Ghostcrawler on Pet Avoidance
As an addendum to the Patch 3.3 PTR notes, Ghostcrawler added this comment about the changes to hunter pet Avoidance via the forums:
It is likely we will just replace the hunter pet Avoidance talent with one that increases pet dps. It is too situational to have as a talent now. Hunter pets will just take 90% less damage from creature AE the same as other pets do (meaning “for free”). We offer that avoidance as recognition that Fluffy doesn’t have the AI to get out of the fire on boss fights and likes to go in straight lines between you and a target, even if that means crossing fire.
Ninety percent avoidance should be enough to survive almost all boss AE attacks for a second or two — enough to get a heal or move your wolf (or sporebat). It isn’t intended to let your pet just ignore AE completely and stand in void zones. If you’re a pet class, you are going to have to manage the pet a little in dungeons and raids.
It was never our intent that pets just shrug off AE in PvP situations. In fact, it’s a little goofy if you think about it. We just technically couldn’t distinguish between creature and player AE before. We only go to that distinction as a last resort, since we like for PvP and PvE to work similarly. However we thought it was necessary in this case, since the complexity of boss encounters just doesn’t always leave pets with a way to avoid the AE damage. We think PvP AE damage often is avoidable (dude isn’t literally Bladestorming the entire arena at once), but we still understand that this is a PvP nerf to pets and we may buff them in other ways to compensate.
Table of Contents for Series: Patch 3.3
- PTR 3.3 Notes Posted
- PTR 3.3 – Unnoted Hunter Changes
- Ghostcrawler on Pet Avoidance
- PTR 3.3: Culling the Herd, Cower Revised
- PTR 3.3: Faster Pet Leveling
- PTR 3.3: Spectral Bear?
- PTR 3.3: Northshire Wolves Getting Sick
- PTR 3.3: Arcturis the New Spirit Beast
- Patch 3.3: Arcturis the Spirit Bear, Diseased Wolves in Elwynn and More
63 Comments
I love how Ghostcrawler uses like the ONLY AoE ability that hits a limited number of targets anymore. Swipe used to, but I think that’s been changed, but other then that, Whirlwind and by proxy Bladestorm are the only limited AoEs left. WAIT, hang on, sorry, I guess cleave, Divine Storm, and Hammer of the Righteous would technically count as AoEs, and all of those are limited.
Keep in mind that when GC makes an arena comment he is typically going to be talking about 3s or 5s. In those there is more scope for the pet to be somewhere other than right in the middle of the AoE, so I took it as a comment on AoE range limitations rather than target limitations.
Still, as I said in the other thread, the changes to pet scaling are supposedly coming in this patch so pet rebalancing is going to be interesting in both PvP *and* PvE.
I like the increased avoidance for PVE (i dont really pve- i am awful at it regardless). I do hope that they make it “free” as GC said. If you consider how many talent points a pet has, and the way one must skip pet RezPop to get the bottom tier, 3 points sunk into avoidance other pets get for free is a lot. Im glad he/she realizes this.
oops. just fixing a typo i missed above. “(i dont really PvP”) that should say. Sounds ridiculous without being fixed ><
This AoE thing blows beyond belief for PvP. It will have a lessened effect in smaller battlegrounds, but in large ones like AV, WG, or IoC the pets will be nearly unsustainable.
There is WAY too much incendental AoE in large battlegrounds for pets to live. I know this for a fact as I tried to not “waste” pts in the defense back in my heavy AV days… I was BM with extra healing and such and could still not keep it alive in heavy spots (usually botlenecks). No one was targeting the pet, it was all just random AoE stuff.
I just can’t figure why Bliz treats the pet mechanic so poorly… after all, IT’S A DOT (damage over time) among a dozen other DOTS in the game. Worse, it’s a DOT that requires some player attention, unlike any other DOT. Sure, it can’t be dispelled like a normal DOT, but it has travel time and other disadvantages. And let’s face it, normal DOTS can be re-applied instantly.
I really hope that the Avoidance Talent gets replaced! Can’t wait! And I really hope they buff up (in more ways than 1!) pets more!
Yanno, I liked it better when I originally heard of patch 3.3 at Blizzcon. Those ideas of the Hunter changes with pets scaling with stats and all those other goodies…. ahh but I should’ve known that I’d have to wait for 4.0 for the good stuff right? Cause I mean, pet’s properly scaling with our stats so BM can gem like the other Hunter specs is a much much much lower issue than OMG Pet AoE! right?
Of course it is GC, of course it is.
Personally, I found 3.2.2. really lack luster. On my end the dps increase was hardly noticable. So it wasn’t “that great” of a patch.
“We’d like PvE and PvP to work similarly”. Personally, I feel… THATS THE PROBLEM!! PvE shouldnt work similarly because they ARENT similar. There’s so many more factors to contribute into PvP that considering PvE and PvP “similar” on any scale is going to screw up the two. (TBW change being a good example of this)
Palla:
LOL I just managed to get some time on today. Admittedly I had to take a break after Brewfest (ram racing on two toons made me want to punt a sheep) and finally completing “What a Long STrange Trip It’s Been”. And of course, school is back in session so that’s where I’ve been for awhile XD And not to mention Aion *cough*
Oh you suck. How is Aion, anyway?
thisl be useful, koralon’s fire in 25 man VoA kills my pet in about 4 seconds, so not only do i have to watch my own debuffs to run out of fire i also have to watch pets and then sacrifice his dps for a while when mend pet is healing him because most healers dont heal pets, so in my opinion this will be useful
No one is arguing about it’s usefulness in PvE, Guthorm. It’s it’s PvP implications that are annoying, and GCs some what glib attitude about it definitely doesn’t help.
