PTR 3.3: Culling the Herd, Cower Revised
I was only away from my desk for a couple of hours, I swear, but while I was gone Blizzard brought the Public Test Realms (PTR) down, presumably for a new build. At the same time, they updated the PTR patch notes for Patch 3.3 with some fascinating new information.
I’m going to post the cool hunter additions. As always, you can find the complete PTR patch notes on the WoW website; in addition, I am using MMO Champion’s handy guide to the differences between the old and new notes.
General:
- Many of the tail sweeps with knockback effects will no longer hit players’ pets.
- Pet Resilience: All player pets now get 100% of their master’s resilience.
- Taunt Diminishing Returns: We’ve revised the system for diminishing returns on Taunt so that creatures do not become immune to Taunt until after 5 Taunts have landed. The duration of the Taunt effect will be reduced by 35% instead of 50% for each taunt landed. In addition, most creatures in the world will not be affected by Taunt diminishing returns at all. Creatures will only have Taunt diminishing returns if they have been specifically flagged for that behavior based on the design of a given encounter. [I assume this applies to the pet skill Taunt as well, right? -ed.]
Hunter:
- Call Stabled Pet: Cooldown reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes. [Yay? -ed.]
- Deterrence: Now also increases the chance for ranged attacks to miss the hunter by 100% while under its effect.
Hunter Pets:
- Avoidance: This talent has been replaced by Culling the Herd. Hunter pets now innately take 90% less damage from area-of-effect abilities like all other class pets. This does not apply to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
- Culling the Herd: This pet talent has replaced the Avoidance talent in the pet trees (Hunter pets now gain that benefit automatically without expenditure of talent points). Culling the Herd increases pet and hunter damage by 1/2/3% for 10 seconds each time the pet deals a critical strike with Claw, Bite, or Smack.
- Cower: Redesigned. This ability no longer affects threat, and instead reduces damage taken by the pet by 40% for 6 seconds with a 45-second cooldown. While cowering, the pet’s movement speed is 50% of normal speed. Cower now only has a single rank and is available at pet level 20.
- Demoralizing Screech: The attack power reduction from this ability has been increased by 40%, equaling the maximum possible attack power reduction from the abilities of other classes.
- Improved Cower: Redesigned. This ability now reduces the movement penalty of Cower by 50%/100%.
- Venom Web Spray: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards.
- Web: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards.
- Wolverine Bite: This talent is now enabled when the pet lands a critical strike rather than from the target dodging the pet’s attacks. In addition, this talent no longer has a prerequisite.
Hunter Bugs:
- Concussive Barrage: This ability is no longer subject to spell reflects.
- Point of No Escape: This ability no longer stacks and now only functions for the hunter.
Mania’s always-insightful commentary: Egad.
I’m glad to see pets get 100% of their masters’ resilience, even though it won’t affect me much, and I am even more glad to see Avoidance become innate even if it doesn’t affect PvP. (I do wonder if they’d be amenable to adding an optional non-free PvP version for PvP hunters at some point.)
As a replacement, Culling the Herd looks very interesting. And the Cower redesign … well, good riddance to the old Cower, I say. (I suspect not everyone will agree.) And the other changes all look quite nice.
My only hesitation here is the change to the cooldown of Call Stabled Pet. Last I tried it, switching between specs and back again reset the Call Stabled Pet cooldown, so I am concerned that they have ‘fixed’ that behavior. This is a benefit for hunters without dual specs, but remember that you must be level 80 to learn Call Stabled Pet. I’d be a lot more excited about this change if it was combined with a lower level requirement — say to 10.
But overall, some very interesting patch notes! I hope the PTRs are back up soon so I can try this stuff out.
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
173 Comments
The cower change is a pain in the ass. I’m not going to spend two more points in improved cower just to get my pet up to speed in PvP, and slowing your pet down by choice for any length of time in PvP is less the intelligent. It’s a lot of juggling and not a whole lot of common sense.
Hmm, hunters being able to bring the attack power debuff is an interesting change – gives a bit more flexibility in the make-up of a 10 man raid.
I can see hunters that regularly run with poorly geared or just plain bad tanks being annoyed by the Cower change (remembering that a hunter has an innate threat split between themselves and their pet – if a tank can’t outthreat the hunter and the hunter’s pet, then they have no chance to maintain a threat lead over any of the other DPS classes). However, for everyone else, the Cower change should be a nice improvement (with Cower + Mend Pet becoming a decent emergency pet heal macro).
Hooking things in to pet critical strike (Culling the Herd, Wolverine Bite) is an interesting way to create pet talents that are more effective for BM than for SV and MM.
The Deterrence change is an interesting one (GC brought this up on the forums in the past) because it is both a hunter buff and a hunter nerf. The reason? The only players that make regular use of non-spell ranged attacks are hunters, so this change primarily impacts hunters shooting at other hunters (although it should also work against Deadly Throw and Heroic Throw, so it isn’t solely about hunters).
I don’t think I even knew that changing specs reset the Call Stabled Pet CD…
And hopefully the removal of the WB prereq is just the first of many pet prereq chains to be broken…
An interesting question to ask (or try out on the PTR) Palla would be how the Cower self-snare stacks with other snares and whether or not is would be affected by snare removal effects.
Although, with a 45 second CD, one might ask whether the snare effect was necessary at all…
The Call Stable Pet cooldown reset on spec change should remain, considering it is not a bug but intended behavior. I think it was GC that told us it would do that at one point in time. I do like the Cower change though, will give me more reasons to tell bad tanks to pump up their tanking if my pet out aggros them. >=)
@Nimizar
You are wrong about the non-spell ranged attacks part. The other class that uses it a freaking lot is the paladin. I was surprised when I’ve read it, but their Judgements are considered ranged physical attacks, so they go right through Deterrence right now, making it look like our skill isn’t working at all. I’m not sure but I think their Hammer of Justice is also considered ranged, cause I’ve often read hunters complaining that paladins can stun them right through Deterence. Heck maybe the rogue’s Cheap Shot and Kidney Shot are also in the physical ranged attacks category? If so this means they won’t be able to use those through Deterrence and then stun lock us to death. I sure hope so!
‘Hmm, hunters being able to bring the attack power debuff is an interesting change – gives a bit more flexibility in the make-up of a 10 man raid.’
You kinda already can atm with a carrion bird, it’s what my orc’s been using, between that and a wolf. Even tho she’s bm .-.
But at anyrate, I’m not really impressed that they’re meekly trying to make more pets instance/raid viable. Feels just a bit to little to late here.
‘However, for everyone else, the Cower change should be a nice improvement (with Cower + Mend Pet becoming a decent emergency pet heal macro).’
Um I doubt it. With NO avoidance that’s still going to be alot of damage taken from AoE’s, and even without that, if your pet is being focused on, popping cower, mend pet and trying to get it back to you … don’t see it happening.
I mean your points are better spent in +stam and +Resistance and mend pet glyph, and spamming it/calling pet back, than reducing the damage of your pet.
And for pve situations? Again, pointless, with the changes to the AoE damage your pet will take, it’s not going to need cower unless your pet pulls aggro off the tank if poorly geared.
So Cower kinda has been broken to a useless talent.
And does this fix the cower bug? Do I really need my pet turning this on when I want it off?
‘Hooking things in to pet critical strike (Culling the Herd, Wolverine Bite) is an interesting way to create pet talents that are more effective for BM than for SV and MM.’
BM already has a talent like this in their own talent tree. So if it doesn’t stack, BM won’t benifit. If it does, then BM will. But again only if it stacks with FI; so until we know, I’m standing on the fence over here for another ‘+3′ talent.
I’ll check it out later Nim, and see if that speed reduction stacks with regular snares. If it does then non-improved cower will be next to useless. I can see this being a big help in PvE when your pet needs that damage reduction, but I’m already hard pressed to take enough points to survive in PvP without dividing up my points anymore. At the moment, Heart of the Phoenix and Lick your wounds are REQUIRED for PvP, no questions asked. ((Speaking of which, on live servers sometimes my Lick your wounds activates before my pet even takes damage….may have to turn it off auto cast)) and now your asking me to drop even MORE of my DPS potential ((While claiming that Culling the Herd makes up for it….)) for more survival. I understand it’s supposed to be a choice, but why not toss some more love Tenacity and Cunnings way?
Although I LOVE THE HELL out of that wolverine bite change.
I can’t stand the new cower change. Quite honestly, wth? No really. Wth? I dunno about you, but when I don’t have Cower on, even with growl off my pet will still threat from a tank. Now one can argue “omg bad tanks!” but any BM hunter will tell you, it happens. You see chances when “oopsie, puppy is tanking again!”, and now there’s no real threat reduction mechanic to lower it.
But yay less…damage?
Also Cower will be somewhat useful for stationary fights (like Patchwerk) but won’t be helpful at all for alot of fights that require you to run or tell your pet to move (Flame Walls anyone?). Sure, I can use better examples, but I think you get the idea.
Woilverine Bite change, well, I don’t use those pets so I’ll let Palla take the reign in on that.
But Cower is just a stupid redesign that wasn’t necessary. Sure, pets need to be reworked, but pets need a threat reduction more than random changes like this. Honestly, at this point, I just won’t use cower period. As Ryai pointed out, now that the pet can’t move out of the AoE situation fast enough, well it just makes the whole thing sort of moot.
Maybe they should tie Feign Death into your pet copying you and dropping all threat too.
As long as Cower doesn’t randomly turn itself on, I’d be happy. I thought they fixed that once before, but still see it happen.
My question is why they didn’t just introduce a new ability that does like their changed Cower does, but call it something else. I personally don’t use cower, but I know a lot of you guys do.
As for Wolverine bite, it is an effective buff against targets that don’t dodge a lot, which is most, and a nerf against targets that are very dodgey, which is mainly rogues. The downside is that you both have to hit, and half to critical, which means that a rogue in evasion will be untouchable, but that is the only real nerf case I can think of for it. Effectively a buff, and a nice one.
Ew Rikaku, don’t say that. If my pet feigned death when I did it’d get me killed on so many group quests or solo-instances….
have to critical*
Palla:
I meant it as a dry hard joke ;)
I do still think pets need a threat reduction (obviously NOT FD) but some sort of skill otherwise…well…it’s gonna get ugly out there.
@Palladiamors:
Do one better with Feign Death: have it as a pet ability that can be toggled on and off, that works in one of two different ways:
* The pet feigns when it gets aggro – for raids and 5-mans.
* The pet feigns when you do – general purpose when you’re soloing and don’t want to waste time and water reviving your pet.
* Probably the easiest to work, the pet simply feigns when you tell it to.
When toggled on, it would work second way: the both of you pulling a Romeo and Juliet act “dying” together. Toggled off, It would work as options one or two, though it would probably be much less of a headache if you had your pet manually drop aggro.
I’d call it “Play Opossum” or something, complete with an icon of a dead rodent to complete the whole thing.
At my previous comment:
It was going to be two ways, but I messed up and added a third without editing my previous statement. My bad.
I don’t really agree to that also, I don’t need my pet going whoopsie without me telling it and playing possum when I’m trying to keep a healer alive, or a clothie, which I have had to do on some runs. Not recently as taking breaks from instances [more like can't get groups :D but anyways], and when I FD I don’t always want my pet playing dead, or I don’t need it playing dead, or if I’m soloing, and I FD I don’t need my pet to FD on me too, as I boost my friends via my hunter, and I have enough whoopsie moments of letting my friends squish when I forget to make my pet defensive again.
Pet’s DON’T need an FD ability or talent like us; and especially NOT with the cower bug still going. I don’t need Erebus to suddenly belly up during Chillmaw or MGT.
Again, Cower should be left the way it is, and pets given a -different- talent, to reduce damage. Or maybe hell IMPROVED COWER DOES THAT; your pet cowers, reducing threat and reducing damage taken, imp cower’s reduced damage ability only procs once ever 40 seconds.
There. Fixed.
@Rikaku: tanks are meant to be able to maintain threat against rogues and mages. For those classes, all of the damage comes from one source. Hunters, on the other hand, have 20-50% of our damage and threat coming from our pet – a natural threat split that makes it even easier for a tank to stay ahead of us. If a tank is struggling to hold aggro off a hunter’s pet (even a BM one), then something is seriously wrong (or the hunter left Growl on). The only time I have recently had trouble with a tank holding threat was when a pally friend of mine forgot to turn Righteous Fury back on after he went DPS for a fight and then went back to tanking Even then, it was me and the other DPS having to ease off to avoid pulling aggro, not anybody’s pet (and the problem was mild enough that it took a few pulls for him to realise what had happened).
I don’t know what it is that is making excessive pet threat a problem you personally encounter so often, but the mathematics of the game make it quite clear that a threat dump for pets is completely redundant with an even halfway decent tank. (And before you ask, yes, several of my recent instance runs have been as BM rather than as SV – and pet threat still isn’t a problem. If *I* don’t need to use Feign Death to stay well behind the tank, then my pet certainly doesn’t need to be using Cower)
@Palladiamors: We don’t need any *more* abilities to find room for on our action bars. We have too many already! :)
As to the utility of the new Cower in PvE, it should give pets at least some chance to survive the single target DoTs that they can still be hit with (Lava Wall on Sarth and Heigan’s poison are the major examples I’ve encountered, although I’m told there are several similar DoTs in Trial of the Crusader). Obviously I’d be happier without the snare, but there are plenty of cases in PvE were fast pet movement just isn’t that critical. If nothing else, it will at least have some use when soloing large groups and elites, unlike the current Cower, which has no real practical use whatsoever in the normal course of the game (Rikaku’s ongoing threat problems notwithstanding)
@Ryai: Umm, Improved Cower is a 20% damage reduction ability *now* (but one only available to Ferocity pets). From a damage reduction point of view, Blizz are just switching it from 20% every 20 seconds to 40% every 45 seconds and making it available to all pets rather than just Ferocity ones.
The current threat component is pointless because a pet does at most 50% of the damage a DPS player with a non-pet class does, so any tank that isn’t hopelessly outgeared should be generating more than double the pet’s threat. (Yes, Rikaku, I’m still blaming your tanks, because nothing else makes any sense…)
The snare seems a little subpar, but without people trying it out on the PTR and seeing how it interacts with Bestial Wrath, Bullheaded and Master’s Call, I’m not prepared to cry doom on that front just yet.
