Word on the street is that Patch 3.1 hits tomorrow. We’ll know soon enough, of course!
[Edit: While I was typing up this monster post the patch was confirmed for tomorrow. Which is now today in my time zone. *sigh* I need to learn to type faster. Or possibly just get started earlier.]
But in the meantime I figured I’d better get ready to update Petopia. In the process, I went through all the pet abilities (skills and talents) looking for changes. And I made a list!
Of course most of this is in the patch notes and I don’t think any of it is a complete surprise because we’ve been talking about it since the 3.1 PTR went up. But you know me — I like to round up information all in one place!
Family Skills
Skill Changes
- Acid Spit: Each stack of Acid Spit now reduces armor by 10% instead of by a flat amount per rank.
- Furious Howl: This skill previously had only one rank which added a scaling amount of attack Power to everyone in the raid within 45 yards. Now it has 6 ranks that each add a flat amount of Attack Power to the wolf and its master only. In addition, the cool down was increased from 10 seconds to 40 seconds and the duration was increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds. And finally, Furious Howl now stacks with Batt;e Shout and Blessing of Might.
- Rake: This skill will now always refresh when used. I guess it wasn’t before, which I can see would be a problem.
- Savage Rend: The tooltip was corrected to say that the skill boosts “the raptor’s damage by 10% for 30 sec” instead of “the raptor’s attack power”.
- Spirit Strike: Prowl will now increase the damage of Spirit Strike (for that first attack out of Prowl).
- Spore Cloud: All ranks now reduce armor by 3% instead of reducing it by a flat amount per rank. In addition, Blizzard now promises that all ranks of Spore Cloud should now auto-cast properly.
- Stampede: This skill now affects only one enemy instead of any within 10 yards, and instead of knocking the targets back Stampede causes the single target to take 25% additional damage from bleed effects for 1 minute. This effect does not stack with Mangle, according to the patch notes.
- Sting: All ranks now reduce armor by 5% instead of reducing it by a flat amount per rank.
- Cower and Froststorm Breath will now display their cool downs correctly.
New Skills
- Pummel: Pummel the target, interrupting spellcasting and preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 2 sec. (20 Focus, Melee Range, Instant, 30 sec cooldown). This is the new Gorilla family skill, replacing Thunderstomp.
Belated Skill Changes
As I checked over my data, I found that I had inadvertantly missed some changes that actually occurred in previous patches:
- The damage for Spirit Strike was out of date.
- I showed Lava Breath and Poison Spit reducing casting speed by 50% when they had actually been changed to 25% awhile back.
- I still had Tendon Rip as a Next Melee skill instead of an Instant skill. Also they fixed the tool tip grammar at some point.
Talents
I’ve tried to organize the many talent changes in a way that helps make it clear everything that happened, but … there were a lot of changes. :>
By the way, in case it’s not clear … I use square brackets to condense the effects for multiple ranks of a talent. So for example, [5/10/15]% means that this talent has three ranks; the first has a 5% effect, the second a 10% effect, and the third a 15% effect. (I picked this up notation somewhere so it’s probably sort of standard, but just in case I thought I’d better explain it.)
Talent Changes
- Avoidance (All): The description of this talent has been clarified by removing the words “an additional” from before the percentage effect. Now the description just reads: “Reduces the damage your pet takes from area of effect attacks by [25/50/75]%.” The functionality stay the same.
- Great Resistance (All): This talent has been buffed from reducing damage by [3/6/9]% to reducing damage by [5/10/15]%.
- Cornered (Cunning): The chance to avoid critical strikes has been increased from [25/50]% to [30/60]%.
- Feeding Frenzy (Cunning): The additional damage from this talent has been increased from [6/12]% to [8/16]%.
- Roar of Recovery (Cunning): The cool down was lowered from 6 minutes to 3 minutes.
- Bullheaded (Cunning): In addition to removing movement-impairing effects, Bullheaded now also reduces the damage done to your pet by 20% for 12 seconds.
- Heart of the Phoenix (Ferocity): Can no longer be set to auto-cast. According to the patch notes, that never worked anyway.
- Intervene (Tenacity): This talent was moved from the third tier of the Tenacity tree to the fifth tier (to make space for Thunderstomp). It wasn’t otherwise changed.
- Roar of Sacrifice (Tenacity and now Cunning): Pets can now only absorb damage from the hunter, not from other group or raid members.
