Mount Pet: Hunters as Main Tanks

Thesis
Hunters should have a main tanking ability.  Hunters should be able to queue as a tank and do it well.  Right now we obviously don't have the ability.  We can do extreme solo'ng and can tank content that we over-gear (e.g.- 5man heroics and lesser tier raids).  We could become tanks.  Here is how.

Mount Pet
Hunters have a non-magical ability which allows them to mount their pets.  MountPet() is both their new travel form and tanking form.  Mount pet has a two second cast time and a three minute cooldown.  Dismounting a pet only requires a global cooldown.

Tanking Abilities
While mounted, hunters lose their normal humanoid abilities, but generally gain improved versions of their pet's abilities.  The hunter and pet fight and operate as a single unit with a single health pool.  That health pool is the pet's, but if a pet dies then the hunter is stunned for five seconds.

Mounting a ferocity or cunning specialized pet is possible, but it is not a good idea to attempt tanking without a tenacity specialized pet.

All mounted pet abilities do more damage and are more effective while mounted than while unmounted.  However only tenacity abilities are improved beyond just numbers:

• Growl becomes a real taunt.
• Avoidance and Cower are proactive defensive cooldowns.
• Basic attacks generate extra [3x tank] threat.
• Charge (Tenacity) is on a shorter cooldown.
• Last Stand (Tenacity) is on a much shorter cooldown.
• Thunderstomp (Tenacity) does more damage and generates more threat.
• All Tenacity pets will have a new interrupt ability.  Pets with existing interrupt abilities (e.g.- the Special Ability, Pummel) will have two.
• Special abilities are slightly improved.
• Bonus abilities are slightly improved.
• Exotic abilities are slightly improved.
• Movement speed is greatly improved. 
• Pet health, armor, and dodge values are recalculated at a higher value than just the normal values inherited from the hunter.  Hunter gear and buffs do apply here, but don't double-dip.
• Additional abilities may be also available for flavor and variety.  Being able to summon a stampede of the same pet would be a useful cooldown.  Dire-beast might also be useful but have a suicidal taunt effect.

Tanking UI
Abilities on a cast bar are arranged once for tenacity pets, once for cunning pets, and once for ferocity pets.  If a mounted pet does not have an exotic ability or a bonus ability, then that button will be blank.

Items like potions and healthstones may be plausible.  But generally all hunter abilities are not usable.

Dismounting
When the hunter dismounts, the pet's stats, abilities, and most notably health are brought back to normal levels.  Dismounting only costs a global cooldown.  The new pet current health should be established as a percentage basis from it's while-mounted health percentage.  After dismounting, threat toward the pet is not immediately removed, but fades like normal threat fades.  As the pet is much weaker this can be detrimental.  If a hunter accidentally dismounts, they may also have a problem with the three minute cooldown on the Mount Pet ability -- and if that isn't an issue -- they may have a problem with the two second cast time of Mount Pet.

New Talents and New Glyphs
These would be far too speculative an area to discuss.  But suffice it to say these would be quite fun to dream up.  All new talents should be useful whether you're tanking or not -- but certainly more useful when you are.  Many new talents could enhance Survivability.  Many new talents could enhance Beastmastery.

New Specialization?
EDITED TO ADD: I wrote this yesterday in one sitting.  Thinking about it a bit more, the model Blizzard uses to determine roles is not one of choice and assignment.  It is based on Specialization.  So it would seem that hunters would need to have one specialization which is specifically oriented around tanking.  This would not be easy to just fold under BM.  I find the word "Huntard" horrid, but it makes me think that an entirely new Specialization would be more suitable than pushing all BM hunters into a tanking role.

Durendil is Still At It

He got up to level 39 in TANK for the Endless Proving Grounds.  Click through for his comments.

Kheldul on Episode 189 of the Hunting Party Podcast

I'm the big eye beholder guy.

Awesomesauce Tanking

Durendil did it two days ago.  He, a hunter, got the Gold Tanking achievement in the proving grounds.  What's awesome about this is the proving grounds make it so you can not overgear the content.  Previously all the pet-tanking and "extreme soloing" we've done, we've done it while having killer gear -- at the minimum a tier above the content being solo'd.

I took a stab at it and realized I needed a fully new bar with full new macros keyed-off of specific pet tanking talents and glyphs.  Threat from chain-MDs isn't quite enough.  Not having a taunt, you have to pick up the adds immediately.  There's only one thing that he did that I was thinking of doing different.  I was going to use the Distracting Shot glyph.  But I guess that might take away from other more important glyphs.

I've been checking the lists for a week or so.  Warlocks can do it.  They have a decent tank and can fear bomb +DoT.  Durendil is the first hunter.

Congrats! Here's a link to the video.

Glyphs on the PTR

I loaded up the latest PTR last night.  Unfortunately, it took a while to download so I didn't have much time to play with things.