Nim, just because you never ran into any problems outside one tank, doesn’t mean you won’t always not run into problems, nor does it invalidate Rikaku’s concerns, nor my own. I have had several bad runs, where I HAD TO HAVE COWER. There’s also the cower bug; what if growl does come on and your pet is threatening to get aggro? And I don’t mean on a boss since they ‘fixed’ that problem.
And speaking of boss fights, your pet STILL ISNT SAFE. I was in one hell of a run, one run so, so bad I black listed the entire damn guild that was in the group, because that’s how -bad- they were. One dps pulled aggro stupidly from the tank as the stupid person didn’t even have any points spent in +less threat talents, then guess what happened after it decided to KILL the first stupid dps and then the second cause they attacked before the tank got full aggro. No it didn’t go for the tank. It didn’t go for me. It didn’t go for priest.
It went for my pet, THEN ME. Ofc my pet died in like 3 hits as I was leveling the poor thing at the time…
But point still stands.
Cower IS needed for those What If Moments, now my example is bad as my pet died, but if things had been going a bit smother, my pet could have possibly got a cower off, tank could have gotten aggro faster than me just slipping and falling down into an FD when the boss went for me [the 'angel' in UP] after it sucked my pet’s soul out of its body.
Because unfortunately not everyone gets in groups with smart people, or smart tanks.
I mean I had days where instances were just ruined because of greedy people leaving or ‘disconecting’ because they didn’t get the loot they wanted, or they didn’t like having to put in a bit more effort, or they just didn’t bleeping speak english on an english speaking server, as why else would a tank not listen to 4 people yelling as caps iz yellingz, TO RUN UP RAMP AND KITE BOSS in VH.
because on my adventures I’ve had my pets, mostly my devilsaur but Jupiter and Aurelius managed it a few times also, grab aggro/threat from a few DK’s, several warriors, I mean SEVERAL. It’s why I dislike grouping with warriors, my pet always out threated a warrior and this was WHEN I WAS GEARING UP and the warriors were atleast halfway or more, geared for what heroics can drop. I’ve pulled it off a pally once, and one time a drood bear.
So while generally cower is useless in most situations it’s the pets own form of aggro drop, cause I put pet on passive/spam cower as quick as possible and doing that would save my pet. Sometimes.
Nim: No you didn’t get my point for it, I meant they should make it like that, as I said a 2 point talent that is available for all pets, this way cower still dumps threat, and on the side WITH NO SNARE DEBUFF, reduces damage.
But then again that just adds more bloat to the pet trees and there needs to be less not more :/
Ryai:
“Pet’s DON’T need an FD ability or talent like us; and especially NOT with the cower bug still going. I don’t need Erebus to suddenly belly up during Chillmaw or MGT”
Again. It was a joke XD. Not to be taken literally. I do NOT want pets actually feign deathing or doing any aggro dumps simo-to the Hunter or relying on the Hunter.
FOR ANYONE ELSE READING. SARCASM!!!! XDDD Rika does not endorse Pets FD’ing.
I really need to use emoticons more i guess =p
Nim:
“Cower IS needed for those What If Moments,” I’m with Ryai on the other topics as well. Just because your experiences are different then mine does not invalidate either. I know I’m not the only one to have a pet get threat before a tank during a fight where there are aggro switches, threat dumps and all sorts of boss-behavior that make up an encounter. So that negates your “bad tank” theory.
All of my experiences cannot be just be one or the other. Yes, I do get bad tanks. But yes, my pet does also steal threat. It may not make sense to you, but I do not need to bring screenshots or spreadsheets to prove what I have seen happening in game for months.
Also, I never said a tank is constantly struggling with my pet “is a good one”. Obviously I wouldn’t bring a bad tank experience into an account where I’m saying my pet needs Cower. Obviously the blame for that belongs on the tank. But has every one of my encounters with this relation been to undergeared and bad tanks? No.
Do my pets always steal threat? No.
Have I had bad tanks? Yes.
Do I want Cower back? Yes.
But I like to have Cower there because sometimes, sometimes, the stars do align and your pet does get off a mega-crit that is just sometimes at the wrong place/wrong time.
Oh I knew you were kidding Rikaku. Mostly. But you were having so much fun foaming at the mouth I thought I’d poke at you, and I guess people thought from my response that you were serious. I am sorry!
Nimizar, for clarification what do you mean sub par? It reduces pets movement speed by 50%, which is pretty nasty. That being said, and I’ll have to look this up, I am pretty sure that since it’s a self buff-debuff that Beastial Wrath won’t negate it. HOWEVER if it does then that’ll make it an effective combination for beast masters, but screw the other two trees. Blaugh.
@Nim… while we do have many abilities, how many of them do we actively use all the time? As in the main ones we prefer over the “useless” and situational ones. What I probably think Palla means is that we need more abilities that are not too situational and more of in the clear lines of proactive, reactive, and defensive. Yes, I know we have them…. but they don’t work right at times and the other classes have theirs that actually work.
If the change to cower is what I think it is… for good or ill… once they start to redesign the hunter from mana user to focus user, the whole dynamic of spells/ability and how they work for hunters will also change.
IMO cower may be bugged since patch 2.4, but I sure as hell don’t want it completely off the grid… I wish they’d just fix the d@mn thing.
Even good tanks can lose aggro on certain bosses regardless…. the bladestorm/whirlwind-happy halfwit in H UP is one good example of that…. you can’t get aggro on him and once he breaks aggro while in WW, that boss runs up to a random party member to thrash before the tank can take aggro back…
Palla:
Oh I know, and foaming at the mouth is fun! It should be done on a regular basis XD I wasn’t too wound up over the mis-reading though, textual interfaces can be such a pain sometimes @_@
Yea, I kind of did that with the avoidance change. “WTF?! WH…..WTF?!” And now they give us this stupid half assed cower change that is obviously meant to cover it, but only ends up blowing a sometimes important skill and forcing PvPers to take a skill that bloats ferocity pets talent trees even more. Lame. Not much else to say except for lame.
to take a pet talent*
It would seem that people are crying out over the Cower change without looking to see where it came from. Cower is now almost entirely like the Unholy DK Ghoul’s Huddle ability:
Huddle-
Go into a defensive crouch, reducing the damage taken from melee attacks, ranged attacks and spells by 50% for 10 sec.
I will note that Huddle is a -channeled- ability, essentially putting the Ghoul out of commision for the duration. I expect that eventually these two abilities will become more normalized in future patches.
Tbh, I’m glad to get a new ability that’ll be useful in PvP (as opposed to something that I only ever used on Loatheb when a tank got hit by a spore). Now, if only there were a few more spaces on the pet actionbar to put things….
I can verify that with Cower turned off, I’m yanking aggro from tanks. I don’t have Growl on, and I’m MDing to the right targets, but the moment I turn Cower off, my Devilsaur takes about 3-5 seconds and tears the mob off the tank.
This isn’t a crappy tank, either. This paladin has tanked for a great many raids, and is considered the best in our guild.
Teridom, it’s a bad PvP talent at baseline, and in order to make it more viable your going to have to spend points some where. Dash to make up for the movement loss, or boars speed to minimize the speed loss, or two points in improved cower to negate it. The points in improved cower, from a PvP perspective, are just one more addition to the bloat in the ferocity tree. I don’t usually use bloat in this sense, and in fact it may not be the right wording, but even after you consciously decide to go with offense or defense, your still left with a variety of talents that you just can’t afford to take. That, ultimately, is pretty close if not definition bloat. To many talents low in the tree, not enough talent points OR talents high in the tree to make a real decision.
For PvE, its better, and worse at the same time. As a seperate, perhaps player activated defensive ability it would have been fine, or even maybe as another auto-cast talent that took effect when the pets took damage. You won’t necessarily need the movement speed in stationary fights outside of raids, and in raids your pet has Avoidance and in general shouldn’t be taking to much damage if your paying attention anyway. It gets situationally better, but leaves PvE hunters without an aggro drop for their pets.
Nimizar, as an after thought pets can deal a lot of damage in a hurry, while most classes require some form of setup before they unload. It isn’t to uncommon to see a pet pull aggro early on in a fight, or even after aggro dumps come into play. I understand thats a non-issue during raids, but pre-raids it’s a fair concern.
I’m glad that knock backs will no longer effect pets. That’s cool that they changed Avoidance. That’s cool that we got “Culling the Herd”! Damn it, now I’m gonna be conflicted where to put Points at. And FINALLY they changed Cower! Even players complained about it. Geez. Although I don’t like the speed reduction thing.
Bad tanks are bad – a waste of a pet ability doesn’t fix that. If a pet isn’t pulling aggro off a bad tank then the healer or someone else will be, because even a fully tricked out BM pet won’t do more than a fraction of the damage of a comparably geared non-pet DPS class (and most of those don’t have threat dumps anywhere near as good as Feign Death).
I should note that the other way players can get themselves in trouble with threat is by blowing cooldowns before the tank has really even breathed on the mob. Particularly for BM, that may bring the target mob down on the pet pretty quick, since the pet only needs 110% of the tank’s threat to draw aggro, while the hunter needs 130%. DPS that go too hard too soon can cause problems even when the tank knows what they’re doing.
On the other hand, when trying to cope with a tank that isn’t generating much threat, then giving them a 5-10 second threat lead before doing anything yourself can work wonders. Even with a lousy tank, by the time you or your pet make up that kind of lead the target should be dead (for longer boss fights, you may just have to pace yourself a bit).
The mathematics of the game dictate that Cower should *not* be necessary to manage pet threat and if you find yourself regularly relying on it then something is wrong.
If you’re genuinely having aggro problems then I suggest grabbing Omen and trying to figure out whether the problem is their threat, your threat, or something strange (remembering that these days Omen is getting the threat numbers directly from the game itself, so there is no longer any guesswork involved). Having Omen is great as a hunter anyway – it makes it trivially easy to keep mobs on your pet when soloing.
I’ll try to resist saying anything else on the topic of threat generation and threat management now…
@Rowdy: yes, hunter abilities need streamlining badly. Between pet abilities, shots, stings, traps, aspects, melee abilities, PvP utility, offensive cooldowns, defensive cooldowns, it’s currently insane. Taking a useless ability (Cower) and turning it into something vaguely useful is a way to provide a new ability without further contributing to the problem of too many abilities. While a new ability might make sense if done in combination with streamlining of other abilities, that isn’t what Palla suggested.
@Palla: regarding the question of whether or not CtH will stack with FI, there’s no reason for it not to. Call of the Wild and Furious Howl are hunter+pet only precisely so they will stack with raid buffs and the same thing should happen with CtH and FI.
To be fair Nimizar, mathematics can’t dictate every situation. Your trying to say that every situation is going to go off the same, without taking into consideration that not every fight is going to go just the right way. Maybe taunt missed, maybe the something happened in the first few seconds that no one planned for, or maybe something weird just happened and all the aggro went onto your pet. Cower was there for that, for those weird situations were something DOES go wrong, and you can drop aggro from your pet. I really don’t think Cower NEEDED a change, and I certainly don’t think the way they went was the right way. Make improved cower baseline and put it at 20%, make the improved 50%/100% or 40% tops and get rid of the slowing effect, and it goes a bit further, but that doesn’t screw a lot of PvE.
And Nimizar, when was the last time you were in a PuG? I’m not saying you haven’t been soon, but I have been in some groups with some REALLY BAD tanks before, and had my pet draw aggro even without growl. And I’ve given tanks the usual preparatory 5-10 seconds, misdirection, the whole nine yards, and my pets ((Or worse, myself)) have still managed to pull aggro. So I have to apologize, but math just can’t predict every situation.
Now if it’s occurring in your guilds raids, then you need to be worried.
I have omen…. been testing it for the threat thing solo as well…. I do not know if I am using it right but some times, there are spikes in which I actually grab aggro for a split second off of a pet even in BM with growl fully on AND under the effects of AotV…
As to bad tanks or not, I’ve also been able to grab aggro off of one of the BEST tanks on our server via pet one time when I was testing tonight with cower off and on halfway into the fight (yes, growl IS off as well during the whole fight) since Wednesdays were our Ulduar or Naxx nights.
Yes, the sign of a “bad” tank can depend on gear and experience…. but there are times, especially in a long-drawn out fight where even a great tank can lose it. I’m not defending bad tanks here, but I’m also saying it does happen that even the best can lose threat. Sometimes, the pet gets the aggro because it is also one of the closest targets among the other melee classes beating down on the target around it (pet criticals notwithstanding)…. perhaps it is random chance that a pet grabs aggro before the other melee does due to other factors (sometimes something the tank has no control over)… pets have a straightforward AI: attack, and keep attacking… other LIVE players actually do everything else, including sometimes dropping threat unintentionally by stopping his/her attack due to cooldowns, or moving away, etc…..
‘Bad tanks are bad – a waste of a pet ability doesn’t fix that.’
Even tho Cower prevents bad tank from losing aggro onto the pet, where as Hunters can FD, rogues can vanish, priests can bubble themsleves, albeit a bit weakly, paladins can bubble themselves, droods can probably do barkskin or even heal themselves if the tank gets aggro back in time; but pets shouldn’t have anything just because it’s a waste of a talent in your opinion?
Ok maybe I should have said MORE than just my bad tank experience.
I had my pet pull off mobs FROM A PALADIN. Granted ONCE BUT IT HAPPENED.
And no the guy was not bad or an utter noob.
‘The mathematics of the game dictate that Cower should *not* be necessary to manage pet threat and if you find yourself regularly relying on it then something is wrong.’
As I said FOR THE WHAT IF MOMENTS. What if. What if. What if.
I don’t need it regularly, but there are times when those what if happens.
And also I can support the fact that devilsaurs do seem to have a slight easier chance to probably pull aggro off a tank.
And I can also verify the aggro dump bosses such as the one in UP or Emalon? Whatever, are bad and annoying.
I had my pet, WITHOUT GROWL pull that b- pull him off a tank, BEFORE he switched, and I was swearing and pressing cower AS FAST AS I COULD.
The second time Jareth smished.
Jareth was smished -hard-.
