WotLK Beta, Pet Winners and Losers
Winners
Bats Sonic Blast. What makes this two-second stun better than everything other pets’ is the uber-short cooldown. If you’re mana-draining hunter in a 5v5 team and your primary target is the paladin, it’ll be hard to choose a better pet than a Bat to interupt that paladin’s heals.
Bird of Prey Snatch. Can you leave your bird on a warrior and just let the Snatch spell proc every minute? Nope; that warrior will destroy your pet. Don’t use autocast for this spell all the time, but save it for when your team focus-fires on the warrior. When you switch to the warrior, turn the autocast back on with a macro:
/petautocaston Snatch
Carrion Bird Demoralizing Screech. What’s so nice about this spell is it’s useful in both PvP and raiding. Reducing the enemy’s AP is always nice, regardless of your situation, and ever better when it’s an AoE-debuff.
Crocolisk Bad Attitude. For PvE-grinding, this is looking sweet. It’s not the same as a mage or paladin AoE-grinding, but if your pet aggro’s additional mobs, at least your Mend Pet spell won’t aggro the adds.
Devilsaur Monstrous Bite. This could be the top-DPS pet in the game with this spell. If it’s not number one, it’s in the top three to be sure. Raiders will be sporting Devilsaurs in great numbers.
Gorilla Thunderstomp. The closest thing to a paladin’s Consecrate we have. Most hunters never get to experiment with a Gorilla, but now that we can get a gorilla to 65 in a blink of an eye, we’re certain a few people will choose a Gorilla to level and grind. It’ll be quite fun to see!
Hyena Tendon Rip. What was once a big-time loser pet is becoming one of the two best anti-melee-DPS pets we’ll have. It has a nice, short cooldown and reasonable Focus-cost. You’ll want to turn off your Focus-dump Bite spell to ensure Tendon Rip has sufficient Focus to do its job.
Moth Serenity Dust. The extra AP is great, the bonus healing is wonderful. A hunter’s major limiting factor in doing MQoSRDPS is keeping the mob at range, which means our pet has to stay alive. We’ve been thrilled with the performance of our Moths, we highly recommend them.
Raptor Savage Rend. They were good before, as good as cats. But they couldn’t beat a Windserpent or Ravager in end-game DPS. But now, this puts the Raptor in the race for top DPS-pet in the game.
Spider Web. The cooldown is long, but the ensnare is long as well. Spiders are not exotic, so all you non-BM PvP hunters might want to consider a one, depending on your playstyle. If you’re a healer-protector, Web will allow your healers to run out of melee-range and escape their attackers. They’ll love you for it.
Sporebat Spore Cloud. The Most Improved Pet in WotLK is the Sporebat. They are basically worthless in BC, but the armor-reduction of Spore Cloud will make them get lots of raiding invitations.
Turtle Shell Shield. Who hasn’t wanted a Turtle-tank? The problem in BC is that the Shell Shield spell is great, but the rest of the Turtle stinks. Now that Turtles get the same benefits of other Tenacity-pets, we hope lots of non-BM hunters start using Turtles to level and grind.
Wasp Sting. The BRK Pet Testing and Waffle Theorycrafting Center has confirmed that this spell prevents rogues from Vanishing, (thank you Pandaba!) Rogues can Cloak of Shadow out of a Sting, but if CoS is on cooldown, Sting will really piss off some rogues.
Losers
Boar Gore. What was once the best leveling-pet and a strong raiding-pet is now nerfed to obscurity. No stun, no Growl-modifier, no chance for double-damage except when under the Dash effect. Goodbye, Boars. We’ll miss you.
Cat Prowl. Prowl stinks. Always has, probably always will. Worthless in raiding, almost worthless in PvP. With so many better choices for Ferocity pets, the cat is going into the history books. /BAWL!!!
Crab Pin. No stun, no DoT? It says, “in place”. That’s a stun, no? Maybe they forgot that part? Until it’s fixed, the Crab is a no-go.
Dragonhawk Fire Breath. It breaks crowd-control more than any other pet out there. No stun, nothing else special. Just say No to Dragonhawk, perhaps The Most Worthless Pet in WotLK.
Ravager Ravage. The one-time DPS-champ for non-Marksman hunters, it gets a new Stun effect. But is two-seconds every minute going to make hunters keep bringing this pet to PvP? With Hyenas around, we don’t think so.