Kheldul couldn't find either of the new major hunter glyphs.  On the PTR there is a vendor in Throne of the Four Winds that sells glyphs. He had some shaman things but neither of the new hunter glyphs.  I've been checking the AH but no love there of course.  I also created a new level 90 hunter, thinking that he might have the new glyphs.  Interestingly he had all the glyphs learned except the two new ones, so that makes me suspicious.  Maybe they were ripped out because they realized how badly designed they are.

I did some playing around with the new amp'd-up Mend Pet.  The redesigned major glyph is much better than they had it when I tried it a month ago.  Originally, it was broken and of no value.  (It healed 25% in just 5 seconds.)  Anyway, it now heals the pet for 50% of the pet health over 10sec, instead of the normal 25% of its health over 10secs.  The way it works is the HoT ticks every second for 5% health.  Unglyphed it ticks for 5% health every two seconds.  The Glyph of Mending will be in every Pet-Tanker's list of must-haves.

Gearing Up Pet Tanking Sets

I re-did the video with much better audio this time.  Click thru for HD and better proportions.

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.

Gearing Up for Pet-Tanking

Last week I started gearing up my pet-tanking set.  This week I filled it in a bit more.  The video shows what I'm doing and a little trick that can surprise people.  Click the bottom for full screen and/or HD.

I guess I really should do something with my YouTube channel...

Raiding This Week

We raid Wed, Thursday, and Mondays.  We one-shot all our farm bosses. I got a new heroic ring and yet-another Thunderforged ranged weapon.  (When it rains it pours!)  I also picked up two more pieces of gear that I'll only use for pet-tanking.  The new ranged weapon is nice because it lets me shed some of my excessive hit rating.  Then we hit Heroic Ji-Kun.  It only took us four pulls.  I was at about 210K dps. We had previously had everyone get practice on nests, but this was far too easy for us IMHO.  So we'll be trying a few other heroic modes.

I'll try and have another pet-tanking post soon.

Kheldul Raiding Updates

Kheldul got "lucky" on a coin.  I had worked it out with the number of drops, drop rates, boss kills, coin uses, etc. that Kheldul should have had three ranged weapons by now.  But he was still using his upgraded 496 rifle.  He did have one LFR bow, but the upgrade of that over the gun was less than 0.1%.  But he definitely got lucky as it is thunderforged -- and an actual gun.

Khel also got his 12th legendary token this week and did the epic cloak questline.  It's a bummer that the celestial blessings token gives us +10% to our Intelligence...  It would be a bit easier if it was +10% to our Agility.  In any case, the battle against the blindfolded Wrathion is pretty difficult if you battle everything as one would expect.  I did this and got him to about 10% life but then was done for.  The trick is that you DPS him until just before he summons the molten oozes.  Then lay off and dismiss or already pull back your pet to the platform.  Feign Death.  Wait a bit.  Bandage.  Etc.  Wait for Wrathion's mirror images and slimes to go away.  Wrathion will come for you.  Just blast him down and get your goods.

Kheldul also went on the taming excursion and picked up a fortitude pet, two new colored porcupine spirit beast "challenges", a blue Portent, and a bunch of other useful pets.  Portent was Khel's first tracking pet capture and was kinda neat.

Khel also worked on his "pet tanking" set.  He kept around all his side-grades or good-but-downgrade gear.  It is fairly impressive while gemmed and enchanted for pet-tanking.  He's at over 550K health, with two of the items being otherwise unused Thunderforged pieces.

It isn't currently clear if we're going to continue to work on heroic modes or have some of our raiders change classes for better class balance before 5.4.  If it's the latter -- and it looks that way -- we'll spend our time just plowing through stuff and gearing them up.

Wow 5.0 Raids Available as Cross Realm

Ghostcrawler recently reported that when 5.2 releases, 5.0 raids can be run in a cross realm raid group.  So this begs the question: What 5.0 raid bosses could be taken down in an all-hunter 25man group right off the bat?  Which would require us to completely over-gear them?  Which would be impossible?

Late in Cataclysm, the Warcraft Hunter's Union (remember to pay your dues!) ran some over-powered cross-realm all-hunter raids.  They were great.  I tanked a few and healed a few.  It's fun to have a challenge.

We can heal.  We can bring every buff.  We can DPS like crazy.  We have some self-heal abilities and decent defensive CDs.  But can we adequately tank?  Just ticking through bosses, I'm not sure which if any we'd be able to stand up against.  Long boss fights with lots of raid damage don't favor us.  Sure we'd have 25 people and pets doing some form of damage instead of a normal raid with healers, but the fights aren't that short.  Taunt trick bosses don't favor us because we don't have a true taunt.  Some of that we could get around with clever pet runs and coordinated FDs.  But then there are tank-only gimmicks (e.g.- Feng).  And then there are role-based things (not the raid frames identification -- but the actual talent spec).  If there is no tank or no melee then the encounter might bug in weird ways.

