Lassirra from the Hunter’s Mark is hosting a special THM chat session in the THM chat room tonight at 9pm EDT.
It’s special because there are special guests: namely me and Pike from Aspect of the Hare. The topic: hunter pets, of course!
I’ve been a bit brain-fried lately so I’m not sure how much good I’ll be, but I fully expect Pike and Lassirra to make up for my deficits. *grin*
The patch notes for Patch 3.3 on the Public Test Realms have been updated. You can find the full notes on the PTR forum or the normal PTR notes page, but as usual MMO Champion has been kind enough to post a notes comparison.
So what’s new for hunters and pets? Just this one note:
Pet Leveling: Hunter pets now need only 5% of the experience a player needs to level, down from 10%.
Nice!
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.
*yawn* It’s too early for me to add intelligent commentary, so I’ll just post what Ghostcrawler had to say about pet resilience on the WoW forums:
We certainly don’t think pet resilience is useless. We are considering increasing it to 100% of master’s resilience to make up for the increased AE damage pets will take in PvP. We don’t want pets to explode on contact (neither do we want pet classes to be twice as difficult to kill) but we did think it was a little goofy and unintuitive that pets could just shrug off AE attacks in PvP. We’d rather make pets tougher against all types of damage than be vulnerable to some and nearly immune to others.
He doesn’t mention if this is a chance they might make for Patch 3.3, but that would seem to me to be a reasonable time to make it.
As an addendum to the Patch 3.3 PTR notes, Ghostcrawler added this comment about the changes to hunter pet Avoidance via the forums:
It is likely we will just replace the hunter pet Avoidance talent with one that increases pet dps. It is too situational to have as a talent now. Hunter pets will just take 90% less damage from creature AE the same as other pets do (meaning “for free”). We offer that avoidance as recognition that Fluffy doesn’t have the AI to get out of the fire on boss fights and likes to go in straight lines between you and a target, even if that means crossing fire.