Get Your Ghost Boar

I have a large collection of Ghostly pets.  The Ghost Boar with Armor Barding will most likely going away with WoD.  He's a tame that maybe you shouldn't be able to tame.  Blizzard has patched tames like this in the past.  For instance, you can no longer tame the Boar on Fire with Armor Barding.  The Slime or Three-headed Ghost Hydra.  The summoned Spore. The Ghost Wolf.  The list goes on.  You'll want to grab this and it's fairly simple.

First head to the bottom of the Southern Barrens.  Because of the disruption to the world, you'll want to then head west.  Pass over Razorfen Downs.  You want to go farther west to Razorfen Kraul.  It is to the west of the road.

Side Note: Traveling to that part of the world is easy for horde with two main cities to choose from.  Alliance engineers can use their portal tool to get to Gadgetzan.  Or they can ask a mage to port them to the obliterated city of Theramore.  Otherwise a boat trip to Dustwallow Marsh or Ratchet will have to do.

Once you're in the instance, you should remove your weapon, legendary cloak (if you have one), and any AoE proc trinkets.  You can punch the mobs to death, or just run through them and FD.

You'll make your way, bending right, and then walking up a little crevase (passing the boss you want to get to on your left).  Make a hard left and you'll see him in a little hut.  I punched out everyone on my way there.  Don't get punch-crazy and nuke the boss too.  

Get your tame button ready.  Then walk over to the boss to engage him.  Don't hit him.  Stand around and wait for him to cast a summoning spell for your new pet.  Once it's arrived, tame it.  It may die afterwards.  That's okay.  Just rez him and he'll still be ghostly.

Enjoy.

Rare Pets

If you still need some rare pet tames, you should get to know someone on a low-population role-playing player-vs-player realm (A.K.A. LowPop RP PVP).

I had a friend from such a realm invite me to group.  I phased to his realm.  Then suddenly instead of more than a dozen level 90 hunters looking for Loque, there was just me.  Oh!  And he's right there because nobody has tamed him.  Port over and grab Ghostcrawler.  All done in less than 10mins.

My mind was completely blown.  I had been after those pets off and on most weeks of this year.

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.

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...

Frenzy Appears Broken

BM Hunters,

I don't have scientific data to understand exactly what is going on here.  But I do see that Frenzy buffs are not happening hardly at all.

I did Durumu Normal 10man last night (5.3) and on Monday (5.2). I always try to do it as BM.   I went from 66 frenzy stacks in 5.2 to SEVEN frenzy stacks in 5.3.  Details below.

On Monday my pet had 163 melee attacks and 72 bite attacks.  I was using a boar.  The fight lasted 8m39sec.  This resulted in 66 frenzy buffs with a total uptime of 89.3%.  I hit focus fire 10 times and got 270 focus total.  This is pretty good.

Last night, my pet had 155 melee attacks and only 8 claw attacks.  I was using a spirit beast. The fight lasted 7m27sec.  This resulted in only 7 frenzy buffs with a total uptime of 13.6%.  One time I saw it stack to two and hit focus fire (once) and got back 12 focus.  Once.

Yes, I had a few variables different in the fight.  Different pet.  Different raid (3 heals vs 2 heals).  But both pets had full autocasts on except for Growl.  I had the same talent choices.  aMoCs and Glaive Toss.  So no Dire Beast(s) talents were in play.  I also spent 3k valor on upgrading gear.  I reforged and stayed hit and expertise capped.

Monday's 5.2 worldoflogs.
Wednesday's 5.3 worldoflogs.

I've added to a Blizzard bug thread on the issue.  Check your logs!

Helping Ten Mans By Saying Goodbye to Old Pets

Over the weekend I made the tough call of permanently dismissing three old pets. I picked up a water strider for combo spell power / crit buff.  I picked up a wind serpent for its debuff . And finally, a hyena for the attack speed buff.  I also swapped out a creepy Halloween spider for a neon spider I got as part of a rare quest.  This fills out many of the buffs my 10man raid often doesn't have.

Sadly - and I mean sadly - I had to get rid of three pets.  Yes, I picked the ones I haven't used in the longest time but it still felt bad.  I'm not sure how to abandon any other pets.  It seems cruel.

