WoW Petopia Community

The topic has been cleaned up and all references to a recent off-topic rant removed. The instigator will be handled separately. Thanks to the rest of you for keeping it level-headed

This just in:
Exotic Beasts now reduces the cooldown of your Pet Special Abilities by 1%, down from 30%.

.... is it just me or does this amount to 'why bother, then?' Seriously, a 1% reduction? What is that, a fifth of one second or something? Just remove it if you want to nerf the cooldown, don't insult people by reducing it to some trivial quantity that isn't going to amount to a hill of beans...

Anyway, why do we need this? x_x Hunters are already pretty gimpy, even in BM.

I just saw that myself. I really don't see the point anymore. It's not even one second off their swings now. Granted they DID cut the time down on rabid and burrow but.. I don't use a worm and I DO use the other specials a lot.

All I can think of is to keep BM from 'abusing' shale spider's 45 second cooldown stun.

Maybe it's a typo and is supposed to be 10%?

Apparently blue posts have said they're -removing it completely- and the 1% is a typo/datamining error.

so tell me why exotic beasts are a lv69 skill, again? Because it's about 100x as lame as any other spec's 69 skill (Titan's Grip anyone?) -aside- from the purely cosmetic factor of having a shiny pet.

This next patch just has me scratching me head and wondering...why? I am just really baffled by all these nerf/changes.

I'm livid about the change to BM...we were finally doing good....then NOPE! Not anymore. -.-;

Junrei wrote:I'm livid about the change to BM...we were finally doing good....then NOPE! Not anymore. -.-;

What makes me furious is that they are taking a huge swipe at BM because of PVP again.

if they are correcting for just CC, as the tweets claim, why not just change those spells? But this effects other things too.. so it appears it's another BM burst nerf.

The terribly ironic thing is that just as we finally get kill command and some other things fixed, then they do this. Back to square one, at best. Considering that they still can't fix BM AOE, going to SV seems like it's going to be the mandated change. SV was really close to BM already in the sims.

Time to seriously work at SV again, and finish leveling my lock.

I am sick to death of friggin PVP screwing with PVE, over and over and over, for every single class I enjoy. People who like PVP, I have no issues with any of them, BUT GET OUT OF MY PVE. Blizz already has altered the diminishing returns of CC when used on a player versus in PVE settings, it's high time they just divide the game in half and have skills, talents and abilities just work one way in PVP and oen way in PVE instead of trying and FAILING to shoehorn everything into exactly one setting.

BM isn't even all that GOOD. According to sims (which Bliz loves to blow off, but whatever), even BM, which is currently "best", is only middle of the road while SV/Marks is sucking fumes at the bottom behind every other dps class.

We're a freakin' pure-dps class. Shouldn't we be near the top? But oooh no. Nerf the one spec that's doing, you know... more or less decently, so it tanks like the others, instead of fixing the specs that are tanking to bring them up.

Nachtwulf wrote:BM isn't even all that GOOD. According to sims (which Bliz loves to blow off, but whatever), even BM, which is currently "best", is only middle of the road while SV/Marks is sucking fumes at the bottom behind every other dps class.

We're a freakin' pure-dps class. Shouldn't we be near the top? But oooh no. Nerf the one spec that's doing, you know... more or less decently, so it tanks like the others, instead of fixing the specs that are tanking to bring them up.

That's not true regarding SV. I checked SV vs BM yesterday after this news was out on femaledwarf.com, and with the new PTR changes enabled, SV was only 2% behind BM (in my current gear/talent/gemming/etc) and possible could be higher if reforged correctly for SV.

Also, the combined PTR changes might actually result in a net dps gain.

So what we are losing in this patch is a LOT of CC/snare/etc ability, and we are going to have a lot of playstyle changes forced on us.

But we might not actually loose any dps, but there might not be a reason to be BM anymore. Big Red Pet and shiney exotics seem to be loosing out.

Slickrock wrote:But we might not actually loose any dps, but there might not be a reason to be BM anymore. Big Red Pet and shiney exotics seem to be loosing out.