Serpent Poison Spit. Too much Focus, too little damage. If Dragonhawks aren’t The Most Worthless Pet in WotLK, then Serpents sure are. /flush
Silithid Venom Web Spray As an exotic pet, only 51-point BM hunters get to chose to bring a Silithid to PvP. If this is your spec, are you going to go with a crowd-control pet, or a DPS-pet to arena or battlegrounds? SV hunters are the CC-specialist, we BM hunters are the DPS epeeners. We think BM hunters are going to look at the two-minute cooldown and go with something other than a Silithid. If there were a contest for Best SV Pet SV’s Can’t Have, this wins, hands-down.
Toss Up
Bears Swipe. Is this better than a Gorilla than can AoE-aggro? Both Gorillas and Bears are Tenacity-pets, so there’s no stat-bonus for Bears we’d advocate. Bears have easier diets, that’s true… We wanted to put Bears in the Loser section, but Swipe is a definite improvement. We just think Gorilla’s could be a better choice for AoE-tanking.
Chimaera Froststorm Breath. This is still borked, the slowing effect hasn’t materialized. We’ll give Blizz more time to work this one out before we label it.
Nether Ray Nether Shock. It’s an anti-warlock pet. OK, how often do we need an anti-warlock pet? BM hunters crush all but SL/SL warlocks in a matter of seconds. Perhaps this pet will have a usefulness in WotLK that we don’t know about…
Rhino. It doesn’t have a special spell yet, and we can’t judge the Rhino on size alone.
Scorpid Scorpid Poison. Always a strong choice for PvP for its rapid application of a DoT, but there are so many other strong choices for PvP now. Will we continue to see Scorpids when the methods for countering them so well-known?
Tallstrider Dust Cloud. Will it work against raid-bosses, that’s the big question. If the answer is yes, then move the Tallstrider into the Win column.
Warp Stalker Warp. If you want a Tenacity pet at level 70, this is one of the few you’ll be able to match you at level 70 right off the bat. It is the only pet that can follow bridge-jumpers and Blinking-mages in PvP. But it’s a tanking pet, not DPS. In PvP, it’ll follow that mage, but unless you’re a BM hunter, it won’t put a great-big hurt on him. This is probably the most-Toss Up pet we’ve got.
Windserpent Lightning Breath. The previous king of high-RAP hunters’ affection, we’re not certain it’ll stay there. We need more information as to just how well it’ll scale with RAP in the expansion before we declare this a raiding-pet again.
Wolf Furious Howl. Just like in BC, the buff from Furious Howl only affects melee. If you’re in a group with two rogues and an enhancement shaman, a wolf is a great choice. How often do hunter get put with a party like this, though?
Worm Acid Spit. Just how much armor reduction? We gotta know some numbers, foshizzle.
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Hey BRK how did your test with Krystalle go with the wasp, was she able to stealth with the debuff or cos and then vanish out of it? just heard the archive of The WowInsider show and was wondering.
aah saw the text on the COS and vanish after i had posted the comment, sozzy and thanks for the info.
The Worm’s acid spit armour debuff is a known value - it’s -785, can stack up to five times I believe for -3925. Which is nuts, frankly.
the worm and wasp armour reduction don’t stack with other player armour reductions like sunder etc. Main purpose is to give armour reduction where other classes are not available to do so.
also most of the numbers on the pet specials are placeholder values, so this review is alittle early
Um, the link you gave for a Crab’s “Pin” http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=53548 indicates “Pins the target in place, and squeezes for 108 damage over 4 sec.” Cooldown is long (1 min.) but the DoT is nice. And a 4 second root in PvP is an eternity. Things may look different when WotLK goes live, but it looks to me like Crabs may be decent.
We love our Monkey! (gorilla) and we’ve had him since lvl 56, from Un’goro. He definitely made the grind from 60 to 70 a breeze, not to mention he’s become a favorite in the raid group.
I also believe he’s the ‘biggest’ pet in BC. You won’t believe how many ‘What a big Monkey you have there’ comments we get every time we pug. *Autoreply -’That’s what she said!’
Ehsobee ftw.
Just a note about wolves; the range on Furious Howl has been, or is going to be, increased to 40 yards. So it’ll be just as good for an all-hunter party as for the melee
Agree about the cats, though. Prowl could really use some work.
from what ive seen so far on beta, worm and wasp armor pen stack together, and today i will see if sunders stack as well (lvling with a worm from Borean Tundra atm)
I’d like to take a moment and defend cats. Prowl is only useful to NE Hunters in PvP. It makes it much easier for me to defend stuff in BG’s because if they come in range I’m just about guaranteed to get the drop on them before they know what is hitting them. I also have found prowl useful in PvE as well in that I can use my cat to engage a mob at its spawn point, and keep it there, while not disturbing and pulling the surrounding mobs.
