today. Luckily I was planning to take the day off to watch the inauguration anyway, so I guess I’ll do both at once.
[edit]
Unfortunately, it looks like we actually lost the ability to tame Gezzarak completely. I have no idea why they would have done that at the same time that they fixed the problems with her, so perhaps it’s unintended and we’ll get her back. *crossing fingers*
I’ve updated Petopia with most of the new info, but I still have a backlog of updates and in fact I haven’t gotten a chance to mark Gezzarak as Cannot Be Tamed yet. Unfortunately I have temporarily lost access to Petopia’s FTP, so it may be a day or two before I can update further. Sorry about that. :/
Blacksands,
Re: “especially when I add snake trap into the the mix”, do your snakes still attack all possible targets? Mine only seem to attack one, and when that one dies, they ignore others and wander off to die. They used to attack enemies until they poofed :(
The “Sin’dorei Recurve Bow” bug has also been fixed btw.
I found out when I was invited into a 25NaxxHeroic as a DPS. I had just logged on and had not done any Hunting yet when I got the invite. Prior to 3.0.8 this bow was bugged and would only fire bullets. I had a 28 slot ammo pouch with 5600 Frostbite Bullets in it – the same ammo I have been using with this bow for almost two months.
1st pull – surprise,surprise “I’m out of ammo”
/facepalm
Funny thing is that’s how I found out about the original bug in the first place, going into an instance with my new bow and a 28 slot quiver full of 5600 Terrorshaft arrows
1st pull – surprise,surprise “I’m out of ammo”
Thank goodness I’m a full 71pt BM with a Borean Tundra Crawler at least I was able to do something with my pet and traps before having to stone out and retreave the “other” ammo, then be summoned back in
Addendum to post 102
I’ll live with the volley nerf, I enjoyed the OP while I had it, just have to shift some tactics. But seeing that first post patch volly and the highest hit was 984 – that hurt. I was too used to 1200, 1300, even some(rare)1400+ crits. I’m going to miss those.
and @64 You beat me to the “Recurve” post, (That’s what I get for Skim Reading I guess) other wise my first line would have read differently.
A note about hyenas.
As of 3.0.8, they no longer have the ‘vanishing butt’ syndrome… when they sniff the ground, their tail stays where it belongs. However MY hyena (specifically was Snort the Heckler) now stands in a very different position than he used to, demonstrating a FAR more hunched position than hyenas used to occupy. I also think they may have done something to his head and front paws. I can’t verify if all hyenas have the same alterations, but I’m going to go check. Will update.
Okay so…. lots of people have already commented about the hyena. *cough*
BUT!
The ‘Rabid Grizzly’ still hasn’t been fixed, so there! *reports something new, lol*
Undead polar bears apparently can’t run. Maybe their legs are too rotted.
Ok seems my pet just had Cower stealth on.. even tho it was off- turned it on, off and everything is fine.
BUT WHAT ISN’T, my Hydra is NO LONGER HEALABLE. A priest buffed him, but was unable to heal. Bad attitude also seems to not want to trigger, and when it does it seems to not affect half the mobs hitting him.
I assume this affects the Wasp too- I am uncertain if this affects them PVPwise either, aka unable to attack players..
Can anyone else confirm this happening to their ‘retired’ Slime/Ghost/Hydralisks and or wasp?
Korzak:
On snake traps: It seems to be working for me, though I do some pretty risky maneuvers when I place them. I let the gorilla gather my targets in one spot then plant it while their attention is on my pet… backpedal as fast (I use strafe… faster for me) as I can and while the trap activates and do volley…. so far it, it helps…. but i can’t say for sure if all of them go off to multiple targets…. I’ll test it when I next go online by planting it a few feet ahead of me and let my pet drag them across it while he gathers them.
If anyone else has more input on this, be my guest…. I’m going to bed.
side note: I only wish they included swipe as an ability for almost all applicable tenacity pets other than bears, they’re supposed to be tankers for multiple opponents, but I guess the T-stomp is good enough as the CD is only 10 secs (more effective than swipe if you have a 5-pull after your pet).
Ryai-My sapphire hive queen is just fine. I was able to heal it, feed it, it was able to be buffed. It only died one time on me in four full wings in Naxx to Lady Blamieux’s marks. So I’m thinkin’ that these ghostly spirits are suffering from the same thing that Death ravager did.
Lygion – really? 1200-1400 Volley crits pre patch and you are going into 25man naxx?! After the patch Im still doing 1700-1900 crits where it used to be 2300+
Also whilst I love the variety and looks of pets… taking a tenacity pet to 25man Naxx? again.. really?!!
