NERF BAT INC!

[Cpatrol]

No Cpatrol that would be dumb not letting MM have pets. Just cos it would make more of those BM hunters that go "look at us we LOVE our pets but you don't cos your not BM!"

Not all hunters rolled hunter cause of the pets. Many hunters play their class because they like bows/guns, and what I meant is surv would be for hunters that want to play like they do now, but hunters that hate relying on pets could use MM, while hunters that love hunters mainly because of the pets could use BM. So there would really be something for everyone.

[Kalliope]

My pet is my right arm as marks, especially in PvP. I for one would be extremely unhappy with such a change.

[Saturo]

My pet is my right arm as marks, especially in PvP. I for one would be extremely unhappy with such a change.

Did you read my suggestion, Kalli?

[Lone Hunt]
Increases your DPS by 6% when you don't have a pet active.

[Kalliope]

My pet is my right arm as marks, especially in PvP. I for one would be extremely unhappy with such a change.

Did you read my suggestion, Kalli?

[Lone Hunt]
Increases your DPS by 6% when you don't have a pet active.

Yes, I saw your post.

6% extra dps doesn't get me out of snares.
6% extra dps doesn't give me free focus regen.
6% extra dps doesn't root my prey in place for 5 seconds.

So yes, I saw your post before I made mine. This is why I posted anyway.

[Saturo]

My pet is my right arm as marks, especially in PvP. I for one would be extremely unhappy with such a change.

Did you read my suggestion, Kalli?

[Lone Hunt]
Increases your DPS by 6% when you don't have a pet active.

Yes, I saw your post.

6% extra dps doesn't get me out of snares.
6% extra dps doesn't give me free focus regen.
6% extra dps doesn't root my prey in place for 5 seconds.

So yes, I saw your post before I made mine. This is why I posted anyway.

Yes, and that is why the talent is just 6%, if you don't want to have to bother with a pet that's dead within two seconds of PvP starting anyway, you can opt to pick the talent. Because the talent isn't a win or loss of DPS. If you want your pet, you can have the talent, but lay with your pet out anyway, it won't make a DPS difference, and you can play around and pretend the pet is useful. Or you can have the talent and no pet out, and just kill stuff, without wasting GCDs on heals for the pet.

Choice is the thing I wanted to portray with the talent. The CHOICE of whether to play with a pet or not, and t doing equal damage regardless.

[Kalliope]

*shrug* I'm not a fan of a talent that would encourage players to let their pets die. Not much of a choice for the pets.

If your pet is dying that fast, you're doing something wrong.

[Saturo]

*shrug* I'm not a fan of a talent that would encourage players to let their pets die. Not much of a choice for the pets.

If your pet is dying that fast, you're doing something wrong.

Nope. It's called "PvP", you know, where pallies and warriors and stuff do AoE as part of their normal rotations. Pet doesn't stand a chance.

And how does my talent encourage you to let your pet die!? Just because the pet is dead doesn't mean that it's dismissed. But sure, just keep sugarcoating it, and try to pretend that all MM hunters like playing with a remarkably awkward and bugged mechanic, instead of, you know, being alert and thinking for themselves.

[Kalliope]

*shrug* I'm not a fan of a talent that would encourage players to let their pets die. Not much of a choice for the pets.

If your pet is dying that fast, you're doing something wrong.

Nope. It's called "PvP", you know, where pallies and warriors and stuff do AoE as part of their normal rotations. Pet doesn't stand a chance.

Don't send your pet in while their cds are going. Sometimes it can't be avoided, but for the most part, pets can live as long as they're not, y'know, STANDING IN THE BLADESTORM. Which players shouldn't do either.

And how does my talent encourage you to let your pet die!? Just because the pet is dead doesn't mean that it's dismissed. But sure, just keep sugarcoating it, and try to pretend that all MM hunters like playing with a remarkably awkward and bugged mechanic, instead of, you know, being alert and thinking for themselves.

You can pretend that all hunters have the same trouble managing their pet that you do, but it doesn't make it fact. The really good marks hunters KNOW how to manage their pets and really lock people down. They keep their pets alive, and with good reason. It takes more alertness and quick thinking to keep your pet alive than it is to just watch yourself.

[Saturo]

And how does my talent encourage you to let your pet die!? Just because the pet is dead doesn't mean that it's dismissed. But sure, just keep sugarcoating it, and try to pretend that all MM hunters like playing with a remarkably awkward and bugged mechanic, instead of, you know, being alert and thinking for themselves.