And to be honest I don’t find this viable or useful. You have to TALENT to make it useful! That’s horrible! And if you don’t if you pop it and try and get your pet to come back to you, at nearly 50% speed reduction, as I said if it’s getting focus fired upon it’s NOT going to make it back to you!
The only way I see this useful for any sort of matter is for serious hard core raiding, but even then I don’t think it’d be that well loved and accepted, as well you’re giving up your pet’s FD for a SLOW and a 40% reduction; which is somewhat alright for BM hunters but would SV or MM even bother? I mean their pet isn’t nearly 50% of their damage, and I mean seriously nearly 50%, I did the numbers with that hunter sim, and Jareth my saur, did only 300 shy of my own dps, and tbh that IS alot, if you take into account monsterous bite keeping up, the crit-speed talent, etc etc..
It adds up. And if there’s no aggro dump it could get messy.
And sorry Rikaku, guess I misread posts myself, I thought I was quoting Nim/that Nim had said it.
So again sorry :c
Edit: Double post.
If I remember right, Succubus have a Cower-esque talent to dump threat from themselves.
So should that be removed to then since Cower is useless in your opinion? :/
There is nothing wrong with having a pet have an aggro dump move; I mean even Imps have their own sort of aggro dump, the phase shift.
Tho granted that only lasts aslong as they don’t attack but still.
Nim, what Palla said is right: Math cannot predict EVERY variable down to the last decimal digit in any given situation. Just like real life, not everything can be laid out in mathematical equations. Game math is just a baseline, everything else is up to random variables laid down by players of varying skills/gear. If cower wasn’t necessary, why have it then since vanilla WoW if “The mathematics of the game dictate that Cower should *not* be necessary to manage pet threat”? What math proved it’s inclusion then and, what math proved it’s non-necessity now? Bugged as it currently is, it is still useful for those strange situations that Palla mentioned. Granted, not many wanted to tame a pet for that skill back then when you had to grab a trash pet to learn pet skills, there are those of us that got it anyways because it was indeed learnable for all pets. There was even a time when it was an actual requirement that hunters were told to DISMISS their pets when going along into dungeons/raids because they usually were aggro grabbers in the past.
You know by this point I am pretty sure Nim heads to Petopia thinking “In what was is Palladia arguing with me today?”
I was reading over some of the early comments, and I’m concerned as well with the Cower change. Running as BM, there have been times when I realized I’d forgotten to turn cower back on, despite turning growl off, and my pet was riding right on the tank’s heels. Will feign death help reduce that aggro, if pets and their hunters are supposed to split threat?
BM needs a “Play Dead” talent where when they feign death, their pet feigns as well. ;)
A PuG with a tank that regularly loses aggro to a hunter pet is doomed anyway (max party DPS is limited pretty severely by the tank’s TPS, the lower the party DPS, the more stress placed on the healer’s mana pool). Pets having Cower doesn’t fix that.
Mobs with aggro drops are a fight mechanic that is meant to be managed by player action (typically stopping DPS, including recalling pets, until the tank reacquires the mob).
Still, if you folks think Cower is a useful ability to cover for (really) bad tanks or players not paying attention to mob aggro drops then I’m never going to convince you that it is no great loss. Just the same as you’re never going to convince me that it was worth having in the first place – the autocast bug is the only reason I’ve ever had it on the pet bar and pre-Wrath I never even trained it at all.
It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun if we agreed with each other all the time Palla ;)
That said, I’m definitely a “glass half full” kind of guy when it comes to WoW changes and I also have a great deal of respect for the intelligence and capabilities of the Blizzard devs, so I often end up arguing in defence of changes they are proposing :)
I’m defending it PvE because Ryai and Rikaku have talked about how much they use it before, and I’ve known other hunters who use it heavily. Personally I’m with you, I’ve never used it at all, but this change won’t make me use it in PvP. I’m not waisting my already thin talent points just to kind of cut back on the damage being done for a bit. In PvE I am sure I’ll find all sorts of interesting ways to make it work. I am just angry because it feels like they are trying to make up for a lack of avoidance with a crappy ability, when the general rule in PvP is the faster the better, the slower the worse.
And I’m the opposite, Nim, which is probably why we argue so much. I USED to be half full, but after about the mid-way point of TBC I went half empty. I just don’t understand where a lot of their design philosophy is coming from, and a lot of their changes aren’t made for the right or even good reasons. I respect where WoW started out, but as time passes it is really becoming a game I don’t want to play.
Why not just make exploding pets then. I mean it’s obvious you don’t want pets to have any form of cower, ANY form. When it’s been said by another player he’s seen his pet ride at the heals of a tank, and I have had my pet pull aggro off a paladin WITHOUT GROWL. And I’ve NEVER had that happen before, and that was when I had cower OFF in the instance and as I said the tank knew how to tank and play.
So no I think the sad thing here is you basically saying that ‘just cause the numbers tell me it’s not needed I decide that because numbers say it’s not needed, it’s not needed’. Theorycrafting is only part of playing, you can get numbers all you want, you can have all the numbers you want in the world.
All that matters is the one time, that one moment when cower IS needed and whoopsie, it’s no longer available. What will hunters do then? Especially BM? Now I don’t really think I want to look forward to trying to get gear, because if my saur can pull aggro off a paladin in a heroic, why should I bother pugging if now, none of my pets will be able to cower in the future and blizz isn’t intending to make any aggro dump available in the mean time?
I don’t see this usefull in pvp.
I barely see this change being useful for pve. And only barely. And I mean barely as in the tank loses aggro and your pet gets it, but even then would it really save a glass pet from being smashed?
Also in the Direbrewfest fights, you know Coren? The craphead dorf who doesn’t drop mounts? My Saur pulled aggro from the tank twice in one run, and a couple others in another run, granted the tank was a war, but this guy had damn good gear.
My Saur didn’t have cower on as it had turned itself off.
So yeah my saur pulled a boss off a WELL GEARED TANK.
WtB Cower that Cowers.
Even I know which are the “bad” tanks and which are the “good” tanks and most of us who have played the game long enough can tell the difference and where Cower can be useful in some situations…. we don’t cover for any “bad” tanking, period.
I’ve personally been in some grand PuGs that exceeded my expectations and blew through some very difficult heroic dungeons out of the water without effort…. not all PuGs are bad. If you don’t like PuG-ing then, your loss… you’ll never know who you’ll actually meet…. take in the good with the bad that comes from a PuG. If we wipe, I just laugh it off – this is after all, just a game… something that should not be taken seriously even though we still encounter some brainless gits while playing it.
Mobs with aggro drops rarely gives you the chance to recall pets because they’re (the pets) are usually dead before you can even press the button… by then it’s too late, even with DBM as an add-on. In fact, I recall your earlier remarks about add-on usage from another post… there those that don’t use any at all, so they can’t pay specific attention to mob aggro drops because of that. Do you include them in those “players not paying attention” category and classify them as bad players regardless of them tanking or dps-ing? I personally know a healer that does not use any add-on at all and still pulls off amazing heals in dungeons and raids…. and also a tank with a couple of blue gear on even out-tank a high-quality geared one without add-ons.
Most of us don’t require math to see this, even though we acknowledge that there are baseline calculations especially in theorycrafting that drives the game (up to a certain point before live player input is thrown into the mix)… Theorycrafting can only go so far….. we know this because we play from the experience we’ve gained playing the game and from knowing our class’s inner quirks (warts and all) throughout the changes blizzard wrought.
There is a saying: “No plan is perfect.” And no matter how the devs number-crunch on baseline math, a lot of things can fly out the window when you least expect it.
Rowdy, way back in Vanilla WoW, all I had were PuGs. I could take a PuG made up of two hunters, myself as a holy paladin, a rogue, and a rock, and five man Stratholme. And we had to share the rock! I was making PuG groups work when, realistically, they shouldn’t have been. But the train wrecks I have encountered since then…..even I couldn’t save. TBC was bad for PuGs, Wrath has set a new standard for bad players.
This is why I PvP now. I realize that I could easily get into this raiding guild, or that raiding guild, but I don’t really have the patience for it anymore, which I know sounds backwards. I used to main heal for raids as a holy paladin ((To hurt myself, I got a lot of “Lulwut? Healing paladin? GTFO!” and then enjoyed myself thoroughly when they saw me outperforming priests.)) and that has honestly gotten easier, and viable, but the heart of it just isn’t there anymore. I think a lot of it has to do with going to expansions without a new healing spell. Painful stuff, that.
And before anyone blinks at me and says “But Palladia, Stratholme IS a five man!” don’t. It wasn’t back then. Scholomance and Stratholme were ten mans, and UBRS was a fifteen man. I used to commonly get groups together to five and ten man them well before they were tuned to that number.
As an aside, and something that has me super pissed off, the trolls in Zul Drak still have bear trap, and I friggin’ want it. Stupid Blizzard.
Something else that pisses me off ((and prompted me to post a double)) is people who give up before the fight is over! PvP, PvE, doesn’t matter! A fight isn’t over until it’s over, which means we’ve all wiped or the other side has won. Grow some cahones, and keep fighting ya pansies!
That should go along with what your saying, Rowdy. You can’t plan for everything, but just because something goes wrong doesn’t mean you give up and claim defeat. If something goes wrong, FIX IT!!! Or keep your ass fighting until your hit points bottom out, but don’t you dare just quit.
ah… one more thing… the devs (as we all like to blame them), aren’t wholly to blame really, they’re just convenient scapegoats because they’re the ones who code in the changes that we see. It’s Blizzard – the producer – itself, has as much to blame for some of their less than stellar changes. I’ve been in a production of a “product” before, and while the devs have certain leeway into it, the last say usually comes from the higher ups when it comes for approval and release. We can gnash our teeth as much as we want against the devs, but it’s still blizzard’s game… and what they say, goes. If anyone really noticed, not all of the core group that did the original vanilla WoW remained through the production of BC and Wrath…. if they did, we’d be discussing entirely different things now.
I actually like that they’re replacing avoidance on the pet talent trees after giving it a reworking and giving it to us free. I always thought it was retarded that my pet had spend 3 points in damage mitigating talent in order to get this nifty attack (Rabid or Wolverine Bite). I would bypass this and go for HotP and Lick Your Wounds instead. Now if they could just fix Wild Hunt… I’m tired of dismounting and seeing that my pets health isnt what it was when I mounted up, just to have it come back in time to get in combat and have my pet at ~85% before taking any damage…
Oh yeah, Palla…. it’s the quitters that I have a beef against as well… hence the “brainless gits” comment… Who the heck quits and boots off players after a second wipe without talking things through? Talk it out first and see what can be done to fix it, not whine and trash talk and mouth off in a group about what to do in a very condescending manner. You’ll eventually see who is an elitist jerk, a trash talker, or a diamond in the rough player who can make an underdog class come out on top. I like to PuG myself…. even like it due to the comedy factor some PuGs get into… except for TBC.. I agree with Palla on that one…. I PuG’d ramparts and was OK… then one run in Underbog and it turned into a nightmarish 4 hour run with constant players changing hands/players (yah, I couldn’t believe that either myself)…. I eschewed PuGs afterward. Wrath made things way too easy sometimes and also way too hard on others.
Actually Palla when groups are really bad or I’m hard pressed for time and things are going bad, and I mean -bad- .. I just leave, I mean this is a big change from when I would stay in an AV to the bitter end but, horde side? I’m sorry but my AV’s have been lately full of people I’d rather punch than play with, from either whiners to spammers, to people who just insult people for rolling Death knights or other classes to wanting Blizz to cater to them and have 60 only servers yada yada, or the fact everyone seems to think zerging balinda will win the game when by the time she’s dead, Galv is dead, IB is down, TP is down and they’re already at our gates.
And then the real whining and snarling begins and I just sigh and afk in the gy after the fifth time being killed in a row for trying to defend a tower/gy or I just leave.
Or for bad pugs and by bad I mean bad, lowbie hunter was in one where the tank was just my god horrible, he decided since we were just four in number, he could pull everything in sfk with very few breaks, very little reasoning and ofc on the second boss, that ghost guy, he decides LETS PULL THE WHOLE ROOM. Then jokes his brother did it and caused us all to squish horribly.
I just left.
Tbh I’m sorry but as of now I do have better things to do than rake up repair bills on my main or alts, or be a free HK to alliance on my belf and orc.
Ah Ryai…. you shattered my image of the horde… looks like horde and alliance aren’t so different…. we got morons in BG no matter what faction.
As for you SFK nightmare… HOLY CRUD! That would put the Leeroy Jenkins video to shame. One part funny, ten more parts pure frustration.
“Wolverine Bite: This talent is now enabled when the pet lands a critical strike rather than from the target dodging the pet’s attacks. In addition, this talent no longer has a prerequisite.”
i can see the “bm pet deals to much damage in arena” crys coming :D
Heh. My case with bad PuGs? This was with my druid without mangle, and I was pinned as a tank. I hate tanking. It makes me headachey. >.> Anyway, we were going about in ST and didn’t kill alll the Dragonkin in that big room. We went right to Eranikus, and everyone was like, “Go! get ‘em!” I was sitting there trying to explain we needed to clear the room, but who listens to bears anymore?
So, we pulled, I was slept, chaos reigned….and the dragons came. Needless to say, we wiped. Hard. Part of me laughed my off, saying, “:See! Told you so!” PArt pf me wanted to scream and run far, far away. >.>
Way back before wrath most people had the grace to let a tank build up aggro somthing like a 5 sunder rule. I know things have changed and most fights we can all pile in straight away for a fun dps race but some fights still are a bit too tricky for that. I am sure most here all know due threat manamegment protocol in raids but I find it suprising that a pet can suddenly grab aggro half way through a fight unless a boss has a threat reset mechanic or glitch.
If we use a threat bar like omen you can just pull your pet off the boss for a bit before he gets over 10% of the tanks.
I do play BM and usually dont sent the pet in untill Ive used up my missdirect on the tank; I rarely have any problems and dont have to use cower. I often achieve a slot in top 3 damage done if not highest so dont suffer much by sending my pet in later.
BM pets can be very bursty with an initial fight, all those talented abilties procking at once (in one global cooldown)throw in a Beastial wrath and the tank will have a hard time.
Tanks gearing up will prioritize defence so their hit rating may be low; if they miss there first few attacks they arnt going to generate any threat.