Ryai – How come you were finding problems getting into instances and raids? Are you not in a guild or even a server with people? Hunters have been popular because of their inflated dps.
Rudda – I think thats the problem for the knee jerk reaction nerf. We scaled well at the start of lvl80 but it evens out or we are surpassed once classes get reasonably well geared. The volley inflated our dps too much for overall damage. BM was pretty high on some static bosses but other less pet friendly fights it was in the toilet. Unfortunately people used Patch etc to show dps stats and this was our bane.
As for balance then I saw a BM hunter beat me last night after I respecced to SV (albeit I havent played SV since BC and there is a lot of new tactics and rotations to get used to), so perhaps there is now an eveness between specs.
In regards to bugs then yes the prowl and cower autocast bugs are still there. Way to go blizzard!
This may be somewhat of a noob question so forgive me I have not done much research on this.
Regardless of whether I got my Gorilla in STV or Sholazar basin, they all have the same abilities correct?
I was just wondering what specifically is different and whether I should “upgrade” him.
For example I was farming Undead Strat for Faction and Runecloth for my guild and where I used to annihilate entire groupings of mobs at a time, my Gorilla seemed to not hold virtually ANY aggro anymore. So my “45 Minute” Baron run that I would use to race and finish in like 30 minutes or less too me like 50 minutes or more.
Have I just been spoiled by “EZmode” and the class not working as intended or was there suomething substantially changed in the pets aggro generation ability.
Also…again pardon the maybe silly question, but should there actually be a “Stomp” action button up by the others like Smack, taunt Etc..because I don’t have one anymore and I seem to recall there being one.
Thank you
Would someone do a quick check to see if any more of the warpstalkers are able to be tamed? I can’t get into Arcatraz at the moment because of the lack of a key or a rogue with 350+ lock-picking.
Prowl: This ability will no longer sometimes turn autocast on by itself.
NOT!!! prowl will still turn itself on, claw and rake cower etc. . . can “magically” turn themselves on and off.
Simple Solution blizzard. . .more spots on the pet bar, or let us put them on a regular bar. Duh!!!!
@Korzak:
I’ve noticed the same problem with snake traps – iirc they stopped shifting targets around 3.0.
@Blacksands:
“side note: I only wish they included swipe as an ability for almost all applicable tenacity pets other than bears, they’re supposed to be tankers for multiple opponents, but I guess the T-stomp is good enough as the CD is only 10 secs (more effective than swipe if you have a 5-pull after your pet).”
T-stomp is WAY better than swipe – in the same space of time the gorilla does about 1/3 more dmg + extra threat for half the mana that will hit as many or more enemies (i.e. comparing 2 20 focus swipes with 5 sec cd in front arc vs 1 20 focus TS with 10 sec cd, extra threat and 360 degree coverage).
Either Gorillas are OP or other tank pets are UP, take your pick. :)
My SV hunter has a hyena – just logged in and checked, and I can confirm he still has the same neck he had before, it’s just that his “idle” posture has changed to more of a mean/slinking stance with the head held low rather than up at perky attention like a dog waiting for num nums… which as someone else mentioned is actually how hyenas normally stand; I think previously a lot of hunters had gotten used to thinking of hyenas as scruffy dogs or maybe dingos, but in fact the hyena is a very distinct creature from dogs/wolves, and so I think this is just a reality adjustment that people will get used to (and FWIW their heads return to the normal upright position when they are walking or running).
In re: their tails and legs – tail has indeed changed to not disappear, legs appear to be the same. If they REALLY wanted to make hyenas look right though, both would be shortened – hyenas have short stubby tails, and their hind legs are shorter to allow them to easily sit down and protect their hamstrings during a fight, which typically are one of the first targets in a fight with other predators like lions, other hyenas etc.
@Rudda:
“Simple Solution blizzard. . .more spots on the pet bar, or let us put them on a regular bar. Duh!!!!”
You can create a macro to cast your pet’s spells and put it on your toolbar, or a macro to set your pet’s autocast to the desired settings and put that on your toolbar.
Also, I only use prowl manually – having my cat slowly plod from fight to fight is not fun.
Ryai – my Hydra works just fine. she was perfectly tanking the Raptor boss in ZG a couple of hours ago with druid healing and buffing her.
Happynote for those that got Gezzarak, she is really fixed and works perfectly.
My ghost wolf still speed walks and cant howl though.
