Scattered Shots: Improving the hunter pet trees
by Brian Wood 
Jul 7th 2011 at 2:00PM
Several weeks back, WoW Lead Systems Designer Ghostcrawler made a passing comment about the input of the community in continuing to refine the talent trees, and since then, we've run with it. We've talked about improving the BM tree, improving the MM tree, and improving the SV tree. We've been swarmed with fantastic suggestions in the comments, including lots of things I didn't think of but made me say, "Oh, yeah -- that's exactly what the tree needs!"
Now if we were rogues, or mages, or some other support class, we'd be sitting on the porch with our lemonade patting ourselves on the back for a job well done. But as hunters, it's not enough to just examine the hunter trees -- we have our pet trees to look at, as well.
Join me after the cut as we dig into the three hunter pet talent trees and discuss how they could be refined, added to, and improved to complete the hunter experience.
What we're talking about
I just want to point out at the outset that we are not looking at DPS balance issues here, which are a separate thing. What we're interested in are the talent trees themselves, how they feel and function and how they affect the "feel" and identity of the pet trees.
BM talent points
Before we even get down to the spec-by-spec rundown of the pet talent trees, let's take a moment to ask for some love for the spec that loves their pets the most: beast mastery.
The final talent in the BM tree gives BM hunters the ability to tame exotic pets, plus an extra four pet talent points. While the exotic pets are the most loved aspect of Beast Mastery, the extra talent points are where BM has the potential to get a mechanical benefit.
Unfortunately, we now have enough pet talent points by default to take most or even all of the truly useful talents in the pet tree. If you're interested in making your tenacity pet a tank, you can get all those talents without the extra four points. If you want your pet to just DPS (which is most of the time), you can get nearly every talent you need for DPSing.
As a result, BM hunters get to spend those extra talent points on things like giving more damage to their tank pets or more damage mitigation to their DPS pets. And that's useful -- don't get me wrong, those aren't wasted talent points -- but it's not terribly exciting, either.
How about giving the pet trees another tier of talents with some nice, big whoppers that are chained in such a way that only BM can get hold of them with extra talent points? Talents like:
- a damage reduction ability similar to block (tenacity)
- a protection talent in which a percentage of damage done to the hunter is transferred to the pet (tenacity)
- a talent to transform 10% of hunter damage into pet healing (I mean, we can already do this at 15% with the tier 5 two-piece set -- how about giving it to us without making us solo BC raids?) (available to all pet specs)
- a flat increase to pet focus regen (all pet specs)
- a crit multiplier increase (ferocity)
For a tree that is defined by its pets and gets more pet talent points for the ultimate talent of the tree, it just seems a little sad that every other hunter tree can get the exact same pet talents as the BM hunters can.
Ferocity tree
For most hunters, our ferocity pets are used more often than any pet type. They are our DPS machines. Happily, I think the ferocity tree is pretty well-constructed these days (though I'd still like to see the addition of some of those talents for BM). There are a couple of fairly unattractive talents, however, many of them available to all trees and are going to get covered now under ferocity.
Improved Cower Throughout the history of pet talents, Cower & Improved Cower have been pretty underwhelming. Now that Cower is a pretty darned useful base ability, we still have a crummy talent that almost no hunters use. Frankly, Cower is awesome, and I'm really not worried about the movement reduction. I generally use it only a couple times in certain fights to tide the pet over until enough splash healing fills them up.
Frankly, I think you could just yoink this talent out of the tree entirely -- after all, it's almost like it's not there now and we have plenty of tier 1 and 2 options. But if we really want an Improved Cower, then have it increase the damage reduction component or apply a HoT when you hit it. I still probably won't take it for any ferocity pet, but at least I'll use it for my pet tanking or extreme soloing then.
Great Resistance Back in the day, before pets had talent trees, we could get fire resistance or shadow resistance or whatever kind of resistance for our pets. That sucked, but every hunter maxed out fire resistance for their pets for BWL -- but that was because those resistances were meaningful. I love that it's just a flat damage reduction now, but it really needs to be more for us to care.
The problem with Great Resistance is that our pets already take only 10% damage from AOE attacks, which is the majority of the time this matters. This talent has gone through tons of iterations, and I say it's time to do away with it entirely and replace it with something new and awesome.