Dk tanks will also need to get some global cooldwns in before their main threat producing abilities kick in.
I got this advice from a friendly guild tank who loves playing with hunters now, so I thought Id share it; please dont take it as condescending :)
My only worry now is where am I going to find room for my pet abilities we need a bigger pet barr Blizz :o
Icecrown: Incoming 3.3 Hunter Changes « Your Best Shot - October 8th, 2009 @ 10:45 am UTC
[...] A quick quote from Mania’s always-insightful commentary: Egad. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Cataclysmic: [...]
wow @ comments so far.
Anyway changing specs hasn’t reset call stabled pet for a while now IIRC, nor does it reset your pet’s spec like it did for a while (If you went to/from BM). Now you get two seperate pet specs in that case.
Ben, I use spec changing to reset my stable CD all the time… i cast stable, causing the CD then pull my pet and switch specs and poof CD = buhbye
Ok for the record, when I mentioned my pets having these issues, it’s never occured in a guild raid setting (has it occured in pug raids? Yes, but i chalk that under ZOMGBad tanK!!!). Now of course, as I said before, my experience would be to not include bad tanks. Yes bad tanks are bad, but I’m not going to re-hash what Palla, Ryai and several other commenters stated, I’m just gonna say every fight is not the same, and leave it at that.
But Arjuna’s point is a pretty good one, so I wanted to point that out.
“BM pets can be very bursty with an initial fight, all those talented abilties procking at once (in one global cooldown)throw in a Beastial wrath and the tank will have a hard time.”
Very bursty. I do run recount and I can watch my dps jump up about 2k when the pets abilities proc (and Furious Howl) and BW is up for the first intial fight.
Palla:
“Something else that pisses me off ((and prompted me to post a double)) is people who give up before the fight is over! PvP, PvE, doesn’t matter! A fight isn’t over until it’s over, which means we’ve all wiped or the other side has won. Grow some cahones, and keep fighting ya pansies!”
OMFG I hate it when people give up before a fight is over. Especially when you’re fighting some new boss (for your group/guild) and they’re like ‘well this is over” and there’s still people up and fighting. Like honestly, grow a pair. XD
Oh and do I hate people who give up in PvP (Arathi Basin I’m looking at you!).. I’m growling just thinking of it.
Cower. This looks like a boost for the solo PVE’er but a loss for everyone else.
Wolverine Bite. This should be an improvement for everyone but esp for BM hunters – I’ll be very interested to see what sort of overall DPS-boost this provides.
Scott said: “Cower. This looks like a boost for the solo PVE’er but a loss for everyone else.”
I guess that would explain why I’m happy about the change. :> I knew some people wouldn’t be but I think perhaps I underestimated how many and by how much.
I’d be perfectly willing to lose Cower as a free skill in any form and instead get two Cower-esque pet talents — one for the old function and one for the new. Or hey, even just a talent for the old function. Just please, please get the free Cower off my pet bar.
*Laughs and pets Mania* I figured you’d see it that way. For a soloing tool it’ll be pretty good, but as a tool for anything else it’ll be mediocre, or just plain bad. I’m already hard pressed to balance pet survival and damage, and having Culling the Herd still connected to Rabid doesn’t make my life any easier. I have very little to no room for customization in my talents. Everything I have at this moment is, from a PvP standpoint, absolutely necessary, and I am actually missing charge.
While I am looking forward to a bit of extra tanky-ness for my pets in solo mode, I have to admit it’s going to seem a little goofy that my pet would be able to hold aggro while whimpering and cringing…
Mania:
I’m pretty sure you can just take Cower off the shortcut bar ;)
Overall, I won’t be using Cower for anything. Especially not in PvE and Soloing. Slow-moving pets drive me nuts. In Soloing it’ll probably not be so apparent, but if it is Autocast the second it enters combat….oi that will make me go nuts.
Rikaku: If I take it off my bar, it turns itself on about once every three minutes. But yes, theoretically that would be a solution as well. :>
If they intended the new cower to somehow make up for Avoidence in PvP, they are smoking something strong. Because what’s the best way to “avoid” AoE damage?
Designer 1: “Oh yeah man, like… they take 40% less damage, but it takes them TWICE as long to get out of the AoE ability due to slower speed.”
Designer 2: “Sounds too powerful man, better give it a short duration and a cooldown.”
Designer 1: “Primo thoughts dude… this is gonna be AWESOME!”
(They must be high.)
That’s why they tried to make the talent make up for it…..because, you know, we don’t already have a ton of things to spend talent points on….
I guess it drives me a little crazy that my felguard is handed everything he needs to achieve ((Albeit with no customization)) while I am forced to pick and choose the optimal path for just plain survival. Theoretically speaking I could drop heart of the phoenix ((Because of the hit points bug, if you HotP in mid combat your pet is going to fry immediately)) but I definitely could NOT drop lick your wounds. I COULD drop spider bite and call of the wild ((Could, doesn’t mean I would drop spiders bite.)) except that both are required for Wild Hunt, which is in no way optional. I COULD drop Culling the Herd, except that once again Rabid is in no way optional. So you have so many non-optional talents, talents required either to survive or deal damage ((Which as beast master is what your pets are supposed to do)) That you can’t afford the ‘lesser’ talents, like armor or health.
I am considering dropping one point in spiked collar for charge though. What do you guys think? Would that 3% damage loss be made up for by the uber cool pounce animation and 25% next melee attack?
Re: “My only hesitation here is the change to the cooldown of Call Stabled Pet. Last I tried it, switching between specs and back again reset the Call Stabled Pet cooldown, so I am concerned that they have ‘fixed’ that behavior. ”
Tested on the PTR changing spec still resets the timer.
Excellent to know! Thank you, Jeanos.
Mania:
That’s why I have it there as well =) However, if you are like me (and do not like complex addons) might I suggest looking into “Badpet”? It’s a nifty addon that allows you to “save” which pet commands you want on autocast and which you do not. Whenever the configurations “auto-change”, a small button appears and with a single click, all your settings are back to their proper order.
It’s very small and a hardly noticeable addon (the only visualization you will see is a “riding crop” button appear (when something is not right) and when you click it a “whipping sound” occurs). I highly reccommend it for anyone who seriously plays Hunter, since it seems more and more abilities keep getting added to the pet list.
Wait wait wait….. I just thought about it: all pets have Cower. So that means they just gave the Tenacity pets a 40% damage reduction skill! I mean, just think about it.
Shell Shield + Cower
Turtles look even more interesting now. =O
@Palla: yeah, in the initial Blizzard forum thread about the pet avoidance change there were a few comments about the ridiculous number of hard prerequisites in the pet trees relative to the size of the trees.
GC also commented on pet scaling in 3.3 to say that armour pen probably won’t be including in the scaling due to technical difficulties, but they still plan on getting scaling with other stats (such as crit and haste rating) in for 3.3
As far the technical difficulties go, my guess would be that pets don’t have an armour pen stat, so adding it would be a fairly invasive change which would then become completely redundant in Cataclysm (with the removal of armour pen from gear).
It really is an issue, Nim. I think I’d probably side it beside to many talents in the first place, and not really enough talent points. It’s one thing to have to make a choice between what you want to do, and another to be saddled with certain talents just because they are linked to other talents. I could do with the number of talent points if they reduced the number of pre-requisites, and maybe baked some of the lesser talent’s like stamina directly into the pets, or maybe into other talents. And they should probably consider making Cobra reflexes either one point or baked into Spiked collar.
Palla that is actually a good idea, they could make spiked collar a what 3/6 or 4/8 increase to pet dmg? And then have it increases pet attack speed by xx/xx.
Or 3/6/9% damage and 10/20/30% attack speed increase. And get rid of that negative, just because Fluffy bites faster doesn’t mean he bites softer.
Cobra Strikes is still a net DPS increase even with the slight per hit damage reduction though.
My own suggestion for a simple improvement in the pet talent trees was just to break some of the more gratuitous prerequisite chains. That would give players a bit more flexibility without increasing overall pet power or removing the 3 point final tier advantage provided by the 51-point BM talent. For example, the Cunning tree will be improved significantly in 3.3 by reducing the first chain I mention to just Wolverine Bite -> Wild Hunt.
I know it is Nim, but that still bugs me. Back in the day when each pet hit at different speeds it made sense, and worked well, but now it’s just a dated idea.
They could theoretically unhook all of the talents and it wouldn’t matter to much, since non-BM can only get down to one point in wild hunt anyway. Not saying they should, just that that is kind of a non-issue.
You know what else would be nice? Bloodthirsty healing for as much as it says it does. 5% of my healths 14,000 hit points is NOT 156, its 700. In fact, 5% of my pets pre hit points, before talents and my stats are added is still 350, since my pet without added stats is sitting at 7000 hit points. The amount healed by bloodthirsty is actually less then 1% of my pets total health.
If that was intended and they just haven’t changed the talent tooltip, then I’d love to hear about it. Do you know if that’s how it is Nimizar, because I don’t remember a blue mentioning it. It’s always been that way though.
Something I haven’t seen anyone commenting on, but for me stood out in *HUGE BRIGHT RED GLOWING LETTERS*:
[quote]Many of the tail sweeps with knockback effects will no longer hit players’ pets.[/quote]
OMG, *thank you*. I’m so sick of my pet constantly being knocked off bosses I’m trying to kill because he’s automatically going for its rear, and getting knocked back. Like Malygos and Onyxia. This is something I’ve been going insane over for a very, very long time.
Also (OMG double post!) Palli: remember that your pet’s Bloodthirsty is not a single burst of healing, but a HOT on the pet. It heals for 1% over 5 ticks, and 2% of happiness over 5 ticks.
“Math cannot predict EVERY variable down to the last decimal digit in any given situation.”
Yes it can! Math is used to predict everything (with true random processes, the result will be statistical, but that is still math). For most everyday things, the basic math is known, any remaining uncertainty is in initial data, or lack of computing resources.
In a computer game everything is CREATED with math, math should certainly be able to reverse the process.
Thank You Kindly.
Corwyn:
“”Math cannot predict EVERY variable down to the last decimal digit in any given situation.”
Yes it can! ”
Actually, no. The Math listed was technically DPS numbers. This statement was made to say that the DPS you get in 1 given fight is not going to be the same number for all fights. There are a number of different factors in each fight.
What I mean is, if you gain 6.2k dps in a Malygos 10m, you cannot expect to have a 6.2k dps on Onyxia 10m, or Yogg-Saron 10m. The math you used to calculate the dps of Malygos’ encounter is not the same math you’d use to calculate your dps on Yogg or Ony. You said it yourself “remaining uncertainty is in initial data,”, correct. The remaining uncertaintity would be what? Exactly! The players.
While math is good for getting the calculations down, human input on this game is what makes the difference, and since most boss fights are different and you usually make a decision on the spot (move out of the poison goo and lose the advantage of attacking from behind or stay behind and get hurt and do optimal dps, for example). Therefore, you can put the boss fight down to an exact science, but in no way will you ever be able to get every variable of all 10 or 25 players in a dungeon down to a math. They’re the human component of the game, even if the game itself is math and codes.
That’s what that statement means. So yes, the statement still stands.
Nimizar: ”
GC also commented on pet scaling in 3.3 to say that armour pen probably won’t be including in the scaling due to technical difficulties, but they still plan on getting scaling with other stats (such as crit and haste rating) in for 3.3
As far the technical difficulties go, my guess would be that pets don’t have an armour pen stat, so adding it would be a fairly invasive change which would then become completely redundant in Cataclysm (with the removal of armour pen from gear).”
I’m hoping that scaling comes in 3.3. According to Blizzcon, pets will follow our Agility as well. Now, if this is true, it would make a huge difference for BMs as well (as we’d stack AGI like our fellow Hunters) and I think that alone will bring BM back into the running.
And I agree with you on the armor pen reasoning. Plus Blizzard has been backing off on the pet and making them “too good”. Perhaps by having so much armor pen (since most Hunters usually hit the soft cap by H-ToC gear & trinkets alone), would make it seem like the pet is “too strong” if that were to happen.
@ Palla amen to your post #44 I hate that so friggin much also alot of times I end up by myself or with a couple others going why in the hell did they even queue up for? I pvp for the excitement and funand mainly a break from farming of all m toons I have 1 in a guild!! and i have moved recently and havent been playing him much but
i have gone on a few raids but lately seems like a headache to stay since I’m way behind in the gear.. any ways when I do raid i use my wolf but i only send him in late in the boss battle mainly cause i dont to have him pull aggro from the tank but also to help us in the back get the benefits of the FH having never truste on the cower i always have turned it of..
sorry for post above typo city I dont want to have him pull aggro off the tank and have never trusted on the cower ability.. classes and work my brain needs a vacation lol
Snowtiger:
“classes and work my brain needs a vacation lol”
Me too D= Our brains should take a vacation to Tahiti XD
You guys find all the bad tanks and groups. My groups for every heroic I have ever done, except one.. but thats because the tank tried to tank.. in dps gear… Lawl.
So yeah, I never pull hate, I don’t even need cower when I don’t feign death. I guess I just find lots of good/decent tanks?
Kurasu, is that how it works?? I quote “Your pet’s attacks have a [10%/20%] chance to increase its happiness by 5% and heal 5% of its total health.” That says nothing about over five seconds or anything……if that’s how it works then they really need to clarify it. Not saying your wrong, I promise, I am just annoyed.
Annndddd Rikaku beat me to the numbers argument. The only thing I have left to add is random numbers, like critical strikes. So while from a technical standpoint math can predict most everything, it can’t predict things like strings of criticals, or strings of misses. It may be able to say you have a 30% chance to critical and that your tank only has a 22% chance to miss, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have moments where WOW! My pet just criticaled the boss five times in a row, and one of those was wolverine bite! ANd…uh…the tank missed everything he launched for a whole six seconds….. Admittedly thats kind of extreme and unlikely, but the point still stands that you just never know.
The Wolverine Bite change actually makes it work in PvE again for hitcapped hunters, if people hadn’t remarked on that already–pets are at the hard expertise cap (no dodge, no parry) if their hunters are hitcapped. Which is just amazing for everything except cunning pets, who suddenly have a useless talent point investiture required to get Wild Hunt.
z_z Testament the spirit beast rips mobs off decent tanks all the time. Something about Spirit Strike allows it to scale in strange ways with spellpower buffs. Thankfully he’s a tough bugger and can tank just fine.
