Patch 3.3

* In Patch 3.3, pets will scale of all of your stats and allow buffs from raid encounters to affect them.
* In Patch 3.3, there will be changes to make sure that pets can't be hit by AOEs from bosses but others (PvP) will be able to affect them.
* Pets classes might get a "move to this location" command for their pet, long cooldown abilities that let your pet teleport to you to get out of trouble. This would be good feature since developers can't make pet AI as smart as a player.

3 buffs to tanking, AGAIN! =D

And this is awesome:

Hunters might be able to choose the talent tree of their pet to let them pick the pet that looks best to them. Zhevra is a possibility for Cataclysm.

I missed that pets will scale off all of our stats, that's fantastic news. I'm really curious to see if they'll include dodge and parry in that since they said all, or if they'll just end up doing only offensive stats. Either way it'll be a great boost to threat, and maybe a huge boost to avoidance as well.

Dodge scaling would be especially interesting. You get 18-24% dodge from AotDH depending on if you take Imp Aspect of the Monkey and depending on your gear you can get another 15% or so on top of that from agility before raid buffs. You have between 5% and 8% parry depending on points in Deflection. Say pets get 40% of our avoidance stats that's somewhere between 9 and 19 percent additional avoidance before deminishing returns.

The AoE one will probably either not go through or get changed. Remember what happened to Voidwalkers when one tanked Sarth 3D? Even if it goes through someone will end up using it to get around a boss ability (I know I will if I get the chance) and it'll get nerfed.

As for any pet taking any talent tree, there's not really any pets with good tanking specials that aren't already tenacity pets. A devilsaur would be a little better for threat and a stun could be situationally useful, but there's no real gems hidden in there really.

I have a feeling that the 'not hit by AOE' may be reconsidered if and when they see how many hunters use their pets for high-level tanking.

Of course, I could very well be wrong. With these changes, it looks like they're fully intending offering 'Hunter' as an *official* sanctioned tanking class. After all, while they're immune to AOE, pets would be taking more damage from direct hits.

... or would they, with the scaling? Suppose it depends on how much they scale.

All I can say is: wow. If the patch goes live this way, I'm going to be *totally* revamping my tanking outfit. Watch me deck myself out like a druid: craploads of stamina and avoidance to trickle down to the pet. Agility will probably be a premium tanking stat, since it'll raise damage, *and* give armor, *and* add avoidance...

Easy, Kura. How often have you said to others not to get excited until the patch is out. Down, Boy.

Wow, this is great news- gonna go look all this up.

Would I always thought would be a easy way for Blizz to get around the AI prob with pets would be for the huner and pet to have some sort of 'merge' with their pet. though this would be a bit 'druidish' and probably lose what hunter pet tanking is all about.


Edit: Whoa, wait up. Potential nasty nerf. Blizz are doing away with tanking stats and making normal tanks get immunities and alike through Talents. Will blizz give such abilites to Pet Tenacity tanks? Or will we be left by the wayside?

If blizz gives pets these talent then Hunter tanks are full steam ahead, if they limit them or dont grant them at all - then we die a death.

Seems to me it's crunch time for Blizzard to decide whether Pet tanks have a place in Cataclysm or not.

The removal of Defense doesn't hurt us at all, as it doesn't currently scale to the pet in any way or offer pet crit immunity. As long as they don't get rid of Resilience we'll be fine.

If we get avoidance scaling it'll be interesting to see what kind of itemization there will be on tanking necks, rings, trinkets and weapons in the expansion. If we do get that scaling with the removal of Defense, Strength will be the only wasted stat for us on these tanking pieces. Heck, if pets really will scale off all stats, they might even get attack power from our Strength, potentially making these tanking pieces great pet tanking gear.

One other potential buff that I just now realized is that Block is being changed from a flat amount of damage reduced on a block to a percentage. If the percentage changes based off strength or something it might not be that great still, but if they make blocks always reduce damage by say, 30%, it'll be a huge boost from the 60 some odd damage reduced by our pet's blocks now.

There are three interesting paths I see: One is the mastery thing, the other is the continuous upgrading talent pointy thingy and the last is reforging.

The first two suggest greater flexibility in picking talents and the third suggests an opportunity to customise pet tanking gear.

Interesting is all I can say.

Ohhhh, that's a good point about reforging. We can take that crit rating which will scale but still won't be as potent as AP because of growl, and either turn it into Agi for AP and dodge, or into more delicious Stamina, nom nom nom.

I didn't even think of IAothM, this can make a Tank build like this: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#cVfGzggRfzhestce (FI-FA are floaters) pretty awesomesauce.

It depends on precisely how they go about implementing it, but unless they explicitly go out to destroy pet-tanking this change could be an absolutely enormous one.

We could even start thinking of Shammy spell power gear to scale TS with, aside from block/dodge/parry etc. Could be very interesting indeed.

I am not entirely sure about the stat scaling though, because we have been using the double buffing to help us for tanking. It might be great and it might be awful, no way to tell just now. One thing it might do though is make it harder for players to think of pets as NPC's.