Lionhearted I don't PVP in the way that actually involved optimizing for PVP. Is Lionhearted actually ever used for PVP?
Tenacity tree
Outside of a lot of those filler talents that are available for all trees, I'm pretty pleased with most of the tree-specific talents. Tenacity is filled with talents that are spot-on tanking talents that generally contribute substantially to your pet's ability to tank things.Before Cataclysm, a substantial part of pet's ability to tank came from the hunter tree (BM). I kind of like the fact that it's now about the pet's talents and not the hunter's.
But this is not to say that I think the tree is perfect. There are, of course, those silly generic talents available to every tree, and one other issue. To address a couple talents in the tenacity tree:
Grace of the Mantis I just want to say that I love Grace of the Mantis -- and thank you, Ghostcrawler, for adjusting this after the resilience change so that we can still make our pets crit-immune!
Taunt I like the idea of Taunt in the tenacity tree, giving our tenacity pets an actual tanking talent; however, in practice, it's pretty crummy. It's not a real Taunt in the sense that it doesn't actually affect threat, and the 3-second duration is crazy-short. I'd like to see this either turned into an actual Taunt, or at the very least, have its duration bumped up to 6 seconds.
Cunning tree
Where the ferocity tree is all about the DPS and the tenacity tree is all about the tanking, the cunning tree is clearly all about healing -- no wait, that's not right. But seriously, how cool would that be?Cunning is pretty much the PVP pet tree, which is also capable of producing nearly identical damage as ferocity. Some of the mechanics are a bit complicated to model, but the DPS is darned close -- too close, if you ask me.
But as I've said before, when it comes to the PVP talents, I'm not the right hunter to ask. I PVP like I raid, only faster and with more fun movement. I tend to hop in random BGs, and on a good run, I can usually top the damage, kills, killing blows, and deaths. From that rather amateur status, the cunning tree looks pretty good and pretty interesting to me. There's only one cunning talent that I'd really question:
Carrion Feeder I see the appeal of Carrion Feeder for wee hunters who are leveling, kind of, sort of. Okay, no I don't. This is pretty much solely a leveling talent, and a bad one. I'm dubious about putting in talents that are only good while leveling; in the long run (and with the speedy leveling available these days), that's a pretty small percentage of our game time.
How about turning Carrion Feeder into something that we can use even if we aren't leveling? Like, for example, something completely different that has nothing to do with standing around doing nothing while our pet munches on a corpse? I mean, we can just toss it a biscuit these days and get better pet healing without having to stand around. This talent is outdated and needs to go.
What do you think?
So these are my thoughts on tweaking the pet talent trees. I'd really like to see BM get some extra oomph for its 31-point talent in the form of meaningful ways to spend those four extra pet talent points. I'd also like to see a handful of those generic filler talents get revamped or changed entirely.
But how about you guys? If Ghostcrawler were reading this article, what would you want to tell him about the pet talent trees? And what should those new pet talents for BM be?
Scattered Shots is dedicated to helping you learn everything it takes to be a hunter. From leveling your hunter through optimizing for heroics, pre-heroic loot and pre-raid loot, then on to choosing the right spec for the right job and how to "aspect dance" to maximize your DPS, we've got you covered.
Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
William Jul 7th 2011 1:40PM
I'm not an avid or good pvper, but one thing hunters need someplace is an improved pet rez mechanic. Currently only ferocity pets have one, and nobody pvps with a ferocity pet.
As for improved cower, I had no idea what you were talking about because it's that worthless.
Pyromelter Jul 7th 2011 2:34PM
read it a bit more closely. He said the talent was so worthless it should be removed from the tree. (I know, it's kind of a long read today... but you and frostheim agree 100% there).
as far as pvp, I think pet death should be a big deal and a tough recovery. If blizzard wants to buff hunter pvp, giving them a faster or instant rez is not the answer. A hunter's pet might be considered like a healer's mana bar - destroy the pet (mana bar) and the hunter (healer) are severely gimped. The pet rez is usable in combat as a long cast, right? Works similar to a healer maybe getting out of combat and drinking water.
threesixteen Jul 7th 2011 2:36PM
cower is actually pretty effective for pet tanking (when you could actually pet tank with viability, before the disaster that is patch 4.2 hit); but improved cower isn't really worth it because in most cases, by the time you need cower to go off, your pet is more or less positioned and stationary.