To be honest, the Cower change looks like it’s designed, to me, for your pet to be using when it would be staying in one place anyway, not moving to avoid damage. My hydralisk has shield wall now. ♥
A double~! Aridlis, back in the day, circa vanilla WoW, I used to be able to tank in healing gear. Nothing past Zul Gurub, but it was very doable on my little holy paladin. That being said, trying something like that since about mid-way through leveling in Outlands has been a bad idea. *Laughs* So yea, always pay attention to your tanks, and smack them hard if they try something like tankingin DPS gear.
Pft if I hadn’t of leveled my Paladin, on/off ofc to 30/40/60/70, I’d never know oh yes you do need a shield to tank, cause I was retarded like that. Cause seriously, I would have tried tanking like Saurfang does when he comes to smackdown the lich in Warsong hold.
WHIRLWIND AND CLEAVE. THAT’S ALL A MANLY MAN NEEDS TO TANK.
I did get into a group once where well we had to try atleast. The retridin tried to tank. But, retridin didn’t change gear. Just shieled and 1hand swapped…
We ofc all squished and Trolgore or whatever that demented troll in DTK is, feasted on us :c
I’m a hunter tank, so the Cower change absolutely *DELIGHTS* me. Therefore I’m not saying anything about it (until now; oops). It’s the best thing *EVER INVENTED*. Outside the no-tail-swipe thing.
Anyway, yeah Palli. That’s how it works. If you get Bloodlust triggering, you can pull your pet back and watch the healing tick. Or if you have him attack a critter and Bloodlust triggers, you can *really* tell then. It’s a HoT (heal over time/happiness over time).
Also, re: the Wolverine bite, this change actually makes me very happy, because it means that Cunning pets will be actually more able to do higher raid and instance DPS than they do. Which makes me relieved; my stable’s full, but I don’t have a Ferocity non-BM pet. So if I have to respec MM or Surv, I can at least use my Serpent. ;)
Then they need to reword it! That or make it do like it says it does and put an internal cooldown on it. Then again, it isn’t like my pet isn’t ever regaining hit points thanks to that…..so…..eh. Still, bad wording annoys me, and that talent description is not very clear.
Translation: My pet is always regaining hitpoints like an HoT if she is in combat. A very weak HoT, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.
Also note, only ferocity pets will be able to get the full benefit from improved cower, since that talent is only in the ferocity tree. Not an issue for a good deal of PvE fights, since the duration is so small, but it’s worth noting.
*sigh* Apparently the definition of “bad tank” includes people leveling up. Not everyone is level 80, and Cower is very useful while leveling up and doing things like SFK or BFD.
“If a pet isn’t pulling aggro off a bad tank then the healer or someone else will be…” This is simply false. Whoever posted this just doesn’t have much experience playing the game, apparently. Anyone who has has seen pets pull aggro off the tank, the same tank who has absolutely no problems at all whatsoever holding aggro when the pet isn’t there, even with DPS and healers going full blast. Sometimes the pet crits, sometimes the tank misses, sometimes things just don’t go right. A faith in the math that on average it never happens fails to take into account actual experience, where it does happen, regardless of what the math says. I’m afraid you’re just a bit too heavy on theorycrafting and light on actual experience.
Just a reminder (not aimed specifically at anyone): We all have different experiences in the game, and while my experiences may not make sense to you — and vice versa — let’s still take care to respect each other.
I think we’ve done a reasonably good job so far explaining why we are each pleased or not pleased with the Cower change. What do you think Blizzard could do to improve the situation for everyone? I know there have been a few suggestions so far, like breaking the talent chains. And speaking of pet feign, I’ve actually wished for a Feign Death for my pets before, although I think it would be very tricky to use in combat. What else might we suggest?
For feign death, an auto-cast feign death that can be manually clicked, or if left on auto-cast feigns when the hunter does. For cower, two separate abilities. I think to many people like and find the old cower useful for it to just disappear. Create a new skill ((Yes, I know, one more pet ability to take care of)) with the effects of the redesigned cower, and rename the old improved cower improved huddle or what have you.
A general idea would be to improve the talent trees overall, adding in enough new talents to warrant pets getting talent points every other level instead of every four. An actual ‘bottom of tier’ talent that greatly improves the pets overall performance, maybe available to just BM. We have 51 point talents, why shouldn’t pets have 21 point talents? ((And by proxy increase the number of talent points to accomadate the 21 point talent, which would just take adding that point back to beast mastery.)) A synergy type talent that heals the pet for so much of the damage the hunter does, and a similar talent for the pet that heals the hunter for so much of the damage the pet does. The first was actually an old tier set bonus, which then went on to be a warlock talent, but not a hunter one, which I thought was odd.
Clean up and solidify the pet talent trees. Right now we’ve got a lot of talents that are just shared between the three trees, and only a couple of unique ones. Give each tree their own flavor, with similarly flavored talents. Let the tenacity tree have to do less for it’s tenacity talents ((Like combining stamina and armor talents)) but make them work for their DPS talents. Vice versa for ferocity. And let cunning have a middle ground, where it can do either or, with some cunning flavor added to it. Make each tree unique, and individual, instead of a rehash with one or two unique things added in.
Make lick your wounds baseline. I think it’s absolutely stupid that both Lick your Wounds and HotP are ferocity only, when it would make more sense for them to be in EITHER of the other two trees. By proxy, it also doesn’t make a lot of sense that cunning got the attack wolverine bite, especially with the change to critical. I’m not saying that they should change it, because I kind of like my chimera having it, just that it seems odd.
I think that’s all I’ve got for the moment.
Well first up breaking Cower into two seperate talents; then maybe chaining it up to the growl and a reworked carrion feeder for cunning pets.
Basically ups growls threat/heals/happiness regen yada yada AND INCREASES the effectiveness of cower. This way if Cower is still needed by a few hunters, it can be used.
Cause my Saur was nipping at the heels of a DK for a few moments.
Secondly, we get given a talent that can be used every 30-45 seconds, maybe lasts for 8-10 seconds, making it a bit better than 6 seconds, incase it’s not affected by longevity and for SV and MM benifit too.
As Cowering doesn’t really do anything defensive for damage preventing measures, if anyone has seen something cower, it’s usually hiding in fear/it’s in pain and trying to hide. Or it’s trying to appear meek or submissive; which is why Cower lowers threat, the pet is trying to attempt to appear weaker than it should.
What this reduction talent should be tied to is basically something like a cringe or huddle movement. Like how they say for grizzly bears you play dead- and protect your face.
And the only way I would agree to a ‘Play Dead’ ability for pets is well if YOU had control over the ability and it WASN’T a pet skill, meaning you can have it on your bars, no macro needed. Works for ALL pets, and is obtained when hunters get FD.
Double post: Palla as much as I love your suggestions, I doubt Blizz would do something like that, they admited they nerfed Exotics, Ferocity and Tenacity pets because of Cunning, and with the fact they’re going to, possibly, most likely probably, open up all pet trees for all pets, I doubt they’re going to admit their mistakes and go back.
This is also kinda held up when GC defended bloated pet trees/general bloat issues with a ’so you can’t get everything hurdur’
I want to slap him.
Combining some talents, getting rid of others, putting in a few more, and getting rid of the be damned pre-requisits would fix a lot of problems and allow you to possibly have less of a glass cannon.
I wouldn’t mind giving up something for Lick your wounds atleast, or HotP. Mostly as had a bad pull and made me remember how much I spammed it in bad pulls. The healer tho was nice enough to rez Jareth so luff for the tree. But yeah HotP is something I miss direly and would sacrifice one dps talent point for atleast if there was no pre-requisit. Mean it cuts down down time if oom, it rezzes, usually, at full health.
Would also be good for tank pets.
I am rather happy with the change being made to cower, as it was an ability I never used (and I mean NEVER). It did surprise me to see so many hunters who DO use it. I am sure that it’ll be like every other change blizz throws out. There will be those who like it and those who don’t, but either way, we’ll learn to work with it.
Hey Mania, maybe you should make another thread for suggestions? We can gather them up and put them on a thread on the forums. Maybe make some noise and see what pops up.
Double! Unfortunately Ryai HotP suffers from reviving the pet at reduced health, and THEN increasing them to full, and suffers from the same setback of combat or taking damage canceling the regen. I don’t remember this happening months ago, but it definitely does now, and it is a bad, bad thing in PvP, since if your pet died to AoE in the first place, then they’ll be reviving some where around that hot spot.
For Cower, Blizz should fix whatever threat bugs are making people think they need it. Outside fights with threat management elements designed into them, the only way to take aggro is to hit 110% of the tank’s threat in melee or 130% when at range, or use a taunt ability. If players aren’t grabbing aggro from a given tank via DPS or healing, then there is zero reason for a pet without Growl switched on to be grabbing aggro (since even the hunter will be doing more damage than the pet will, let alone the other DPS in the group).
I’ll freely admit that I have *never* seen something like that happen in nearly 4 years of playing a hunter. I’ve seen plenty of cases where my pet took aggro because I sent it in before giving the tank a chance to get some initial threat (or to recover threat after a boss wiped their aggro table), or because I left growl on, or because the tank wasn’t generating enough threat and I forgot to call my pet back when easing up on the DPS. Those cases were all my fault for poor pet management though – Cower wasn’t the solution, managing my pet properly was (i.e. waiting before sending the pet in to attack at the start of the fight or after an aggro wipe, making sure Growl was off, recalling my pet when easing up on DPS due to a tank’s low threat generation).
However, a number of players in this thread are claiming that they see pets taking aggro in cases where those 3 explanations (jumping the gun on initial threat, leaving Growl or Taunt on autocast, poor threat generation from the tank) do not apply. While that doesn’t match my personal experience, I’m not going to claim that every single one of them is mistaken. If pets are taking aggro through a mechanism other than those designed into the game, then that’s a bug and it needs to be analysed and reported as such.
At the moment, we are in the situation of “the plural of anecdote is not data”. Anecdotes unsupported by direct evidence are not particular useful in investigating bug reports (not entirely useless, but definitely not the preferred form of feedback). However, by collecting and documenting multiple cases of pets taking aggro in situations where none of the standard explanations apply, players would have a much better case to present to Blizzard that there is a bug here that should be fixed.
Oh, one last item: bosses with randomly targeted abilities may one-shot pets. While Omen and the like will flag that as “pet has aggro” (since the boss switches to targeting the pet), that isn’t actually true – the RNG just came up with the pet’s name rather than one of the players in the group.
Hateful Strike abilities may also insta-gib pets if there are no other melee DPS or off-tanks around to soak the attack.
I’ve had it happen once or twice even with proper planning and management, but it isn’t a wide spread thing for me. But as for your comment about the hunter dealing more damage then the pet…..Nim? I know you’ve played beastmaster before, and I know you know the ratio. Right now it’s at about 60/40 depending on the hunter, and I think in extreme cases I’ve seen it be 55/45. At 60/40 your not outstripping your pet by that much, and with beastial wrath up pets can get some impressive numbers. So it isn’t really all that unusual to think that during a beastial wrath a pet could pull aggro. Now, off of guild run tanks, then I have to wonder if it isn’t a bug or some such, though.
And as my double, not happening Nim. You can’t get three people to agree on what time it is on the WoW boards, let alone enough people to get Blizzard to budge on much of anything.
….The problem on most bug reports – and this is from experience – will get the standard replies on more than half of them as “….is working as intended….”, or “…you need to reset wtf folder, etc… clear all add-ons, etc….. blah-blah-black sheep-have-you-any-wool-rigmarole of excusess, etc…. and then it’ll a while for them to acknowledge it finally and either fix it or break it some more. I admit I tend to be biased on bug reports because sometimes blizzard won’t acknowledge it right away unless it is seriously affecting the game as a whole (no, I won’t make the obvious pun on that word the way I said it)… small glitches like that tend to get ignored/shelved for later perusal and they tend to concentrate more on the game-crashing bugs.
*it’ll take a while… is what I meant… typos and omissions tend to sprout when I am posting a reply while dead on my feet after a exhausting Ulduar run can do that…. time to go to bed.
Why? Even with absolute BIS gear for a BM Hunter and a Devilsaur, you’ll see at most about 4200 DPS from your pet (part of a composite of about 9k). If your tank can’t generate 4200 TPS (dunno if Hunter pets get the 15% innate threat reduction that every class but Hunters gets), then they ARE doing something critically wrong and any other DPSer will pull threat long before your pet will even think about it.
Personally, I don’t use cower. I don’t even want to, but I do know about the need for better threat reduction in regards to hunters. I’ve run with a tank with the highest gearscore I’ve personally seen in our realm and there are times I do drag aggro away (albeit rarely). Paladins who know what they’re doing rarely have that happen to them when they tank, but event they do acknowledge that there can be slip-ups when threat can go down. All this math talk aside, I’ve noticed that some dungeons have been acting strange lately (probably in my server only). For instance, I’ve started to notice some mobs do knockbacks more often – most importantly in places where they weren’t able to do before. I just did AN and the ads on the spider boss didn’t despawn when they should’ve died, they litterally whupped our collective butts with a literal unending stampede.
Anyway, back on topic. If threat in hunters have slowly become a problem, then I think it partly has to do with some of the Arena changes they’ve made that somehow uintentionally altered some things in PVE for hunters in regards to pets.
The redesign of cower to damage reduction is partly welcome, but can you really still call it cower? The avoidance change and the change to cower should have at least been one and the same in regards to damage mitigation and reduction. Why change two abilities into something that almost mirror and completement the other one (although avoidance is now an innate skill)? Avoidance mitigates AOE damage reduction in PVE and from non-player AOE while the new “Cower” mitigates actual all-around damage (most likely including some small form of all-around AOE damage reduction as well because it was not specified in the new Cower) for a few seconds. The 50% movement speed penalty is ridiculous in my opinion and completely unecessary when the next two tiers below that point in Improved Cower gets rid of it. That makes the tree a heck of a lot more bloated and clunkier than it was before, because you have to actually WASTE talent points just to get rid of the penalty when the points are more useful elsewhere. In fact, damage reduction is a TENACITY trait, why put it in ferocity?