While I do agree that some of the looser pets are in their rightful place I have to say that this list will need to be updated in the future. It seems Blizz has been very attentive to the needs of hunters and paying a great deal of attention to their posts on the forums. Beta still has a way to go and I think that we have at least a small if not good chance to see some major improvements to these pet families. As Blizz has said before they have place holder numbers in for a lot of things, specifically pet abilities, because they have not yet passed over them for analysis and finalization. So who knows what the live versions will bring.
I can’t remember where I read it, but a blue post somewhere said that Furious Howl would be bumped to 40y, and that it was very strange indeed that the range was so short. Now they only have to make it raid-wide
Dear boar fans, do not fret! As BRK metioned, boars did get beat with the nerf bat rather badly, but there’s hope! Believe it or not a RP debate in reguards to boars broke out on the hunter beta forums and ended up in making changes that affect all the the tenacity pets! Check it out:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=9023656642&sid=2000
I, for one, couldn’t be happier about tenacity pets getting Charge in tier one of their talent tree. I mean, honestly, when have you ever heard of a large, angry animal ‘Dash’ing after someone anyway? = P
Can we presume that this was also posted on the beta forums?
Thank You Kindly.
I may be incorrect but I believe the armor pen spells will not stack with spells of the same type. The worm skill will not stack with sunder and the wasp skill will not stack with Faerie Fire.
WINNAR
ME
LOSER
BRK
Thx!
No more kitties… hmm…
Big Red Devilsaur?
Big Red Rhino?
Big Red Moth?
/ponder
I like Big Red Moth, Pike. :3
The cooldown on Thunderstomp makes it an extremely underwhelming pet talent. I had a gorilla and dumped it a day later due to to the sheer uselessness of this talent.
I don’t know, “Big Red Bat” sounds better, but for practical purposes I’d guess “Big Red Devilsaur”
…A rose by any other name…
I’ll still read BRB or BRD
Even the “losers” look pretty solid, so there doesn’t seem to be the same disparity between pets that exists currently.
Many of the family abilities look quite situational, with limited but extremely potent usage. I think what’s more important than family ability in determining a win/lose designation is that of talent class. I’d be curious to read some analytical run-downs of Tenacity, Ferocity and Cunning trees.
That said, the Hyaena’s Tendon Rip looks too sweet to pass up for PVP.
And I have a question about the Spider’s Web ability - does the Web break if the webbed target is damaged?
“Just say No to Dragonhawk, perhaps The Most Worthless Pet in WotLK.”
T-T
It’s Big Red KITTY!! I will keep my cat because he’s been my favorite pet for years!
and I will keep my dragonhawk…cuz i enjoy setting (digital) stuff on fire!
I think BRK may have to take the bear off the fence. I would personally think a 10 sec cool down on swipe would imply more threat generation then the 1 minute cool down on thunder stomp. This is given that you can generate enough pet focus to keep up swipe on every cool down and that you have to micromanage on more then 3 mobs.
I guess it depends on the threat bonus co-efficient on thunder stomp. Still I would guess 8-10 swipes (given appropriate focus gen) would generate more threat then one thunder stomp.
Just how do I put this to the test in beta?
So does this mean…its the end for Hobbes?
@Nahis
Generally, I am killing mobs faster than every minute. I think the up-front threat from thunderstomp would outweigh the overall tps gain from bears
@Anon
He has already stated - hobbes is here to stay.
Re: Furious Howl-
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765584820&postId=90228091329&sid=2000#17
My pet is numba one!So what if the list is in alphabetical order?
I always got strange looks in BGs with my bat.
“You don’t see bats very often” is the usual comment,other than “Whoa nice pet!” and “TURN THAT DAMN SCREECH OFF!”
I’ve used Screech since level 16 so it doesn’t effect me at all but it bugs the heck out of others apparently ;).
Whose Big Red Bat is up in your grill,obscuring your targeting and making your ears bleed?Mine is!
Thank you BRK,for this list.
I was about to join the Kitty Brigade,thinking I’d just have to bear having a cat like everyone else.You set my thinking right.
/cry
I’ll NEVER LET MY KITTAH GO! I know that the cat isn’t the best pet, not even close, but I can’t give up my awesome Ghost Saber - I’ve had her since I was a little lowbie!
I’ll keep her for nostalgia’s sake. If they hadn’t added extra stable slots I’m not sure what I’d do! Time to make a list of 3 “winner” pets I guess
While I kinda agree that it will be hard to give up my cat, Detroit (a tiger from STV) that I have had since level 38-ish, it will be a lot easier knowing that if I ever want to have that skin again, I can get one and it will automatically be level 65.
