Nerfs are made because it *is* hurting something.

In this case, it's hurting the hunter's decision on picking their best pet to be used for soloing purposes. If hunters are picking up boars solely because they hold aggro way way better than other pets, then their aggro holding ability should be nerfed, and the aggro holding capabilities of other pets should be buffed.

The competition for Max raid DPS pets, for example is a close one, with Ravagers, Wind Serpents, Cats and Raptors all very viable options.

First off, why can't we do nested replies? What is this, 1999?

Balasan said...
"In this case, it's hurting the hunter's decision on picking their best pet to be used for soloing purposes. If hunters are picking up boars solely because they hold aggro way way better than other pets, then their aggro holding ability should be nerfed, and the aggro holding capabilities of other pets should be buffed."

This is a bogus argument and can be applied to almost every pet and variable in the game.

Before ravagers people picked cats because they were the maximum DPS. Going further into that subset, people picked Broken Tooth because of the attack speed and caster push back. So Blizz nerfed. We got the infamous "pet normalization."

But let's throw attack speed, pursuit speed — another nerf — out the window. Almost all pets have special skills, here we bow our head in sadness for the Mighty Spore Bat, that allow them to do things that others can't.

Gorilla's Thunderstomp is an AOE aggro generating tool which allowed hunters to maintain and hold multiple mobs.

I think the birds have a similar skill — don't know, can't stand all that damned flapping.

Cats have prowl. Scorpids have poison. Ravagers...well ravagers are just fracking ugly.

They all have things that differentiate them from the other types of pets. For the boar it was charge and the big aggro boost that went with it. Other than that it's just a middle of the road pet that nobody will get because a cat/ravager will ALWAYS out dps it.

By taking away the boar's aggro building ability you aren't helping a hunter's pet choice option — you're essentially negating it. There is no advantage to a boar. Get in line, take a number, and tame a cat, NEXT!

Your philosophy opens up the door for future pet "normalization" where we'll all be given weighted companion cubes at level 10 with the exact same stats, same look and same abilities.

Maybe on the bizzaro server you inhabit there are armies of hunters, with bacon as far as the eye can see — on mine I see maybe one other boar a day.

Other than that, it's just one big litter box.

Dunhear and Clank

Did it ever occur to any of you that the "nerf" was an unintentional side effect of the change to the combat log? The reason they aren't "fixing" it is probably because it would take a bunch of work and was an unintended boar ability in the first place. They probably heard about this effect and said, "wow, that sucks, but fixing it would take WAY too much work."

I highly, highly doubt any actual effort was put into "nerfing" boars because their ability to hold agro has no balance issues in raiding or arenas.

That said, as a player with a level 70 hunter... Who cares about growl? My pet lost the ability to hold agro against me a long time ago. I have two options:
1. Let my pet build up some initial agro, and then finish the mob off (takes about 30 seconds).
2. Just let loose and kill the mob as fast as possible, which is usually before it can even run to me (takes about 5 seconds).
As a DPSer I always pick choice 2 while soloing (I'll be damned if I have to wait as long to kill something as I do on my resto shaman or prot paladin). If something actually gets to me I have feign death, concussive shot, wing clip, traps, and as a BM hunter I have my pet's intimidate.

This is all a non-issue for me as I've never had a boar, and could care less about growl. I'm not trying to say that there aren't SOME hunters who care about this, but all of these posts lately seem to indicate that a LOT of hunters care. We don't.