Hunters – WotLK Pets

I’ve been meaning to post something about hunters, but despite it being my favorite class in WoW, I couldn’t really think of an angle that interested me enough to actually do it. Then the other day I noticed the Wrath of the Lich King hunter pets preview over at Petopia, and realized I’d found something to talk about – hunter pets are going to be revolutionized in a few months.

So, what will happen to our pets in November? I highly recommend going to the source for the full details (especially since they are regularly posting new updates as changes occur in beta), but if you want a quick preview, here are the essentials that I’ve been able to glean from the excellent research done by Mania and friends:

• Pet families. Pets are now grouped into 3 distinct families according to basic function – cunning, ferocious and tenacious. The cunning family seems to be more about having PVP utility skills, while the ferocious and tenacious families contain the DPS and tank pets respectively. Stats are now based off of family rather than pet species, and a pet’s family will also determine which talents it is eligible for (“caster” pets apparently still have lower stats but this is supposed to be fixed soon).
• Pet talents. These are accumulated at the rate of 1 every 4 levels beginning at level 20, and the pet can only choose from the tree assigned to its family. Talents are how your pet will “grow into” his family’s role; although a Beast Master spec’s pets will remain superior as you’d expect, it will no longer be necessary for a hunter to take the BM spec just to have a pet that is capable of pulling its own weight.
• Implications. This is huge: no more pet trainer (well that’s not quite true – they are still available if you want to respec your pet), no more taming pets just to learn their new skill, no more spending ridiculous amounts of time raising your pets’ loyalty levels… and your third stable slot pet can now be a “keeper”. Apparently the basic pet feeding/loyalty mechanism will remain but only for the purpose of retaining the “happy” damage bonus and preventing it from eventually running away due to neglect.
• Pet skills – Blizzard finally will be delivering on their promise to assign a unique ability to every species, so folks who stuck it out with their spider or croc will finally be rewarded for their perseverance. In general pets who already had a special skill will keep it as-is; this is mainly for the pets who previously had been ignored.

Some other bits

• New species – They’ve moved owls over into a species called birds of prey, which also includes hawks and eagles. These birds can disarm an enemy and belong to the cunning family, so it looks like they may be handy vs uber geared pvp meleers. Also and more dramatically they have made moths tameable – these are ferocity pets with a pretty cool looking turbo boost/recovery skill and I will definitely be taming one or two of these for my hunters.
• Exotic pets – level 60 BM spec hunters will be able to tame “special” pets available to noone else. So far Mania has confirmed that devilsaurs belong to this group, and I have heard that chimaera may also be tameable … this is very cool and I can’t wait to learn more about this.

New roles (IMO)

• AOE pets – for the solo hunters out there, there will be 7 pets with AOE type abilities, with pretty even representation from all families (recommend taking BM spec for the cunning/ferocity pets though);
• Cunning – dragonhawks and sporebats
• Ferocity – carrion birds and tallstriders
• Tenacity – bears, gorillas and crocolisks
• Tank pets – these pets have the toughness for heavy solo’ing but lack AOE and so their main value lies in their ability to offtank in groups (just be aware that when the tank is holding aggro, the guys with cats and scorpids are going to be laughing at you);
• Tenacity – crabs, boars, turtles and warpstalkers
• PVP pets – for those who prefer the arena and want something relevant to that environment, there will be 7 pets with PVP type abilities; most are from the cunning family but the other families do make a brief appearance;
• Cunning – bats, birds of prey, ravagers, spiders and nether rays*
• Ferocity – hyenas*
• Tenacity – crabs*

*Some of these pets are equally useful for PVP and solo play – PVE’ers take note.

• Raid pets – not much has changed here, although as the list of known “exotic” pets expands this may change (note that raid pets are also fine for solo’ing and share the popularity of DPS pets within groups);
• Ferocity – devilsaurs and wolves
• Tenacity – scorpids
• DPS pets – these pets are best for getting into groups who are “LF1M DPS”, and are also nice for casual solo’ing (the single target DPS is great vs 1-2 mob fights, but they won’t do as well as AOE pets in the larger rumbles);
• Cunning – serpents and wind serpents
• Ferocity – cats, moths and raptors

Other thoughts

Charge. The charge skill is being moved from boars over to the pets in the ferocity family. Initially I was kind of annoyed at that, because after all it is the boar’s trademark move; when you see it you think of something big and heavy coming in like a meteor and stunning its target with the impact – not something light and agile like a kitty or buzzard (plus I went to all that trouble to tame a blue agamar – how could they do this to me!)…

However, on further reflection I think there is a good justification for giving it to ferocity pets; charge is one of- if not the best- skill for a MM spec’s pet, and so they wanted to give it to more species so that MM spec hunters could have something with both the opening threat spike of a boar and the longterm DPS to continue holding aggro through a long fight.

It will be nice to be able to change some of my hunters from BM to MM, but I’m going to miss having it on my dwarf’s boar – currently my only MM spec hunter. I still don’t think it should have been taken away from boars (why can’t they just share it with the ferocity pets? There’s no good reason why it can’t be a pet skill for one and a talent for the other), but at least they did give them a damage bonus to gore while dashing, which is better than nothing I guess.

Dash/dive. This is the only bit that I still have an issue with; apparently this can now be purchased with the pet’s first talent point (i.e. at lvl 20), at the current rank 3 strength – not only is this overpowered for a level 20 pet IMO (there’s a reason why it currently isn’t available until lvl 30-36), it will now be available to every species. That’s right, come November we will be seeing giant galapagos turtles, kodiak bears and other extremely ponderous things zipping around the battlefield at the same speed as hawks and cheetahs (faster even than a lvl 30 mount). It’s going to look ridiculous, and detract from the “feel” of the tenacity pets. Why not give them cybernetic jet boosters and gun pods while they’re at it? Maybe the ability to polymorph into humanoids for covert operations, like a terminator? The possibilities become endless when you ignore game atmosphere. Seriously though I could possibly see giving tenacity pets dash rank 1, at a higher level (like say 40 or 50), just to reflect the general uberness of the high level creature, but rank 3? I gotta say this one just seems dumb (and I’m saying this as one of the prime “beneficiaries”).

Know what they could have done that would keep it balanced and preserve the pets’ feel? A) Limit tenacity pets to dash rank 1 as above but also B) give them a high level version of barding that actually shows up on the model itself. That I think would make everyone happy, or as close to it as can be accomplished. But it’s something they would have to do now if ever, because if they wait and do it after every last Tom Dick and Harry have their superfast bears, turtles etc, the screams of dismay from players who prefer things that look goofy and contrary to the feel of the game will be deafening and unending. Sadly I have a feeling this brainless change is going to sail all the way to the end zone without challenge… and you just know that either they extend it to lock pets or provoke a lot of complaining from that class (and rightly so)… and then next thing you know warriors will be angrily wondering why they aren’t getting turbo movement too…

All in all though I’m psyched about the new pet changes, and plan to follow this closely at Petopia.

Acknowledgment

Once again I’d like to thank everyone at Petopia for providing such a huge wealth of information on the upcoming pet changes to us hunter addicts!