You can pretend that all hunters have the same trouble managing their pet that you do, but it doesn't make it fact. The really good marks hunters KNOW how to manage their pets and really lock people down. They keep their pets alive, and with good reason. It takes more alertness and quick thinking to keep your pet alive than it is to just watch yourself.

I have never said that everyone has trouble keeping the pets alive. So far that seems to be limited to me. But I'm pretty sure everyone can agree that the current pet mechanic isn't very well done. I can mention countless games that do it better. And FYI, I can keep my pet alive. It's called having a spider on passive. Which I don't particularly enjoy, I might add, because it's just a very short root that is likely to be made unusable anyway. But I still manage my own in PvP, with the pet dead withing two seconds. If, however, I focus on keeping the pet up, I'm face down on the ground in three seconds. Wow. Great benefit.

And calling Divine Storm a CD is wrong. Same for Whirlwind. Bladestorm is different.

[Palladiamorsdeus]

I actually don't have that many problems keeping my pet's alive in PvP, unless I am asleep at the wheel. For PvP, you just have to spec a bit differently. Heart of the Phoenix and Mend pet become VITAL. Your pet is still probably going to drop, but it won't happen as often or for as long. I still think that pet's should get some protection from PvP AoE damage, but it's about to matter a lot less. Cataclysm PvP is going to be much, much different.

[Kalliope]

I have never said that everyone has trouble keeping the pets alive. So far that seems to be limited to me. But I'm pretty sure everyone can agree that the current pet mechanic isn't very well done. I can mention countless games that do it better. And FYI, I can keep my pet alive. It's called having a spider on passive. Which I don't particularly enjoy, I might add, because it's just a very short root that is likely to be made unusable anyway. But I still manage my own in PvP, with the pet dead withing two seconds. If, however, I focus on keeping the pet up, I'm face down on the ground in three seconds. Wow. Great benefit.

And calling Divine Storm a CD is wrong. Same for Whirlwind. Bladestorm is different.

Keeping your spider on passive ALL THE TIME is an overkill non-solution. That's just being too lazy to properly send your pet in and call 'em back repeatedly. This is the essence of true PvP pet management. The key to not having the root countered is to manage cooldowns to force a freedom or whatever else before you root them, or use the root to force them to break it and make them eat a frost trap. It's all about using your full toolbox and forcing them to use theirs. Most ways of keeping your pet alive don't involve self-sacrifice, so once again, just because you're doing it wrong, that doesn't make it impossible to do.

*I* did not call Divine Storm a CD. You did. Bladestorm is the one your pet won't live through. If a pally uses wings and focuses your pet, it's in deep trouble. But this QQ over general AoE taking out your pet is bs. That's leaving your pet in a bad situation.

[Anansi]

Because as MM, bothering with the pet is usually a DPS loss.

What exactly do you mean here? By "bothering" do you mean resurrecting a dead pet? I can't figure out how exactly a pet could ever be considered a DPS loss.

But I'm pretty sure everyone can agree that the current pet mechanic isn't very well done.

Pets have never been easier to manage in WoW. It wasn't that long ago that we really had to keep an eye on positioning, health and a host of other situations, practically requiring us to be playing our pet as well as our Hunter. Now, pets go where they should most of the time, they don't get insta-killed the way they used to, we really don't have to fuss with them a whole lot these days.

Yes, PvP is a different story and I do tend to just send my pet to do it's job and if it dies, well, it'll be rezzed next trip to the Spirit Healer. I tend to prefer to rely on my own class skills for PvP and I admit to not being a great pet manager (which is why I was never very good at BM back when pets needed more management) but having FatCharlie in a BG and Webbing people who try to run or try to get to me or the healer is a fantastic mechanic and I'd never trade any DPS boosting talent for that, nor for a pet that can get me out of snares, give me a surge of mana or really start letting the damage fly on low health Alliance players. PvP isn't about DPS, so a DPS boosting talent in place of a pet would be a total waste and definitely not something I'd want.

[Palladiamorsdeus]

I absolutely do not agree that pet management is poorly done. I've played plenty of MMO's at this point, and WoW has about the best pet management of any of them, as much as it might pain me to admit that. What's not well done right now is the amount of AoE damage flying around in BG's. It's incidental damage that ends up doing a lot of 'whoops' damage to surrounding targets. Pet's aren't the problem. Pet management skills and badly implimented AoE damage IS. A pet with a constant mend pet, heart of the phoenix, and lick your wounds will stay alive fairly well, unless you are at entry level or zero PvP gear. And even then, if you pay attention, even just a little attention, it isn't hard to keep them in the fight.