Rikaku it’s not just that!
Cower bug!
Cower bug un fixed!
‘Why is Jareth not even holding aggro with growl?
‘Oh bite is off. Silly me, for having to have Call of Wild, Cower, Growl and Rabid in a FOUR SLOT PET BAR.’
I’ve noticed this is happening when I zone, I mount, I switch between BM-tank and BM-dps, and generally anything and everything including stable pet.
I mean it’s bad enough when I dismount and it’s like oops Pet only has 5k hp instead of 13-24k hp like it should, or, pet gets stuck in a wall. Or pet can’t path properly to a human in a bg and darts around wasting 5 seconds. Or when my pets decide no I’m not going to use a ramp I’m going to circle the tower/bunker below the ally, before TELEPORTING STRAIGHT UP LIKE STARTREK.
/facepalm
Please just, please pet bugs need fixing. Blizz needs to fix pets.
Not just you know fix bm. I would love BM to be fixed, but Rikaku gotta disagree, atm I would be MORE happy with FIXED PETS D:
and don’t mean with ‘lulz avoidance’.
The core difference for hunters in PvE and hunters in PvP is that in PvE, a hunter can reasonably expect to be able to control aggro and keep it on his or her pet or tank in one way or another. In PvP, though, it doesn’t take much for a play to totally ignore the pet and start burning down the player. A secondary difference is the need for movement on a fairly constant basis in PvP as opposed to PvEs by and large stationary fights. ((With credit given to fights that require some movement.))
In other words, your are 100% correct, Rikaku. It is further complicated by ‘arena’ changes that sufficiently damage normal PvP and PvE, or force Blizzard to compensate PvE but leave normal PvP jimmyjacked, as it were. Certain changes are already in place to distinguish PvE from PvP ((Dimishing returns, certain abilities and spells only working on mobs)) but I don’t think it’s enough. I say give each section it’s own ruleset, and stop trying to balance all three at once. Have an aura in the arena that prevents this or that. Have more spells only do this or that to players or mobs. Have certain effects only viable in certain places.
And Ryai of course has a very good point. FIX WHAT’S BROKEN, and THEN worry about what’s not. We’ve had reoccurring pet issues SINCE BEFORE 2.0! This avoidance change? Was totally pointless. It’s 15% more AoE reduction for PvE, and that is NOT going to make or break a pet in most cases. It was a 75% AoE damage NERF for PvP, and that most certainly WILL make or break a pet. Once again it seems to be a case of nerfing for the arena, but trying to make it seem like a buff for PvE so they don’t get as many complaints.
This also flies in the face of their “We’re trying to make pets not die as often.” And doesn’t do jack !@#$ to make the hunter less reliant on the pet.
That being said! There is no way on gods green earth that this is all of 3.3′s patch notes. We still have most of the rest of Icecrown to go, and a whole slew of promised changes. It may be that they implement pets garnering all of the masters stats in this patch. Maybe something will come along to make this not seem so bad. We got a minor buff to intimidation, a fair sized buff to misdirection, a minor buff to PvE Avoidance, and a shot in the face to PvP avoidance. A good day for PvE, a bad one for PvP.
Heh, like I said last night, I’ve never seriously used avoidance and it’s honestly never been an issue in pvp for me, even on that BM spec. Just gotta know when to play yo-yo with that inexperienced player. If a player focuses on a pet, chances are they’re going to get the pet down. I guess it’s just how I play differently.
In instances/raids however…heh, totally different story.
I am really excited about the misdirection change and the implications for hunter pet tanking especially if more than one hunter is in the group. It sounds like we’re going to get much more threat generation oppertunity for our tanks/pets! Now if we could get rogue tricks to work on player pets as well..
=======
I have gone to the dark side though. I’m working on a full furious/relentless suit (still gemming stamina, but I’m throwing raid peices on that are gemmed for agility instead,) and I’m seeing great returns in pvp from it. I still really find resiliance as a boring stat, but when it’s thought of as a sorta multiplier for your total HP pool (kinda like how armor mitigates all physical damage,) it’s slightly more bearable. I’m just silly in that I love those hilariously high hp totals.
@Saranette
Player focus on pets is actually not the problem with the nerf (quite the opposite actually). It’s the incedental AoE that get pets destroyed before you can even call the out of danger. The nerf won’t mean much in a place like WSG, where AoE is not heavily used… but in an Alterac Valley, er… valley where the players are bottlenecking, pets (1/2 your damage as BM) will become useless. Just an example.
lol offtopic my dragon mini pets fly with me now? like dragonhawks n whelps
Ryai:
I didn’t mean “fix pets for BM”. No no, I want pets fixed. PERIOD. However, I was only stating how excited I was for some of the other “promised pet changes” as it’d be incredibly desired by BM hunters AND hunters as a whole for pets to scale completely with our stats!