NOOO Screech has a cooldown. Why would they do that? Owl is the best pet for grinding at the moment, with its aoe-no-cooldown-screech I never get aggro from mend pet and can even multishot. Well, that’s the price we have to pay for all these new shiny pets..
I’ve pretty much committed to leveling with Copper, my tiger from STV. Had her since the first year WoW launched, and tried other pets, but Copper is an icon with my friends and guildmates.
RE: Snatch “save it for when your team focus-fires on the warrior”
No. Big fail, BRK.
Focus firing the warrior has very little to do with said warriors damage output. The goal is to interrupt the *healer* when focus firing the warrior/rogue/whatever.
Snatch would be good, however, for getting back to range. But there are way better options. Especially given the cooldown and duration of snatch.
Snatch is a big fat fail.
So sayeth Kapu, (the former uber hunter of Drenden), and so it shall be.
comment system gave me an error and wiped out the nice long comment I typed up.
There is too much, let me sum up!
This is a beta. A lot of these abilities will be “normalized”
Ex: stun w/ damage will be x cooldown
stun w/o damage will be y cooldown
armor reduction will be q amt for z length etc etc
Woah too much info! Thanks for the great long list but tbh I reckon half of them will be changed before release. Then again, it is nice to know which direction pets are going in.
samownall - Wow Blogger
IMO Ferocious Howl should be a raid-wide buff similar to totems and battle shout and such… If so, there is no way im dropping my wolf as 10 or so people (melee, tanks, hunters, pets) getting howl in a 25 manner… thats like 1k damage every cast… minimum.
from http://www.maniasarcania.com/2008/08/21/ghostcrawlers-arcania-more-on-pet-abilities/
“On pet mobility talents:
“We have been trying to find more uses for the once-a-fight abilities like Prowl and Warp. More discussion on this topic is really useful.”"
so it looks like they’re trying to make prowl and warp more useful…
There might be hope for Hobbes yet!
Cheers
Syz
Thanks for the write up BRK, super useful. Man I wish I had the Beta heh.
I’m not sure how you can say Carrion Birds are good for raiding. A warrior with 3/5 imp Demo Shout will reduce any boss’ AP to 0, rendering the pet special useless.
I’m sure that Furious Howl affects hunter attacks too.
The tooltip says it adds 5% to physical damage, and aside from arcane shot, traps and our stings (maybe a few other abilities, I forget lol) hunter damage is physical. Only casters loose out with that, but I say “feh” to them.
I’ve had my wolf for around 2 years now, and I love him to death. To see the family not only DPS worthy, but providing a very nice little buff (with increased range woot!) makes me a very happy hunter indeed. Now I can take my beautiful wolf instead of my silly cat to raids and not feel guilty about nerfing my DPS.
Cat’s nerfed in LK? awww mannnnnn
I have one toon that has had one pet. Picked Geronimo up at level 10, and he has been with me ever since. Saved my butt countless times.
I hope Hobbes didn’t hear you say that!
I beg your pardon.
Having used both gorillas and dragonhawks, the ‘hawks are far better for AE grinding than the gorillas. Thunderstomp does NOT cause as much threat as often as Fire Breath does, and getting mobs into a nice neat cone in front of Ascension is as easy as pulling her back a few yards to line them up.
Plus, the DOT from Fire Breath scales wonderfully with my RAP, and it’s very rare indeed I have issues with it breaking CC in groups anymore–largely because I only bring my ‘hawk out when I’m running with a crazy paladin, but also if it’s a warrior or a druid tank, they’re moving far away from the CC’d mobs anyhow to keep from busting them with Swipe or Thunderclap.
So no, just because they look like butterflies does not make dragonhawks useless, and I highly recommend trying them out for any curious hunter rather than dismissing Fire Breath as a worthless skill. Plus, as I am not a monkey fan, I enjoy having a graceful-looking avian predator by my side rather than something that scratches its butt every thirty seconds.
Also, I would be a proponent of Prowl turning into something like Shadowstep or the new rogue talent Shadow Dance. If Nemesis could pop in and out of Prowl repeatedly over a short period of time and launch new attacks with a damage bonus over the course of it, that would be hot~
I don’t know why you’re so hard on crabs, and still list spiders as “winners”.
in my opinion pin and web are just the same thing, only that atm pin has the shorter cd and does dmg besides.
is that only because they have different trees? well i think there are pvp talents in all the pet trees (think of roar of sacrifice and intervene in tenacity tree).
tell me, brk, why do you hate the cute crabby crabs??? spiders are ugly :-> and they don’t seem better to me.
Prowl stinks?!!
Have you missed a PvP trick here BRK?