Whatever happened with the buff to Growl that they was going to make to counter the loss of pet dps?
OHHH NOOEESSS I hope Gezz is a bug :(. I hurried to get the hydra because I knew that would be taken away but if I had known about Gezz I would have grabbed her instead! NOOOooooo please Blizz, give us back the black warpstalker!!
I mean they fixed the pet’s stuff..so…surely this is a unintended side effect of fixing those other quest mobs..*begs*
Hy88: Ok maybe the priest was just using a wrong spell or something- I’m still worried but this is where friends come in, I’ll ask them to spam heal and see if it was just a one time glitch and if I was over reacting.
Drina: because first I never had time, and I am in a guild but it’s with friends and we aren’t serious raiders [ok two of them were but then their respective guilds evidently kinda imploded], and cause Blizz was crashing then my comp died.. my bad luck continues when an alt got kicked out of a guild I helped build, and another guild mocked me for being an american on a EU server..
And now that I do .. unfortunately have time, Ryai isn’t well geared, I mean seriously, she has about 5 quest blues or so, and the rest are level 70 purples, who’s gonna taken in a casual hunter just to help her get geared up? When as someone said, DPS are a dime a dozen atm :/
yes while you can make macro’s to set pet skill’s autocast on or off. . .
you can’t see if you need to hit the macro without opening the spellbook. . .
So in a raid, you simply must have growl and cower on the bar. No options there.
You also need Heart of the pheonix on the pet bar, because you can’t have you’re pet autocasting it while doing the safety dance in Naxx only to die immediatly because he was in the green goo. That leaves one spot for . . . which of the remaining claw? rake/Spirit strike/prowl, 2 more ferocity specials if a BM hunter etc. . .
Oi, Pall, chill out. Not “starting” anything. Fantastic Exotic pets are an EPIC reason to stay Beast Mastery.
Or, include your /petautocaston and /petautocastoff commands in with a macro you regularly use such as your shot rotation macro, like I do – don’t need to check the autocast border then as I already know it’s being set explicitly…
Also in re: heart of the phoenix, like prowl that’s another spell always left autocast=off, and activated manually via a toolbar macro; my “heal pet” macro is all-in-one* and displays whichever of the following is most appropriate for the moment:
1) Call pet (if pet’s not around)
2) Mend Pet (if I’m in combat and pet is not dead)
3) Heart of the Phoenix (for pets that have it)
4) Revive Pet (for pets that don’t have it or ferocity pets whose HotP is on cd
*The one function I didn’t include was feed pet, which I keep separate for simplicity.
The [] conditionals and /castsequence command are great ways to intelligently cover many functions with just one toolbar spot.
Very nice Scott :D Now I have an extra space for the pets that have HotP!
Very nice as in, good idea lol Now just need to make a macro for that :P
heart of the phoenix macros are a bit tricky. you can put one on your bar, BUT if your pet has been dead too long or you’ve moved away from the corpse, you can’t use it. The pet’s spellbook must still be available(even though you dont really have to use it), or the seperate macro will not be able to cast it. Not sure why, but it just wont cast if the pet has “despawned”.
On the hyena subject, the hunched posture isnt so bad. cats hunch some too, so whatever. What does bother me on the hyena change is their mini portrait for targeting and beneath yours. It used to look SO happy and cute. But now is at a weird angle and looks a bit rabid. Oh well.
I wonder why blizzard would FIX gez’s usability as a pet,then make it untamable. That makes no sense. I hope they make her tamable again.
Is it me or haste dosent affect shots like it used to do now? seems like the only ability that does is rapid fire now. i got improved aspect of the hawk and got the trinket that raises haste and the ring but when these proc they dont affect my special shots like before
Noba: I’ve been muling over Gezz and her fixed yet untameable status, after I got over her becoming untameable and other pet problems fixed and sorted before I went back to as I said muse over this.
There have been two cases of something like this, the infamous purple Ravager, and the if I remember right, Windfury Serpent? Whichever was tameable for being classed as a WS. Now, in the former case, was never fixed and made untameable. In the latter’s case, it was later made tameable for good and put in a whole new pet family.
So this means one of two things- Blizzard intentionally have made Gezz untameable after fixing her, without telling anyone [like the cough ghostwolves cough], or this is an unintended bug, that may or may not be fixed.
I for one,don’t want to have to make a macro to handle the prowl and cower bug. For me prowl isn’t fixed at all. Claw on Spirit Beast autocasts itself as well,just not as often. Sorry to all those who wanted Gezzrak. I wanted that ghost croc,but could never get the right daily for it. I hate to seem greedy,but I think we could use more stable slots. Lots of new pets,2 new slots.