Culling the herd is a great addition, yes, but the change to Cower is clunky as all hell. Get rid of the penalty, and make Improved Cower something of an automatic threat dump when talented for the threat conciouse Ren and Stimpies out there.
I think I get what you’re trying to say Black. Now here’s a thought.. we have natural armor for pets that increase pet armor by a certain percentage… why not include the damage reduction there since having armor does reduce damage by a small amount? Some spells in the pet trees are indeed sort of redundant, therefore making it bloated. Now that I think about it, no wonder why it’s clunky. I could almost say the same for our own hunter talents and wonder it is so.
Rilgon, no offense intended but you must play in a perfect WoW world. Things happen that you just can’t predict, and it’s not just been one or two people mentioning it here. I realize that, like Nim, you know the numbers, but that doesn’t mean that these things are impossible. I am sure there are plenty of other hunters out there who get a use out of cower. Personally I’m NOT one of them, but that doesn’t mean I think the skill should be removed. What’s wrong with having an aggro dump, and the damage reduction? Would that really hurt you, or anyone else in anyway?
Rilgon does indeed live in a perfect WoW world, and is the best hunter in it! =D
Seriously though Rilgon, even some of the best tanks on my server managed to lose aggro to me and my pet when I puged heroics with them. Why? Just cause they usually think they’re the *bleep* and don’t need to be at their best when tanking with lowly casuals in a pathetic heroic instance. Then there’s always the fact that when you pug you might end up with a so-so tank, or one that just plainly sucks.
I know you have your opinions on the game man, but it is far from being as perfect as you claim it to be. Not every one is walking around with BiS gear, and putting out +10k dps on everything out there (yes I took that number out of my behind). Unless you do everything with guild members, you end up puging with all sorts of people. I can’t count the numbers of MM hunters I saw with no pets, claiming that they’re rangers and don’t need one, or SV hunters that refuses to send their wolves out there in fear of it dying and lowering their dps, or BM hunters wearing STR thinking it gives their pets more attack power, warriors wearing spell power trinkets, mages with trinkets that have on melee or ranged attack procs (mah spells r ranged lulz), and the list goes on.
I am happy that my pets are getting a mini Shield Wall, but at the same time I wish the old 5 secs cooldown Cower was still in the game. Right now with it’s 20 secs cooldown (14 if BM), it’s really not enough to make the pet lose aggro if it pulls it from a tank.
ok so read thru all comments pretty much anything i was gonna say has been said lol i kno this is off topic but i was curious about the upcoming expansion and whether well see some new types of pets? curious to see what others think or if Mania has heard anything thru secret hush hush channels lol, seems only natural wi,th the introduction odf two new races/starting areas as well as the changes to all of azeroth that somne new species would be found. what do you al think?
Nameless:
“…wi,th the introduction odf two new races/starting areas as well as the changes to all of azeroth that somne new species would be found. what do you al think?”
What a fun topic to dwell on though! No really, it is. It sounds like a whole bunch of fun. Fromw what we do know, there are some new species running around the Worgen Goblin areas(including confirmed Mastiffs and Monkies). Also, we did hear some word that Zhevras are a possiblity for Cataclysm.
As for other (new) families, I have no idea. But I’m hoping against all odds that foxes are added. *squeal*
Unfortunately I don’t have access to any secret hush-hush channels for WoW. I wish I did. :>
I know that! *Laughs* I meant just in general. Take some of the ideas you like and think are plausible and post them on the suggestions forums. Lord do I wish some of us had access to hush hush channels….
@Palla: I’m not disputing that people are seeing their pets take aggro when there is no way that should be happening according to the mechanics of the game (as several people have chimed in to say they have seen such glitches, suggesting that their experience differs from that of folks like myself that can attribute every case of our pets being targeted instead of the tank to a mistake on our part or just to the random number generator coming up with the pet’s name on it).
What I’m disputing is that Cower (in its current form) is actually making any difference in the frequency of occurrence of any such glitches. It only affects pet threat, and there is no way a tank should be losing threat to a pet unless the tank is generating minimal threat and the hunter is failing to manage their pet accordingly. There are plenty of cognitive biases that may lead folks to *think* that an ability is helping, when the reality is nothing more than “random glitch is random”. The human mind is really, really bad at determining cause and effect for low probability events for a whole host of reasons (that’s why scientists spend so much of their time on experiment design in order to tease out real correlations as opposed to mere coincidences). In the case of Cower, it’s perfectly possible that the same tank failings that lead hunters to go “Hmm, maybe I should turn Cower on” lead to them being more careful with threat and general pet management anyway, and that change in behaviour is the determining factor, rather than the activation of Cower.
I still don’t think the removal of the current form of Cower is going to cause any serious problems, even when running with PuG tanks. It may be necessary to put your pet on passive and have it spend most of the run parked beside you, but that’s the kind of silliness that can result when trying to cope with poor tank threat generation. It’s similar to melee DPS dropping back to just auto-attacking with only the occasional special thrown in, just so they will stay behind the tank on threat.
Basically, I believe the “OMG, but I need Cower” reaction is pure superstition or results from a refusal to use the pet Passive button when it is appropriate (such as when the tank can’t out-threat a wet noodle). I realise that opinion is probably going to offend some folks here, but how much do you really care if some random guy on the other side of the world thinks you’re being superstitious about a game? :)
Oh great so now I have to have pet in Passive to l2p. I’m sorry but I came here just after having a real big headed fathead shammy try and insult me on Rosalyn for using AotV every other trash pull in VH and I left after the first boss; if I’m gonna get slack that quickly I aint doing crap to help.
But here you’re telling us, even with proof of cases where Cower is needed by some hunters, it’s a case of L2P passive?
Ok fine have it your way. Pet getting aggro is a GLITCH. So then me getting aggro off a tank IS A GLITCH. Or the priest over healing and pulling aggro accidently IS A GLITCH.
I’m just I’m mad and your post is pretty condesending. You aren’t aknowledging there could be errors that ARENT IN THE GLITCH WAY, but because of your perfect math and your perfect luck and your perfect pets performing perfectly cower isn’t needed.
Until I hear a blue saying that pet threat has been resolved in instances- which is where this is heading I bet you ten to one, if you can accept that and which will nerf pet tanks majorly probably.
Or didn’t you think that’s why Growl was broken for boss fights?
:/
In only ONE fight when I had a dragonhawk, did I ever have to have it on passive, unless I had to revive it after sacrificing it to save a healer :/
Stopping (or otherwise severely throttling) DPS when the tank has no idea WTF they’re doing isn’t a glitch – it’s just part of playing a DPS class (and fortunately, a much rarer situation these days, now that Blessing of Salvation and other passive threat reduction abilities have been baked directly into tank threat multipliers instead).
And isn’t that what cower does? It controls your pets aggro- to an extent. And I sure as hell needed it in my UK run just about 30 minutes ago- the tank wasn’t bad but he was still gearing up and I only realized tank DIDN’T have aggro when lol, Frost lost 4k hp in the span of a handful of seconds. Ofc I had to spam cower cause the tank had spammed DG BEFORE the fight, so yeah I had to use COWER. And while it didn’t drop threat imidiately, I doubt that Frost would have survived if I hadn’t of used cower because I was in my ‘ten sec window’ that BM now gives you and I barely have time to pop everything off let alone use mend pet.
I was also unofficially given duty to smack down the icebarriers the first boss of UK throws onto other players.
So yeah I don’t think I’d be able to micromanage a pet on passive, and I doubt dragging Frost away from the boss would have done anything really :/
But no you are basically saying the only reasons pets are pulling aggro, outside of A: tank is gearing up. B: tank is generally bad. C: both of the above, but that we, the hunters who are experiencing this, are just generally playing bad.
I’m sorry, when was it required to have addons to help prevent a tank lose aggro. Or to know when pet gets aggro? Cause as far as I know, you really only need the WoW threat meter as up until Wrath instances, my pets never dragged threat off the tanks, in the rare few instance runs I did. But now, they are pulling threat and while I gave off the bad idea that it was only bad tanks or wars having this happen in the pugs I was in, no, even good tanks have suffered some insane pulls, in VoA 25 Jareth somehow got aggro twice, of the first boss before the others were added. For Brewfest it was the dorf that refuses to drop anything but useless trinkets.
And managed in DTK, UK, UP and a few other places- as it’s mostly all a blur for me.
But the fact remains, you’re basically telling me it’s my fault, if the tank isn’t bad, that I need to ‘l2p’, because my pet for some freak reason, obtained aggro when it never has before. That I’m at fault because I want a sure fire button I can press that can help the tank get aggro -faster- so my pet doesn’t, maybe, possibly die.
I -know- how to throttle my dps, I know how to control my pet. I also know that sometimes pets need a threat reduction to help get the heat off them faster.
You also didn’t read that if they are planning on taking Cower out- look at what they did with Growl. INSTEAD of fixing the cower bug, they removed Growl’s ability to work on bosses. NOW they are removing and reworking Cower basically.
Are they planning from having pets generate any threat or aggro in a dungeon?
And btw what about Succubus’s for warlocks, they have a cower essentially, or are they exempt because they’re not a hunter pet :/
So yeah I’m sorry I can’t micromanage every little thing as a hunter, I don’t like using addons ever since several I used in the past and now have either been retired/stopped working or interfered with my pet; that I don’t use macros. That I can’t control my pet every single second and expect to have a couple of fail safes before my pet goes squish like a clothie in a wave of furbolgs.
Nimizar, why are you unable to look at this a different way? You have your mind locked into “This is your fault, and an aggro dump won’t help.” And I honestly have no idea why your not willing to be more open minded about it. To coin the phrase, $@#$ happens. Just because it hasn’t happened to you doesn’t mean it can’t happen. And as far as that goes, even by your own admission! You shouldn’t have to throttle your pet DPS. As a BM, actually, you shouldn’t have to throttle you OR your pets DPS since the spread is fairly even. I am sure Ryai and most of the other hunters here know after the first pull or two when a bad tank is bad. I don’t think it is necessarily those types of situations that we are talking about here. Its when, for one reason or another, our pets get a little ahead on aggro and need to tone it down a bit. In fact it’s a great prevention method, turn it on and you either don’t have to worry, or it’ll help when it does happen.
Wow, Nimizar, even if you tried to sugarcoat it, you still just insulted most of the hunters in here in regards to being hunters when they KNOW what they’re doing. Most of them have been playing since WoW started and KNOW their class inside out throughout the changes and the nuances it brought to the class as time passed by. I’ve been playing a hunter long enough to know when I am bad at threat management or not. I have my pet on passive ALL the time in instances and send them in with a macro at choice targets… and they STILL manage to miraculously grab aggro every now and then even on the best tanks. Does that make all of them bad tanks? No. Does that make me a bad hunter when I did the best I could in threat management and they still come after the pet and then me? No. So write that down.
“It’s similar to melee DPS dropping back to just auto-attacking with only the occasional special thrown in, just so they will stay behind the tank on threat.” Reeeeeaaaaalllllyyyyyy?? The difference to a pet and a live melee player is that the pet is just an AI… it keeps attacking with no thought of backing off unless the master calls them off the target… that is if we can get them off in time… they have no way of “slowing” down on a target even when you notice (with an add-on) that they suddenly got threat off tank. Passive does not help because the moment threat is transferred to a pet, even when you try to call it back or cower sometimes, they’re still squishy enough to die faster than a mage blinking off to a safe distance. One “silly” (to you) way of completely eliminating pet threat is just to have pet beside us all the time in the instance/raids and have them not do anything at all…. or send them in on auto-attacks only – NO specials and regular pet abilities being used at ALL… just a steady stream of pew pew pew that looks like smacks akin to a lazy void walker. Who would want a pet to be that completely ineffective? And yes, even buffs can generate a bit of threat – furious howl is a buff that wolves can cast on them and their masters that greatly increases hunter overall dps in the few seconds it is up… in all fairness, priests don’t attack when healing and they still get threat doing heals and buffs… they’re like on auto-passive simply because they concentrate on other players and not on the actual fight. I doubt you would call priests bad players when they get aggro off tank and save your @ss even when they’re not fighting alongside the tank but healing them. I don’t think so.
What superstition? There is no superstition inside and outside of playing the game, just facts, only those maligned enough to start caring about the game in a very creepy and obsessive way and start saying “my precious” over and over on their characters and exclude the world outside of it would say believe in superstition. I sure as heck don’t dig a sacrificial pit in hopes of a good run in Uluar.
Cause and effect? Cause: Tank loses aggro, and you pull your pet back… doesn’t work? Try blowing cower… mob immediately goes after someone else or goes back to tank: Effect. Is that superstition coming from an addled mind after seeing that scenario repeat itself? Hell NO!
But hey, since you’ve already made up your mind that the aggro dump issue is a non-issue and it’s the hunter’s fault when it happens to them (veteran player or no) then you really must live in a perfect WoW world. Can we get an invite to it?
Easy Rowdy. I know Nimizar well enough, I don’t think he meant it to be insulting, though I fully understand how it came off that way. I nearly said as much myself, especially since his reply stung Ryai so much.
I think that’s enough talking about the issue. There are two dedicated camps here, and neither is going to convince the other. Why don’t we just leave it there, before tempers rise anymore? Come on, a cookie for everyone who makes peace! Chocolate chip!
A cookie? I can sacrifice something…… or someone for a cookie. *evil grin* Oh wait… it’s about peace…. I’ll let someone else hide the body. LOL
I agree to disagree. We all play the game our own way, what works for one does not mean it will work for another…. it’s the way life is, math be damned. That’s how it should be. Freedom of choice.
No human sacrifices! No! Nor animal! But you can sacrifice vegetables. Just be gentle! *hands Rowdy a cookie*
It looks like we’re going to have to agree to disagree on the overall value of pet Cower in hunter threat management (never used it in 4+ years, won’t miss it in the slightest when it is gone, don’t agree that it can make a difference in any scenario where the tank isn’t already in danger of losing aggro to other players).
Perhaps folks will reconsider their opinion in 3.3 when even hunters that currently use it will have to play without it.
