Well, it has been just over a month since my last post, and not without reason. Personally and professionally I have been absolutely swamped. A beloved co-worker has passed away, which has been extremely difficult for me, but I have taken alot of encouragement from my interactions with his family, who have been extremely friendly and shown alot of inner strength.

Needless to say this has left me with little time or energy for writing, experimenting, and just playing warcraft in general. What time I have had to play has usually been used as a destresser, not as a hard core/experiment/push the envelope session. When I write I like to put time and research into it, and even then I make way too many mistakes (and you all spot them for me ), so I can only imagine how bad it would be if i rushed something.

I have been ducking in, reading the forums, checking out the news from other sites. I am interested to see how pet scaling will play out, especially with resilience (are we sure if this will work in pve yet?). I am amused at the reports of the worgen pet, and although I don’t have any interest in having one, I am tempted to go for the ‘difficult tame’ just for the sport of it.

On that note I have actually decided to tame a bird of prey for my fifth and final pet slot, which has been ‘vacant’ for some time. I had tried to level a crab for pvp, but I just couldn’t get into the crab. I have always been jealous of the passion that mania has for her crabs, but im just not feeling it. So ive decided to go with a flying pet, and I love the owls. Between my Wolf, Bear, Turtle, and Rhino, ive got alot of four-footers, and I was definitely feeling the lack of diversity.

Lately Ive been treading on the lighter side of wow, getting acheivements, reputation, non-combat pets, etc. My guild is breaking into ulduar slowly but surely, and I have been able to make about half of the sessions. On the pvp side I have been trying to up my game, which aint great as long time readers will know. Im in Best In Slot pvp epics for gear that doesn’t require arena ratings, and I have yet to get a solid team together, but I have a couple leads. I got the honor of running about 30 games with one of the better pvpers on my server, and I learned alot from the experience. It was consequently alot of fun, as we went 25 and 8, if my memory serves me right.

All in all, Im chugging along, trying to make it through the rough patches, and still enjoy life in the process. I hope all of you are doing well in these difficult times.

Let the Hunt begin!

Ihlos

Well, if all the crazy changes to hunters and the game in general haven’t proved to you that blizzard is evolving, this will certainly be the last straw. I first noticed the new philosophy when they changed the deadzone. Since then we have had a series of changes you-thought-would-never-happen-and-blizzard-said-they-would-never-do. Another such change was the additions of more stable slots. In general, this trend has been favorable to pet tanking, and from this post by ghostcrawler, we can expect further benefit to pet tanking:

We think it’s probably time to let pets scale, to some extent, with resilience and spell pen.

The way pets scale from the master’s stats was implemented (on our side) in a slightly clunky way which made it difficult to add additional stats. In BC, it took some effort to kill a pet so it wasn’t a burning problem for us. In LK, we have bumped up pet health a few times, but we are thinking now that the balance will never work right without some crit mitigation. Pets will never scale right with gear as long as the master improves in ways that don’t benefit the pet.

We have a new way to let pets scale, and assuming it works, we should be able to give the pets scale with all relevant stats from the master, from hit to haste to crit. Some things will need to scale at 100%, since it’s silly to have your pet inherit part of your +hit.

No promises until you actually see it live, but that’s what we are thinking at the moment.  

It was not long ago that ghostcrawler was pretty firm about pets not getting resilience. And now it looks like the pet will get some resilience, and other stats too. From what is said here, we can expect to see all relevant stats transfer to the pet. Unfortunately that means we probably won’t see anything like defense scaling to the pet, but we may see dodge and crit, which could drastically change the priorities we have for tanking gear.

Primarily, though, we can probably expect to get our pets to crit immunity through scaling resilience. This will mean that pvp gear will now hit big on our radar for pet tanking gear. Also, we may see some boost to pet threat with things like haste scaling, armor pen, and crit. All we need now is to get our taunt back =)

So, what stats do you guys think should get scaled to the pet, and which stats would you like to scale but can only hope for?

After an initial burst of interest in pet tanking from my guild, the novelty of using my pet to tank has worn off a bit. An abundance of player tanks has rendered further opportunities to tank few and far between. So I was pleasantly surprised to be asked to off tank on four horsemen last night (10 Man).