1: Pet on prowl and plant at flag
2: Snake trap at flag
3: You shadowmeld away from scene - oh .. you’re not an elf are you :o)
4: Wait for hordie to come bouncing up to ‘unprotected’ flag
5: KABOOM!!
The only downer is you can’t see the guy on the other pooter as he has the crap scared out of him
Hey, even non-nelves can still park a prowled cat somewhere unexpected to get the jump on people in PvP.
And let’s not forget the utility of Prowl and Eyes of the Beast.
And yes, Pin and Web are functionally identical except Pin’s got a shorter cooldown AND damage added. They both read as roots, not stuns. (”Preventing movement”.) I’d think crabs are actually the winners over spiders here!
Might want to realize something on Prowl though - theres no info on how Camouflage is going to work with pets, in pvp if you can stealth but your pet cant, kinda makes it useless. I suppose one could dismiss and resummon the pet as soon as you exit stealth, but most pvper’s know that adding an extra global cooldown to your critical lead in shots is devastating
I’m picturing the huge devilsaur in raids, poor gnome’s.
Poor Gnomes?
Pfft roll Horde.
Hmmm on the Carrion Birds I wonder if thier Demoralizing Screech will stack with a warriors Demoralizing Shout? I could see it being beneficial in raiding if you’re raiding without warriors that are specced into demo shout and if it stacks, otherwise it’s useless for raiding.
Also, on the subject of dragonhawks, having done the math, Thunderstomp would need to generate an extra 900 threat to keep up with the amount that Fire Breath can generate over the time it takes Thunderstomp to cool down.
I don’t think it generates that much extra threat. :I
[...] BRK’s pet Winners & Losers post: a damn fine summary of what we can expect the pet line-up to look like when the expansion hits the shelves (thats a yay for my desire to own a hyena and a damn shame for everyone else sitting in my stable currently.) [...]
There is an easy way to save the tigers (and other cats).
They need to upgrade Claw to Mangle.
And maybe give us something like Rip for a finishing move.
That would require you to pay attention to your cat’s performance–Kitty lands 3-5 Mangles, hit Rip FTW!
But hunters are getting a quasi-stealth ability. Prowl + invisihunter = pretty decent AB/WSG defense.
I was really hoping my poor old pig would be fixed in WoTLK.
they need to change ravagers name. i mean how the hell do you name a pet ravager and then not put them in the ferocity family. it just makes no sense that they aren’t in ferocity. a once awesome pet is now craptastic.
[...] who in the zoo’ (See what I did there? Yes, I did go there). He talks about the (pet) winners and losers in Wrath and even lists a few that are in between at the moment until more info comes out about how [...]
[...] Big Red Kitty has the story. WotLK Beta, Pet Winners and Losers [...]
Dear BRK,
For the worm it seem that the armor reduction stack up to 5 times (1 apply is -785 armor) so 5 stack is around -4k armor, could be an EXCELLENT raid pet, especially if it work on raid boss, negative point is that this pet is meant for tanking, therefor his dps is not that good. If we are able to take 2 pets maybe save this one for Boss only (no enough time to put 5 apply on a trash anyway)
[...] Alternativen durchzugehen, haben andere schon getan aber insgesamt bin ich durch die Eule ein Fan von Flugtieren geworden und ich werde mir wohl die [...]
What would be the best pet for pure PvE raiding?
I was thinking sporebat or wasp, if you dont have 51 points in BM.
How about adding the ‘pets’ tag to this posting? I had a difficult time finding it again!
i’ll never leave my rare black lion out of a raid, even if this mean lil’ less dps than other pets, it’s with me since i was a lvl 20* noob and it will always be at my side even if nerfed,normalized or whatever blizz will do or as done, it’s love ya know
gief cats an ambush like ability or a 100% chance to crit from 1st,while in prowl, hit?
sounds good and not overpowered to me.
I like apples
So what we thinking is the best dps for end game raiding?? and not into BM spec.. im currently surv so devilsaur not really an option. Im looking at a raptor atm, as its in the Ferocity talent grp. just get some ideas.
What about MC core hounds? I haven’t heard anything about them and I know you can tame them in expansion.
I know this info in this article is old but i wonder: Lets say that you have 80 boar whit higtest rank of Gore, what makes 122 to 164 dmg and causes double damage if used within 6 sec of a Charge. So if we get lucky:
164 x 2 = 328 + 25 % AP from Charge and it will make.. 1312 damage?! Oh dear that is.. Heavy. Hmm.. what u say? Is my calculation right? o__O
I hope that you will make Boar movie someday if you arent too busy of course. :3
Peace (and hug)
hey u forgot core hounds!