This is an exciting thought experiment that we could marshal enough people to participate in.

Knight Mail Transmog Set

On my hunter, I have a transmog set that looks like plate. Not so coincidentally, it happens to be my pet-tanking set.

The base components of this set are from the "Knight's" set:
Knight's Breastplate
Knight's Legguards
Knight's Boots
Knight's Gauntlets
Knight's Girdle

The true gems are from other sets however:
Champion's Helmet
Ornate Pauldrons (shown) though if you want a softer look, the Ancient Pauldrons are nice.
Gossamer Cape

Now come your accessories and trimline:
Ranged - Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle (shown) though Rifle of the Platinum Guard is a very close second.
Tabard - Stormpike Battle Tabard (shown)
Shirt - White Tuxedo Shirt (shown).  The shirt does show through in many places.
Bracer - Any bracer. Color can show as a short banded cuff above the gloves.

All Hunter Raid

Head on over to Arth's post at the WHU
http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2012/06/hunters-conquer-bwd/

Looking for Pet-Tanking Trinket Recommendations

I'm looking for better trinket options for pet-tanking than these (slot1 / slot2) stamina ilevel 365s.  My unbuffed pet health is quite good (185K) but I don't think I should give up 1,000 stamina.  I am considering the alternative stamina trinkets and pondering how -- and how difficult they would be to get.

Cataclysm Raiding: Tired or Wired

Wednesday night we kicked off our raiding week.

I picked up "OS" off-spec gear.  I take it when nobody else needs it for their main spec or off-spec.  I got three pieces.  Heroic pieces.  I am upgrading 397 tier pet-tanking gear to heroic 410 pet-tanking gear.  /face-palm?

We raided and one-shot the first three bosses on heroic and then two-shot Hagara.  It was only our third kill of her.  We had previously done everything right except a for two things that seem like they shouldn't be an issue.  1) We didn't previously have the boss positioned on the edge facing away from everyone except the tank.  Ice lances used to shred us.  2) We used to have eight people chain the lightning (in four groups of two).  It is far, far, simpler to have two groups of two chain the whole thing, one working clockwise and one working counter-clockwise.  I'm always one of the four and enjoy when my group does one or two more than the other group.  Oh, and your pet can help or hurt chaining you.  I have a how-to I need to share for heroic Hagara.

After Hagara and Ultraxion, we realized we only had 45mins to try hitting heroic Blackhorn.  We also realized the other two raid nights had no tanks available.  So we all logged onto our alts and finished the instance in normal mode.

I have to say it was quite fun and enjoyable.  But I'm not sure if I'm tired or wired.

Loot Reaver Loot Fail

I'm looking for the Merciless Gladiator's Chain Spaulders for one of my transmorgrify sets. Every hunter should solo Loot Reaver once. The nice thing is that it's easy. ;-)  Click any image for a slide show.

Very simple fight.  I was already in T5x2
so I didn't even need to use mend pet or pull him out for stomps.

The mortars he throws are of course "old school"
and don't have those ground target sign effects.
But with the MM self-heal you don't really
even need to move around unless you want to dance a little.

The trash is more difficult than the boss. 

This raid is configured for 25man only, so you get
three T5 tier tokens. Of course no hunter tokens.
So, I guess I'll come back next week.
As a consolation gift you get 250g cash too.

Pet Tanking Ideas

Eidotrope over at outdps.com suggests a number of ways to make hunter pet tanking a viable tanking option.  I do truly like the notion of pet tanking.  I have a mostly 378 item level pet tanking set gemmed and enchanted for mostly stamina for raid tanking.  But pet tanking is in a sad state.

One of my main concerns is that one tree would become a tanking tree.  This seems like a wrong move.  It would inevitably be the beast master tree, and I don't think that is a perfect match.

I would more envision it as another hunter aspect that works along the line of other class stances -- and with a redesigned Tenacity tree.  e.g.-

Aspect of the Beast (redesigned) is a hunter aspect that can be used with a tenacity pet.  When activated, it switches your bars, and has the character "ride" the pet.  All tenacity pet abilities are still possible through direct control.  In this aspect, the hunter is completely focused on controlling the pet and  takes no direct actions.  Because the hunter is not firing his weapon they are able to much more actively handle their pet; They help the pet cause more damage and threat with a better understanding of their opponent's weaknesses and they help the pet avoid a substantial amount of damage similar to druids.

Some pet abilities that are currently from pet talents would need to become baseline pet abilities.  Other abilities would need to be strengthened for proper tanking and boss tanking.

Pet Growl Threat

What will Pet Growl Threat look like now?  Will it still be a huge challenge to get it to be enough?  Or has it increased too?

Hotfix: The threat generated by classes in their tanking mode has been increased from three times damage done to five times damage done.

Hurray!

It certainly took long enough!

Name Those Beasts