This, as we have discussed elsewhere Sat, is something that we will never agree on.

[Silvarain]

LOL thx Jangalian ^_^ very yummy

there should be differences to the play styles of the 3 specs, otherwise way play one over the other, which i believe includes whether or not to have your pet out W/O suffering a dps loss. i cant understand what happened to the damage type differences blizz said they would put in the hunter specs. im glad this thread is all better now, thou lets stop using terms like "QQing" since they do nothing but start stuff.

sidenote: it CAN be hard to keep pets alive, even for BMers. my BM spec is nothing but damage save other talents i have to take to get to more damage talents; same with my pets. my pets dont have lick, phoenix, or whatever else because those talents dont add to my overall damage. what does this mean? it means that if i move too fast for my pet/team then my pet dies! and dont get me started on how weak pet mend is! >_< come cata i will be able (in theory) to have some pets that can have the other survival talents, but right now i dont feel as if i can. YES, this is coming from a BMer who has the 4 extra pet points! i dont go SV too often but i can only imagine how pet up keep is in SV/MM for even minor level maxers. i would love to be able to have a 3rd spec so i can have my BM raider spec/SV "in case stuff happens" spec/BM fun spec, but sadly.... basically, pets can be hard to manage w/o the right talents; and a lot of us cant take those talents.

[Nimizar]

On the PvP AoE tangent:
Note that all player-generated AoE (especially incidental AoE) has been nerfed heavily for Cataclysm. Nobody has a single-target rotation that includes an AoE ability anymore. This should cut down greatly on incidental pet deaths in PvP.

On hunter shot rotations:

To paraphrase a post I made on the Blizzard forums, the fact that there is no CD on Arcane Shot and no focus cost on Cobra/Steady shot means that the core rotation of each of the hunter trees looks fairly similar:
1. Ensure focus is available to cost "main nuke" (Kill Command/Chimera Shot/Explosive Shot) whenever it comes off CD
2. When possible without violating 1, use excess focus to cast Arcane Shot
3. Any downtime is filled in with Cobra Shot (BM*, SV) or Steady Shot (MM)

*(The jury is still out as to whether it may prove worthwhile for BM to take Improved Steady Shot and use Steady Shot while refreshing Serpent Sting manually instead of extending its duration with Cobra Shot. We won't know how that is going to play out until numbers are closer to final)

The key difference between this system and our current rotations is that Arcane Shot is resource constrained rather than CD constrained. Hit it too often and you won't have enough focus for the main nuke. Don't hit it at all and your DPS will be lower than it could be.

The damage on all 3 main nukes is currently too low, such that they do worse damage-per-focus than Arcane Shot. However, that's just a numbers issue and Blizz are in the process of tweaking that kind of thing as the various trees begin to stabilise.

Each spec also has some random elements to manage:
BM: Focus Fire is used to transfer Frenzy stacks once pet reaches 5 stacks. Invigoration creates some unpredictability in focus gain.
MM: Master Marksman provides free, instant Aimed Shots when it reaches 5 stacks
SV: Black Arrow/Lock and Load/T.N.T. randomly provide free pairs of Explosive Shots. Thrill of the Hunt creates some unpredictability in focus consumption.

Now that the Improved Steady Shot refresh bug has been fixed, the MM rotation should be pretty smooth and the most straightforward of the three (as it has no random component to focus generation or consumption). Rapid Fire and Readiness provide decent damage CDs as well.

BM is also looking like it will be in a reasonable place once the low damage of KC relative to Arcane Shot is fixed. BW/TBW and Fervor provide decent damage CDs (albeit not what they once were).

SV is playable, but not great. The fact that Arcane Shot is still on LnL is an anachronism from the days when SV hunters received LnL long before they got Explosive Shot. Just fixing that (so an LnL proc meant doing Ex/Ar/Ex/Ar/Ex) would go a long way toward cleaning up the shot rotation. Tweaking Thrill of the Hunt to have a higher chance to proc, but a lower percentage focus return would also help reduce the current "famine or feast" focus experience of SV hunters. That said, GC did say some time ago that SV was the furthest from finished of the three hunter trees, and there hasn't really been much adjustment since then. While the basic rotation is unlikely to change, we can definitely expect to see a cleanup pass on this tree. It would be nice if SV acquired a real CD somewhere in there (Rapid Fire on a 5 min CD doesn't count), but I'm not holding my breath on that front.

