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.
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.