New Talents
- All Trees:
- Wild Hunt: A new talent in the sixth tier of all three pet talent trees, Wild Hunt increases the contribution that your pet gets from your Stamina and your Attack Power. Wild Hunt has different pre-requisite talents in each tree: in Cunning it requires 1 point in Wolverine Bite; in Ferocity it requires 1 point in Call of the Wild; and in Tenacity it requires 1 point in Roar of Sacrifice.
- Cunning:
- Grace of the Mantis: Although previously in the Tenacity tree, this talent is now available to Cunning pets as well. However, while it remains a fourth tier talent for Tenacity pets, it is a fifth tier talent for Cunning pets.
- Roar of Sacrifice: Likewise, this talent is now available to Cunning pets as well. Just as in the Tenacity tree, Roar of Sacrifice requires 2 points in Grace of the Mantis. However, while it remains a fifth tier talent for Tenacity pets, it is a sixth tier talent for Cunning pets.
- Ferocity:
- Shark Attack: A new talent in the sixth tier of the Ferocity tree, Shark Attack increases pet damage by [3/6]% — like another, rather expensive, Spiked Collar.
- Tenacity:
- Thunderstomp: The Gorilla family skill Thunderstomp is now a talent available to all Tenacity pets. It moved into the spot formerly held by Intervene in the third tier of talents. It has no pre-requisites and only one rank. (Presumably the damage from the attack scales, but reports seems to indicate that the talent does less damage than the gorilla skill used to.)
- Silverback: A new talent in the sixth tier of the Tenacity tree that causes your pet to heal 1% of its total health every time it uses Growl.
Belated Changes:
Again, these are changes that happened previously which I just ran across in my data. I’m calling them out in the hopes that I didn’t mislead anyone.
- Apparently the description for Rabid (Ferocity) was clarified at some point and I missed it.
- I was still showing Call of the Wild (Ferocity) as being raid-wide when it had in fact already been changed to affect just the hunter and the pet.
Whew!
And that’s that! I hope … Seriously, let me know what I missed so I can get it updated on Petopia! (I’m putting this post up slightly before the Petopia update, but it’ll synch up soon enough.)
Ariamodasu:
I wish I hadn’t vendored my fishing pole. *sigh* Could really use it since Im actually leveling fishing for once.
Neither:
I still don’t see why you’re upset over the Gorillas. How arre they murdered? Cause Thunderstomp is a talent now? Gorillas can still use it! Be glad you weren’t using a Rhino, *those* got murdered; not gorillas.
Honestly, if you like your Gorilla enough, you’ll keep using it no matter what, best pet or not. If you’re just changing because it’s not “the best” tanking pet anymore, then you should be used to changing pets because no one pet stays “the best” forever.
Honest to goodness, if I didn’t level entirely aoe grinding from 32-65 with a Gorilla, I’d totally still be using one today!
They’re going to make thunderstomp suck completely.
Mark my words.
Rikaku: Tell me about it, but if you’ve done Nat’s quest he’ll give you one now which is a nice up from the crappy +10 I got from a vendor :) I only level it when it’s croc daily and I’m a proud owner of a single bucket….
Neither: But right now it’s fine. How about a little less pessimissm and just enjoying whats there soon as the servers come back in the states hm?
No because I know for a fact it’ll suck. And pummel is almost worthless pvm.
Neither:
No, you’re just assuming it’ll suck. Have you even *been* on the PTR? Did you even *try* a Gorilla on the PTR? I doubt you did. Pummel does NOT suck. It is one of the *best* PvP abilities a pet can use. Thunderstomp does *not* suck. I didn’t see much of a difference on my lvl 75 Gorilla’s thunderstomp live to PTR.
So before you going saying “it’s going to suck”, why don’t you try it? Or at least if you’re going to insist upon it regardless of what people are telling you with actual evidence, give some facts as to why it’s going to suck instead of just whining about it.
That’s more then enough, Neither. Have you tried it yet? Have you tried pummel yet? No, and it is very obvious from your statements that you just want to complain about SOMETHING. Why don’t you just knock it off until you’ve tested them? There’ll be a bit more weight to your words when you can say “I tried them, and I think they suck.” As opposed to “I just know they are going to suck!”
……I heart you, Rikaku…..