So no worries, I havent forgotten the lost sou- I mean SV’s and MM ;)
To be honest, Ive given up on them ever fixing the cower bug and the pet’s HP dropping to 3k in combat or instances upon summoning. I really have.
COWER WAS BROKEN FOR AN ENTIRE EXPANSION PACK. AN ENTIRE. EXPANSION. PACK.
That’s beyond ridiculous. Really. They’re going to REVAMP THE ENTIRE WORLD before fixing one measely bug?
/annoyeddddddddddddddddddddddddddd
Palla:
lol the proto is purdy, too bad i probably wont bee using it seriously til cataclysm. As for Aion, it’s pretty fun.
“COWER WAS BROKEN FOR AN ENTIRE EXPANSION PACK. AN ENTIRE. EXPANSION. PACK.
That’s beyond ridiculous. Really. They’re going to REVAMP THE ENTIRE WORLD before fixing one measely bug?”
Cower even if it did work would still be a garbage spell, if your pet pulls from a tank with growl off, shoot the tank. For soloing there is no point in your pet dropping agro so you can have it, if something in PVE is actually big enough to shred your pet, You’re probably going to die anyway.
As for the BG issue with avoidance, set a hotkey for pet attack, possibly even make a mouseover macro for it, if your pet is in AoE send it away from the AoE by either sending it to a new target or putting it on passive so it runs back to you. Keeping your pet on passive is advised as that way it runs back to your side and is at the ready for your next target not being kited around by someone you multi-shotted. I’ve said this many times before if your pet is going to die from AoE in a BG it’s safe to assume if you were there you would have died too, don’t send ur pets on suicide missions and then complain about the survivability.
I’m gonna await future builds before I go off on Blizz about them just hating BM hunters. But honestly, Ghostcrawler and the rest of the staff need to realize that PvE, BGs, and Arena are three completely separate kettles of fish. They need to stop trying to cook them all in one pot, it won’t work.
Sarissan, you do know that the COWER BUG has become a blanket term for ALL abilities, ALL. From growl to bad attitude to pummel, turning themselves ON AND OFF at random, right? it’s NOT about Cower itself. It STARTED with Cower, it SPREAD.
So instead of just saying ‘that damn pet spell problem where all the pet spells turn themselves on or off randomly whenever you zone, enter or exit an instance, have a pet die and rez it, dismiss and summon pet, even sneeze in the direction of your pet’, over the course of a few months, most if not all hunters at petopia, have dubbed this mess ‘Cower Bug’ mess. Which is what saved my ass in a group when my pet decided IMA GONNA HAVE GROWL ON MASTER.
IMA GONNA GROWL THIS TANKADINS MOBS!!! Pet ofc pulls aggro, somehow, and pet dies cause ofc I’m not expecting it to do that then mob came for me, I fd, and it went straight to the healer
OOPS.
And that’s a really nice post you’re giving us, mean, oh if your pet dies it would have died anyways and you would have died too, so if it dies it’s your own fault.
Yeah cause I mean 75% avoidance and Mend Pet isn’t so bad. Mean pets get ate enough when you have that, and even probably with the %/%/% talent for magical resistance. But the thing is there’s SOME survivability there and WETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT SOMETIMES you have to be the one to zerg thru that AOE spamstorm to stop the spammers, I’ve done it, I’ve seen others do it, I’ve sent my pets in thru it. It’s not pretty but sometimes drastic measures are called for.
I mean when I get to the bridge in AV [as most of you know I am a horde player 80% of the time], it’s a HAILSTORM of AoE’s and you can’t always just stand back, especially if BM and just pew pew pew, your pet is part of your damage, it’s an extension of yourself. And sometimes IT is the only thing to go un noticed and take out the annoying resto- or distract it from spam healing the people you are trying to kill and get past.
This isn’t about pets dying anyways. This is about pets having, when this happens NO planned protection against ANY AoE spell. None.
Nada.
And extra talents in armor or stam won’t help. It’s like just saying a DPS can tank, just cause it has Bear form or a Shield or Frost Presence. If you don’t have the gear people? What happens?
You squish. You squish horribly. A good example is when Aria was in a CoS hc run, the tank decided to screw everyone over cause they couldn’t get to the bronze dragonkin and save it in time for the mount. The feral DPS decided to try and go bear cause mean it was that or nothing. And Aria told me it took everything they had, even herself helping a RESTO heal that druid to keep him alive.
This, is what we’re looking forward to. Not just pet taking damage and dying like anyone else.
Pet taking damage and just dying like a kite in a storm; no protection. At all.
And sorry for the misread then Rikaku.
Just, the pet bugs, the pet buuuugs.
Tho I admit it is funny when your pet gets stuck ON A TREE and a mob aggros it and keeps trying to attack and from your pet you get an ‘evade evade evade’ spam message.
Pets = customizable DOTBOT sprinkled with gimmick abilities that req a pet to stay alive
Blizzard needs to come up with a way to make it more than a simple extra DPS source with tilting around % of total damage contributed.
“Cower even if it did work would still be a garbage spell, if your pet pulls from a tank with growl off, shoot the tank. For soloing there is no point in your pet dropping agro so you can have it, if something in PVE is actually big enough to shred your pet, You’re probably going to die anyway.”
