Spirit Kings Encounter, Maddening Shout, and Pets...?

[Neilaren]

I ran my first LFR of the second half of Mogu'shan Vaults last night. Technically, I did the Will of the Emperor fight a few days before, having gotten into a 2/3 done group right away (And got the shiny bow on my bonus roll! But I digress...)

I had done my reading via dungeon journal for Spirit Kings, so I at least knew the basics for, say, stacking on Qiang, spreading out for Subetai and Zian, and that there'd be MC and damage reflection mechanics on Meng to watch out for.

Something I noticed though, is that on Meng, every time he did Maddening Shout (this is where the raid appears to be mass Mind-Controlled and the idea is that you stack and AoE everyone down some %s to "snap" them out of it; in reality, everyone has control over their own character), my pet would just start taking some serious hits and die before I regained control, and I had to revive him each time afterward. This happened at least twice in one attempt, and three times the second.

Why is my pet being targeted and attacked by players? As they are not supposed to take high amounts of AoE damage, this is the only possibility I can see as to why my artificially intelligent friend kept keeling over.
OK, so players in LFR aren't always the brightest lightbulbs, I know. I need to wait and see how this plays out in my own normal mode raids before I can really fret about this quality of life issue for me (I am BEAST MASTERY after all).
Why are pets even allowed to be targeted and attacked here? I feel like anything that isn't directly a player should just be disregarded because everything that is a pet-class's pet is very important to DPS, and extremely frustrating to have to recover it multiple times in one section of a fight.

I can only imagine what would happen if I cast Stampede before Maddening Shout...

I tried searching all over the Blizzard forums to see if anyone anywhere had encountered this issue, but I'm turning up nothing, so I'm absolutely boggled by everything.

[Edanna]

Oh so that's why my pet died lol I had no idea what happened to him.

Guess it was good I was survival than because I was doing low dps as it was if I kept having to rez my pet I'd have fallen from 4th place and permanently stayed there heh

At least now I know not to go BM on that fight so thanks

Lets hope blizz fixes that for those of us who only want to use bm though because otherwise that's just a pain.

[Kalliope]

Hrm, I wasn't losing my pet on that section. Perhaps it was just that raid group?

[Bonita]

I would lose my pet in groups that took 50 years to break everyone out, but if a group broke everyone out quickly my pet was fine. My thinking is that melee just tab and attack whatever they target without looking to see what it is.

[Neilaren]

Yeah it's definitely dependent on the raid group, and probably more likely in LFR where you'll have people throwing around DoTs during Maddening Shout and hitting anything with a bar because they can.
This week's LFR my pet still got hurt by death knights tossing around howling blasts, but no deaths. It probably also helped that Meng popped up last that time so we only had 2 Maddening Shouts to deal with.

In my own raid group at least it'll be a lot easier to tell 9 other (trusted) people to not touch the pet.

Kind of related, but this past week I encountered a *new* bug in LFR where the Stone Guard's petrify debuff did not properly clear on any pets. I was hitting Kill Command and wondering why it wasn't going off, and then saw a big pile of garden statue hunter and warlock pets on the floor... oh boy! Weird that it didn't happen the week before in LFR or in my own normal mode... I of course wanted my pet to dps, so i called out a new pet and was stuck with a permanently petrified pet until something killed him during a stampede and fixed everything. Yikes...

[Kalliope]

I think the only thing I can suggest is making sure that there's enough AoE to pop the MCs right away, saving your own cooldowns and such. :/

And re: the garden...oh my, that sounds like a terrible, but hilarious bug!

[SpiritBinder]

Sounds like a pain with others killing your pet

One suggestion would be to try and remove the possibility of this happening by adding a little pet micro management to your arsenal during that time. I know it's probably not all that convenient, but would save you have to constantly rezzing your pet.

Prior to the start of the fight, use the "Move to" function and pick a place on the outskirts of the circle/area in which the fight takes place.. Once the fight starts, send your pet in or have it set to assist.

When you come up against the Maddening shout, as you start to stack, click your pet onto passive. Doing this should now have your pet run off and position itself where you told it to "Move to" at the start. Hopefully on the out skirts and out of the group of people doing AOE and damage to one another. Once your regain control of one another, simply send you pet back to the boss or click it back to assist.

I know it may seem a little annoying/inconvenient but hopefully this will solve your problem and your pet will love you for it

[Neilaren]

I'll admit, I laughed when I saw everyone else's pets were petrified, at least.

Spiritbinder, I like that idea! With all the messing around I do with Move To command, sometimes I forget how it interacts with the pet stances.

[SpiritBinder]

Glad to be of help

[Ziarre]

Oooooo, thank you for that tip. I'll try it out after raid reset--poor quilen kept getting nuked!