I offered to tank both with a healer but they preferred to have me as my own unit. I wasn’t sure how that would work out, but I was willing to give it a shot. So I busted out my BM build and my turtle and was ready to go. I didn’t swap out alot of my usual gear for threat gear, as the threat mechanics are spatial, but I also didn’t swap out for heavy stam gear. I didn’t think I would need it, and I was right. Of course, had I needed it, the extra stam, in conjuction with shell shield, would have been great. I talented my turtle for zero threat extra survivability. Here is the build I went with. In the moment I was debating about taking last stand or not, and whether or not there was aoe dps. Either way would have worked for sure.

The only time I took any heavy damage was when the other tank didn’t switch right away, and I took the pain for it. A quick heal from one of the front healers and I was back in business. Shell Sheild was definitely necessary, I kept it up as often as possible. During its use my pet would often get back up to full for a few ticks, so extra stamina would be worth its weight in gold if you were struggling to stay alive.

Making the switch with the other player was not much of an issue, with me standing near the middle I sent my pet to the other boss. If the other player wasnt at the middle as my pet approached me i put the pet on follow to give them some time, and then sent the turtle on its way as the player crossed the midpoint. If the other class is a healer ask them to throw a hot or something on you and your pet as you pass them.

Lady B’s void zones can be ignored by the pet as stated in previous feat articles, but watch out for them with your hunter.

Other than that you are free to dps, something that a self healing player doesn’t have the (full) freedom to do. Wewt.

Recently we heard that Blizzard had upped the dps on higher ilvl bows and guns, and that they had one other smallish buff in mind for hunters, in an attempt to bring hunter dps up to snuff. I had my fingers crossed in hopes that the buff would also buff pet tanking, and to my pleasant surprise it did!

Hunter’s Mark: The ranged attack power bonus from this ability has been increased from 300 to 500.

So what do we get from this?

First, what do we have? 200 extra AP, but if you are like me you have Improved Hunters Mark, and the Glyph of Hunters Mark, for 30% and 20% increases to hunter’s mark, respectively. I’m fairly sure that these stack additively, so we would get 300 AP from this buff. If you don’t have these bonuses to Hunter’s Mark, perhaps this will convince you to pick them up.

So, from 300 AP, we get 26% direct scaling (with talents) to the pet’s AP, or 78 AP.
We also get an extra 450 threat per growl, or 128 extra TPS for the pet.

Considering the fact that our pet’s are in need of more threat, and this is not a global player dps increase, I’d say this is a very welcome buff. Your thoughts?

UPDATE: Intial testing suggests that the AP does not scale to growl. Sad Panda.

Between getting into pvp, and my desire to pick up the dun morogh cub (pictured left) from the argent dailies, I have been thinking about the tagline for the blog, “All things Tenacity Pets”. So far, this site has been about the talents, soloing, tanking and that sort of stuff, and hasn’t really dealt with other stuff out there. I have already expressed my desire to start including more pvp stuff, but more than that I want to branch out and really start covering all things tenacity pets. This is not to say that I don’t also want to cover tanking issues, no, I still do and I still intend for this to be the main thrust of the site. I just want to cover more stuff about tenacity pets on top of that. Why? Because i’m a big fan of tenacity pets. I think they are great!

Soooo… to kick off this new trend with a bang we will address what might possibly be the farthest thing from serious raid-level pet tanking… vanity pets. And because we want the best source for vanity pet info, we are going to turn to Breanni’s WarcraftPets.com

Let’s do this!

Bears
Ok bears are easy. Iconic warcraft fare, we have a few great choices, some of them quite new. Here’s a link to all bears.

Baby Blizzard Bear, Poley This little guy comes from blizzard’s fourth anniversary or the coke promo, so you can’t get one now, but if you have one, it matches the white bears nicely.
Panda Cub This guy doesnt match any of the tenacity models but is a tenacity pet at heart! This was obtained through a collectors edition of wow so you may still be able to grab one.
Dun Morogh Cub This may be the only one obtainable, and certainly through in game methods. Its a great match for the black bear and is next up on my list to get.

 Boars
Ok, so there isn’t too much in the way of boars, the closest we get are pigs, but they aren’t really in the spirit of tenacity. They look more like piggy banks.