@Palla: Actually, it was kinda late and I was pretty tired. I wouldn’t bet I wasn’t trying to be insulting ;)
I may have regretted it somewhat in the light of day, but I’m still a little nonplussed at the idea of anyone particularly missing such a situationally useful ability (particularly when the situation where it is useful is worth avoiding for so many other reasonds)
You guys are allowed ONE parting shot a piece! No more! *Hands Nimizar a cookie* And we’ll just have to wait and see.
@Rowdy: One minor point – I never said having your pet sitting beside you doing nothing was silly from a tactical point of view. If a tank had truly terrible threat generation, that’s exactly what I would recommend doing (at least until the tank had a really solid threat lead, anyway). Sure, it’s a silly way to DPS overall, but working around poor tank threat gen gets like that sometimes. It’s why you’ll find *all* DPS classes hate it when they end up being threat limited – having to back off from doing your best is just plain annoying.
It’s why I don’t see a great deal of value in Cower – it takes a scenario where you have to do some pretty silly things to work around tank threat problems, and lets you do some slightly less silly things instead. The irritation level induced by “turn Cower on” and “recall pet” isn’t particularly different for me.
On a completely different note, a question that should have occurred to me sooner: did anyone here ever train Cower on their pets prior to Wrath? For many hunters, the idea of having Cower at all only happened in Wrath when it became free, so 3.3’s removal of the current form of Cower will be a return to the pre-Wrath status quo for them.
(Gah, I was going to let this discussion die a natural death, but I really want to know the answer to that last question! C’est la vie…)
@Palla: I’m trying to stop, I really am… but I thought of an interesting question :(
Nimizar:
Just answering the question peacefully cause I’m here for my cookie XD
I actually did train Cower on my pet back in TBC times. Though, I will admit, there was never really a reason (like now) that I had it other than for precaution on my raiding pet.
HOWEVER.
I can’t accurately compare the two differences (TBC-Cower Cat & Wrath Cower-Wolf) for a multitude of reasons. One, I never did any raiding past KZ in Outlands. In Wrath, I’ve been more into raiding (still casually but alot more raiding than I ever did in TBC) and thus I have better gear. I realize BM was more powerful back then overall, but it wasn’t as “bursty” as it can be now in Wrath (given all the new pet abilities).
So your question is a good one, but I think it’s not exactly a fair estimate only because there is alot of variables between patch 2.0-2.4 to 3.0-3.3. But if you’re just asking on an “interested” basis, well then there’s your answer.
And with that, I’m done with Cower talk and all it’s relations *munches on cookie* =)
I don’t really want any parting shot as I don’t really ‘want to be right’ hell I would love to not worry about my pets to not get aggro, but I really didn’t want to be, what I thought, was reciving belittling treatment from a fellow hunter for my want of usage of Cower in instances.
ESPECIALLY after as I said I had a Shaman insult me and call me ‘fail hunter’ basically for using AotV ON TRASH so I would have mana FOR BOSS.
I know how to play and I know how to control my pet but I shouldn’t have to always have my pet on passive, and give me something else to micromanage, and I know not all the tanks I group with are bad, but the majority of the problems I experienced with were either gearing up tanks or bad tanks tho there were the few where pet DID get aggro off good tanks, and I can really assure you my gear is not the best, I can’t even get into a Naxx-10, my dps seems to flux at 1.8 to 2.1k depending on the sitatuon too.
But I have come to rely on cower as a failsafe so I don’t have to worry about my pet to much. On trash I try not to have it on incase of ohcrap the tank lost aggro of one and the healer pulled!
Cause w/o healer we would die.
But as said the pet has a basic AI. To attack and keep attacking the monster you tell it to, unless otherwise. That’s it; and being told it’s my fault for that, that it’s my fault I have enough on my plate as it is, that it’s my fault I don’t want to use addons or macros or other such things when I shouldn’t have to unless I want to, that I deserve to have my pet squishing basically.
That’s what stung me, I don’t really mind if there are hunters that don’t need cower I mean grats to you for never having my bad luck with threat- but I have needed it and I just like having it around as a failsafe as I said, because of those what if’s.
And I’m BM AND pet is 40-50ish% of my dps, so I like my pet staying alive :/
I don’t really feel like their IS a right here. I think it’s just a matter of experience, and everyone tends to see things differently. It isn’t uncommon that people can’t see eye to eye on things. That’s why I am trying to resolve this as peacefully as possible. It may be that come 3.3 the hunters who currently use cower won’t need it anymore, or it may be that they are screwed, glued, and tattooed. It’s a perfectly rational fear if they are already having problems with pets pulling aggro and ’smishing’, as Ryai puts it.
So c’mon. Pitchforks down. You too, Nim. You’ve made your point, Rilgon made his. Rikaku, Rowdy, and Ryai theirs. We’ll just sit tight, and wait and see. Meantime, cookies for everyone!
@Palla: Indeed.
On a more helpful note, in relation to the reactive use of the current Cower to try and give a mob back to the tank after grabbing aggro (as opposed to just leaving it on autocast when trying to cope with generally bad tank threat gen), it may be possible to macro an approximate equivalent with the new Cower:
/cast Cower
/petstay
/petpassive
/cast Mend Pet
The idea being to let the pet survive long enough for the tank to grab the mob back (or to give the hunter a chance to try to MD the mob back to the tank if the tank isn’t particularly quick with their taunts or general threat gen). Obviously not as effective as actually shedding a bunch of threat (and hopefully dropping below 90% or so of the tank’s threat in the process), but it should help a bit.
I like cookies as well…
REally, I also never used cower pre-wrath. That, and Mongoose Bite, (which I still never use!) were left as ‘Don’t care, don’t want, why spend money?’. Albeit, I instanced very, very, little pre Wrath, but still.
Now, I use cower and just have it on without growl and then go nuts, yet Iorek will still occasionally pull aggro from our very well-geared, skilled tank. He’s even earned the infamous ‘Wolf tank’ nickname.
After 4 years of hunter-ish activities, I can’t remember EVER using cower (on purpose anyway).
Despite that, I was one of those crazy OCD hunters that didn’t rest until I had trained in ALL pet possible abilities (back when you had to tame to train). MAN am I glad they got rid of that stuff!
And a small glimmer of hope side note on pets getting the whammy from PvP AoE stuff: It looks like AoE damage caps are making a comeback (to a small degree)… it still won’t be good for us, but big clogs in AV MIGHT not be 3 second death for our pets. I guess we will see.
I was noticing that, Netrallo, and it did give me some hope. It’ll make AoE less devastating in PvP all around, and that is a very good thing, in my opinion.
Hmm, I hadn’t thought about the impact of the AoE cap change on mass AoE fests in PvP.
However, note that this isn’t about bringing back AoE caps, as the current hard cap system has been in place for ages – it’s about replacing the current hard cap with one which scales with gear. (GC posted on the forums to clarify how this was going to work)
Currently each AoE spell has a maximum amount of damage it can do – once the number of targets is sufficient to hit that limit, the spell will never do any more damage regardless of gear improvements. The change in 3.3 is to make the damage cap on each spell 10 times the single target damage. Up to 10 targets and each takes full single target damage, more than 10 targets and the per target damage is proportionally reduced (as with the current hard cap).
To match the old Avoidance (i.e. only taking 25% damage), the AoE spell would have to be hitting 40 targets at once. To match the new Avoidance (10% damage), the AoE would have to somehow be hitting 100 targets!
Whattabout me Palla? I didn’t make my pitchforky riot!! but then again, i agree that we should sit back and see how this one plays out so /pitchfork away
Dammit, Nimizar, you just rained all over my parade with your math….
And cookie for Gimilion! *Tosses him a chocolate chip*
The thing I hate about this is, a Rogue can now kill your pet with Spam-o-Knives without even targeting. Only way to prevent it is to put points into Cower so your pet can actually keep up with the Rogue and stay alive.
… so much for Ghostcrawlers BS about making pets a mild challenge to kill.
I see why I play my druid now…She’s a lot harder to kill then my hunter’s pet, or my hunter really….even if the hunter is better geared. xD Fgures.
Spam o knives never gets my pet.
Cause the rogue’s weapons are always ten inches into my back 8D
Tbh what about direct damage I mean aka Retridins GOLDEN SHOWER OF PAIN my god, I’ve had them -one shot- my pets more than any other class has been able to.
@Firewing: yeah especially since it seems I can’t scare beast druids now, seriously 80% of the time I try even when the drood is on someone else, it fails.
I have more fun on my DK. Even against retridins.
Unless twinks Dx
@Nimizar
Yeah, I had similar numbers running through my head when I wrote that. So I wasn’t kidding myself to think it was “fixed”… just that large AoE fests won’t always be instant death if this applies.
Ultimately, I just can’t see how Bliz is going to be able to keep this new Avoidence rule for PvP… unless they simply hate the thought of BM PvPers (which seems silly, but who knows). I could probably see them settling on a 50% value for PvP… it’s not great, but possibly viable.
Playing for as long as i have ( since start basically) I never seen a class so torn apart and reconstructed and nerfed !!! As I have seen with the hunter class…
I play all classes but my most played are my hunters and most are dual specc’d I never tried to worry about the numbers the most part but just played to play the game..I enjoy the group of people in here and agree and respect most of them cause I myself have gone or been thru what they have!! So I will help Palla hand out the cookies and Ryai I agree with many of your post as i do with others!! I dont believe all hunters should play the same way wheres the fun in that??@ Rikaku Tahiti sounds great you bring the mix I will bring the Capt.Morgans lol
off topic, but tier 10 sets are now viewable. I think I’m the only one who looked at hunter as a visual downgrade, lol. Like we went from chainmail in pve and scalemail in pvp to plywood in pvp and level 50 greens in pvp. With troll feet! (except for trolls!!)
(I just got a t9 looking helm back sunday night, I’m gonna miss it when I have to change it out for that… Marvel Universe helm thing. Then again I was one of the few who loved the Scurgestalker Gasmask too.)
(I guess the one flip side about the t10 helm is that if you look at it from the side long enough and squint your eyes it ceases to become a phallic rhino thing and more a Secutor hood or some Gladiator ridged cap.)
On topic; quoted from MMOchampion
‘Hunter
Pet
* Culling the Herd – When your pet’s Claw, Bite, or Smack ability deals a critical strike, you and your pet deal 1/2% increased damage for 10 sec.’
I guess 3% was TO IMBA.
But guess this would solve bloat a bit if it’s now just a near useless 2 point talent :/
I was just thinking that, Ryai. At the very least they could have made it 2/4 or an odd 1/3. But eh, it’s one less talent point that I am required to spend in order to get something I want. Now if they could just clip down a very other areas, I’d be a happy hunter.
a few other areas*
Or, if they could cut pre-requisits [I can not speeeeeell atm], but anyways, flipping thru Wowhead, it has culling cut off completely from wolverine/Rabid/Last Stand.
Is this actual on the live servers? Mean all these points are free standing?
Cause if they did this I would -love- Wild Hunt to be cut off from Roar of sacrifice… Mean it’s not even connected in the cunning tree- or maybe they could connect it to Last Stand?
RoS is useless when tanking old instances or PvE imo since the change.
And doing up a quick draft omg it gives BM one extra talent to use … where … is the question…
And non BM can get 1 talent point in Wild Hunt/Shark frenzy. Hm.
Getting rid of Avoidance now that I’ve sifted thru Wowhead pet talent trees, seems to have been very benificial- even if they nerfed the replacement from 3 to 2. Guess I can’t complain ‘that much’ if this is a slight solution to pet bloat.
Now hopefully Blizz realizes this is a GOOD thing, and don’t mess with it. Or give us more options.
Bloat really shouldn’t be defended ever :/
mean the PTR servers not live. Doh.
The 1/2% thing is from MMOC’s datamining scripts which are occasionally a little dicey (not showing info for all ranks is a particularly common error with them). Without confirmation from someone that has logged in to the latest PTR build and checked it has changed, I would guess that CtH is still going to be 3 ranks.
Hopefully Wowhead are right that all 3 trees have had the post-Culling dependencies cut for 3.3 though.
Interesting question, does anyone remember how long after the Isle of Quel Danas came out until Wrath came out? I think 3.3 will be the last major patch before the bridging patch, and I’m a little curious about how long after until we can expect that….
I’m kinda liking the sound of CtH so far. It doesn’t sound like something that would scale with higher crit rating as in, works fine with lower crit rates with a ten second window, along with kill command, sounds like a nice little reliable boost for pvp/pve. Not much but I like solid damage boosts.
The placement on the other hand of what trees get it and where and if it’ll be tethered to other skills is what I’m concerned about.
Anyone on the ptr know just exactly what stats are scaling with pets now and how much?
@ Ryai,
I remember the one time my druid was feared by a hunter I was like, “lolwut?” only to realize she’s classified as a beast instead now.
@ Palla,
No idea. I avoided that Isle like it was a plague….>.>
Palla:
Quel Danas was part of patch 2.4. That patch went live on March 25. Wrath of the Lich King later came out that year November 13. Patch 3.0, the Pre-release patch for Wrath was October 14th.
However, Blizzard is following a much more predictable trend. I’ve been guestimating Wrath’s patch post 3.1 pretty well (not saying I’m a whiz at it) but they seem to follow a 4-5 month-ish trend now. (They admitted that they waited too long for 3.1 to come out)
3.3: Is expected sometime this December & we do know it’s Wrath final content patch (major). Which seems to point that 4.0 will be released Sometime possibly in Feb/March. We do know Cataclysm will be out before next Blizzcon (which only occurs in August or October; before November as lots of people expect) and that Blizzard isn’t planning to have a long wait again as it leads to alot more complaints from players “with nothing to do”.
Again, it’s all speculation aside from the official stuff, but thats my opinion.
WoWWiki has a number of pages with patch dates for the different expansions, such as this one for TBC and this one for the current expansion.
I think Rikaku is being rather optimistic with an estimated time frame of less than 3 months for the 3.3->4.0. Don’t forget that the whole F&F Alpha and a fair chunk of the beta cycle have to happen before the live servers will see a bridging patch. Blizzard have also pointed out a few times that they have learned from their mistake in not giving people enough time to explore Naxxramas in vanilla WoW before the bridging patch for TBC was released.
Allowing at least a 6-7 month gap, similar to the gap between 2.4 and 3.0 seems more realistic, particularly given that Sunwell was only a 6 boss dungeon, while Icecrown is going to be twice that size.