I was glad I didn't seem to need to pick up a pet that can do a battle rez.  But this was a mistake.  Wowhead has it as a brez with 60% health and 20% mana.  I was reading Petopia who had it at 20% health and 0% mana... which would be really terrible.

Hunters are Healers Too

Updated for Mists of Pandaria here.

Spirit Mend is a nice little spirit beast heal with an Achilles heal.  It has a 28 second cooldown.  An anonymous commentator suggested chaining those pet heals by using multiple pets.  I spent a few days off and on checking and Kheldul now has five spirit beasts.  Spirit mend is based on ranged attack power (RAP) and he has about twenty-three thousand RAP.  This lets him get up to about 4,800 HPS.

It took me about half an hour to get a nice elegant macro that accomplishes what we would need to make a mediocre healer.  It uses mouseover macros for the heals.  This mirrors how I work on my healer alt.  Use raid frames and hover over a name and click the macro button.  You'll want to start out with your first pet already out (and attacking!).  Adjust the castsequence for the number of spirit beasts you have and which stable slot they're in.

#showtooltip
/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/petattack
/cast [@mouseover, pet][pet] Spirit Mend
/cast [pet] Dismiss Pet
/castsequence Call Pet 2, Call Pet 3, Call Pet 4, Call Pet 5, Call Pet 1
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

I was stoked enough about this to grab the demo version of Fraps and ffmpeg -- made a movie clip.  Unfortunately my mic died a week ago and hasn't been replaced.  Otherwise, I would have been more motivated and gotten the pay-for-version of Fraps...  In any case, I hope you enjoy.  The video is when I only had four spirit beasts and it has been noted that I was suffering from a bug.  (Details below.)

In the above video I cycle through the pets pretty quick.  There is a drawback that hits a Blizzard bug; Like a pet's stamina, the pet doesn't inherit the hunter's RAP immediately.  If you wait until the pet has full health and then hit the heal you will get a much bigger heal.  The problem is that it's not a fixed amount of time for the pet to inherit the hunter's stats.  It can be 80ms, 500ms, or even two seconds.

If you have five spirit beasts and you pause a little bit while waiting for your pets stats to snap in you can pretty much cycle through all five pets without needing to wait for the 28 second CD to return.

You can check the numbers I ran on spirit mend with five spirit beasts for healing hunters with spirit bond and for non-hunters.  It shows a hunter with 23,000 RAP can sustain around 4,800 HPS on a non-hunter and about 10% more for a hunter with the spirit bond buff.

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.

Tame Beast

Tame Beast is how hunter get new pets.  The channel time is ten seconds.  This is the challenging part and it's what makes some pets challenging to acquire.

In theory it could be used as a [bad] form of CC.  Yes, let me state that again with more specifics.  Before a pull a hunter could not have an active pet out and could have a spare stable slot.  If one of the mobs was a beast, she could in theory tame it and use it like a normal pet.  The issue of course is that Tame Beast doesn't work like CC.  The start of the very long channel initiates combat.  That channel is broken from any damage.  It is also broken if the pet focuses its attacks on someone else.

So in theory, a hunter could start a tame, lead it to a trap and then once tamed, use it to finish off the other mobs. (Or immediately dismiss it.)  The problem is that this theoretical and not

Let's pause for a moment and think about heroes from movies who were "hunters" or "beast masters".  They could soothe pets to sleep.  They could exert mental control over beasts and get them to do things.  They didn't simply tame one and "train" it or "tame" it and keep it forever.

Priests can Mind Control humanoids.  Druids can Hibernate Beasts and Dragonkin.

Hunters need a Control Beast ability.  What should it look like?

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.

New Pet Bug on Nef

If you're polishing off Nef the Hyper-Nerfed, be aware that you will not be able to get your pet to attack either Ony or Nef at all.  No matter the pet stance, no matter the command, even typed /petattack.  It will just blink and be on you.  You'll get to use your pet when you're on the pillars.  That's all.

I haven't had any problems with any other bosses or mobs anywhere.  And I didn't have this problem last Thursday on Nef.

Questions on Pet Stances

Will the new-fangled "Aggressive pet stance" cause my pet to do less dps if the mobs are small and they die quickly?

In "Defensive pet stance," will I still be able to have my pet manually attack enemies who may not be attacking me [yet]?

