Exotic Pet damage and PTR

Q u o t e:
Now I remember reading somewhere, I believe it was a blue post, that mentioned that there would be a DPS increase of the exotic pets by something around 10%. I also remember reading that they were going to nerf rake and scorpid poison. Have these changes already taken effect? and if they have are there any further plans to buff exotic pet damage or nerf regular pet damage?

The PTR did not have the nerfs to Rake and Scorpid poison. We reduced their AP coefficients. They should still be fine pets, just not head and shoulders above the others. We also fixed a bug where Spirit Strike was not playing well with Longevity (and this bug fix was also likely not on the PTR).

I can't recall off the top of my head the history of the exotic pet damage (i.e. when we made changes relative to data pushes). We increased it a couple of times, though I suspect what you are seeing on the PTR for them is what you will see in 3.0.8.

I have said most of this before, but perhaps some of you are just joining us. :)

1) Exotic pets should be a choice. We do not want every BM (or every hunter for that matter) feeling like they have to get an exotic pet to be competitive. We spent a lot of effort to get say gorillas, crabs and spiders up to snuff so we didn't want hunters to actually enter LK with fewer pet choices. Even a 51 BM hunter should feel like a crab (especially a crab) should be a useful pet.

2) Exotic pets should be a choice, part ii. They should not be demonstrably below say cats and scorpids. That seems to be the case on live at the moment, so we adjusted it. Because of the somewhat convoluted way that pets scale, it's not always easy to predict what the average pet will look like on live -- it varies enormously depending on gear and buffs (more on this below).

3) Our target is that the exotic pets are slightly better than normal pets. The key word is "slightly." If you forego an exotic pet for whatever reason, you should not feel like you are gimping your team or group. Note that part of the value of the exotics is their unusual abilities, some of which can fill in missing debuff holes if you are lacking certain classes in your group.

4) We offered the Spirit Beast as a challenge for hunters to try and tame. It would be a big mistake if we made this pet the best one in the game. For starters, it would no longer be rare. :(

5) We disagree that the 4 extra pet talent points are useless. You can call them useless if you only care about your pet's dps and can max that out without those talent points. Not all pet talents were intended to buff dps. (More on this below too.) At the end of the day, the BM 51 is just one talent point. It shouldn't grant you a 10% dps increase. We like for the 51 point talents to be attractive but not mandatory.

6) If you think that no hunter cares about the look of their pet, you are just wrong. :) Very optimized players might be willing to tame an untextured cube if it had the highest dps. However, a great many hunters (I would argue probably even the majority) rolled their class because they wanted to tame pets. Being able to tame exotic pets is very exciting for them.

7) The way pets scale is convoluted. Certain stats scale while others don't. Pets double dip from buffs because the pets benefits from the buff directly and indirectly through the hunter. In short, this is something we want to clean up. We just need to figure out how to do it the right way to avoid these problems in the future. This applies to warlocks, DKs, and to a lesser extent every class with a temp pet like druids and shamans.

8) On the topic of hunter pet talent trees, obviously this was a new feature for us. We have a much better idea now of what works and doesn't. For example, I don't know that pets need many more clickable abilities as hunters have so much to manage already. It also threw a rather harsh light on the system that allows you designate abilities to be autocast or not -- that system can just be buggy and frustrating. We have some plans to look at the trees in a future patch (not expansion). We might even add another tier to make sure that 51 BM hunters can improve their pets dps (slightly) with those bonus talent points.

Q u o t e:
Ironic you mentioned untextured cubes when the spirit beasts are untextured cubes to non-wotlk accounts on live. ie. the art is missing from the generic 3.0.3 patch so if you haven't installed wotlk then you just see an untextured cube whenever a hunter is standing around town with their spirit beast out. I submitted a ticket but the response was a generic "I'm new to the job and have no idea wtf you're talking about so I'll blae your interface addons."

That is an awesome bug, and yes this is the first time I have heard of it. We can get that fixed. For the future, submitting bugs on the bug forum here will almost always get bugs in the queue.

Q u o t e:
I find it absolutely hilarious that after 2 separate replies by GC, he STILL won't acknowledge the bug that exists where some tenacity pets aren't receiving the +10% baseline damage buff!

Sorry, I can't offer commentary on every bug in the game. This one is fixed.

