It looks like pet special abilities are finally finished

[Bendak]

In today's build, there were new exotic abilities added for Silithid (30% movement speed passive) and Clefthooves (10% more armor and 20% healing received). This means all Exotic families now have at least 2 special abilities/passives. All non-exotics have something too, which is nice to see after the complete butchering of family specials in Legion.

They tweaked the 2-minute damage reduction to give 60% DR and last a few seconds longer to differentiate it from the 1-minute Turtle-style 50% DR.

Also, Primal Rage's focus cost was removed. It used to cost 50 (pet) Focus, which was a huge problem for SV and MM with their reduced passive Focus regen.

My main complaint is that for Exotics there are some pretty massive discrepancies in terms of quality and general usefulness. And of course I'm still not a huge fan of specializations being locked, but it is what it is.

I have an organized list of what each family has in this post if you're interested: http://eyesofthebeast.com/2018/04/guide ... r-azeroth/

[Quiv]

Thanks Bendak! Your stuff is always well laid out.

Clefthooves look like they may be a high contender for the go to Tank pet. Still feels weird a big ol beast of burden is Ferocity.

[Xota]

Silithid's snare is still melee range? That's disappointing, the other two exotic snares are ranged (and silithid used to have a ranged CC ability).
Crab and Tallstrider's abilities (both snares) are also inferior to the other melee snares. Crab's is channeled, Tallstrider's is on a significantly longer CD.

Locked specs has grown on me, since every category (spec x buff) has at least one non-exotic pet family in it. Tenaticy x Snare isn't great because the only non-exotic member is Crab, which has to channel currently. But I like that pets are less identical than they were in Legion, while still not making one family the only viable pet for raiding.

[Bendak]

The Tallstrider cooldown was fixed to 10sec. But yeah Crab still needs to be fixed. I will submit a bug about it. They have been pretty responsive with this stuff. I don’t think it’s their intent to make just one of them worse for no reason.

[SpiritBinder]

Thanks for the updates B, v glad they are still working on it.

Still a little unfortunate about the worm/chimaera - burrow/froststorm abilities not getting a look at, they're near almost an "extra" ability like trick or rest, adding some visual flair with little else of practicality. I know they have had to do a lot to try and gets pets up to scratch, I'm VERY grateful for it. That said, to be fair however, if they had not been so badly broken and unbalanced for literal years, it would not have likely be such an undertaking. And as such I fear things like the above mentioned, and other imbalances will be easier to make their way in due to the massive bite they had to chew.

[Xota]

I haven't used worm's ability much, it makes them untargetable, but I think now you can just have them play dead. But Froststorm is handy as a mobile flare. Chimaera are my preferred AB pet for that.

[Wain]

Sorry it took me so long to reply to this, but thanks for all your work Bendak!
I kept putting off reading your article because I've been occupied with other aspects of the site and only now got around to updated pet abilities, but your blogs are great as always

I'm working on getting the family abilities ready for BfA now.

[SlickrockGhost]

I'm really annoyed with some of these combinations. I'm especially sad for the new Lizards, which are sub-obtimal for any PVE now, especially raiding.