Not true at all. Cower is by far not a “garbage spell”. In my experience and the experience of many of my fellow Hunters, a BM’s pet with Cower AND Growl both off can still pull aggro. Keep in mind, a great many bosses nowadays even have “aggro dumps” or switches or other quirky things about them that make that particular boss encounter. A pet with Cower and Growl off is a bigger threat issue than a pet with Cower on.
And of course in soloing, that (you said) applies. However, as Ryai pointed out, the “Cower Bug” is the term for any Auto-Cast bug. And once you look at it like that, are you still willing to tell me that the autocast bug isn’t an issue in soloing? Your pet not growling, not clawing, not biting, not raking, etc etc etc?
Ryai:
Heh I dunno how many times Heeroo got stuck in a tree over Talbuks back in Outlands…. good times?
Yeah gotta defend Cower, in most cases it is useless, I will agree. But in other cases? It’s saved my rear end. This is mostly in cases where I was in a pug with a few DKs, a paladin and a war who shan’t be named.
They sucked. To coin the phrase nicely.
I HAD to have my pet on cower, because my pet was doing as much threat as the tank and in some cases ALMOST pulled it off. The tanks accused me of having growl on which I ofc already had made sure it was off. I’ve only laxed recently in the dire brew runs but since the growl changes, does it matter? No not really.
But at any rate I have been accused of having the pet with growl on, and yada yada.
Then ofc people ‘whined’ at me about my having my pet off tank mobs when situations got hairy, or when I dared to save the healer.
This was especially ironic when a pug got hairy, the tank lost aggro of a mob, mob pinged for healer, so ofc what do I do? whirl around drop trap, get that one, and a second one whirls off WELL GO PET USE INTIMIDATE WHOOAH.
I don’t care about someone’s epeen about being an imba tank, I’m gonna stop the healer from smishing if I can.
Rikaku:
Yeah, good times, real good times thar.
oh and also, very, very off topic, but I’ve found twinks trying to do non twink bgs on non twink alts… I know this as there was a hunter who was twinked out as much as my newb cow hunter [tauren] is, aka a few BoA items, but lacking enchants and etc… [so maybe it's not off topic since it's concerning my pvp activities on a hunter? XD] [anyways]
I decide to save my fellow hunter! and then as I’m running off to go help some others, the guy screeches I’m a KB stealer and then when I stupidly try to save him, insults me cause I died, cause well 4 vs 1 is an ow situation. [this is no offense meant to people who do twink and are actually nice people].
Sarissan, are you even thinking about what your saying? You’ve just tried to clump everyone into one of two categories, either A: You know what your doing, and don’t send your pet into AoE or pull them out or B: the Your a moron category. Your not taking anything else into account, INCLUDING the fact that we have had this entire expansion so far, almost a year now, to get used to pets being able to withstand some PvP AoE without falling over. This is going to require a substantial rethink on the PvP side of things, and paying a lot more attention to where your pet is at any given point in time. Which is a SERIOUS problem when the pet is half of your damage, and there are times when you don’t have a CHOICE, unless you want to gimp yourself out of your pets damage.
*takes a deep breath* I am not saying this is the end of pets in PvP, ooohhhh no! What I am saying is that this is going to make BM even more complicated and harder to play then it already IS in PvP, and flies in the face of their own reasoning. For their reasoning for pets to not be so squishy, AND in their reasoning of the hunter not being so dependant on the pet. If that were the case they’d have given us something to make the hunter tougher when they nerfed pet survivability in PvP. It makes no sense.
Double! Don’t forget the standardized “Slightly elevated surface, so your pet won’t attack!” bug. I don’t know how many times my death knight has gone to attack something, and I thought all the while that my trusty ghoul was right beside me! Only to see that he’d stepped on a slightly uneven patch of ground and apparently become unable to move. This is actually worse with my warlock and felguard, whom is to large for his own good, but it tends to be more amusing with my death knight.
When a bug as well known as the pet autocast bug sticks around for this long, it’s a fair bet it isn’t because the devs don’t care – it will generally mean that either they still don’t know what’s causing it (quite possible in this case, given the unpredictable nature of the bug – e.g. I haven’t had any of my pets affected by the bug since before 3.1), or that fixing it carries a high risk of breaking other things (whether that explanation is likely or not depends a great deal on how it was originally implemented, but GC has already gone on record as saying that the pet handling code is quite clunky in many ways).
If you’re still consistently and persistently affected by the Cower bug then it may be worth taking a long hard look at your addon usage, as frequently encountering that bug these days is *not* a universal hunter experience. While that doesn’t rule out a character or player specific glitch in the core game engine, when the experience varies across players like that, faulty addons become a real possibility. (Note that this current situation contrasts with the early days of Wrath when the bug was affecting all hunters all the time, no matter what addons they were using).
And yeah, if your tank is struggling to hold aggro against a BM pet with Growl switched off… the tank either has really lousy gear relative to the hunter or just plain doesn’t know what they’re doing.
Regardless, this is the first round of patch notes for what is going to be a rather large content patch – the sky isn’t falling, so kick back and try to enjoy the ride :)
I don’t disagree with your main points, Nimizar, but I would like to comment that I am still affected by the Cower bug.
I keep Cower and Prowl on my pet bar so that it doesn’t get me killed, but I take them off about once a month to see if it’s magically fixed — and so far it hasn’t been.
