Assist stance broken?

[CrystalKitten]

I've submitted a ticket, but, as you know, after patches ticket times are rediculous. I was wondering what everyone else thought of the assist stance?

Personally, I don't think it works at all as advertised. Sometimes when fighting groups my pet will just stay in the group and move on to another target before I do.. or it will still end up fighting something else even though I'm attacking something different. The moving on by itself thing is pretty explanatory, but the other is QUITE annoying.

Example: I just did Ahune, and figured.. assist would be perfect for this. If the pet's gotta attack what I'm attacking, then he won't suicide himself trying to kill Ahune when his defenses are up. So Ahune comes back out, and I switch to the big rock elemental. They take a while to go down, so I figured it should be more than enough time to get my pet to switch over.. Nope.. Kinsy goes flying.. I'm wondering where he is... spamming mend pet to try and keep him alive... etc... So, I figure.. "Maybe for some reason blizz set the 'switch target' timer a little too high" so I try ctrl+1 to send him at one of the water elementals.. Elemental goes down and he charges RIGHT back in to Ahune...

Also, sometimes after my current target goes down, he'll switch to the next one right away. Even if I haven't used any multishots or explosive traps myself (in which case I could see maybe an expected bug of "oh, you attacked that one? okay! *chomp*").

I would expect that kind of behaviour from defensive.. but I thought that the whole POINT of the new assist stance was so that your pet would always attack your target so that it wouldn't get lost, or move on and break some CC, or pull another group if you're fighting in close quarters... Pretty much, I was thinking it would be something like putting your pet into passive stance, only having it go and attack without having to hit ctrl+1, judging from the way blizz described it at first. There's not much of a description of it in game, so I'm not sure exactly what Blizzard's actual implementation is supposed to be.

What do you guys thing? Have you noticed similar issues? Does anyone know what the details of pet behaviour in assist stance is SUPPOSED to be? As right now it seems mildly erratic...

[gigandetsgirl]

So far, I'm really not a fan of the assist stance. I also did Ahune last night and had a bit of a different problem. For some reason, assist seemed to lag - Whitney would help me down the elemental, then run back to my side and not leap back into action for a few more seconds, even after I already began shooting the next target. I'm really missing aggressive, which I used for PVP

[CrystalKitten]

Yeah. I can see assist being useful... I really can. Sure, aggressive was fun for pvp, but I KIND of understand why they got rid of it. I just... I really can't tell the difference between assist and defensive. The ONLY difference i've seen is that SOMETIMES my pets will come back after the target is dead.. I say sometimes, as sometimes he'll act the exact same as in defensive... And continue battle.

I'm thinking maybe we should take this over to the official forums.. as... I'm really confused as to how assist is SUPPOSED to work... Maybe I'm just using it wrong. I had assumed it would be the "ideal" stance for group work, where you might need more control over what your pet is attacking (I believe "more control" is one of the reasons given for the change), however, I almost feel like there's even less control than in defensive, which I had assumed would be more for solo work, or maybe certain types of pvp, where you want your pet to manage it's aggro itself a bit...

I've found myself trying to like assist... but.. maybe I just don't understand it yet, it just seems far too erratic.

It's strange that we're almost having exact different "bugs"/issues with assist though...