I was just thinking about how great minds think alike Palla <3
I’d like to see Cower gone forever! I also hate that if I dismount or log in my Cat automatically has cower and steath on. I have to right click to make them stop re-casting and then left click to make the cat uncast them! That’s so annoying!
And pets making the talent tree reset. It’s so annoying when I’m looking at say the Unholy Tree on my DK, dismount and my ghoul makes it switch back to Blood. Bah!
Nooo! Cower is way too important for me for it to be gone forever o_o My advice is this, the autocast only effects those spells that are NOT on your pets spell bar. I personally keep Cower, Growl, Prowl(or other family skill if the pet is not a cat), Heart of the Phoenix on my pets’ pet bar. That way those abilities are never affected by the auto-cast bug. It’s a temporary solution, but they work.
going back to warp stalkers, instead of a poison bite how bout either an attack like rake or stun using its huge tail? think he could just swing it and knock an enemy over for 1-2 sec…..dunno but what do u guys think bout it i think the tail should be used for something =P
Well, I have a battle.net account, and I’m able to log in and stare at the little “Developer” checkbox, so… seems they’ve got that working now. :P
…And why should they remove cower? Sure, it’s not always necessary, but it’s saved my pets before – especially at lower levels, since my newbie hunter is way overgeared and a lot of lowbie tanks can’t even keep aggro over my pet without it. :P
sry double post but got 2 more questions? does anyone know if w arp in arcatraz was ever made tamable? and was blighthound animations ever fixed? the animations is what made me keep one for like 5 min b4 goin back to my snarler
I REMEMBER WHAT I WAS GOING TO SAY!!!!
Heart of the Phoenix pretty much ALWAYS autocast for me. What the !@#$ is Blizzard talking about, saying it never worked?
And Pikaley, I brought up poison bite because some warp stalkers already do something similar, and that would let it be like rake or spirit strike.
Pikaley:
No, Blighthounds still can’t run. Neither can devilsaurs (majority anyways). Not sure if Warps in arcatraz was made tamable.
Arnen:
Cower, I never used to use it pre-3.0 XD Now though, my poor Spirit Beast grabs aggro (in heroics mainly) like crazy if I leave Cower and Growl off. Not to mention my wolf did the same on the ptr XD So yes, I agree. Super useful.
Bah I wish class was over so I could go play and re-do all my friggin’ options and setting for the millionth time again.
Frelling, Neither, I got on the PTR before it broke for me. Erebus with Thunderstomp, by himself, was doing 400-500 dmg per stomp, when I buffed him up completely he got off nearly, a 1.5k crit.
So unless you really know the damned numbers behind Thunderstomp, please be quiet. All you are doing is being a troll, sir.
And yes Cower IS to important to keep- and if I was a serious raider I would probably invest in imp cower as damage reduction is always good :c
realms are starting to come back online.its sticking on the character select load screen though…
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Heart of the Phoenix never auto-casted for me… but after the few tries, I never set it to do that anyway (what if I didn’t WANT my pet alive right that second?), and now I just don’t have the points to toss around to take the talent anyway. :/
As for Imp. Cower, I’ve never bothered with it, because I’ve always seen Cower as something you use early to avoid your pet getting aggro in the first place, and not usually as a last-second “Ohcrap, Fluffy got ahead of the tank” button.
I’m able to get into my realm, too, but I also am stuck at the “Retrieving Character List” message. …For some reason it’s listing Argent Dawn as high pop, though, even though no one I know can get in. Hrm. If someone ninjas Old Cliff Jumper I’m going to be angry – got up earlier than usual and everything for him.
Arnen:
No it never did, but I keep HotP on my pet spell bar for quick clicking when my pet does die.
OCJ camping, ahh I rememebr when I did that. Camped for 3 month to get him, took me longer to get OCJ then it did Loque’nahak. It’s doubtful OCJ would even be up when the realms come up. Generally maintenace are realm restarts, so consider his timer to be re-done.
Yeah, that’s why I’m hoping he’s there right away, and that I’m the first one there… xD Otherwise, hey, if I’m here I’ll know what time the server came up, so I’ll know what times to camp… And Ironjaw is a good second choice, I think. :)
Curious…anyone know if they ever fixed that “Call Stabled Pet” bug where it was losing pets?
O.o Losing pets? Like… permanently?