As someone who has always been BM, this is bad news. I'm not changing for any reason (especially since I don't really do current non-LFR raids, save an occasional OpenRaid once they become x-realm) but I'm still extremely disappointed. I don't even understand why this nerf was made.

If the problem was in PvP, then nerf these abilities only for PvP...? I'm content with being in the top 4-8 DPS of LFR for the first time since LFR has been out, and then this happens.

Honestly, WoW's had the pve vs pvp balance problem for a long, long time. PvE often suffers in favor of PvP, or perhaps that's lol anecdata speaking. I wish they would do something like CoH does and have the spells do one thing in pve and another in pvp.

I am not seeing anyone mention the nerf to blink strike.. it is a nerf, not just a change. So currently blink strike does 5-6% of my total damage, bite/claw 9-10% this is a roughly 1% overall damage nerf no? Not to mention you cannot control it to jump your pet to a mob or enemy running or NOT use it when it bugs out on 1st boss of Shado pan Monastery or 2nd boss of Gate of the Setting Sun... which they have yet to fix. In fact I only see a cpl benefits of this change... at least my pet can now hit malygos/mimirons head more often >.<

As to the exotic beast nerf... it better be a damned typo or someone will finally assassinate Ghostcrawler.

@Nokikova agreed.. whats funny is Guild Wars 1 has had pvp vrs pve spells speparate for a LONG time. Why cant wow figure this out? They nerf and nerf to balance PVP while PVE gets all screwed up... and really sick of hunters being middle of the road all expac while locks/mages have been top the whole time. 5.1 BM did get close to the top though.. too bad it didnt last long and it was ONLY BM with the other 2 specs dreadfully low.

A thought just occured to me.

GC: "Hunters are not meant to be crazy cat ladies. You won't get more stable slots for now."

Next big patch: Hunters get more stable slots. Also hunter's CC gets nerfed to the ground, really hurting PvE functionality.
GC: "Hey, you know what, Holinka? Maybe hunters should be crazy cat ladies after all!"
Holinka: "Good idea!"

Voodoou wrote:I am not seeing anyone mention the nerf to blink strike.. it is a nerf, not just a change. So currently blink strike does 5-6% of my total damage, bite/claw 9-10% this is a roughly 1% overall damage nerf no? Not to mention you cannot control it to jump your pet to a mob or enemy running or NOT use it when it bugs out on 1st boss of Shado pan Monastery or 2nd boss of Gate of the Setting Sun... which they have yet to fix. In fact I only see a cpl benefits of this change... at least my pet can now hit malygos/mimirons head more often >.<

As to the exotic beast nerf... it better be a damned typo or someone will finally assassinate Ghostcrawler.

@Nokikova agreed.. whats funny is Guild Wars 1 has had pvp vrs pve spells speparate for a LONG time. Why cant wow figure this out? They nerf and nerf to balance PVP while PVE gets all screwed up... and really sick of hunters being middle of the road all expac while locks/mages have been top the whole time. 5.1 BM did get close to the top though.. too bad it didnt last long and it was ONLY BM with the other 2 specs dreadfully low.

What nerf to Blink Strike? Everything I've seen and all the sims say it has been drastically improved, for PvE at least. I'm switching to it from Lynx Rush as soon as the patch goes live. People keep complaining about changes in 5.3 but the facts are that our dps is going to go up by about 5% in all specs.

Danielfboone wrote:

Voodoou wrote:I am not seeing anyone mention the nerf to blink strike.. it is a nerf, not just a change. So currently blink strike does 5-6% of my total damage, bite/claw 9-10% this is a roughly 1% overall damage nerf no? Not to mention you cannot control it to jump your pet to a mob or enemy running or NOT use it when it bugs out on 1st boss of Shado pan Monastery or 2nd boss of Gate of the Setting Sun... which they have yet to fix. In fact I only see a cpl benefits of this change... at least my pet can now hit malygos/mimirons head more often >.<

As to the exotic beast nerf... it better be a damned typo or someone will finally assassinate Ghostcrawler.

