Avoidance, Cobra Reflexes and the New Pet Mend
BRK ran Shadow Lab last night, cleared it, and as we mentioned earlier, got nada worthwhile gear-wise. Ce la vie.
But we did get some good feel for the new pet dynamics. So let’s give some impressions.
Hobbes tanked a 70 elite Felguard - those are Felguards, right? - with no problem. Once when everybody was feared, the Felguard went right for the healer. So as soon as the fear ended, we popped Intimidation, Bestial Wrath, and sent Hobbes to save the day. He readily grabbed aggro, at which point we mashed our Pet Heal and let loose with the dps. Hobbes held up really well, so much so that we called out over vent,
“Look at that cat tank! Yeeha!”
We tried the same strategy when Ambassador Helmaw aggro’d the healer. Only this time, Hobbes died but it was totally our own fault as we were mashing the wrong button. We moved Snake Trap from F10 to a non-primary key and put Pet Mend in its place. Unfortunately, when Hobbes was saving the party’s life, we kept mashing F11, Freezing Trap. Doop.
We also noticed that Ferocious Inspiration was basically “on” all the time. It wouldn’t even reach the end of its 8-second timer before it proc’d again.
8… 7… 6… 5… oh, 8 again… 7… 6… etc. We are wondering if we could pull one or even two points from Frenzy and put them in Hawkeye, or maybe Scattershot and Efficiency. Just random thoughts, of course, we need a lot more play-time before we spend another 50 gold on a wild-@ss theory.
Second Boss was silly as usual, except we actually trapped Hobbes in our own Freezing Trap. He wasn’t happy and when he broke free he went after a mage with a vengeance. Mage wasn’t happy but we were smiling.
Oh, before we forget. If you have Scrolling Combat Text Damage - we color Hobbes’ damage as blue - your screen just freakin’ fills. Totally awesome.
Third Boss was nothing special either.
Murmur. This was what we wanted, both in terms of loot and pet study. If we tell you that not only did we send Hobbes to attack but he actually tanked for a bit, would you believe us? He sure as h3ll did. When the tank couldn’t get back to Murmur after the first sonic blast we sent Hobbes, just so that there would be someone in melee range so Murmur wouldn’t do Resonance.
We sent Hobbes with a Pet Mend already cooking and spammed it every 15 seconds. The tank was always able to get aggro back from Hobbes very easily; we had Growl off.
Throughout the entire fight, Hobbes was sent in, brought out, healed by Pet Mend only, tanked a little and survived his encounter with Murmur. We screamed into Vent,
“Have ya ever seen a Hunter’s pet do THAT? HOT D@MN!!”
Yes, the party was silent and probably questioned our sanity. And they may be right, we may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for.
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Seems like avoidance is nice, can’t wait to get my BM hunter to Outlands and really check it out. Looking at your spec, and with the new pet skills, I have acouple questions. I would think that dropping Edurance Training, and putting those points in Thick Hide and Bestial Discipline would help increase pet DPS. More focus means more DPS, right? Seems you could compensate the STAM loss from ET with Avoidance and Greater Stamina.
Anyways…./cheers
The new pet buffs are huge.
I’m a resident MM hunter for my guild (BM hunter + pet needs to get +125 AP somewhere :p) that has always uses his pet. I run with a BM hunter in all raids.
My MM pet (no BM tree pet buffing talents) with nature resist trained (still from AQ40/Naxx) + my nature resist aspect held up pretty well against Murmur PRE-patch (Has tanked in place of the warrior long enough to kill Murmur on 3 separate occasions).
Post patch… I might try and get our BM hunter’s pet to solo tank Murmur.
So far we’ve done Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, and Opera (BBWolf this week) this week. I will say that I envy the BM hunter. I do everything he does PLUS manage complex shot rotations (can’t just spam auto->steady do do dps as MM) and manage my much higher aggro just to keep even with him in dps (I have to put my beer down to raid! The Humanity!). All the bosses went the same except Maiden.