I agree that we’re likely to see 3.3 go live some time in December, but after that I would expect the Cataclysm F&F Alpha to start up around March and the closed beta around May or so. Then a bridging patch in July with a Cataclysm release in August. If there is a Blizzcon next year (which isn’t a given unless Blizzard have something specific to announce, such as the name of their new MMO), then we’d probably hear about what is coming in 3.1 and maybe 3.2.
That kind of time frame would give more casual raiding guilds a chance to have a solid crack at Icecrown before the bridging patch is released, while the cutting edge guilds would likely be given beta keys to allow Blizzard to get some serious testing in on the Cataclysm raid content (and at least some of the leading raiders would be given alpha keys before that).
We were actually talking about that on Twitter the other day, and my guess was around yours, Nimizar. I do think the Alpha and probably the beta will start before your estimation, judging from their own desire to start the beta by winter, but other then that I agree.
Then again that got me thinking…..Nimizar, you recall them saying the time between Naxx and the bridging patch was to short, and I remember that. I also remember them saying that the time between Sunwell and the bridging patch there was to long. Most likely it’ll be a 4-5 month waiting period after 3.3 goes live before the bridge, and then the usual month or so wait before Cataclysm.
But….this is going to be one interesting bridging patch, to say the least. Are they going to introduce all the new changes in the bridge, including the ones to Azeroth, or just the talent and skill changes? Not that it matters, those changes are going to be massive enough for us hunters.
As I was strolling down the road just now ((Yes, at two AM.)) something occurred to me which made me violently sick to my stomach. Avoidance is gone for PvP. 75% damage AoE damage reduction, gone. AoE caps have been raised by ten. TEN TIMES. Pets are already taking some serious damage in PvP. Right now it is workable so long as it is JUST the AoE damage pouring in and no one is focusing on them at the same time. But we’re about to see an AoE damage INCREASE, and our pets are going to have roughly ZERO defense against it. Even WITH a talented cower, pets are about to explode.
Unfortunately, I’ll have to wait for 3.3 to go live to test this. As anyone who has been to the test realms will tell you, they are just about the worst place to test high end PvP, especially with premades.
*shudders* Premades.
Nimz:
Actually I meant to type Nov/Dec – Fed/March. Which is 4 months at the minimum. Still yes optimisitic, but not overly gregarious. However, I have heard from some friends (in reputable places) that testing is already being done on Cataclysm, so alpha may actually start this winter. I wouldn’t expect it to be so late in the year before Alpha starts. Perhaps beta (closed) will start in March.
It’s very hard to say since this expansion is alot of new skills, but re-vamped old-world. It’s hard to say just how “hard” that is to do XD
But Blizzard has already stated they’re not not gonna do a 6-7 month gap again. They considered that “too long”. 6 months was the gap between 3.0 and 3.1; a time-frame gap Blizzards considered to be too long and slow and got criticized for. That’s why we see patches every 4-5 months now. I wouldn’t expect that to change.
But that’s me ;)
Palla:
By bridging you mean 4.0 right?
It’s hard to say if we’ll get talent points this time. According to Blizzcon all the talent trees are getting pruned. (Again, going by what Blizzcon panel said) Alot of the talents that provided “passive” bonuses are being moved to part of the “Mastery” system (or something along those lines). In essence, Blizzard wanted the talent trees to actually provide more “visual” talents.
I don’t believe we’ll get the changes to Azeroth though. What we’ll get is probably some precursor story. Like a bunch of fire suddenly shooting up from the ground, black dragons wreaking havok and such.
Is it the .0 patches? I mean the patches just before the expansion that give us all the new features coming out. I just refer to them as bridging patches, since they update everything to be on par with the expansion.
I think we’ll HAVE to have new talents, Rikaku. I don’t mean down five more points new talents, I mean new talents to fill in the trees for all the new voids every class is going to have. A lot of what are talent points now are going to be part of the passive mastery system, as you said, meaning that we’ll either be getting at least a couple of new talents to fill the void, or, well, the void.
Hunters in particular are either going to see some talents reworked to fit with energy, or just changed completely. Oughta be interesting.
Oh, meant to toss in that I totally forgot about the events taking place before expansions……….
@Palla: I’m pretty sure the fixed AoE caps are currently high enough that most players can’t reach them with less than 10 targets (although presumably the raiders in top end gear are getting there fairly regularly, otherwise Blizz wouldn’t be changing the mechanic).
GC did say the change would probably be a nerf to things like mage solo AoE farming (he didn’t give an exact number of mobs where the new mechanic leads to a lower per-target damage cap than the existing system since that will vary depending on the player’s gear level, but I assume he meant that it would consistently be lower in cases where mages are riding around collecting 20+ lower level mobs by proximity aggro before nuking them down with Arcane Explosion).
So I wouldn’t expect AoE damage in BGs and Wintergrasp to be going up all that much – most of the players in those battles wouldn’t have been running up against the existing cap anyway. If anything, it may come down a bit in bigger brawls involving 20+ people and assorted pets on each side.
I’m sure warlocks will get a heap of talent changes to work in with their new soul shard mechanic as well.
As for my suggested delay in getting the F&F Alpha and the closed beta started, part of my reason for that is that I doubt Blizzard will want to overshadow the release of the pinnacle content for Wrath with too much Cataclysm info.
I could definitely see the alpha starting within 6-8 weeks of 3.3 though, so depending on exactly when 3.3 is released, I guess it would be conceivable to see the alpha starting as early as mid-January.
I’m going to take your word on that, Nimizar. I know I’ve already seen some pretty big numbers off of AoEs even with the current cap. I’m not really worried about the low end PvPers, it’s the high end, top of the line PvP or encroaching PvE mages that give me goose bumps.
Oh! And the point I was trying to make, and totally forgot…..it’s still a decrease in pet survivability coupled with an overall increase to AoE effectiveness, which was where the decrease or nerf occurred. I just kind of have wonder how that made sense at Blizzard HQ….
Palla:
“I think we’ll HAVE to have new talents, Rikaku. I don’t mean down five more points new talents, I mean new talents to fill in the trees for all the new voids every class is going to have.”
Oh most definitely. I agree with that too, and I apologize for not being clear.
I just meant that if Blizz was going to cause talent chaos then Cataclysm is most likely the most-likely expansion for this to happen in a pre-release patch. That perhaps the new talents won’t be something we have a chance to have in 4.0. Perhaps 4.0 will come, we have our same 3.3 talents, but instead on the night of release they throw out Patch 4.0.1 and give us our new talents for Cataclysm.
After all, releases tend to fall on Tuesdays… ;)
Oh and yes Palla, the .0 patchs are the expansion patches. =)
Thank you, Rikaku, I couldn’t remember if they were the .0’s or if they did .9’s for them. And if they are going to do it for 4.0 then they’ll wait until the conclusion of the last arena season, and THEN toss in the massive change. My vote is on that one.
For both Burning Crusade and Wrath, the new talent trees were released in the bridging patches (i.e. 41 point talents arrived in 2.0, 51 point talents arrived in 3.). All class mechanic and spell changes also arrived in the bridging patch.
For Wrath, the final TBC arena season closed before the bridging patch, and the first Wrath arena season didn’t start until well after the expansion itself came out (although I would expect a shorter expansion->first arena season gap this time around). In addition, all TBC raids were severely nerfed when the bridging patch was released (something like a 30% reduction in boss health). The whole achievement system was also added in 3.0 rather than waiting for the expansion.
In both previous cases, the expansions were only required to gain access to the new zones, level past the old level cap and to take up any new professions, races or classes.
Cataclysm makes this a bit trickier since they don’t have the easy chokepoints for restricting access that they had with the Dark Portal to Outland and the boats and zeppelins to Northrend. It isn’t quite as clear what content Blizzard will be restricting to folks with the expansion and what will be available to everyone (particularly since Blizzard have said that the modified terrain will be available to everyone).
My guess is that we will at least have to wait until the expansion for:
- worgen/goblin characters
- new race/class combinations
- access to Archaeology
- ability to level past 80
The things I definitely expect to see in the 4.0 bridging patch are just the mechanics changes:
- hunter focus
- warlock soul shards
- mastery system and associated talent tree revamps (but no mastery on gear at this point)
And then there are a whole pile of updates that relate to the Azeroth changes, that I expect to be present in the 4.0 patch files, but not enabled until Cataclysm is actually launched:
- new zones and map and terrain changes in Azeroth (Access to new zones for people without the expansion could be restricted completely, or else just by hiding all the quest NPCs)
- flying in old Azeroth (this is linked to the previous point, as the ability to fly won’t go live until the new terrain goes live. It will be interesting to see if Blizz restrict flying in Azeroth at all, or if they just let it be a matter of anyone being allowed to fly in Azeroth as soon they learn how to fly at all)
- quest updates in old Azeroth (as with flying, the new quests require that the new terrain has been put in place first)
Finally, I’m not clear on how thorough Blizz plan to be in retroactively applying their changes to itemisation. For previous itemisation changes they left existing gear alone, leaving the situation to resolve itself as people upgraded their gear. In this case, though, they’re already doing a cleanup pass over the old world quest rewards and drops to ensure they still make sense in light of current itemisation, so they may do the same for TBC and Wrath gear as well.
As far as old world changes go, I think we’ll see an event larger then the two before the previous expansions before hand to introduce the changes to old world Azeroth. I don’t think the actual changes will happen until the release of Cataclysm though.
As for itemization, I suspect that any ‘hunter’ or ‘enhancement shaman’ gear will just have intellect removed and added onto other stats……well, agility and stamina anyway. And remember that attack power is going away too, so they’ll already be doing a pass on a ton of gear for that reason.
They MAY do the new race/class combination before Cataclysm proper, but pretty much everything else I agree with. Flying won’t happen until the old world changes are made, and I don’t think the old world will change until Cataclysm is out. As for quest updates, I see that being a MASSIVE undertaking, which I don’t mind. Try to remember that for the most part, quest rewards in old Azeroth suck. It’ll be nice to actually see some real options for quest rewards.
I think we can safely assume that all power/talent/itemization changes will take place a good month or so before Cat (possibly even two). This gives them a while to work out the major PvP and DPS kinks before the real product goes live. It will be like a big patch for player interest AND they have done it before this way so they know it works.
Even though they have said otherwise, I kind of expect them to do the new Hunter chages before then since it is so drastic of a change. Since it will be a large alteration in playstyle, we may get a month or so of being way overpowered and then get nerfed all to hell.
I’m expecting a June-ish release for Cataclysm personally. Logically, it would be later than that (based on the previous two) but consumer attention spans just won’t hold much longer than that I believe. Although the release of other Blizzard projects may alter that prediction.
Actually, that’s a good point neutrallo – with the mechanics changes this time around being so much greater than those in TBC and Wrath, having 6-8 weeks of tweaks between 4.0 and the Cataclysm release rather than just the 4 weeks or so we had with the last two expansions is a definite possibility.
That time frame would also be appropriate if they decide to wind up to it with a bigger event than they have in the past.
Ok, to people thinking that cower is now worthless, they are forgetting that pets are still tanks to alot of players. For lvling up, cower gives a great dmg reduction much like a turtles shell shield. For those of use who are lvl 80 and like to do xtreme soloing, this is just plain awesome.
I’m pretty sure your not talking to me, since I’ve stated that cower will have ample solo usage, but I’ll bite anyway. The problem isn’t that it isn’t useful in some situations, the problem is that it isn’t useful for all situations. In fact it’s only real useful application is the afore mentioned soloing, or for when your pet is tanking in a five man for a stationary boss. From a raiding perspective, slowing your pet down when the fire is around isn’t usually a smart option, and any raider worth his salt is going to try to maximize DPS, meaning that improved cower isn’t an option. And you obviously have my PvP point of view, where willingly slowing down your pet is just not a good idea at all.
And unfortunately Xan, six seconds is just not a long enough duration to be of much help anywhere. I don’t know what, but inexplicably all of the hunter’s defensive durations suck serious ass. The pet durations I can sort of explain, but the player durations I can’t.
It seems like unlike the majority of hunters here, I LOVE the new Cower ^^;;
I have been dabbling in pet tanking and soloing instances for a while now, and the new version will be a welcome addition to my bag-o’-tricks that make my guildies go “O_o I didn’t know a hunter could do that” lol (I do wish that it was a longer duration however, 6sec seems a bit too short a duration imo)
No, I don’t like the snare component, and would greatly prefer it to be debuff to pet dps, so IMO blizz should change the new Cower so that it reads “Reduces the damage your pet deals and receives by 40%”. This would make more logical sense, since a cowering pet would be less focused on smacking the target, as well as enabling 2/2 ImpCower to become useful by eliminating the dps debuff. This reworking would answer the complaints I have read in this thread and elsewhere about the new Cower, while also keeping it from becoming just a baseline Shell Shield ^^
………….
Something I’ve been thinking about though is could this change to Cower be in response to the change in Misdirection? I don’t think anyone else has addressed this issue so far here, but the new MD gives the hunter the potential to MD about 300% more threat to the tank per CD. There has been no change to the CD of MD itself so far, so that means that if MD is used every CD, a hunter will be able to transfer 13%+ of their threat to tank (considerably more if a BM hunter syncs with BW.) For those who haven’t bothered to read patch notes, the new MD will redirect all threat from the hunter for 4sec instead of the current 3x charges
This change should also make AOE soloing brainless as the newMD will be able to redirect all threat from Volley to your pet instead of only 3x arrows from said Volley right now.
……………
Since I have yet to be able to login to the PTR, can anyone who has access please tell us whether CtH stacks with Ferocious Inspiration? Getting 6% dps for me and 3% for pet every time my pet crits sounds rather nice ^^
Many of the tail sweeps with knockback effects will no longer hit players’ pets.
Oh thank God. My guild’s last Ony run was bordering on the ridiculous. “Devilsaur in to the whelp caves!” Since pets automatically position themselves at the rear, our pets were CONSTANTLY getting knocked back- our leader finally just asked us to hold our pets at our side. Everybody’s damage got gimped (particularly the poor BM specced hunters), but it was the only way we could win the fight…
I’m going to hold off judgement on Cower until I see how it plays. I can see it being valuable as a way of keeping your pet up through an unlucky Whirlwind, but we’ll see.
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