Hunter Questions on the official forums

[Durante]

There's currently an event going on on the official WoW forums where community managers are taking questions in a sticky post in each class forum. They're going to collect the best and most important questions and answer them in a series of posts over the next few weeks. This is a perfect time to get our voices heard and get an idea of what Blizzard has in mind for pet tanking. I believe its a global event so no matter where you are, your region's forum should have a sticked post in the official hunter forum.

Surprisingly for how high profile you'd think this would be, even though this post had been up for almost three days the thread on the US hunter forum is only 10 pages long. Seems to me that its a small enough number that if we get half a dozen or so civilized and thoughtful posts on pet tanking concerns and Blizzard's intent for it, we have a good chance of getting some answers. If nothing else they'll probably stick out from the PvP QQ enough to stir up some discussion in the Blizzard offices, even if we don't get answers.

[Nordh]

Should we make a collective questionaire for someone to post?


1. Thunderstomp.
One of the biggest set backs in tanking as a hunter was the damage nerf to Thunderstomp when it became available to all Tenacity pets. From being decent AoE tanks, they became bad AoE tanks. Would there be a possibility to raise the threat generating modifier to counter the damage reduction?

2. Taunt usability.
With the recent nerf to pet taunts, making bosses immune to them, taunt has become a rather useless talent. The only place it can now be used is on trash, and I think the cooldown is way too long for the very limited use of this. I think that pet taunts should either have a much lower cooldown (30-60s) and/or not be limited against bosses. Because let's face it, if a hunter brings a tenacity pet with taunt with him to a raid, it is because he plans to tank something, not to dps.

3. Roar of Sacrifice.
With the nerf to Roar of Sacrifice it's become a pure PvP-talent, and while I can't say you shouldn't bring a Tenacity pet to PvP, that's not quite what they were made for. There are several options that I see fit for this.
a) Revert the Tenacity pet's version back to the old skill, but keep the Cunning pet's version as it is now. This would give Tenacity pet's back their usefulness in raids without making it overpowered in arena. And it gives the hunter a good choice of utility vs dps.
b) Remove the link to Wild Hunt. Wild Hunt is pretty mandatory, while RoS is very limited.
c) Replace the skill with something that's more Tenacity oriented, for example improved threat generation, but keep the skill in the Cunning tree.

[Doug]

1. I would be happy with anything that allows threat scaling to work a bit better. Right now a dps specced BM hunter wolf with growl on can grab threat off George the turtle fairly easily even with TS and Growl going because of the scaling. They took a lot of effort to make a AotB glyph, and EotB, I am sure they can tweak it a touch to make is useful, a bit of threat scaling would not go amiss.

2. RoS, I agree but I would add that the link to WH should be severed forthwith but so should the one from Avoidance to Last Stand. I don't think one should be using avoidance while tanking anyway and the way it is set up now BM dps actually suffers more than other specs when they can't pick up the Rabid talent on fights like OS where the major damage component is not considered AoE.

But I think in general the most important thing is to make sure that Blizz knows that there is an interest in the idea, my belief is that pet tanking is very very close to viability in a more general if not full MT sense. Full MT would require a little tweak to EotB, not hard to do I reckon but with potentially far-reaching consequences.

[Ihlos]

Ill go drop a post with suggestions too!

[Durante]

My questions as far as pet tanking is concerned were very similar to Nordh's, as well as adding Grace of the Mantis to talents that should unlinked to Wild Hunt as the resil change might make the ability outdated as since PvP gear is often the best stamina gear one will probably have some amount of resil. I also mentioned the possibility of using Aspect of the Beast as the tanking and PvP emergency Aspect. Switching to Aspect of the Beast cuts the hunter's DPS in half like Viper, increases pet and hunter stamina or HP by 30%, and increases pet threat by 50%. Back during the WotLK beta, I posted about updating the pet stats window and got a blue post saying it wasn't something they were going to have at the expansion's release, but that it'd be added to the to do list, so I asked if that was something they were still working on. Seems like changing the scaling is the perfect opportunity to update the display.

Most importantly in my mind, I asked if the lack of crit immunity and fully functional short cooldown taunt was an intentional limiter on pet tanking. Its fine for us to suggest crit immunity and other improvements, but it might be for naught if these are intentionally placed restrictions that are meant to put an upper limit on what we're able to tank with out pets.

[Nordh]

Could anyone post my questions on the american board? The EU board is severly ignored. We never have any blues comment on things unless it's world wide information that they've copied from the US boards.

[Doug]

Their design philosophy on pet tanks was pretty transparent. Someone had gone and looked at the tank model and copy/pasted EVERYTHING to tenacity pets, then painstakingly nerfed each ability (except spell-shield) just so much that tanking would not be feasible. This is clear on Taunt and GotM as well as the ridiculous tying of Last Stand to Avoidance. If you add Last Stand/Scorpid and Distracting shot BM hunters have more tanking utilities than druids have.

But my feeling is that it is all related to scaling in the first place: They new they couldn't give us everything we needed because of the 5/5/5/5 scaling implementation so they decided to keep the options limited. That and the fact that technically hybrid/pure is still a design parameter even though, looking at their reasoning, it is better to think of pure status being given a dps boost to ensure raid viability rather than hybrids being TAXED as such. Given the fact that hunters do not currently benefit from any boost and have some of the worst utility in the game (especially BM) it may not be too much to ask for to have some more extensive allowances for tanking.

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