Example Beastmaster Hunter Pet Tanking Gear for Patch 3.2

In my Hunter Pet Tanking Gear post, I outlined six gear prioritized objectives for a hunter pet-tanking set. There of course may be circumstances where you just want to go all-out stamina. I'd argue you still need to meet the hit-cap, resilience cap, and not slide too far out of mail for its armor value. So let me show you how I accomplished it for my set.

Meeting Objective 1: Your gear needs to be fully hit-capped. I used a variety of PvE and PvP gear that had +hit on it. This wasn't particularly difficult to do. I first found all my decent +hit gear and looked at in terms of the other important elements; does it have gem slots? how high is the stamina? does it have good AP? will it help my resilience? I set the best of the items aside in a bag. Luckily, I had more than enough to get up to 263. A few of the pieces appeared to be must-haves. This included my Ignus rifle. (+hit, +stamina, and dps makes it too juicy!) I slotted them into my Outfitter set.

Meeting Objective 2: Your gear should have 328 Resilience. [The resilience level needed in 3.3 is now just 132!] My PvP set is pretty good. I can run between 800 and 900 resilience. I've upgraded plenty of PvP epics to better PvP epics. I've actually gotten a little lazy about it and have some enchanting to do. To meet this goal, I went with four pieces of armor and two rings. Picking them was tricky. I flipped things a few times while I was trying to make the other Objectives work out. The easy winners were my right and left rings. They have all good stats for tanking. Nothing wasted there. I also knew that I really should use the gloves I got as a VoA drop. Well doing that meant that I should also try for the set bonus to get an extra 50 resilience. So I tentatively put a few other pieces in as well as my cloak and helm. The cloak was all good stats and a lot more stamina than my other dps cloaks. The helm was the same. Of course they didn't help my set bonus and I was waaaay over the Resilience I needed. So I decided to let the other priorities help decide.

Meeting Objective 3: Equip two pieces of Tier-7.5 gear for the +5% pet damage. This was a much harder one for me. I have full T7.5, but I use some of it still. And I can't possibly re-enchant and re-gem something for tanking that I need for dpsing. Well. I use T8.5 for gloves and chest and I use T7.5 for helm and shoulders. So at the moment I had gloves, chest, and pants available. And I really never used the pants. Additionally, I never used the chest. There were many other items that were better for my survival spec. The chest was almost the same. And I knew I really wanted to use the gloves I already had slotted for tanking. The chest and pants had pretty decent stamina and of course had slots. So I went with them. Eventually when I had it all worked out, I gemmed and enchanted them. This helped me remove two pieces of PvP gear from the set too. And I was still well over the Resilience cap.

Meeting Objective 4: Get to about 25% crit. This was a bit harder. I had to address my overload of PvP gear now. I had a bunch of things I did like. I had the nice boots with a resilience gem for my PvP set still in there. They were pretty lackluster compared with some of my other boots I still had around. And it wasn't getting me that +50 resilience set bonus. I had Noth's boots and XT's. XT's were great for dps, but took a stamina hit in the chin. Noth's were just one stamina less but still nice for agil, crit, and AP. Score. My PvP neck wasn't doing me too much good compared with my quest neck. It was a tough call, but I went with the quest neck for the red/blue gem coverage for my helm. This only left my bracers, shoulders and belt as PvP gear. Ooops! I have to keep the shoulders to get the set bonus. So in they stay. Hey! But I was already really close to 25% crit. So I left the bracers and belt question on hold.

Meeting Objective 5: Stack Stamina. Really. Hmm. So I wasn't terribly high on the stamina pole. I still had to re-gem and re-enchant. Okay. But I had a bunch of belts to choose from. My PvP belt, my Thorim belt, and my Naxx belt. I didn't need much from the PvP belt other than stamina and really that's all it gave. I was flipping between the Thorim and Naxx belts for dps +hit considerations. Ahh. +hit! I forgot about Objective 1. I was no longer swimming in +hit. I in fact needed some. So I either needed it from bracers or the Naxx belt. But that belt.. mmm. I didn't want to shove a stamina gem in it. Looking over my bracers, I had a whole bunch. But interestingly, I had one that had the +hit I needed and had decent stamina. Score! So what to do with the belt. Hmm. Well, I had achieved all my previous objectives. And I really needed stamina, so I looked my belts over again and noticed one that I carry around all the time. Ah! And I could stack some serious gems in it to get me a +201 stamina.

Meeting Objective 6: Stack raw Attack Power. So I had two or three slots left. My melee weapon(s) and one trinket. I chose my Heigan stick for it's stamina. The Ignus rifle still looked good even compared with my newer power cannon. Looking for more +hit would be tricky, and downshifting stamina even trickier. So my trinket. I had already reserved one trinket slot for either the infuser or grim toll for a large part of my +hit requirement. Grim toll procs Armor Pen which doesn't pass down to a pet, where the Infuser proces AP, which 22% does. And the Infuser has more +hit, so decision made. I don't have a large depth of other great trinkets to pull from. I went with one trinket that would help me dps a little but sadly not pass down much to the pet. I think I may change this up and go with my first emblem reward because what it procs is much better for the pet. I'm also considering using one of my PvP rewards to help with initial aggro. Having a large proc-based thing is okay for dps, but tanking you kinda want to have predictability.

So once settled on gear selection, and knowing what if any gear was dedicated to pet-tanking and what was also used in PvE and PvP, I began to re-gem and re-enchant. I may swap trinkets a little bit. I may re-think the neck piece. I still need to fix a few enchants, but I'm pretty happy with how it has turned out.

I'm at 24k health and 10k armor unbuffed. My pet as raid pet-tank spec'd with buffs is over 35k health. Unbuffed, my AP is 3142 with a crit of a little over 25% with 285 hit and 335 resilience. I'll have to get more pet raid stats sometime soon.

I don't claim my pet can tank like a tank. He's very special use. Healers need to heal him differently. DPSers need to dps with much more care. He has a hard time with positioning, kiting, and moving in general. He can not taunt most bosses. He may not be able to beat enrage difficult timers. But he can help. With the right hunter talents and glyphs, tenacity pet talents, pet selection, and pet-tanking gear, he can off-tank like a champ and build up enough threat to not be challenged. He can deal with adds. He can avoid 75% of AoE damage right off the top. He can shrug off a huge amount of damage. And he is crazy-easy to heal. And he's a lovable pet.