Saturday, July 20, 2013

What the Mend Pet Change Means

Over on the PTR a new change was made to the Glyph of Mending.  I haven't heard any reasons or hypothetical reasons for the change.  But here it is:

Glyph of Mending now speeds up the periodic effect of Mend Pet to restore health to the pet every 1 second.
To be honest, I couldn't recall what this meant, so I headed to wowhead.com to get briefed.  Unfortunately, wowhead.com and mmo-champion both have an out-dated definition of Mend Pet:

This isn't the actual in-game tooltip. We haven't channelled our pet heal in several major releases. It is a HOT (Heal Over Time) and has been since Burning Crusade.  The rest is right though.  Here's the real current in-game tooltip:


Specifically what this does is give your pet a HOT that heals 5% of the pet health every two seconds for ten seconds.  So five ticks.


The current in-game Glyph of Mending is quite nice for solo stuff that your pet needs to tank or for say, an all-hunter Flex Raid.  The +60% is multiplicative.  This means that the pet is not healed for 85% of it's life (25% + 60%).  It improves Mend Pet by a factor of 1.6.  Or taken another way, 60% of 25% is 15% so it increases the 25% by 15%, which is 40%.   So we end up with this as a tooltip if we take that glyph of mending:

When we hit Mend Pet while glyphed, the HOT is an 8% health heal every two seconds for ten seconds.  And it's five ticks in total.

Now, let's take a minor detour.  The Glyph of Mend Pet removes curses.  Don't get confused with that one.  It's totally separate.  And if I recall correctly, it's going to be a 100% chance.



The other thing to keep in mind is that all healing is affected by the Glyph of Animal Bond.  It's nice.  But again, not central to the change here.


Now back to the basics.  The blue PTR notes may tell the whole story.  Yes, the new PTR "Glyph of Mending now speeds up the periodic effect of Mend Pet to restore health to the pet every 1 second."  But there is fine print in the tooltip.

"Your Mend Pet now ticks every 1 sec, but the duration is reduced by 5 sec and it gains a 10 sec cooldown."

That sounds like it should be the same heal but it will come in five seconds and we wont be able to hit Mend Pet for another five seconds after that.  So no real change, right?  But wait a second.  Where is our current +60% to the mend pet?  Is it gone?  It's no longer in the tooltip.

I'm currently downloading the latest PTR client but it will be a very long time until it's done.  I suspect that this is just a tooltip error.  Because the spell logic, while very terse seems to imply the +60% is still in there.  (See: ptr vs live spell logic)  If anyone who is on the PTR can check and see if the total healing is still improved by 60%, that would be very re-assuring to the hunter pet-tankers.

2 comments:

  1. I think they clarified this in a blue post, that the duration will stay the same (and the PTR tooltip was incorrect), making it a buff:

    "The plan is that the glyph will make the Mend Pet tick twice as fast, last the same duration effectively doubling the amount healed, and no cooldown. However, I must append the caveat that things on the PTR may be subject to change."

    This sounds much better, and hopefully will be implemented this way - 5.5% per second over 10 seconds with Animal Bond would be nice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks! I was searching for something like that but couldn't find anything.

    I got on the PTR and it was as the tooltip implied; It was only 5 ticks over 5 seconds for the same amount as unglyphed.

    ReplyDelete