This is actually one reason I’ve been hunting with the slime almost exclusively (instead of my cat Cloud) — that way I only sacrifice one pet bar slot instead of two.
(My addon usage is minimal. On Mania I’m using .. let’s see .. FactionFriend. Yeah, I think that’s it.)
Anyway, a data point.
Same here. I don’t use a single addon. Yet I still find things turning on or off without my say so.
I’ve taken off my addons and that bug is still there…. I even reset it the way Blizzard suggested it numerous times, and the bug is still there… ergo, addon usage is NOT part of the problem if it keeps acting that way even without them. The “Cower” bug is still a universal hunter glitch since they broke it way back when. Only time I actively leave it on where it does the most good is when I am doing dungeons and raids so as not to grab aggro off the tank. Outside of said instances/raids, I leave it off… and with every consecutive patch, I test to see if they ever fixed it… answer is a resounding “NO”. For a game with so many patches per year, it’s rather dumb to say that the devs still haven’t found out what is making that bug – there’s a whole expansion and a half to look for it for crying out loud, so that’s no excuse. The “easy” fix for the bug was – and still is – to put that spell in the visible pet action bars and click it off manually… instant easy fix and the bug no longer plagues us. But put that thing back into the spellbook and you know it will go off every now and then…. especially when you either mount or dismount. Heck, don’t even get me started on the quirky pet health when you suddenly dismount and go into immediate combat… or even not in combat at all. I am greatly annoyed that the “bug” of having a pet with FULL health re-appear with only less than half health is still there once I get off my mount and enter combat immediately every now and then.
See, I want to say about the ‘pet taking 90% of AoE’?
YES, BLIZZARD! YES YES YES!
I understand that this is a huge nerf for PvP in that the effecting is no longer there for PC targets? But I see all the disparaging and figure that *someone* should offer a lot of glee for it. As a PvE BM raider, and a hunter who tanks, this will increase both my pet’s tanking ability and raw DPS-without-dying ability. Not to mention that’ll be three more points that I can put into something that’s hopefully more useful. Like Great Resistance on a tank pet. Plus, I’m interested to see what they’ll put in there in its place, if anything.
Believe me: I feel for the PvP nerf, but *someone’s* got to be gleeful for ‘OMG REMOVING AVOIDANCE!’. :)
Well as far as the Cower-bug goes, i haven’t had that issue since about february, dunno why it isn’t affecting me, but i haven’t even heard alot of it since then on my server anyways, so maybe it affects some servers, but no others? because i definitely thought that it had been fixed until you guys started talking about again.
Hmm, maybe I just use so many addons that one of them is inadvertently “fixing” the bug for me then :)
I haven’t done actually done any deliberate testing on it lately- just the occasional check of the pet spellbook to see if autocast is all set the way it should be (and it has been every time I’ve looked). That’s with regular switches between BM and SV and between different pets for soloing and instances (devilsaur or worm for instances as BM, wolf for instances as SV, gorilla for soloing), so I’m definitely giving the pet loading code a workout.
A server specific bug would be an interesting possibility – since this is related to zoning, it could easily be a database access glitch.
Random thought… does anyone that is still encountering the problem have two specs on their hunter? I’m just thinking about the fact that I don’t remember having the problem since 3.1 came out and the very first thing I did after logging into 3.1 was to go buy a secondary spec so I could easily solo as BM while keeping SV as my normal instance spec.
*reviews thread* Ah, damn, Ryai did mention having the problem when switching back and forth between BM-tank and BM-DPS specs. Oh well, it was a nice theory for the 5 minutes between when I first thought of it and when I found Ryai’s counter example :P
@Kurasu: some of us mentioned being happy about the PvE aspect of it in the comments on Mania’s patch note post. The PvP implications are more interesting though :)
Nimizar:
I agree about the devs not caring anymore about the autocast bug. I completely agree. As I said before, its been a broken feature since pre-Wrath, and now we will finish Wrath before it’s fixed. Killing the Lich King is easier than this bug.
The problem is, is that not all these addons work that well. I can only tthink of oone offhand that deals with pet autocast bug, and that’s BadPet. Sadly, Badpet is also “bad”. It will only work with my Wolf or my spirit beast (one of them). It will not work for any other pet, so instead I have to re-download it again again again everytime I get a new pet.
Blegh. I hate addons. But yes, Badpet has become a staple in my ui now just because, well, going through the spell book every 5 secs is annoying.
Gimlion:
Honestly, some people reported this problem as early as 2.4, though persoanlly I didn’t begin having the issue until 3.0 (one of the lesser patches in there is when I began to experience it). I believe it might actually depend on the way the servers hardware works out. While this bug is standard all across the board and affects someone on every realm, it seems to be more apparent on some of the pre-BC realms more than it does the servers released during TBC and Wrath. Some have argued its because the ccoding may have something to do with how “old” the server’s hardare is, therefore that is what makes it “triccky, and that is why it just won’t be fixed =/
A/N: Sorry for any mispellings. I know I don’t usually make so many double-letter mispellings. I’m on a laptop because my tower unit is currently in-shop and blacking out. So I’m stuck with this laptop that had to have been made for a pixie cause these keys are small as hell.