but frost makes some very excellent points about there being not much for BMs to spend their 4 additional pet talent points on. i especially like his suggestion about translating damage done into pet healing; the tier-5 bonus was awesome but no longer is it really viable to use simply because of the tradeoff in raw stats with the current gear itemizations.
i would say that any changes that involved any more micromanagement are probably not really worth investing in. it's already bad enough with the new pet stances, to have to micro any further abilities would be very challenging, even with macros.
all that said, i would forgo all of the more than excellent suggestions made in this article for a revert to pet stances pre-4.2. If you wonder why, just check out the forums to see what other BM hunters are saying about the extraordinary negative impact this change has had on raid viability and dps numbers.
Netherscourge Jul 7th 2011 3:09PM
Pet trees really aren;t as "flexible" as Blizzard tried to make them.
There's basically TWO builds - the PURE DPS build and the PURE TANKING build when it comes to pets. There is no viable in-between when it comes to pets.
You either use themfor DPS in group/raid/pvp situations OR you use them for tanking while playing solo or playing some off-tank type of role.
That's it. So there's a cookie-cutter DPS build and a cookie-cutter tank/aggroing build.
There are several completely useless talents in these trees that nobody ever uses. Those should be gone IMO and replaced with more DPS or tanking options.
There is really no thought needed for pet trees, which makes me wonder why they even give us options at this point.
Tygerwolfe Jul 7th 2011 5:50PM
I actually PVP with a ferocity pet (hyena) and do a fair amount of damage. People have a hard time killing him, and FINDING me, and I pop off powerful shots every now and then, but mostly stay hidden and let him kill them. We take out Rogues, Mages, Warlocks, and clothie healers. And, honestly, even with some good gear on the part of our enemies, four or five Kill Command, plus the occasional Serpent Sting, Arcane Shot, and Kill shot seems to be more than capable of killing any of the aforementioned classes.
I've had a lot of PVPers comment that they've never seen a ferocity pet/BM Hunter combo in a BG before, and I always laugh because it came from me not having a clue what I was doing but needing to do the Children's Week stuff the first time I was able to do that holiday. So, not knowing any better, I queued for the specific battlegrounds just as I was.
Noyou Jul 7th 2011 7:01PM
I also PvP with tenacity pets at times. It's nice with heart of the phoenix and lick your wounds. Especially at the lower levels. I usually go with my Marshlight Bleeder (Wasp/Firefly)
He has a 2 second stun and a knockdown which is nice. Always wondered why such nice tanking/PvP talents were in the wrong tree :p
Brock Jul 7th 2011 2:11PM
I think they should give every pet all three trees. We should be able to pick if we want our bear to dps or tank. I would love to have more variety. I wood also like it if they consolidated some of the pet buffs so you can see more variety. For example let bears cats and gorillas all share the same special abilities, roar of courage and demoralizing roar, but you can only use one at a time. Let's get some variety with our pets!
Brock Jul 7th 2011 2:14PM
Spelling errors abound! Darn auto correct.
Tippy Jul 7th 2011 4:17PM
This is a brilliant idea. I love having a variety of pets, but I think it sucks that every hunter has the same ones due to the talent trees. I like the idea of having unique abilities for each animal, but the talent trees really restrict which pets players will actually use in raids and PVP.
Brett Porter Jul 7th 2011 5:00PM
I really like that. Similar to the level 10 specialization, just have it at pet level 20. Very cool idea!
Chucks Jul 7th 2011 6:34PM
Awesome idea! There are so many pets I love but never pull out or even tame because they just don't suit.
incoming00 Jul 7th 2011 2:28PM
are the pictures of each talent tree recommend specs?
Arrowsmith Jul 7th 2011 2:28PM
In hindsight, I should have just said this in the article about improving the BM tree, but since you brought the BM tree back up...
What if Focus Fire was made passive? Where every time your pet got a stack of Frenzy, you get a stack of Focus Fire for either the same amount of haste or slightly less?
Otherwise, I think Wolverine Bite in the Cunning tree could use some love, and I'd like it if Heart of the Phoenix and Lick Your Wounds in the BM tree actually became worth taking without having to skip on other more essential talents first.