…
…
well I’m not ever using call stabled pet. And I won’t learn it. So I don’t risk it.
@ Arnen: I use it all the time since it doesn’t require focus and doesn’t set off any real GCD for other pet talents. That and I got tired of warriors complaing to me all the damn time.
Bare droods? Never.
DKs? Never.
Paladins? Heaven to betsy, never.
Besides I don’t use Jupiter and Jareth or Abyss or Aurelius for farming [or well I wont] so having them with Cower on and Growl off doesn’t bother me. Hydralisk all the way.
The only problem I had with Call Stabled Pet ‘losing’ pets was a temporary display problem that happened early on and was solved by shifting the pets around. I don’t remember hitting it later when I was using Call Stabled Pet regularly, although I also can’t say for certain that it was fixed.
Yay!
My guild will no longer be mad at me for not having a gorilla!
rip aoe gorilla.
Im upset about the gorilla change. My hunter is only 36, and loved his gorilla, but now i have to wait 8 more lvs before i can retake thunderstomp. its unfair to the lower levels that now the pets we were used to playing with are not as good untill we get higher level. from what i can tell, my pet has no AoE. if im wrong, please let me know.
Hey Mania… Sorry to point stuff out but Silverback has two ranks and is listed as only one on your talents page:
2 Ranks
Your pet’s Growl also heals it for 1% of its total health.
Should be:
2 Ranks
Your pet’s Growl also heals it for [1%/2%] of its total health.
Really cant wait to get home from work and get rid of my stinky-butt-scratching gorilla… FINALLY!.. yehhhh…
@ Xaldin
Yeah Thunderstomp wont be available now until later levels for you.. I guess you’ll have to get a Bear or Croc is you fancy limited AOE until Thunderstomp is available to you again.
To be honest I think it will help lower level hunters as it means you have to learn how to use a lot more skills and talents than just thunderstomp 2/3 mobs and then volley … rinse and repeat… now aggro must be watched and targetting 1 mob and burn them down then onto the next. Just my opinion anyway…
I never used a Gorilla until they became so overpowered that it was crazy not to have one for farming/aoe… and I believe I’m a better player for it… my scorpion was my pet the whole way through till then and he’s still waiting in my stable for me now..
Mania you need to change Thunderstomp to Pummel on the Gorilla Family page. http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/families/family_gorilla.html
Whoops! Thanks, Guntitan. I’ll get that fixed right now.
And thanks also, Jaeger. I’ll fix SIlverback while I’m in there. :>
Mania, great job done! Really don’t know what i would do without Petopia!
By the way – didn’t know where to post it, but isn’t Terror Spinner (rare bonespider) found in ZD instead of Icecrown?
Big thank you to Mania.. even with all the fun im sure your having with 3.1 your still managing to do an amazing job here on the site and keep things up-to-date…
A very big thank you, and you are always my first point of call when I need to research something pet-related.
I know sometimes we might seem ungreatful with requests or pointing out the little things but really we loves you… :x
I don’t know if it was said someone in all these posts but they also changed the Bear’s Swipe move, it now hits all targets in front of the bear instead of just 3 targets
Yeah same as our swipe… Even if it does bug ocasionally justa s fore warning.
I don’t know if someone has mentioned it yet (too lazy to read) xD
But has anyone tried to tame a Silithid recently? They seem pretty bugged, cause you can’t teach them Dash in the talent tree… Because they already got it when you tame them for some reason… And it doesn’t work to go to a pet trainer and unlearn them.
Also, pets that was elite before tamed seems pretty bugged when you point at them with the mouse – example: “Wolf – Someone’s Pet – Level 55 (Elite)”…
And yesterday I found a even “worse” one. I tamed a white devilsaur on my horde hunter alt, and right after I named her Angel, it said: “Angel – Seranas’s Pet – Level 55 Angel Angel (Player)”. I was like O.o lol
“According to the patch notes, that never worked anyway.”
Yep…it worked just fine, and I kicked myself every time it reset to auto-cast and I missed it, ’cause it would automatically go right back into the heat of battle before I was ready for it, rather dumbass excuse, guessing they just didn’t like it.
“Pets can now only absorb damage from the hunter, not from other group or raid members.”
Hunters are less useful, who knew they could be even more of a plain-jane DPS class? I guess Blizzard is hitting them from both ends, at least it wasn’t removed.