Whelp just realised why I thought Bad Attitude was bugged.
‘All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.’
LIES D:
I’ve just noticed Bite and Bad Attitude doing the same ‘cool down’ affect when you use an ability and growl’s gone off. I also try to spam bad attitude since you know it’ll help farming strat as I dun wanna use mah gorilla all the time…
And I get ‘this ability can’t be used yet’x50
I mean I know my Warlocks VW had a buggy Suffering when used manually, but this is just down right annoying, I know it was bad for cunning and dps pets, especially when I want to pop Roar of Recovery and it’s a bit lulz can’t do that..
But this is far from fixed >>
use an ability or growl’s gone off*
curse lack of edit buttons
Just noticed something…the posture on my hyena pet has changed…it’s more hunched over now. Can someone confirm that this isn’t my imagination?
Yep. It helps when you read up too. ;]
Well, this sucks. My hunter is almost full BM, and now, I’m screwed :( I finally got my hands on the Spirit Beast, and now, my spec is almost meaningless! Epic fail Blizz, epic fail! I’ve been a BM hunter ever since before BC even came out!
It may not be as nightmarish as all that.
The recent trends have been to nerf the hell out of something, and then gradually back off it over time; I suppose they figure it’s better to overcompensate for it and tweak back up to equality, than just constantly hit you with small nerfs until they’re happy. They’ve done it to other classes, I’m going to be optimistic that this will be the case for us as well.
*sigh* after two days of testing on live (since I wasn’t on PTR), Blizzard left a bunch of glaring errors/bugs/glitches/what have you aside from the obvious nerfs. I logged on my lowest level alt today to try some of the STV quests and the “Curse of the Tides” end of chain quest is still really screwed in my server…. before, he just gets stuck inside the altar after you summon him and you can’t kill him unless the server resets… now the goblin is “friendly” to all, you can’t attack it at all even after a server reset.
Back to the hunter problems, I’ve noticed that some of the supposed “no longer share a global cooldown if your pet abilities are 30 seconds or more” effect is bugged on some pets… like the crocs as stated by Ryai….. The hyena graphic change is bearable… my Shenzi looks like one lean, mean, ugly mother$@#$%….. you get the idea.
Glitches/problems to snake traps are confirmed…. either blizz took out the AoE capability/power for the snakes to target multiple mobs, or simply changed it and made it only target the one that ran over it. But per 3.0.0, the reduction to its effectiveness was already felt…. but it just wasn’t noticeable until the overall power reduction to the hunter was made.
Growl buff does seem to be missing…… even with the loss of power, I still seem to be drawing aggro off of my non-tenacity pet (and I have been keeping an eye on cower)… I even had aspect of the viper on full time and I somehow still manage to draw aggro. Tried it wearing crap gear, same result.
For laughs, I went naked, and it wasn’t funny to draw aggro on a less than a 300 point critical hit out of arcane shot for them to start gunning for you when you least expect it.
mmmmmm back to hunting now……
Oops, my mistake, sorry!
yeah can anyone test if other warps are tamable now? i can also tell that my tenacity pet [white warpstalker lv 77 and imm 80] still wouldnt even hold aggro in any cot i was doin today for rep.
also does anyone know if they fixed the fast walk for the vargul blighthounds?
Yeah, I’m having a problem with growl as well! I’ve even waited until the mob was at half health then went all out like usual and BAM! not even a crit and I grab aggro! Cower off and growl on.
…Also, hate it point this out, but after playing with a hynea for a while (got it patch day before I noticed all the “special” stuff about it, I swear!) I checked it’s family move and it’s horribly embarrassing.. The highest rank of Tendon Rip does a petty 49-69 damage.. Hell, even the wasps’ Sting does 64-86 damage AND reduces armor.. A tiny nibble at the tendon and a slow’s not that impressive at lv 80 *sweatdrop* I don’t want to dig through every pet, but do Hyenas have the lowest damage of them all? DPS Pet failure :/
They nerfed my main weapons as well, so I’m having a hard time now getting new ones, but that all comes in time.
Steadyshot was always about useless to me without haste buffs, but now my auto-shots do more. Now I’m wondering why I left it on my more, more room yay!
I’m starting to catch up to my pre nerf dps as well, I just lost the damage my pet added in my spec. I’m currently 18, 52, 1. Might change if you armory her, Moltenrain SoE 80 troll hunter.