Crabs
Well really only one crab (unless you count Mr. Pinchy) but a great one! Also the Jewelcrafting figurines are like mini pets but they aren’t permanent companions like the rest in this listing.

Strand Crawler This guy is the first so far that is actually just a smaller version of a pet model. A must for crab lovers! You can get this from the Dalaran fishing dailies.

Crocs
Fans of the crocs have a few different skins to choose from, and can obtain these guys from the outland fishing daily “Crocolisks in the City”. From left to right: Chuck, Muckbreath, Snarly, and Toothy

Gorillas

Bananas Sadly the only way to get this is the tcg, which can be expensive. On the flipside, he pounds his chest and scratches his belly just like his older sibling.

Rhinos
I have to admit im kind of wondering why a mini rhino hasn’t made its way into the game yet. I am confident these guys will eventually make it into the game, at which point BRR will have a new mascot!

Scorpids

Durotar Scorpion Obtainable through the Argent Tournament, this is another model that is a direct match to the pet model.

Turtles

Speedy This lil guy is a cartoony version of a turtle, but he has a rare roar so watch out. You get this guy from the children’s week quest chain.

Warp Stalkers, Worms
Unfortunately, there are no Warp Stalkers or Worms that I am aware of. I thought I had seen something about these, but nothing is in the game as of now. Both would make great mini pets though so I wouldnt be surprised to see these down the road.

And thats it. A big thanks to Breanni over at warcraft pets, and if youre reading this, perhaps a filter based on matches to hunter pets would be a cool feature for your site. With the other three families there are quite a few that would match.

Hey everybody, I hope your week is going well. Yesterday was of course the patch, and as far as I can tell there are no changes that effect pet tanking, documented or otherwise.

There is, of course, a new equipment manager, and if you haven’t used one of these before, I suggest you check it out. The great part is that you can save several different configurations, so you can make several tanking sets with different blends and swap them out quickly. For example you could make a threat set, a survival set and a mixed set.

The other use for the equipment manager can be to compare several peices of gear on your character at the same time, swapping between the two. Use this function to compare the benefits of different peices quicly. This also has implications for any kind of testing related to gear, and will save at least a few of us some time while testing out stats.

On another note ive been experimenting in pvp a bit lately, building up a set of gear and considering getting a new pet for pvp, maybe a crab…but definitely tenacity

Depending on how it goes you may or may not start to see more pvp stuff on the site. I have been toying with the idea of mouseover macros for pvp, and once I get one to my liking I’ll throw it up on the macros page. I can see some use for these in pet tanking as well, so if any of you use these macros already, let’s hear about it!

Also I’ve decided to start working towards a Dun Morogh Cub, which is like a mini tenacity pet

So yeah, I know its just a bunch of ramblings, but that’s the kind of mood im in. I haven’t been able to make raids lately, and thus opportunities to pet tank have been sparse. I’m considering pulling a guild healer in for a Heroic and recruiting 3 random dps just for the heck of it. I’ve also been toying with the idea of soloing or small group-ing some of the bc raid content. I don’t know, we’ll see.

Oh, and GC posted a hunter buff, not directly to pet tanking but another hunter buff of an undisclosed nature is coming in the next few weeks, so let’s hope for something favorable for pet tanking.
Heres the post link.

Recently Ghostcrawler has been having a substantial and ongoing discussion concerning hunters, and several statements caught my eye concerning tenacity pets. The thread is quite long and full of a ton of other topics, and can be found here, and for your convenience I’ll sum them up here. Let’s start with the most interesting quote

I wish Blizz did remove the ability to “buff” pets by raid buffs and simply let them scale with all the Hunters stats..

Crit rating, Armor Penetration, Agility, Attack Power, Haste

That way it would open up ALOT more gear possibilities..

Yes, we agree with all of that (more or less). The barrier in this case is technical — it’s just not set up to work that way, so it’s not a quick change. But we would like to eventually get that fixed.

Obviously more scaling is great, although it would probably come at the cost of a dps nerf. Agility would be great as we could then have the opportunity to obtain extra dodge if we wanted to. The nerfs would come in the form of losing the abilty to recieve straight buffs, most likely…

I think part of this problem goes back to pet scaling and how well they benefit from buffs. That may have accounted somewhat for the initial success of hunter dps.