On Maiden (who, if you don’t know, constantly consecrates through the entire friggin fight), we hardly ever used our pets before, or they’d die pretty warly after getting a Holy Fire. We’ve only downed her twice before this week, so we don’t always spare cleanses/heals on pets. Well… with Avoidance and the new Mend Pet we were both able to keep our pets in there dpsing nearly the whole fight.
To be honest… KC comming off the GC and pets having much higher survivability in PvE fights (plus the HM change and the epic ranged weapon upgrades) are a boon to every hunter spec. Use your Pets!
@Dahm-
Race you for the Sonic Spear! I’m only 6K past revered LC and still don’t have it! (Killed Murmur on every SL run I’ve done, from lvl 69 to now)
Surely you mean you are considering taking a point or two out of Frenzy rather than Ferocious Inspiration?
Doop! Yup, we did. Corrected. Thank you. +5 BRK Cool Points.
@Damh
I don’t think you could move those points to Scater Shot, you wouldn’t have enough points in BM to keep The Beast Within
-Misguided
Kel’thuzad
Not entirely on this topic.. but FYI:
http://petopia.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/tame-beast-bug-or-feature/#more-52
Hi BRK,
Just wondering, do you know / recommend of any blogs that write about rogues as you write so passionately about hunters?
Not specifically, but we do know that Mark of the Wild has a much more extensive list of WoW blogs than we do.
http://markofthewild.blogspot.com
As far as the pet stabling thing is concerned, I believe it’s a bug. Here’s what happened to me last night:
*Wanted to tame the new skettis owl
*Tamed normal owl in nagrand for screech and claw
*Flew to skettis and forgot to Abandon normal owl before attempting to tame new one (pet was dismissed, though)
*New pet tamed and first owl was kinda sent to my stables
*When pulling pets in and out of the stables, I could see the first owl briefly in the picture, but could not select him
I didn’t want that other owl. I just wanted to get him out of my stables so I could abandon him, but there was no way to actually select him as my pet. I eventually submitted a ticket, and the GM said it was a bug and that they would need to delete one of my pets. This worked great, as it was my goal in the first place.
It would be great to temporarily tame pets just for skills without having to abandon your real pet. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem like a reliable system for doing that. If it had put any pet besides the one that I wanted to abandon in the phantom stable slot, I could have just pulled him out and abandoned him and then used the empty slot. Unfortunately, the only pets I could access were the ones I wanted to keep.
FYI - Here’s what I’m using now:
Ravager (PvP) - High white damage + Gore
Scorpid (Dungeons) - High Armor for Off-tanking
Owl (Solo PvE) - Using screech to deal with agro issues
Before I got the owl, I was having a terrible time soloing. Switching from 43/18/0 to 0/20/41 made it nearly impossible for my pet to hold agro. The owl is doing great, though, as screech generates more agro than gore.
And before I go, I saw the coolest pet last night -
petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/skins/skin_carrionbirdskinoutlandwhite.shtml
I want one! I’d use him to replace to scorpid just because he looks so cool, but I’d have to train him up from 65, and I’d have to abandon the scorpid now (stupid 3 stable cap)
We ran Sethekk Halls last night, and btw it was my first time pulling an instance, and I thank BRK for all of his information on that because it went almost flawlessly.
My main point though is that I kept my pet on the last boss (forget his name) the entire fight, through the 6000 dmg ae’s and just hotted him every 15 seconds as needed. He grabbed aggro and kept the boss in one spot after the blinks until the tank could get back to the boss, and he lived through the entire fight. I was amazed.
world of ming is the rogue equivilent blog that someone was asking about. hes contoversial like dahm and gets lots of fun comments. they could be related..lol.
keep up the great blog Dahm.
Rubber Duckie, check out Psyae’s Blog, she’s very passionate about the rogue class, unfortunately I believe she’s stopped blogging, you can access her via my blog (links are on the left).
hey sylvina,
yea she kinda stoppped. cos i was hoping to get some insights into how to improve my rogue dps…
feel kinda shitty that when we have 3 rogues in kara, i am the lowest… though i can outsap/outsneak them, but whats the point right?
recently respec to assaination/mutilate.. am trying that now ..