Hal Jul 7th 2011 2:32PM
What if Ancient Hysteria was a BM-only pet talent? You could then put it on any pet you wanted, rather than being limited to a Corehound for that option.
Elwoods Jul 8th 2011 7:17AM
What about taking it one step further and having a bunch of BM only skills that you spend your 4 BM points on - these would mirror player skills (Maybe only allow you to choose 2 if it is OP). You could also have maybe 1 active skill (like below) and 1 passive still (5%/10% hunter dmg -> Pet healing)
For example the BM can choose the following skills:
1) Hero/Bloodlust
2) Heroic Leap
3) Lifebloom or other HoT
4) Long cast big heal (maybe 2.5 or 3 seconds)
5) Sap
6) AoE or targeted fear
etc etc.
This would solve lack of BM only skill and lack of custom pets.
El
ghola Jul 8th 2011 1:17PM
@Elwoods I suggested basically the same thing later in the comments but you phrased it better. I love this idea.
Hawkyn Jul 7th 2011 2:42PM
I agree with removing improved cower ... totally worthless. I would also get rid of the one that makes your pet move faster. When is the last time you worried about your pet keeping up with you? Also lick your wounds is right up there with carrion feeder ... you might as well heal the pet yourself then waste points on that.
Brock Jul 7th 2011 3:07PM
Play BM in pve or any spec pvp. You want your pet to get to the target as fast as possible and be able to stay on it as long as possible. The increased speed talent is super important.
Gimmlette Jul 7th 2011 2:57PM
Having played a dwarf hunter since I was just able to reach my mug of ale on the table, I miss each pet type having a unique ability. When my bear got Thunderstomp, I stopped trying to understand the trees. Gorillas using Thunderstomp, yes. Bears, no. What about a hibernate ability where the bear pumps up his stamina by 15%, but it's a 10 second cast time with a 5 minute or longer cooldown?
But I can see that with all the pets in the game, designers would rapidly run out of individual talents to make all the types of pets unique. So, they devised the three trees. It is simpler to manage.
As a BM hunter, what would I like to see on the trees? Remember Spirit Bond? To me, that represented what a BM hunter's bond is with their pet. Revive that idea but vary it across the pet trees. Tenacity pets get more health or armor. Ferocity pets get more dps. Cunning pets get shortened cooldowns on their special attacks.
I'd like to see a buff to shorten the taming time of pets. Make me have to kill 85 rhinos and stack the meat in pyramids and then have to stand on one foot and hum an ancient dwarven drinking song while trying to tame this special bear, just like anyone else who wants to tame it. But, when I do it, because I'm spec'd all the way through as a BM hunter, it takes me 5 seconds less than the MM nelf to my right. Would we see a rush to spec BM so the taming process takes 40 seconds instead of 45? We might, but if it's not a huge buff to taming, like say lopping off 15 seconds, I don't think MM or SV hunters would respec for 5 or maybe even 10 seconds.
I'd like to be able to choose a resistance to increase. I remember running to the stable master and respeccing my pet to make sure I had stacked shadow or fire or nature or cold resistance. Allow a BM hunter to select a minor buff in a certain resistance. It seems that if you are as close to your pet as is implied by being a BM hunter, as a team you'd have the ability to resist one type of damage. Make it have a longer cooldown so, if I'm in Blackwing Lair as an easy for instance, I will want fire resistance but if I remove that buff to apply shadow resistance, I'm locked out of fire resistance for, say 15 minutes. There are many cases where a primary resistance like fire is the obvious choice for protection from. And then the boss's shadow AOE kills you.
And speaking of killing you, shorten the time a BM hunter takes to rez a pet.
I don't see these items as being things a MM or SV hunter would change their spec to get. I like that the three trees are finally close in damage. I think the days are gone when you rolled your eyes if the hunter was specc'd survival or beast mastery. Now we just roll our eyes when the hunter stands in stuff, shoots the wrong target, pulls aggro and when told to kite what he's just pulled yells, "What the H*%% does THAT mean?" It means you better keep that beer coming.
loop_not_defined Jul 7th 2011 4:21PM
Gimmlette: "...I miss each pet type having a unique ability."
I'm sorry but I don't understand what you mean by this. Each of the three pet trees have unique abilities, and each of the pet families have a unique ability, so it's sort of confusing.