Pets scaling from buffs is a problem. If we had the tech, we would let pets benefit from buffs but prevent the pet from getting extra scaling from the same buffs on the hunter. That would solve some of the problem.

Well, you have to assume that Blizzard nerfed ferocity pet damage precisely because they thought pets were doing too much damage (presumably across the board)… so asking for pet DPS to be boosted again is probably going to be met with deafening silence

We don’t think it’s a strong design to have too much of your dps tied up in the pet, because then you are really crippled when it dies and we aren’t going to provide you with 100% certainty that that isn’t going to happen.

And also this was mentioned about Roar of Sacrifice, which means that we aren’t likely to see RoS returned to its former usefulness.

We can understand how Roar of Sacrifice was cool because it gave you some utility you could share with the rest of your team. Maybe there is some way to bring back that functionality, possibly in a different ability.

All in all, we can only hope that the implementation of this design is favorable to pet tanking, as they probably won’t be considering pet tanking in their balancing of pet dps and scaling. Let’s hope that it opens up stats and gear to us in a whole new way.

Today it occurred to me that I haven’t put together a list of useful consumables for pet tanking and soloing. Although most of the potions are obvious, some might not be, and its always handy to have a list in one place for comparison. Feel free to mention any other potions you find useful!

Elixirs and Flasks
Elixirs can be Battle Elixirs and Guardian Elixirs, and you can only have one of each type at a time. Flasks count as both a Battle and a Guardian Elixir, and persist through death. Ive also included less expensive versions in parentheses if you are strapped for cash.

Elixirs
Elixir of Accuracy, 45 Hit Rating, Battle
Wrath Elixir, 90 AP, Battle ( 60 AP )
Guru’s Elixir, 20 to all stats, Battle
Elixir of Protection, 800 Armor, Guardian
Elixir of Mighty Thoughts, 45 Int, Guardian ( 30 )

and situationally: Elixir of Demonslaying, 265 AP vs Demons, Battle *Jury is still out on whether this applies to the pet*

Flasks
Flask of Endless Rage, 180 AP, Battle and Guardian ( 120 )
Lesser Flask of Resistance, 50 to all Resist, Battle and Guardian

Observations:
-With only one notable guardian elxir, you are basically weighing 180 AP vs 800 armor and one of the other Battle Elixirs (and the fact that they don’t persist through death).
-If you are likely to die often, an AP flask is probably your best bet, but you limit yourself to only extra threat. Going with the elixirs is more defensive.
-If facing a demon (mostly in old content you crazy soloers) then Demonslaying and Protection are by far your best combo.
-Don’t overlook Guru’s elixir. With talents you get 20 stam, 40 AP (through agi and int), and 36 armor (agi). Its not the best, but it is nice and balanced, and in terms of budget is only a little behind other choices in terms of budget. It is also the only stamina option.

Potions
There were only two potions that really stood out to me.

Indestructible Potion, 3500 Armor for 2 min
Shrouding Potion, Permanently reduces 1500 threat

-Obviously the shrouding potion has limited potential due to feign death, but it still could have its uses.
-The indestructable potion is a great way to get through a tough spot, and if the fight is longer than 2min it can be used right before the fight and then again any time after the first two minutes. Great for reducing the initial healing needed.

Food
For food our choices are pretty straightforward. You aren’t going to get any more than 40 stam out of anything, but you do get a choice between AP and Hit, whichever you need. The great thing is that food is a good balance in stats and nothing is wasted.

80 AP, 40 Stam
Fish Feast
Mega Mammoth Meal
Poached Northern Sculpin

40 Hit, 40 Stam
Worg Tartare
Snapper Extreme

Pet Food
Spiced Mammoth Treats, 30 Str 30 Stam ( 20,20 )

-A fish feast is great if someone has one, but the other options are less time consuming to obtain, and if you need to level a pet, Mega Mammoth Meal requires killing.

Scrolls
In the absence of a matching (and stronger) player buff, you can supplement your pets stats by applying scrolls to your pet and/or yourself.

