Monday, November 19, 2007

Hunter Pet Problems Continued (And other issues)

Current bugs:

I'd say a good 20% of the time I send a /pet attack command to my pet, it will make the "attack" feedback noise that pets do when you issue the command, and he'll face the target, but he won't actually go. He'll just sit there and not attack anything.

I think it might have something to do with telling pets to attack targets that are standing near objects. Pillars, houses, logs of wood, mining nodes, trees, etc. It seems a lot of environment objects are causing all sorts of pet pathing issues now.

It might be because it sees no way to get behind the target maybe, since pets try to do that all the time now. I'm not sure what exactly is causing it, but it's beyond annoying.

Also, my pet and its target are constantly re-ranging each other in melee combat. I think it has a lot to do with hit box size as well as the pet trying to get behind the target. My pet will move closer to the target, and the target will back up, and my pet will readjust to the targets new position, and the target will readjust to that, over and over and over. It happens every single fight now.


Pet leveling system:

Pet leveling, as bad as it was before, is just horrible now. I'm out-leveling my pet as is with the recent XP changes to the player level grind. It's my understanding that pet level requirements have dropped 15% as well, but i'm also collecting a retarded amount of quest EXP since 2.3. My pet just can't keep up.

Please, please, please, just do away with the role-playing crap of going out and finding a companion that you train and level. Just make the pets match your level when you train them, as long as they are at or below your level, and allow them to ding when you do. Also, going back and leveling a new pet type (boar for grinding, scorpid for arena, ravager for raiding, turtles for off-tanking, etc) is not only incredibly frustrating, but horribly time consuming. For what? Lore and RP reasons? Is it really necessary? It's already frustrating enough to have to go to a stable master and pull the right pet out for whatever you will be doing. Hunters don't have the ability to switch pets on the fly as warlocks do. Why punish them further by forcing upon them yet another leveling treadmill so that they can better fill their required role? It just seems silly.

Pet Agro Issues:

My pet can't hold agro off me for #!!@ as is, unless I limit myself to autoshot spam and maybe a serpent sting. Having my pet be constantly 4 levels below me doesn't help anything either. Growl threat needs to scale more than it does. I'm specced BM and used a cat for most of my leveling. I end up dumping a bunch of mana on feign death, or blow an intimidation (1min cooldown, but I need it basically every mob), or I'll try to use disengage (bad ability btw. I'll get to that)*.

Also, if I get agro while mounting along somewhere, and FD, they all go for my pet that appears as I dismount instead of deagroing. I don't remember them doing this. I thought as long as my pet stayed out of combat, mobs that agroed me would not go for the pet when I drop combat. This is no longer the case. Now I just get to sit there and watch my pet get slaughtered, get up, res it, feed it, heal it, drink up, and go.

Pet Feeding Issues:

Speaking of feeding the pet, why can I not do this in combat? I know many hunters are complaining about this issue during raids (especially BM spec) as they have to res their pets sometimes multiple times throughout the fight. The happiness system sucks. My pet is basically penalized for being in combat for long periods of time. His damage goes down over a long period of time (as he loses happiness), whereas my felguard goes up after a short period of time. And to top it off, I can't even feed him mid-combat to solve the situation. I don't like this mechanic at all. It's not fun, and rather frustrating.


*Disengage:

As far as this ability is concerned, I hate it. Feign death, for the most part, is great at deagroing in combat. Disengage sucks. What's the point of this ability? Assuming my melee weapon skill is maxed (and it never is while leveling, but I'll leave that argument out since I have a problem with the core design of this ability by itself), this is not something you will use preemptively such as rogue feint as it's a melee ability. That being said, you generally only use this after you have pulled agro, and only while feign death is down. Why use feign death? Because disengage can be parried/blocked/dodged or just plain miss. Not only that, but the tiny amount of threat reduction that disengage provides is even more of an excuse to use feign over this bad ability, especially considering its mana cost vs feign death (205 vs 80). It also does absolutely nothing in PvP, which I guess is fair since feint does nothing, but when disengage misses (and it does, a LOT) and I'm still snared (and feign is down), I'm still boned.

So to recap on disengage:

A) It's melee and should never be something to be used preemptively because of that.
B) Its mana cost is too high vs feign death
C) It's only needed when a melee char is ON the hunter, meaning it's going to be dodged/blocked/parried or just plain miss
D) Feign death is better in every situation. Total agro wipe vs small agro wipe for less than half the mana cost and can be used preemptively at range
E) Does nothing in PvP

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's interesting that MM pet is holding aggro better than BM one too.

Reason being in growl scaling with AP. And 125 AP from Marksmans TSA is very very hard to overcome even with all BM damage multipliers. Not to mention Survival hunters like me, our pets can't hold aggro for more than 2 auto shots.

I did some math on wow general forums for SV vs MM comparison.

* Pets get about 22% of the hunter's ranged attack power added to their melee attack power.

Take 2 untalented Huntesr with 2000 AP.
= Pet with Base+440 ap.

One becomes MM = 2125*1.1 = 2337.5 ap
= Pet with Base+639 ap

Second becomes SV = 2000*1.04 = 2080ap = Pet with Base+457 AP.

So at unspecced (same ilvl) 2000 AP, real difference in SV vs MM hunter Pet ap = 182 AP. When this is added to Growl scaling numbers, happy pet factor etc... difference in single growl is more than 300 Threat.

For Survival hunter to be equal to MM in pet aggro generated. SV hunter must in current scaling have be 2 tiers ahead from MM hunter in gear.
T4 MM pet = T6 Survival pet aggro.

Thats broken even before the fact that T6 Survival hunter generates 2x aggro of T4 Marksman hunter due bigger hits, far greater crit ratio and many critical hit multipliers.

Anonymous said...

I really appreciate how deep you're looking into the hunter class and there are a lot of things broken. What you experience now, is what caused the frustration amongst us. We somehow managed to overcome most nerfs by unconventional playstyle and the love for our class.

The most curious part in all those nerfs the hunterclass had to go through, is the fact, that they weren't even considered as nerfs from the developpers but bugfixes. Not realizing, that our unconventional playstyle was needed to keep up somehow. This somehow created and fed the rumour, that none of the developpers is actually playing a hunter and knows how the class works.

Hopefully your knowledge will be well recieved and enlightens the developpers. We don't need buffs and bandaids, we need serious fixes. I happily trade the overpowerness in BGs against some real class fixes (raiding, pet, arena, etc.)