Actually Rikaku, I think in 2.4, it wasn’t exactly the same as Growl, Cower and other pet spells turning themselves on and off, and I remember that time well as it wasn’t just because my computer was slowly dying to a corrupted vid care and a trojan vundo spamcrap. It’s because Ryai was of my highest level char, and ofc a hunter, and well when the patch hit I had, at the time Alice, a Carrion bird. The white double headed outland model.
Growl broke. Growl broke BADLY. And I mean BADLY. Now ofc it didn’t affect all hunters as I was still going to WoW forums a bit and there was a thread made where people were reporting Growl was BROKEN and they were snubbed by devs AND other hunters alike!
Untill several players found cold hard truth growl WAS broken, it WASN’T working. Then ofc there was the infamous dev who told us hunters our shot rotation was, you guessed it, Arcane and Auto.
Now I remember a patch or two ago, Blizz claimed THEY FIXED THE BUG, didn’t they? I mean if they could ‘fix’ heart of the phoenix turning itself on and going off automatically, as yes that did happen a couple times for me when I actually used it. Then why not fix this? Why not aknowledge this? Why not say at the moment we are unable to derive a cause as to what is causing this but we’re going to be on top of this in a patch or two hunters, don’t worry!
But I’m not holding my breath, not after Aria linked me a GC post.
With GC defending bloat.
Cause evidently BM hunters wouldn’t feel spechul enough.
/facedesk.
I just recently started replaying and leveling my hunter again, I haven’t played her since the beginning of BC. The first time I experience that growl bug, it took me a long time to find out that my pet wasn’t holding aggro due to not growling anymore. I asked another hunter about it and thats when i found out about this most recent bug with the hunter pets.
Although I understand this has been a problem since the beginning of wrath or earlier, I am not too suprised that the bug hasn’t been fixed. My main character used to be a mage, and their blink has been broken since vanilla wow (blinking in place anyone?). I guess they just recently managed to fix it, so thats what 4 or 5 years of an ability that is used a lot being broken.
What I don’t understand is, if blizzard cannot figure out whats causing the problem, why they can’t at least just allow more action buttons available to the pet or ability to drag the pet actions to our normal action bar, at least then we can monitor if the ability is on auto or not.
Seems to me that growl likes to turn on automatically in a dungeon and off automatically while soloing, lol.
I’ve encountered the “growl” phenomenon a few times even when I change specs. One time I know I purposely left “growl” off on my wolf and changed specs when I entered an instance… when the pet respawned after I whistled, I didn’t notice growl had come back on and realized too late in the middle of the fight when my wolf actually grabbed aggro off MT and and the monster shredded my wolf in no time flat, and then me afterward before tank can take back aggro.
Part of my gripe about blizzard is that when they plot and plan “new” changes, they never really, “REALLY”, take the time to go back on some of the mess and fix what actually needed fixing and simply offer poor alternatives, solutions, or outright ignore it. Every single patch that came out, I re-test some of the old glitches like pet abilities and the odd “low health of pet when spawned” to find out if some of them are still ongoing. I even actually saved the emails whenever I tell them the “glitch” in question is still alive and well…. the generic response of “reset by deleting wtf, cache, etc folder and what not” and possible addon usage was getting tiresome… and monotonous…. when even if we did play the game with no addons, the supposed bugs were never fixed unless we turn it off/on manually.
Hopefully, with the ginormous changes being bandied about in Cataclysm, a complete redo of everything hunter-wise might have a chance of actually removing most of the glitches – esp with the mana turned focus for hunters that would guarantee a complete overhaul of almost all hunter and pet skills/spells. For now, one must make do with what one has at the moment…. Sometimes I get a knee-jerk reaction to think “What are they going to screw up next?” whenever a patch comes out ever since 2.4 broke a lot of things hunter-related (the big hunter nerf included).
… on a side note…. after patch 2.4 came the advent of the tanking Owl that held more aggro than it was supposed to for a “cunning” pet due to an overpowered screech…. then a few more patches after that, the advent of the Gorilladin came and it pretty much became the star pet of choice for most hunters, coupled with an overpowered volley and you can mow down more than a 5-mob pull (those BRK videos became epic)… Now, the closest thing to pet AoE after the passing of the Gorilladin (at least to some of us) is the bear with it’s swipe, coupled with Thunderstomp….. what next?
Well as far as I know my realm is rather old, Im on Nordrassil just FYI but not sure how old…
Or the Crocalisk w/ Bad attitude coupled with TS, personally i like my VW tho…
WS not VW*
OK, this has nothing to do with avoidance, but I di encounter a huuuge problem the other day, and I was curiousif anybody else had this problem. I just got done running the daily dungeon, and was about to do some farming. So, I went to the stable to put my Skoll-skin SB in th stable. I clicked on the stable and tied to call out my oozeworm skined worm. When I did this, my oozeworm turned into another Skoll-skin SB. Now, i like my SB very much, but I also like my oozeworm. So, after a few minutes, nothing changed. i tried restabling the pets to see if it was just a glitch. nothing worked so I wrote a ticket. Over 24 hours later, my ticket disappeared with no answer. So, i tried to contact a GM. Over 24 hours later, that ticket also disppeared with no answer. It seems like Blizz is avoiding me on this problem… so maybe this does have to do with avoidance. lol Anyway, is anyody else having this problem? if so, how did you get it reseloved. i am on my 3rd ticket and I have not been answered yet. i would think over 3 days wiorht of questioning should get an answer. Anyway, if anybody know, could you please tell me what is up? Thanks.
the same problem used to happen to me when I had a Devilsaur…. right after a patch especially… I got two devilsaurs in my stable when one of them should have been Loque — my spirit beast… after another patch, same thing happened… this time I got three!… count them, THREE devisaurs in place of where my other pets used to be. Granted it took a while for blizzard to restore my other pets (especially Loque), I did get them back in the end… you just have to be persistent with the tickets and do it every time you don’t get a response back… check your email if they sent any replies as well.