Agility VIII: Gives AP, Crit, and Dodge on pet, AP scaling on hunter.
Intellect VIII: Gives 1:1 AP scaling on hunter.
Protection VII: Armor on pet, Armor scaling on hunter.
Stamina: Health on pet, Health scaling on hunter.
Strength: AP on pet.

So there you have it, I didn’t spend too much time on this, so if anyone sees anything I missed, speak up!

UPDATE: added in scrolls (if youre missing player buffs), pet food, and elixir of mighty thoughts.

I have been considering trinkets for boosting pet threat, and comparing the various options available at the higher levels of content. There are limited options when it comes to defensive trinkets for pets, and it can be difficult to obtain them since tanks are usually given the first shot. So it naturally made sense to look at threat for at least one of the trinket slots. I make at least a few assumptions when making calculations.

-You have at least the AP threshold for growl (Around 2k), which means any AP from trinkets will have their full effect through growl.
-You have both points in Guard Dog.
-You have 2 Points in Wild Hunt.
-I’m only going to calculate straight dps from scaled AP and growl bonus threat.
-Calculations are rough and meant to show the relative benefit, not hard numbers.
-Proc based trinkets will vary as you are not always dpsing.

So lets compare the following trinkets:
Wrathstone, Pyrite Infuser, Bandit’s Insignia, Fury of the Five Flights, and Mirror of Truth.

Some quick observations
-First off, The Pyrite Infuser is obviously superior to the Mirror of Truth, having hit instead of crit, and granting more attack power, but the Mirror of Truth is easy to obtain, So I included it.
-Secondly, we observe that these trinkets all act differently (with the above exception).
Wrathstone is ‘on use’,
Pyrite Infuser is ‘chance on crit’,
Bandit’s Insignia grants passive AP,
Five Flights is ‘on hit’,
and the Mirror is also ‘chance on crit’.
This presents a dilemma. While pet tanking we have to be moving, using pet skills, using hunter skills like mend pet, intimidation, and misdirection. Therefore, the ‘on hit’ and ‘on crit’ trinkets are going to be less effective than they would be in the hands of DPS, and it is hard to quantify how much less.
-Thirdly, ‘on use’ and ‘passive’ items have the benefit of being used for initial threat, they start working right away.

So lets break each one of these trinkets down to learn how much benefit to threat we should get.

Bandit’s Insignia
As far as straight AP goes, 190 is currently the highest amount you can get on a trinket. Shandara’s spreadsheet calculates the DPS of the trinket at 44.42 DPS. For threat we can calculate an extra 285 (190 * 1.5). With 3.5 second growls this comes out to 81 TPS. Your pet will also get an additional 49 AP (26% of 190) which translates to an additional 3.52 dps. So the total additional TPS you can expect is 84.52 TPS.

Pyrite Infuser
This trinket also gives +hit, which if you need more to get to the cap, has value. If you don’t need hit it becomes a total waste, so I’ll leave hit and crit off my calcuations. The Pyrite infuser procs on crit, and Shandara’s sheet calculates the uptime for these trinkets. (using durante’s stats cuz thats what I have loaded and he is a stud)

We can calculate this using average and uptime, or on a per proc threat basis.
-Using uptime, the average ap gain is 155.6, yeilding 68.46 TPS.
-If we calculate it on a per proc basis, its harder. We know that in the 10 second window we will get at least 2 growls, maybe three. If you look at the timing, 83% of the time we get 3, and 17% of the time we get 2. We get an addtional 1,851 threat from each growl, so on average we get an additonal 5,238 threat each proc. According to the sheet you will get a proc every 80 seconds or so (with durante’s setup). Add in the smaller amount from ap scaling (231 extra threat) and it comes out to about 68.36 TPS.

Fury of the Five Flights, Mirror of Truth
Since both methods yield basically the same result we can use the short method for the next few.
Fury’s average additional AP is 307, yeilding 135 TPS, and will be a smoother threat generation.
The Mirror of Truth gives 126 average AP, yeilding 55.44 TPS.

Wrathstone
This one is different. We control when the proc happens, so we can easily calculate the threat over time.
We get 856 AP for 20 seconds every 2 minutes. Thats an average AP of 142, yeilding 62.77 TPS

For each use of this trinket you can expect anywhere from ~6,712 to ~7,991 extra threat over the 20 seconds.