I’m noticing that even good bm hunters too heavy hits, some having trouble passing 1500 dps at 80. I just got a feeling it’s going to kill the pre 80 bms. *rolleyes* Way to go blizzard.
And just like blizzard to take that pretty warp stalker out, just as I abandon her for thinking they’d never fix her. >< *shakes fist* That was my favorite pet.
Hey, does anyone know if those cool new serpent skins in one of the Northrend instances are tameable? (Drak’Tharon Keep? Can’t remember :S)
Blargle I thought it was Cower ._. I didn’t want to be right about my first freaked out post over Jupiter not holding aggro, and I’ve been praying it was just cower stealthed on but reading these other posts :/
This is really gonna make leveling 4 pets fuuuun! >> wtg Blizzard, way to go …
And Kikaku, I’ve just finally managed to tame the hyena I’ve always wanted on my orc, and so I can tell you the pet isn’t a DPS failure, so much as it was put in the wrong ‘tree’. It’s more of a PVP pet- ofc probably not effective against classes with xx movment reducing talents..
Anyways getting back to the pet problem with threat- it’s alot like what was it, erf, patch 2.0.4? Or was it 2.0.3, I forget, when growl became broken and blizz denied it and all that.. I’m finding it seems to waver as much as anything, how some people claimed it was all the hunter’s fault for dpsing to much- even other hunters, but, anyways, with me Jupiter has like a 50/50 chance to either hold aggro damn well, or one crit and lo’mob in face.
Though it could be because she’s Tauren …
I’ve also stopped using Steady- I don’t see the point anymore. I’m critting 600 for crap crits, and 1.3-1.5k crits when my pewpew really pewpews, and that’s just AUTO SHOOTING. Then my Arcane hits for 900 min, seen 1.2k crits, so .. I don’t see how this keeps me from being more than an Arcane/Auto shoot rotation now, WHY WASTE MANA. And bullets. [not that I raid so I don't know anything outside that so I lolfail]
I think part of the problem also could be the nerf bats that hit pets- mean when you downgrade the damage any ‘tank’ does, you downgrade the threat right? And if growl is resisted, or worse it’s not going off or working right- one crit and you’ve got the mob in your face.
Atleast my Gorilla and to an extent Hydralisk are holding aggro well.
…..Growl…… I seem to remember one post by a GM or maybe it was GC in the forums that said long ago that there are a “few” mobs that can “resist” growl….
My reactions then were the same as they are now: “GET REAL!” and “What are you smoking?”
From what I remember in the early days of WoW, growl mechanics were akin to a Warrior’s taunting abilities. No way can that be resisted unless someone else does higher damage and steal threat from the person it snapped to the first time.
Growl never was and never is in the category of arcane, shadow, holy, unholy, disease, poison, what-have-you kind of spell damage — in fact, it does NO damage other than snap aggro. In other words; if you go by those categories, growl is in a class by itself and cannot be resisted because it affected all mob levels – at least to me. I mean, if some mobs can resist that thing, then it stands to reason a higher level mob would ignore it or we would see a miss/invalid blurb that tells us the spell was resisted. I even remembered that our old combat log used to record them back in the day until we saw no sign of it.
…. and there went bliz on not admitting they screwed up on that — denial is not a river in Egypt. There was a forum war back then in the official WoW site about it when they first made note of the “error” and some in the “glitches/errors/bugs” forums……. blizz never listened to them and insisted that it was not glitched when it stared at them in the face.
Then we had to do a silly thing in regards to attack power that helped buff growl…. a warrior’s shout and or a scroll of strength/attack power buff (yadda yadda) that you aimed at the pets… it “helped”.. then they got rid of that and you had to buff the HUNTER himself/herself’s attack power to help the pet get the buff to buff their growl… then they created pet food and whatnot to do the “trick”….. think they got rid of that too…. what do we do now??? talents….. good for tenacity-class pets…. the others? its a hit or miss thing.
Way to go bliz…….
As a side note I am finding Explosive shot is messing up misdirect aggro too. Prio to the patch I would fire Aimed/Arcane with MD up then continue to autoshot/steady shot the target and my tank would build up aggro. Now since going SV I MD and fire an Explosive shot and continue with Auto/Steady but seem to pull aggro off my tank after a few shots. Its like the aggro from ES ticks doesnt go towards MD.
However I havent seen a massive change in aggro from Cat. It can hold aggro on mobs until they are about half health but then I am reasonably well geared so my damage output is high. If I shoot on AotV then its unlikely I pull aggro.
