Gief! Whatever next.

Unless my slow old lumbering mind is loosing its touch... I am pretty sure they have buffed the concept of Hunter tanks for 3 patches on the trot - with no real visible nerfings *touch wood*

3 saw the new talent trees and host of new abilities for Tenacity pets.

3.1 saw Thunderstomp going across all pets and the massive buffs that were wild hunt and Glyph of mending.

3.2 has thrown in Crit immunity and a number of other little threat increasing buffs like Catlike reflexes.

The buffage is most welcome, but what I am more keenly interested in is the lack of sustantial nerfs to other abilites to stop Hunters tanking. With every passing ppatch i think Hunter Pet Tanks are coming a little more viable, a little more well known and, dare I say it, a little more acceptable.

3.3 needs to fix taunt and change Aspect of the beast to increase Threat and we are all in


Edit: And LazOr Beeems to my Monkey's head would be Nice

Edit edit:Ooo and soz not been around much recently - been forced to DPS for Ulduar alot and been specced into PVP to get some tanking gear. Have been reading the forums tho

Well, I have a feeling the resilience thing wasn't made for pet tanks in particular. Especially considering they're making resilience 'Less appealing for tanking' in their own words. But by not removing the crit reduction, it *does* still make it more interesting for hunter tanks, obviously.

Personally, for me, one of the biggest helps for pet tanking was 'If the hunter is hit capped, the pet is hit, spell hit, and *EXPERTISE* capped'. Ask any tank how important that Expertise is for TPS. Ask any tank how hard it is to *get* expertise capped for both dodge and parry. Not positive if Growl can be dodged (I doubt it can be parried... though with Blizzard who knows!), but I know that every hit missed is a bit of threat missed. And while I know that Growl is the big threatgiver, the attacks your pet is spamming *do* count toward it.

The only nerf that stands out is the taunt nerf.

That wasnt directed at us in particular, just an unfortunate collateral damage.

Unfortunately, it seems that pet tanking buffs are also not really intentional, we are just benefitting from them trying to balance bm dps, and trying to balance hunters in pvp.

The good news is that their current philosophy will in general line up with pet tanking, so we just have to hope we get lucky!

Kurasu, I think Growl can be resisted. I know there is some way that it can miss, and I do believe it's through the built in less than 1% chance that something can resist, dodge, parry, etc, no matter how much hit you have.

I remember this built in mechanic was talked about when the untouchable rogue tanked Gruul and Mother Sharaz. Even though he had over 100% dodgechance he could still get hit like once every 10 minutes, but due to the talent rogues has that puts them at 10% (or whatever) HP when they should normally have been killed, this was never any problem for him.

Nordh wrote:Kurasu, I think Growl can be resisted. I know there is some way that it can miss, and I do believe it's through the built in less than 1% chance that something can resist, dodge, parry, etc, no matter how much hit you have.

I know for a fact that Growl can be resisted and can miss. As I've said before, take a pet against a higher level mob and you'll see it happen. SCT reports it as 'miss' as opposed to 'resisted'. Which is why I wonder if it's being dodged as well.

The thing that's become clear, though: they removed the 1% chance of miss if you're hit capped. I've done masses of experiment shots at target dummies (about 4000 rounds of ammo expended) at my hit cap. Not one of them was a 'miss'. So without some way to lower hit, that hit capped Growl (or spell hit, or expertise hit) will never miss, if it's on the same numbers.

Something I would like to test out if I can figure out how: put a pet on the heroic target dummy without hit cap and start spamming growl and nothing but growl. See how often it gets resisted, parried, blocked, missed, et cetera. Just to see what the exact mechanism that Growl is using: a spell or melee-type effect. Then go to hit cap and make sure that the cap is, indeed, 'capping' growl.

I'm unfortunately not sure what AddOns could work with this. Recount is great for when I, myself, am doing something, but I don't know if Recount would have the detail for a pet that it does for the hunter. I seem to remember trying to work something out on my pet and not being able to because of how it counted numbers.

My curiosity has been piqued. Currently running a test and I'll likely put the results in the Theorycraft section of the forum for the sake of trying to stay on topic.