3.2 PTR Patch Notes and Tenacity Pets

1. All pets now receive 40% of their master's resilience and 100% of their master's spell penetration. In addition, if a player is at their appropriate spell hit chance or hit chance maximum, their pet will be at the maximum for spell hit chance, hit chance, and expertise. If they are below the maximum, their pet will be proportionately below those maximums.
Uncrittable, YAY!


2. Catlike Reflexes now also reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command ability by 10/20/30 seconds.
9% pet dodge lost, BOOO! A slight increase in threat however. (oops, I misread this one, not a nerf)

3. Roar of Sacrifice: Redesigned. This ability can now be used on any friendly target to make that target immune to critical strikes, but the Hunter pet takes 20% of all damage taken by that friendly target. Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.
This is undeniably a PvP only talent, all the more reason having it required for Wild Hunt is bad.

4. Beacon of Light: The healing amount on the Beacon of Light target is now based on the total healing done (including over-healing) instead of the effective healing done. Radius increased to 60 yards. Multiple Paladins can now have this active on the same target. Buff indicating a player is within range of the Beacon target is no longer displayed.
The fact that this will work on overhealing just made Tenacity pets Holy Pally superchargers. The Pally can put Beacon of Light on the MT, then heal your pet with its 54% bonus to healing recieved, and the MT should receive the full amount of healing done to your pet.

So far we have a buff with being able to gain crit immunity, a nerf with 9% loss to dodge, and an interesting piece of new utility.

I am almost positive that Catlike Reflexes will still retain the 9% pet dodge. They're just adding a bonus to it to lower the cooldown of Kill Command. This is a very nice buff for BM, especially for BM tanks.

I am very excited for these upcoming changes, especially now that pets will receive some of our resilience. Looks like I'll have to start working some arena in to get in on the upper tier pvp gear.

Just re-read the resilience scaling and such again...and if I'm reading this right, it looks like a major buff. If we're hit capped, our pets will be spell hit capped, hit capped, and expertise capped. If this is right, it makes Animal Handler not a must have requirement anymore. Interesting.

Yeah, looks like you're right. I just reread Catlike Reflexes and I completely missed the "also" in there when I read it before, my mistake. That's a huge relief. I was worried that they were removing the dodge in order to keep pets from being decent tanks since they're now uncrittable.

I also saw that KC and felt my heart sink, but in fact this is a spectacular buff to pet tanking.

Looks like someone was listening after all, it is things like this that make me suspect they are prepping BM for a closer to full tanking role eventually since the KC change is on a taken which is hardly ever taken by BM dps and amounts to a major threat boost to TS. I would still like to see threat scaling introduced, but I suppose one shouldn't be greedy.

Of course these changes look like they also may be PvP directed, but we won't go into that.

*Another thing* The expertise change: How does this affect animal handler? Can Growl be dodged? If it can this is a major buff to threat.

As a moderately successful PvP BM hunter and someone who keeps up with the PvP community, I can say with almost 100% certainty that the resilience to pets change was made for PvP. The Catlike Reflexes change is a little less obvious though. I figure they're either trying to eliminate "useless" talents so they added a damage benefit to the talent, or they added the damage to entice PvP BM hunters to take the talent and in doing relieve some of their pet's durability problems when they wouldn't have otherwise.

Oh yes, certainly the Resilience change is from a PvP standpoint, especially since it looks like it goes to all pets.

What strikes me as odd about CR change is that I find it hard to see what talent points will be dropped to make this a dps increase for BM. One thing I can see is that it might have some synergy with Invigoration but it strikes me as a rather weak one from a dps perspective. Again, it is great for tanking. Another interpretation is that they were looking for a way to buff BM PvP without affecting PvE dps, but it isn't as if BM dps is blowing away the meters right now so I am not so sure about that.

The other odd thing is the fact that Animal handler will become a redundant talent if the expertise changes are implemented the way the notes suggest (so that you are expertise capped if hit capped). I wonder if they realise this or if it is again a PvP only consideration. Looking at possible tank trees it is looking better all the time:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#cVbGzggRcuGestce with the three points in frenzy as floaters (could be used for Improved Arcane shot too for big MD's).

All very iffy if you ask me, this can't be the final iteration, but I do like it so far .

The Catlike Reflexes was one of the most surprising changes I've seen in quite a while. It's obviously very tanking related. I can see how this is a buff to BM in PvP though. Dodge is always welcome for PvP, and getting a bit of an extra dps boost from the pet is never wrong, especially now that they get resillience so that they are harder to kill.

I like the change to RoS, it makes it a better talent all around, but it sucks that we have to take it. They should give it to cunning pets, but replace it for tenacity pets.

What they are going to do with Animal Handler now is interesting though. They have to change it. Noone with their mind straight will use 2 talent points for 6 seconds of extra immobility immunity alone.

So, what exactly does max Expertise do for us. More threat from no parries and dodges, and less incoming damage because of no parries. Is that correct? Is there more to it? Expertise has always been one of the strangest stats for me. It only works from in front of a mob as well, right? If standing behind they can't dodge or parry anyhow?

As far as I understand Animal handler would probably be useless is PvE then, unless it is changed.

How they handle expertise may be very telling as to their intention for pet tanking, as there are two separate expertise caps.

