“Dear BRK … Last night I had the chance to take [my hunter] into Kara with my guild and … I didn’t respec my pet to absorb Arcane because I hadnt planned on going to shade. He did real good up until the elementals spawned. Then it seemed Aran was two shotting him. I was keeping Mend Pet on him at all times, but he would loose three quarters of his health all at once and if I didn’t get him recalled he would die. This happened twice and the last time we had Aran at 3% so I didn’t take the time to rezz him again … What should I do to be sure to absorb the hits better? Tempest.”

If you haven’t spec’d your pet with Avoidance Rank 2 and Arcane Resist Rank 2, do not leave your pet on Aran during the Arcane blasts. There is never a reason not to have Avoidance Rank 2 trained, but you can swap your resistances around based upon the fights you have planned.

Just last night, our guild’s Kara group 2 cleared Prince and Nightbane and we re-spec’d Hobbes with Fire Resist Rank 3 and no Shadow resistance, (we wanted to be able to show some stuff for this post; we’ll explain.)

Let’s look at the damage Hobbes took against Prince:

(We recommend you open the picture in a separate window while we analyze the Shadow and Fire damage.)

Hobbes is trained with Avoidance Rank 2 which reduces AoE attack damage by 50%. Prince’s Shadow Nova attack deals approximately 3000 damage. We would expect Hobbes to take 13,500 damage, 9 hits for 1500 damage each. But no, Hobbes took 15,000, averaging 1666 per hit and a maximum of 3000.

What if WoWWebStats miscounted? What if it was really 10 hits, not 9? Then total damage would be exactly what we would expect with a 50% mitigation. That’s a possibility.

Hmm. If we subtract one 3000-damage hit, that means there were 8 more hits that did 12,000 damage. That averages to 1500 damage per hit for 8 hits, which is 50% of the standard 3000 damage that Shadow Nova deals and meets the expectation we had for the Avoidance reduction. Perhaps for eight of the nine Shadow Novas Hobbes ate, his Avoidance mitigated them by 50%, and for one shot he really did take the full 3000 blast. Perhaps Hobbes’s Avoidance get “resisted” or the Shadow Nova crit. Possible, we think.

We don’t know the correct answer. We would like to get another raider’s combat log, merge them, and find out if they recorded only nine Shadow Novas, too.

But for now, let’s “say” that without Avoidance Rank 2, Hobbes would’ve taken 27,000 damage from those Shadow Novas; all 9 shots at full-3000-damage-value. If you don’t have Avoidance Rank 2, get it and get it now.

Now the Fire damage comes from the Infernals. As we saw from the Shadow damage, WoWWebStats does not report the damage mitigated by Avoidance. However, it does report the damage mitigated by spell-resistances. Fire Resist Rank 3 mitigates approximately 50% of fire damage and our WWS report confirms this by showing Hobbes mitigating 49.3% of the fire damage from the Infernals.

Using a simple extrapolation was can calculate that had we not had Fire Resist Rank 3, the 25 hits of fire damage Hobbes took would’ve been 15,290 instead of 7645. Extrapolating once more, had we not had Avoidance Rank 2, the 15,290 damage would’ve been 30,580 damage.

Did we mention that Hobbes didn’t die during our Prince fight? Well now we know why. Avoidance and spell-resistances can be of tremendous value to your pet, depending upon the situation in which your pet is placed.

Had we trained Shadow Resist Rank 3, the Shadow damage Hobbes took would’ve been reduced to 7,500. With the priest’s frisbies flying all over the place, we might have gotten away without having to toss a single Mend Pet for the entire Prince fight. Pretty amazing.

For Aran, get that Arcane Resist. It’s incredible what your pet can withstand if he’s trained properly.

Want to know how to resist-train your pet? Look here.