Conclusions
-The Fury of the Five Flights gives the smoothest and the largest threat generation of all by a very considerable amount. It will also come closer to its potential when we are not focused on dps. Crit based trinkets are more likely to suffer when we are focused elsewhere. It is not surprising that this trinket provides the highest since it only yields AP.
-The Bandit’s straight AP yeilds more threat and smoother threat than its bigger brothers, Wrathstone and Pyrite Infuser, which have higher I levels. However those trinkets also have crit/hit which may swing the balance.
-The Wrathstone has the unique ability to generate an large amount of initial threat, which may just put it ahead of the pack.
-The Mirror of Truth is the worst, but is the easiest to obtain.
-Considering which two trinkets to get, im wavering between Wrathstone/Fury and Wrathstone/Pyrite. It would depend on how much hit my tanking set had. Obviously if i could get the hit elsewhere, I would want Wrathstone/Fury, for great initial threat and smooth, high sustained threat.

Again, the calculations here are rough, and you may not always see these levels of threat due to the proc-based nature of the trinkets. Hopefully though, this will help you to evaluate which ones are best for you. When I started this little investigation, I was surprised by both the bandit and the Fury trinkets, I did not expect them to stack up so well against the other trinkets.

EDIT:
I had originally not included Darmoon Card: Greatness because I was mistaken as to the proc chance, which is actually 35%. This gives a static 90 AP and an average AP from the proc of 95.65, yielding an average of 81.86 TPS. Its still not as good as some of the others, but worth considering, especially for fans of the faire.

Now that we have a section on the forums for people to post their own feats, I’m going to scale back posting on the pet feats. As of now I intend to post anything with raid content posted on the forums, anything else that catches my eye from the forums, but also anything you guys want to send me. If you want it up here, send it to me. This one is sent to me from Kurasu, and has been up on the forum for a bit, so you may already know about it, but it took me a few days to sort out how I was going to go forward with posting pet feats. Congrats to Kurasu on this acheivement!

Where: Obsidian Sanctum Heroic
Who: Kurasu of Emerald Dreams (EU) (80)
Pet: Panzer (80 Turtle)
Group: Full raid group

Description: What had originally supposed to be a 25-man attempt on Malygos and Sarth 2d/3d unfortunately ended up as a rather anemic 21-man. A 21-man where one of the two tanks was rather unwell already. Our first pull was a bit of a tragedy, with mobs running every which way, many people getting struck down and killed, and some very unhappy yelps in every direction. Feeling tired and grouchy myself (and I’m willing to admit it), I pulled on my tanking suit, summoned my turtle, and declared something about going tank for this bunch.

“No, really. We’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

About that time, the pair of Onyx Sanctum Guardians got too close and aggroed on our party. One tank ran for the mobs. I sent my turtle to the other, immediately pulling aggro with a ‘Taunt’. One of the healers (I don’t know who, but damn; thank you!) started throwing heals on Panzer, and we were able to gun down the PC-tanked mob, turning to the Panzer-tanked one. The turtle didn’t lose aggro, and the mob was downed.

Raid Leader: “…. carry on.”

And so I did, proceeding to join in offtanking most of the trash, and main tank both Vesperon and Shadron (Tenebron was left up for a Sarth 1D) and doing so quite handily. With Growl, Thunderstomp, and a couple MDs just to make sure (though to be honest, I don’t think they would have been needed), Panzer was able to carry it through without more than a couple close calls. This included a very uncomfortable moment when Shadron was pulled as we were fighting trash, and Panzer was forced to hold him while we finished off the trash and *then* went portal-diving. Fortunately, we had on-the-ball healers and he had Shell Shield.

For the record, I offered to offtank Sarth or Tenebron, but at that point, folks weren’t quite willing to experiment as much, and so I got to (read: had to) go back to DPS for the fight. Still, the words ‘Carry on’ was probably the biggest success I’ve ever felt with the whole ‘pet tanking’ thing.

No photos, unfortunately; still, with how successful this was, I have high hopes of being allowed to MT the drakes again at some point.