I had a problem with one of my pets, not duplication, but vanishing. I my case, my pet completely disappeared, and every time I tried to pull out another pet it would temporarily show up then disappear again.
I got the usual from blizzard, delete your wtf folder etc. Did that, logged back in and now I just had an empty spot in my stables, no pet whatsoever, not even temporarily seeing my pet. but when I tried to move a pet that did work to the empty spot, tada, there was my missing pet, hidden UNDER one of the others, lol. was wierd
feh… the delete wtf folder blah blah blah etc has always been their standard reply to things that are sometimes screwy… especially if it was on THEIR end. Sure that does get rid of a few of the addon-related issues, but try explaining doing that “fix” on a cower/growl bug or even a pet duplication trick….. I got similar emails right down to the same instructions for a whole host of other issues that didn’t get fixed after you reset everything…. nice PR on that one, Blizz. The duplication thing got more prevalent when “call stabled pet” was first implemented. There were even reports of hunters not being able to access pets from the stable masters at all when it first came out.
Yeah, after over 3 days of waiting.i finally got the usual emial from Blizz…. Delete this file and then delete that file. so, i am gonn have to give that a try. I am just happy it happenbed a replaceable pet. If it would have happened to my slime or hydra,i wouldn;t be this “nice” about it. thanks for the replies though.
Finally! I get tomplay with my worm again! That makes me soooo happy! lol They finally gave it back to me.
Not really avoidance related, but something that bugs me…..heirloom items work in BGs now, to increase the amount of BG experience you get. But our pets STILL can’t level in BGs. Basically you have to take time out every time you level in a BG to get your pet up to your level. It starts out a minor annoyance, and quickly becomes time consuming.
Or what about going back and doing lowbie quests Palla? Aria does it on her nelf and tauren hunters, doing grey quests and while she gets meager exp she still levels up; and pet doesn’t.
Pets need to either A: auto level when they reach YOUR level. B: Get exp EVERYTIME we do.
I mean Hunters are the only pet class that have to LEVEL their pet :/
I mean yeah it makes having a pet original, but such a hassle when it only gets exp from killing things PVE wise.
I’ve often wondered why our pets never auto-level like warlock pets do nowadays. Granted that the novelty of “raising” a pet to your level is nice, it has indeed become time consuming, especially now that we have at least 5 stable slots. I can understand the philosophy in the old days where it’s not at all that too hard to level 2 pets as you go, especially when the spare slot was used to stable your main pet while you go out and tame a trash pet to learn the next level of skill/ability for your main one.
5 levels below your current one is a bit bearable for lower level hunters, however, when you’re a lvl 80 hunter who tries to look for the “right” pet for you, leveling a new pet from lvl 75 to 80 can be a chore/grind/face-slam-into-your-desk-out-of-boredom because it can be soooooo slow.
…that is assuming the pet you tamed is below lvl 75 to automatically turn it into level 75, not including the pets above lvl 75 but still below lvl 80 (did I even make sense?). I’m not including the few lvl 80 pets that we could tame.
Trust me, grinding a lvl 75 pet to lvl 80 was not a pretty sight for me, even if I did all the dailies while raising it. It was THAT mind-numbingly slow, for me anyway.
I’ve got a pet that’ll almost never see the light of day out of a stable except for bragging rights: Nuramoc. I spent an entire bloody week trying to tame him on a server full of hunters who wanted him as he was the only unique-skinned Chimera before Wrath came out, so no way in heck will I toss him out. Another one that I will probably max (if I feel lazy and just want to run around like a zombie) is Loque. I can understand the boredom of leveling a pet five levels lower than you when you’re at max level, I did that on my Zuldrak wolf so he can be viable for raids while my trusty bear and former pet gorilla leveled with me all the way to 80.
Technically pets will start auto-levelling with you once they fall 5 levels behind ;)
But yeah, something needs to be done about pet XP for cases where the hunter is getting the bulk of their XP from something other than killing things.
@Ryai: I don’t actually have *any* pet addons – my comment about one of my addons inadvartently fixing the problem just referred to the fact that counting support libraries I regularly use nearly 200 of the things. I think it’s just random that I’m not affected by the bug these days.
And I wouldn’t say that the devs don’t *care* about the problem – just that they have other problems to deal with that are far more game-breaking (or affect more people) than that one (and probably more amenable to being resolved relatively promptly).