Bosses can dodge attacks from behind, and dodge and parry attacks from the front. Their dodge chance is only 6.5% while their parry chance is 14%, so tanks have a much higher expertise cap than dps does.

If they give pets the tanking expertise cap, it'd be a great sign that they're acknowledging that there are some people tanking with their pets out there. If we get the DPS expertise cap, its still a very sound buff, and Animal Handler can still be used to bring down the target's parry chance further for more threat and less incoming damage.

The new version could have limited usefulness in pve, like on fourhorsemen you could give the buff to whomever is tanking the other boss.

I like this alot. so many good changes. we only have a few more wishes on our lists.... That holy paladin charger thing seems way too overpowered to last long. way too overpowered. People will catch on kaaaawick.

Has the beacon of light function been tested on pets for live? because even without overhealing, this makes a strong case for using the pet as an off tank. Obviously paladins will already be using beacon of light to heal both tanks, but this just makes using a pet as an off tank 54% sweeter

Just tested it, a normally ~3.6k Flash healed both the pet and the beacon for ~5.6k. Its going to be incredible for healing through soft enrages and damage buffs like Hodir's Frozen Blows, and also for fights where healers need to be split up like Thorim, where allowing the hallway healer to heal for 54% more could free up another healer for the arena area. In PvP, this will be even more ridiculous.

There's really very little question that this will be nerfed as soon as word gets out and Blizz takes notice. I say we keep this quiet and hope that anyone else who notices has the sense to keep this on the down low as well. Afterall, who among us wouldn't want a chance to take advantage of this on live before they nerf it?

Just realised there is another possible tanking buff hidden in there with the resilience change since it looks like it will reduce all damage.

Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage over time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. The other effects of resilience (reducing critical chance, critical damage and mana drain effects) have not changed.

The wording suggests that it is only player damage but you never know, it may not be coded that way. Here's to hoping.

Just to clarify, the change to resilience affects ALL player damage. This includes both normal hits and crits. We wanted to keep the proportion of damage coming from hits and crits the same and just reduce damage across the board. Crit damage is lowered twice, but will still contribute the same proportion of damage as it does today.

Looks unlikely, he seems to be taking care to mention player each time . On the other hand hand he could just be emphasis the fact that it is ALL damage coming from the players (or anything else) and not all damage coming from the PLAYERS (and not anything else). I think that is a bit of a desperate interpretation.

With regards to Animal Handler: As things stand now normal attacks don't really contribute all that much to threat, so I can't imagine dropping points in there would be worthwhile for tanking unless growl can be dodged, I've never checked but I doubt it can. If we got some sort of pet scaling however...

Changing resilience to affect player damage is an attempt to make it unattractive to tanks and make it less useful for PvE in general. Note also that resilience becoming a more important stat in PvP means that damage (and to a lesser extent healing) will also likely go down, since wearing PvE gear in PvP will be even riskier.

Looks like no dice on that one.

Looks like no dice on that one.

Drat, I didn't see that one, oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Oh man, just when we got crit immune they have to take it away from us =(

Will the new RoS work on the pet for limited crit immunity or will that be pvp only as well i wonder.

No, sorry for causing confusion...

I was just looking at the overall damage reduction added to Resilience. I think the crit portion will remain unchanged:

Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage over time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. The other effects of resilience (reducing critical chance, critical damage and mana drain effects) have not changed.

[My italics]

I was hoping that it was a miss-type or poor phrasing until Durante pointed out the bit I missed, hopefully the crit chance won't be affected by the 'player only' thing.

Will the new RoS work on the pet for limited crit immunity or will that be pvp only as well i wonder.

I wonder if the pet can target itself with this, I think if it can it should have that effect because they are coding it that way specifically to avoid it being useful on tanks (who are crit immune in PvE anyway), the PTR is apparently nearly up so we can test for ourselves shortly .

Pets can't target themselves for RoS, at least they couldn't before they changed it to hunter only. Whether or not both pet and target gets crit immunity though, that's something I can't answer.

It would be strange, but since RoS confers crit immunity it would simply confer that immunity to itself. I would be surprised if it works though.

Well, they both get a buff, like misdirection, right? And it wouldn't be strange if Blizzard had to implement the crit immunity to both because of limitations in their programming so that pets wouldn't take crit damage when the target should have gotten critted, but got saved so to speak.

I hope you understand what I mean, rather than the strange way I'm trying to express it =)

But the odds are against something like this of course.

Actually if I understand you correctly it looks like the effect is conferring immunity and the penalty is transferring 20% damage so that the aggregate damage would be 20% higher even if no hits were going to critically strike.

This means that a pet using it on itself would be taking 120% damage but would be immune to crit spikes. I'm not sure if that is a price worth paying for a 2 minute c/d ability that scales negatively with resilience. Hopefully they will come there senses and not implement this.

It is very odd...

You understood me wrong. I'm not talking about targeting the pet itself, since I'm 99.5% certain that won't happen as it couldn't before.

Oh I see what you meant now lol. That is one way they may have coded it, but I think it is just: Crit immune to you, transfer 20%. So that there is no crit damage for the pet to be immune to in the first place, that is how I read it anyhow.

But PTR patch has downloaded now, let me see if the character copy is finished so I can try it.

Damn login glitch *grumble grumble*