@Nokikova agreed.. whats funny is Guild Wars 1 has had pvp vrs pve spells speparate for a LONG time. Why cant wow figure this out? They nerf and nerf to balance PVP while PVE gets all screwed up... and really sick of hunters being middle of the road all expac while locks/mages have been top the whole time. 5.1 BM did get close to the top though.. too bad it didnt last long and it was ONLY BM with the other 2 specs dreadfully low.

What nerf to Blink Strike? Everything I've seen and all the sims say it has been drastically improved, for PvE at least. I'm switching to it from Lynx Rush as soon as the patch goes live. People keep complaining about changes in 5.3 but the facts are that our dps is going to go up by about 5% in all specs.

Did you even read my post? a 50% increase is less than the damage it is doing now for PVE and those sims have NEVER shown blink strike properly.

I did a lot of personal (if flawed) testing sitting in front of a test dummy on the PTR and live, with blink strike 1 and 2 vs lynx rush. I found them to be very, very similar, with blink strike pulling a little ahead, on the PTR. It seems to be a little lower on live, with an ilevel of 503. Using it 'in the wild' was a vast improvement in pet mobility though. If you have problems keeping your pet on a highly mobile target, blink strike the new version is completely the way to go.

Edit: Also, if the ...1k or so difference in DPS doesn't really matter to you, keep Lynx Rush. If you like it, play with it. I didn't find the difference to be SO HUGE that a skilled player wouldn't make up the difference easily!

Voodoou wrote:

Danielfboone wrote:

Voodoou wrote:I am not seeing anyone mention the nerf to blink strike.. it is a nerf, not just a change. So currently blink strike does 5-6% of my total damage, bite/claw 9-10% this is a roughly 1% overall damage nerf no? Not to mention you cannot control it to jump your pet to a mob or enemy running or NOT use it when it bugs out on 1st boss of Shado pan Monastery or 2nd boss of Gate of the Setting Sun... which they have yet to fix. In fact I only see a cpl benefits of this change... at least my pet can now hit malygos/mimirons head more often >.<

As to the exotic beast nerf... it better be a damned typo or someone will finally assassinate Ghostcrawler.

@Nokikova agreed.. whats funny is Guild Wars 1 has had pvp vrs pve spells speparate for a LONG time. Why cant wow figure this out? They nerf and nerf to balance PVP while PVE gets all screwed up... and really sick of hunters being middle of the road all expac while locks/mages have been top the whole time. 5.1 BM did get close to the top though.. too bad it didnt last long and it was ONLY BM with the other 2 specs dreadfully low.

What nerf to Blink Strike? Everything I've seen and all the sims say it has been drastically improved, for PvE at least. I'm switching to it from Lynx Rush as soon as the patch goes live. People keep complaining about changes in 5.3 but the facts are that our dps is going to go up by about 5% in all specs.

Did you even read my post? a 50% increase is less than the damage it is doing now for PVE and those sims have NEVER shown blink strike properly.

It has not been nerfed but actually buffed for PvE. The sims show it doing a lot more then now. If it goes live that way, it's the clear choice for max DPS.

Danielfboone wrote:Did you even read my post? a 50% increase is less than the damage it is doing now for PVE and those sims have NEVER shown blink strike properly.

It has not been nerfed but actually buffed for PvE. The sims show it doing a lot more then now. If it goes live that way, it's the clear choice for max DPS.

I can't help but think that the truth on Blink Strike lies somewhere in the middle here. A few notes here:

I strongly suspect that Blizz's numbers show it as a minor dps loss, as they would never intentionally make a passive talent that is higher dps than the other choices.
It IS a PVP burst nerf. Again. Enough now Blizz.
It should be of benefit to anyone that sees BM as too cluttered, as it will free up a GCD, and this may result in a DPS gain for many, even if the new version of the talent is a dps loss by itself.
Hunters who want predictable dps will love it, those who still want to control their burst (until Blizz takes more of that away) will look elsewhere.

All that said, I'm likely to use it, as I really like the removal of that GCD.

And that being said...

I'm looking to SV being the best spec overall in 5.3, because of the AOE damage, and single target dps getting within 2% or so of BM on the sims. I'm also looking at my lock to possibly be my new soloing toon.