Aye, the only way to level a pet once you hit lvl cap is to keep killing things that are within your level range for them to get “supposed” XP regardless of quests (because you don’t get any at max lvl., Once you stop leveling, the weight of grinding a pet up to your level is really felt. I only wish instead of at least 5 lvls below you, why not make it 1 lvl below you? Easier and a heck of a lot less time wasted in the “wilds”. If I had my way, I’d do away with pet leveling for good and have them instantly level with you like the rest of the other pets do (i.e. Warlock pets, DK Ghouls, Treants, Spirit Wolves, etc.).
According to Blizzard, they still want hunters to have to do some sort of work to make a pet viable. I think it’s kind of an exchange for us being able to tame such a wide variety of pets. But with all of the anachronistics’ being put to rest, I think this one is on my list for need to go’s. It would be perfectly bearable if pets actually got BG or quest experience, but they don’t, and hunters can have up to five pets to keep leveled. In my experience, there is no point in time when your leveling aside from like, 10-20, where you can manage that. It’s just not possible. It’s just this side of BS when all five of a warlocks minions are always on their level. ((Four for regular warlocks, five for demonology.))
I understand that Blizzard doesn’t want pets to be something you just pick up and run an instance with, then ditch, but the stark reality is that most hunters will just pick a level eighty wolf from Storm Peaks when the need arises anyway……and then ditch it. If it’s going to happen regardless, shouldn’t we at least be able to pick a skin that we like?
Er Nim I think you missread a few posts, as when there gets to be alot I understand confusing one post for another, but I never mentioned anything about addons. And to be honest I don’t use any addons, for anything anymore, mostly as when I did use them the addons REALLY messed with my pets. The infamous pets never re-appearing when dismounting or pet would suddenly random be on passive or something and just well, I never used any addon again really, because of how negatively they affected all my hunters.
And to be honest, I don’t really care about if they care, or not, imo they don’t care. They know there’s a problem with cower and etc, and in one patch I remember them proclaiming cower was fixed! And it wasn’t; when they fixed cower it was like everything broke, cause I remember in the beginning it was just cower flipping itself on.
Then it became -everything- flipping on and off. And Blizzard has ignored it, and no I don’t mean in the we can’t fix it way, yet, I mean in the we’re turning a blind eye to you and your troubles. And our fix to it? We nerfed non player taunts on dungeon bosses!
Granted this was probably also from a VW supposedly tanking what was it Sarth? I forget, but this does seem like a damn good excuse to once again be lazy about fixing something they’ve said NOTHING about for a long time :/
Oops, yeah… s/Ryai/Rikaku/ in my last post :)
As a software developer, though, I’m pretty confident that the Blizzard devs *do* care. It’s just that given a finite amount of time, you can’t fix everything and intermittent/selective bugs like the current state of the cower bug are one of the worst kinds of problems to try to track down (and often turn out to be due to misbehaviour in sections of code that are known to be fragile, so fixing them often isn’t easy even when do you manage to figure out what is going wrong).
It’s also a philosophical thing for me – I subscribe to the notions that you shouldn’t ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence, and you shouldn’t ascribe to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by inherent difficulty. So transitively, don’t ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by inherent difficulty :)
I kind of have to disagree, Nim. Not fully. I don’t think it is a matter of “We hate the hunter class.” But I do think it might be a case of extreme laziness. After all, how long did it take them to fix the dead zone bug, which was potentiality crippling to hunters?
Well Palla remember, this is people who give paladins a bubble that last for 10 seconds, but hunters barely lasts for 5 seconds, and, I had a rogue get me while it was up, in front and behind.
So guess Deterrence is our new dead zone.
I don’t even know…..what deterrence is, Ryai. I guess you could call it limited immunity but….it seriously sucks. Hardcore. It BARELY works as the stall it’s supposed to be, and sometimes it doesn’t even achieve that.
You know…. I never used deterrence… I know, stupid of me for not even trying…. but I got so used to not using it because it wasn’t a mainline spell before — I remember that “Deterrence” was a talented ability long ago so I’m used to not using it. I’m one of those that just keeps on unloading shot after shot in between running like a chicken on a boss we were burning down to use it. After I saw Palla’s post above, I did try it a few times during a run and noticed I was better off without it — I usually die anyways and clicking on it was a bit of a waste even when I time it right during some fights… as corny as it is, if I go down, might as well keep shooting than try for the “oh shat” button that barely works. Now, I don’t pvp anymore, so I’ll take Ryai’s word for it not working as advertised…. but I know first-hand that it rarely works right also in PVE. It looks sort of cool… but it’s just eye-candy (if you can call it that) and not much else. Might as well wear a sign that says “I’m wide open, gank me for free.”.
as a side-note: Paladins also have another bubble ability that more than halves the damage received by a wide margin and lets you attack with a major decrease in speed or something… why not give something like that for hunters as actual “Deterrence” instead rather than that load of c**p that we’re stuck with.
Being that my main is a gather skin/herb the pet being 5 levels below dont bother me at times except in certain area’s and zones.. Since I’m running around killing in sight and skinning all i can and gathering herbs my pets level pretty well but if your in some where you have a level 80 mob with a level 75 pet then its chaos at times..
thats killing everything in sight sorry!!
Its nice that it will be built in. PvE Players rejoice. It sucks that Rogues can Spam-o-Knives pets down unless they put points into Cower, not required, but you want a speedy pet.
So in reality, its a PvE Buff, and a PvP Nurf.
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