Q u o t e:
Like others have noted, this statement is just plain stupid when talking about Hunters. 51 point talents should be the bread and butter of a tree, it should define the tree. If I want to be a Marksmanship Hunter, I need to get Chimera Shot to deal damage. If I want to be a Survival Hunter, I need to get Explosive Shot. If I want to be a Beast Master, I should need to get Beast Mastery.

That is not our design. If the 51-point talent defines the tree then you are closing the door on a hybrid spec of some kind ever being viable. The rest of a talent tree should not be filler to reach the 51 pointer. That is why we budget them exactly the same as the first tier talents. Now there are specs for which the 51 feels more mandatory and those for which it feels less mandatory. We’re okay with that too. Talent trees should be diverse and what works for one class might not work for another.

I don’t think I was clear enough: the PTR build does not reflect the new numbers for cat and scorpid. If I remember, I will post what those new numbers are since there seems to be a lot of concern about it (but I don't have them in front of me).

Here are the cat and scorpid numbers for anyone who wants to theorycraft them. These will be in the next patch (3.0.8) even though they were not on the PTR.

We also did fix several pet families not getting their correct stat adjustment: Wasps, Spirit Beasts, Rhinos and Silithids were affected I believe.
Spirit Strike should work with Longevity now and has an initial damage component that can crit.
Not sure why it wouldn't work with Kill Command, but I'll look into that.

Rank 6 Scorpid Poison - 20 base Nature damage per tick, ticks every 2 sec for 10 sec, 0.04 coefficient, 1 stack max
Rank 6 Rake - 29 base physical damage, plus 21 base damage per tick, ticks every 3 sec for 9 sec, 0.06 coefficient
Rank 6 Spirit Strike - 50 base Arcane damage, plus 50 damage per tick, ticks every 6 sec for 6 sec (it ticks twice), 0.049 coefficient

My comment about many hunters caring about what their pets look like was just that, not that 51 BM was intended to be a cosmetic talent point. If you just hate dinosaurs and core hounds, I'm not sure what more we can do in the short term, but show me other exotics than don't stack up and perhaps we can adjust their numbers. Longer-term we'd like to explore just letting you be able to increase damage with the bonus talent points.

EDIT: These numbers are now out of date. New ones below.

We are iterating on the pet abilities I mentioned earlier and we have new numbers for anyone out there who is still trying to theorycraft this. One of the reasons I don't always provide numbers is because we change them a lot.

Rank 6 Scorpid Poison - 23 base Nature damage per tick, ticks every 2 sec for 10 sec, 0.014 coefficient, 1 stack max, 10 sec cooldown
Rank 6 Rake - 57 base physical damage, plus 21 base damage per tick, ticks every 3 sec for 9 sec, 0.0175 coefficient
Rank 6 Spirit Strike - 57 base Arcane damage plus 57 additional damage after 6 sec. The initial hit can crit. 0.04 coefficient. 10 sec cooldown.

We realize gorillas are great for tanking and leveling and we'd like to get other Tenacity pets up there, but right now we are focuses on the raid dps pets since they seem to be of the most concern to the community.

All pet damage should be based on the hunter's AP. Are folks assuming spellpower for Spirit Strike because it does Arcane damage, or has someone actually shown that it scales with spellpower?

Spellpower -- okay thanks for the clear explanation. As I've said before, we think the way pets scale from both the hunter (or other class) and the player's buffs and then their own buffs is just complicated and leads to weird cases. As long as the Spirit Beast is competitive now (even if his AP buffs don't translate to damage) we're happy. Long term, we need a better solution to the entire system.

Cunning Pets -- were the EJ calculations made assuming we changed all AP coefficients? I saw some discussion about that, but the only ones we changed were the ones I mentioned, plus fixing the bugs that prevented rhinos, spirit beasts, silithids and wasps from getting their appropriate modifiers for being a ferocious, tenacious or cunning pet.

For comparison:

Rank 6 Sting (Wasp): 75 Nature damage, 0.049 coefficient, 6 sec cooldown, plus the existing armor debuff (that does not stack with Faerie Fire). As a Ferocity pet, the wasp now has 10% extra damage and 5% extra health.

Thanks for the quick feedback on all of this. I know we normally don't go into this kind of detail on numbers, and I don't want other classes to interpret anything out of this about themselves or hunters, but we're just tired of having such inequity in hunter pets.

I think you're not seeing the coefficients from mmo champion's numbers or wherever you have seen them.