Game Changers for Pet Tanking in 3.3.0

The patch notes look very good for hunter pet tanking. They are patch notes so we won't get them all, but they look nice all the same.

Call the pet you need for each encounter you face:
Call Stabled Pet: Cooldown reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes.

Don't stack as much Resilience just to have an un-critable pet:
Pet Resilience: All player pets now get 100% of their master’s resilience.

Avoid 90% of AoE instead of just 75%:
Avoidance: This talent has been replaced by Culling the Herd. Hunter pets now innately take 90% less damage from area-of-effect abilities like all other class pets. This does not apply to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Cowardice tanking! Take less damage a fair amount of the time:
Cower: Redesigned. This ability no longer affects threat, and instead reduces damage taken by the pet by 40% for 6 seconds with a 45-second cooldown. While cowering, the pet’s movement speed is 50% of normal speed. Cower now only has a single rank and is available at pet level 20.

Don't suffer the [new] movement penalty while cowering:
Improved Cower: Redesigned. This ability now reduces the movement penalty of Cower by 50%/100%.

More damage, more threat:
Culling the Herd: This pet talent has replaced the Avoidance talent in the pet trees (Hunter pets now gain that benefit automatically without expenditure of talent points). Culling the Herd increases pet and hunter damage by 1/2/3% for 10 seconds each time the pet deals a critical strike with Claw, Bite, or Smack.


Win!

Ab

So

Lute

Ly

E-P-I-C

win

OMG OMG OMG

I am sooo excited i swear a little bit of pee just came out....

Coupled with the MD changes this patch will make Hunter tanks very viable!

Pure awesomesauce in its purest form

If they remove Wild Hunt's prerequisite and fix Taunt, that'd about round out my Christmas list quite nicely.


Oh, and this is nice too.

Hunter T10 2P Bonus - Your Auto Shots have a 5% chance to cause you and your pet to deal 15% additional damage for until cancelled.

I feel pretty confident that the "until cancelled" bit is just a placeholder, as they often do placeholder values for tier bonuses on the PTR, but if its more than a few seconds this could defiantly be a threat set standard.

Pets scaling in Patch 3.3
We're still working on it. One stat that will almost certainly not get scaled to the pet is armor pen. It is technically (for obscure reasons) challenging to convert the armor pen rating from the hunter to the pet. Given armor pen's not so rosy future (as a stat on gear anyway), this one probably won't get resolved.

We'd still like to scale haste, crit and just about everything else. We'll get done what we can.

Small chance for parry to come in

If they do a turtle will have 5sec of 0 damage, 12secs of 50% damage and 6 seconds of 60% damage.
Or...
5 secs of 0%, 6 of 10% and 6 of 50%. And then back to 60% damage 25secs later.


Even if they just give us dodge we would have a place to spend those extra talent points.

The cower alone mad eme squeal like a little girl. Like, literally. My neighbour must worry about me. I live in an apartment.

I'm imagining the new hunter tanking outfits looking a lot like druid tanking outfits if the stat effect goes live. Stacking stamina will now potentially be enhanced by strength (for parry) and agility (for evasion) as well. Plus, a lot more avenues open up for rings, cloaks, and necklaces, since I somehow doubt that they'll ever make mail with higher tanking stats.

Also, if I may note, as much as all this tanking stuff stood out and made me gleeful?

Many of the tail sweeps with knockback effects will no longer hit players’ pets.

YES! YES! OMG YES! OMG! OMG! YES!

I might be a little excited. But I can't tell you how *sick* I am of trying to DPS Ony or Sapph or, well, any other dragon in the whole wide world, when my pet is being hurled across the room every tail CD. Sapph especially; she keeps despawning them.