More generally, I don't believe the various key hunter procs (Focus Fire, Master Marksman, Lock and Load) have been hooked up to the new proc alert system as yet. Once those hooks are put in place, the random elements should all be significantly easier to manage.

[Nimizar]

sidenote: it CAN be hard to keep pets alive, even for BMers. my BM spec is nothing but damage save other talents i have to take to get to more damage talents; same with my pets. my pets dont have lick, phoenix, or whatever else because those talents dont add to my overall damage. what does this mean? it means that if i move too fast for my pet/team then my pet dies! and dont get me started on how weak pet mend is! >_< come cata i will be able (in theory) to have some pets that can have the other survival talents, but right now i dont feel as if i can. YES, this is coming from a BMer who has the 4 extra pet points! i dont go SV too often but i can only imagine how pet up keep is in SV/MM for even minor level maxers. i would love to be able to have a 3rd spec so i can have my BM raider spec/SV "in case stuff happens" spec/BM fun spec, but sadly.... basically, pets can be hard to manage w/o the right talents; and a lot of us cant take those talents.

Just like dead players, dead pets do no DPS. For PvE, you can skip the survivability talents. For PvP, survivability trumps sustained damage.

As a pure DPS class, we have the luxury of choosing to either have two PvE specs, or a PvE spec and a PvP spec. If we choose the first option, then we can't complain about lacking PvP survivability.

[SpiritBinder]

Keeping your spider on passive ALL THE TIME is an overkill non-solution.

I kind of d this as well When I play MM in Bg's

and it is mainly because for me the web snare is just too sexy, and it is very annoying to a melee. I have found on many occasions that If I send my pet in and it webs on it's way, the "victim" cannot move and the only thing it can wail on in those few seconds... and you guessed it, if Mr spider is there trying to bite their face off, generally they will smear it across the BG in a cooldown or 2 out of shear annoyance. If she goes down, it takes good time and mana to get her back, and for me, her web is far more precious than her dps, hence I try keep her by my side most of time.

This is also because of the current stat of burst. Our pets will scale allot better in cata guys, they will have more health, more armour and generally it will all be a less burst. This I believe/hope will give us the time to pull out our pets in time to get them out of harms way, no matter what spec we have.

I actually don't mind Lone Hunt tallent suggestion. Don't forget that GC and the devs have been really adamant about adding talents that are not mandatory dps ones, in fact ones that are situational and more of a personal preference. This one really fits the bill. It could in fact be coupled with an opposite talent choice of something like.

[Lone Hunt]
Increases your DPS by 6% when you don't have a pet active.

[Crazed Vengeance]
If your health lowers below 50%, your pet is whipped into a vengeful frenzy causing it to do 10% extra damage for the next 10 secs

See, best of both worlds no?

[Kalliope]

Just like dead players, dead pets do no DPS. For PvE, you can skip the survivability talents. For PvP, survivability trumps sustained damage.

As a pure DPS class, we have the luxury of choosing to either have two PvE specs, or a PvE spec and a PvP spec. If we choose the first option, then we can't complain about lacking PvP survivability.

This is beautifully said.

Keeping your spider on passive ALL THE TIME is an overkill non-solution.

I kind of d this as well When I play MM in Bg's

BGs are different. You're more likely to have a pack of 5+ enemies throwing random damage around. That's the sort of stuff that kills pets and melee players alike. As a ranged class that has to stay at range, we're less appreciative (as a group) of just how dangerous it is in there.

In a bg, you aren't necessarily depending on your pet to be on your target in the middle of the dogpile, so it's more acceptable to keep your pet out. But in a more balanced situation, you'd usually be crippling yourself against your opponent. It frustrates melee a LOT to get rooted while the hunter dances out of their charge/grip/shadowstep/whatever range.

[Silvarain]

As a pure DPS class, we have the luxury of choosing to either have two PvE specs, or a PvE spec and a PvP spec. If we choose the first option, then we can't complain about lacking PvP survivability.

i dont PVP at all, the few times i have to for something i have no prob being bad it it lol. however, being all damage is not just about PVP but also end-game raiding as well. i dont know much but i do know that i need all the dps i can take to keep up with the other guys or im out of the raid.

(thinking about dropping SV but not sure just yet)

[Lisaara]

*eats popcorn* Watching the drama unfold over BETA(aka not confirmed/set in stone stuff) things is amusing.