• The Aggressive pet stance has been removed and replaced with the Assist stance. This stance will cause the player's pet to attack the player's target. The pet will not change targets unless the master attacks a new target for a few seconds.
• The Defensive pet stance will now only cause the player's pet to attack enemies which attack the pet or the master.

I suspect the answer is "yes" in both cases.

Hurray!

It certainly took long enough!

Name Those Beasts

Pet Tanking in 4.0.3

Wow I love my TequilaShock.  I've done some city invasions with him and he can chain tank and do it well.  The threat buildup is really nice.  Kill Command, Thunderstomp, Acid Spit, and Growl are the main keys.  KC really does the job.  Throw in taunt, last stand, intimidate, bestial wrath, and burrow and it's a nice package.  I may even try and work in intervene.

I do need to learn to use Misdirect more often, but it's really nice what I can do without it.  Mind you, I'm not auto-attacking here with the pet on aggressive.  This is a fair amount of work and every GCD is used.  I do spare some for MDs, but I can't seem to get more in without a lot of other stuff falling by the wayside.

In these city invasions, you really don't have any idea who is a tank and who isn't unless you see their health going down; Looking for shields takes a bit too much effort!  For this reason, I have my pet trying to get a mountain of threat on at least one if not multiple elementals.

BM is Too Fun

I fully plan to keep BM as one of my talent trees.  The pets are just too damn fun.  The issue is that I'm doing far less DPS with them.

I'm often using my Ghost Worm, "Tequila Shock".  I don't even need to use Misdirect with him.  He's got two AoE abilities.  And between Kill Command, Growl, and his Acid Spit he generates great single target threat.  Add in the on-demand never-on-cooldown Misdirect-to-pet glyph and they are pretty amazing.

I also got back Fluffy, my Molten Core core hound who can now do Heroism.

I picked up three of the four different devilsaurs, each with a unique smile.  I tell the kids that somehow I found Chuckles again.

I have the cat and bear spirit beasts and I love their ability to toss out heals.  But wow are the spirit beast spawn points camped!

I still have my handsome wolf.  And my Ghost Hydra, Malcolm.  And my silver fur, green-eyed gorilla, Jason.  And Flash, my hyper-resilient turtle.

To round out my "ghost pet" theme, I got my "Ghost Cat".

Looking at all those pets, only a third of them are usable if I'm MM or SV.  These days you can use a different pet between each pull.  I guess I just need to work on doing more DPS as BM ... and layoff the tenacity pets.  They're just too fun.

You Are Not Prepared: Hunter 4.0 Specs, Glyphs, Pet Changes, Spells, Macros, Shot Priorities

Time to re-learn the hunter game!  I've been trying to get onto the PTR since it opened.  My loader just didn't want to keep downloading.  It died frequently and only got about 1/3rd of the PTR down.  This was almost enough to load screens, but nowhere near close enough to play.

I've been spending most of my hunter time collecting acheesements (hero, did it years ago, pacman, master wg,  74 mnts incl. a hog, a whole bunch o pets, and not quite insane 36 rep incl. fur love).

I've also been preparing for tomorrow.  I prepped myself by getting every Glyph that exists today (including some that will be junk tomorrow).  I bought out a few AH markets that may be blossoming tomorrow.

All that said, I don't know the ideal spec.  I don't know how much I'm going to re-forge or into what.  I don't know the best glyphs to use, best shot selection or even my UI and macros.  It's all changing.

Here's the thing though:  It's okay.  In the next month, we'll work it all out.  But most likely nobody really cares about level 80... least of all Blizzard.  They are only balancing and tweaking things for level 85.  I mean, SV and BM don't even have access to cobra shot (the non-Marksman version of steady shot).

Everyone's UI is going to suck. Auction addons will be broken.  Macros will need to be stripped down and re-built from scratch.  It's all okay.  I'm not even overly concerned that my uber armor pen gems will become crit gems.  I may just reforge other crit and might even switch to SV for a while.

But I'll be keeping my eye on what works, playing with test dummies and showing off what I'm using. I really love all the specs.  To me: BM is like sittin on the floor givin your pet a good scritchin'.  MM is all about the ranged weapon and headshots.  SV is like dancing with your enemies and blasting them to bits.

Pet Abilities Round One

Sweet stuff for Exotic pets (tame-able by Beast mastery hunters).  The big list is over at MMO-Champion.  Kings, heroism/bloodlust, sunders, heals, etc.