The problem with pets is gear scaling:
In raids pets have lots of buffs and scale very well so do lots of damage hence the BM nerf.
Outside of raids the pets dont have buffs and if your gear is good it goes the opposite way so you scale better than the pet and thus are more likely to beat its aggro.
This is the crux of the pet problem so growl is only a factor. Rather than them buffing growl I would like to see more pet scaling from gear and no benefit from buffs. This solves over inflated pet dps in raids and then keeps a pet on par with the hunter in heroics/solo thus helps them keep better aggro.
To those wondering about Gezzarak, I have GM confirmation that her being untameable is in fact working as intended, and is not a bug. I went after the patch to tame her and got the heart-breaking “Creature is not tameable” red line of doom. Entered a ticket as a bug report: “Working as Intended”.
Kikaku:
Here you go; includes a few other bells and whistles such as revive override, last stand, and mend pet anti-spam* :)
#show
/castsequence [target=pet,noexists,nomodifier] Call Pet;[target=pet,dead,combat,pet:devilsaur/wasp] reset=600 Heart of the Phoenix, Revive Pet;[target=pet,dead][modifier] Revive Pet;[pet:turtle] reset=15 Mend Pet,Last Stand,n;reset=15 Mend Pet,n
Noba:
I’m way ahead of you – this macro lets you explicitly choose revive pet (which works 100% reliably) if you hold down any modifier key while clicking on the macro – this is necessary if your pet is dead but its corpse is not close enough to count as “existing”.
*Once you cast mend pet, icon switches to a ? until spell is finished, to prevent overuse and wasted mana.
In re: hyena dmg – they are the one ferocity pet with any kind of slow effect iirc, and with a 20 sec cd it goes pretty often – why is that important? Well if you’d like to solo as something besides BM, and by “solo” I mean “fight using all of your big shots and not hold back on dps”, not “serpent sting/auto/stare out window till sounds of combat end”, then the hyena is one of a select few pets that will work for you. This is how I play my SV hunter – using a crab, hyena and spider he has one of each family and all have slow effects, and so I know whichever pet I’m leveling at the moment, I can count on being able to unload ordinance pretty much at will without mobs reaching me hardly ever (and the few that do are easy enough to handle with SV talents but that’s another topic).
Don’t be too quick to write off hyenas. :)
In re: haste, I’ve loaded up my male nelf hunter on all the +haste gear I can find and it sure feels like his attacks (special and regular) are going off a heck of a lot faster as compared to my other hunters who use little or no +haste, but as I don’t use addons I can’t back that up with hard numbers…
Don’t be so quick to write off Steady, at least if you’re grouping. It may “seem” a waste of mana and bullets, but what else are you going to do with those leftover GCDs between Arcane shots? You can “waste” mana and bullets, or you can waste time/GCDs and take a bit longer to kill stuff, lowering your DPS further. None of this applies to regular mobs really, since trash is trash, but if I saw another hunter only using Auto and Arcane on bosses, even in heroics…
Also, something else I noticed as far as undocumented changes. In the stable/pet window, up until this patch my Core Hound always showed as pretty much just a big eye, like it was still trying to show in its original scale. Now, it shows the whole model for the puppy in both windows(though the Sapphire Queen shows as nothing but a blank in the same windows now).
In my experience so far:
- Prowl and Cower still turn autocast on (about 50% of times) both on Cat and Spirit Beast.
- Improved Cower (trained to test un a raid pet) turns autocast on, but it won’t go off. Sometimes it went off when pet got aggro, which in a raid usually means the pet will be dead in a few shots.
- Sportebat is still fully bugged: spore cloud won’t autocast and 80% of times fails if casted manually. Roar of Recovery acts very oddly.
- Hydra pet seems to work fine, and the idle animation actually stopped a few times. It still believes to be a crocolisk of course.
- Stuttering gone, dps lowered as expected, added Arcane Shot to rotation and it’s not bad at all.
- Mend Pet Glyph seems bugged, or my Pitbull addon went crazy suddenly. Which one is false? I can’t tell.
I hope this can help somebody.
Good health, long life!
Levesk (Defias Brotherhood, EU)
So they aren’t going to do anything about the Elder Ashenvale bear being exotic and taking up a stable slot in my lowbie hunter’s stables? That’s been an issue for a very long time now, and I guess they’re just gonna forget about it.
Sorry to be another hunter complaining, but this is a little irritating.
RL hyenas are also much cuter that WoW hyenas, imo.