As the release of Patch 3.3 approaches, the class changes seem to all be in place and finalized. Let’s take a look at our upcoming tanking related changes before the patch hits.

Avoidance: This talent has been replaced by Culling the Herd. Hunter pets now innately take 90% less damage from area-of-effect abilities like all other class pets. This does not apply to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Straight buff as far as we’re concerned. Our AoE damage reduction goes from 75% to a whopping 90%, and it doesn’t cost us those three precious talent points.

Culling the Herd: This pet talent has replaced the Avoidance talent in the pet trees (Hunter pets now gain that benefit automatically without expenditure of talent points). Culling the Herd increases pet and hunter damage by 1/2/3% for 10 seconds each time the pet deals a critical strike with Claw, Bite, or Smack.

A mediocre replacement for the old Avoidance as far as tanking goes. It makes for a nice DPS boost, but we should be more concerned with survivability or TPS, which other talents will do better. Just take those three new points that this talent would take, say thank you and smile, then spend them elsewhere.

Cower: Redesigned. This ability no longer affects threat, and instead reduces damage taken by the pet by 40% for 6 seconds with a 45-second cooldown. While cowering, the pet’s movement speed is 50% of normal speed. Cower now only has a single rank and is available at pet level 20

Hot diggity, a brand new and free tanking cooldown! With 3/3 in Longevity, this talents down to a 32 second cooldown, so it can be liberally used throughout an encounter and still be saved for specific moments when you know there’ll be a big incoming hit. This addition gives all tenacity pets almost the same durability that turtles have had, and if you time this together with Shell Shield on a turtle it’ll almost completely negate any incoming damage for 6 seconds.

Improved Cower: Redesigned. This ability now reduces the movement penalty of Cower by 50%/100%.

Sadly we won’t be seeing this ability as it’s not part of the Tenacity tree. Sorry folks.

Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.

Moar threat is moar better. This change is almost unarguably the most important in this patch, as it will significantly improve the amount of threat that both we and the other hunters in our groups can give to our pets. If you had 3 other hunters in your raid group using MD every cooldown, that could easily add an extra 3k TPS to your pet. While its still not as good as if Tricks of the Trade could target pets, this will still cause a paradigm shift in terms of what we’ll be capable of tanking.

Pet Resilience: All player pets now get 100% of their master’s resilience.

Less required resilience stacking to be uncrittable never hurt anyone. Stamina junkies like myself won’t see any change since we’ll be well over the cap from Gladiator gear already, our PvE wearing Threat-lovers will get some extra flexibility in their gearing.

Call Stabled Pet: Cooldown reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes.

As long as you had dual specs, the cooldown on this ability was effectively 20 seconds anyway, but if you don’t feel like throwing down a thousand gold pieces you’ll now be able to throw out your pocket tank pretty much whenever you feel the desire.

Taunt Diminishing Returns: We’ve revised the system for diminishing returns on Taunt so that creatures do not become immune to Taunt until after 5 Taunts have landed. The duration of the Taunt effect will be reduced by 35% instead of 50% for each taunt landed. In addition, most creatures in the world will not be affected by Taunt diminishing returns at all. Creatures will only have Taunt diminishing returns if they have been specifically flagged for that behavior based on the design of a given encounter.

This change suprised me when I was going over the patch notes for this article, as this announcement has gone under our radar. Now while the diminishing returns part won’t effect us much, its still a nice little bonus on those mobs that we can Taunt.

If we’re lucky though, and I mean very lucky, them maybe while they played around with taunt mechanics they fixed out taunt either intentionally or just as accidentally as they broke it when instituting this change in the first place.

All in all, 3.3 looks to be a great place for us pet tankers. Its a patch filled with new abilities, new opportunities, and new goals.

Yesterday one of our own completed a very significant feat. Dnysopheus of Nagrand, known to us here at BRR as Doug, became the first entirely pet tanked Northrend Dungeon Hero. With the wide variety of trash and boss encounters that you face in the heroics, its a strong signal that while pets have their disadvantages as tanks, there’s nary a situation where a skilled player and a steadfast group can’t pull through.

Take a bow friend.

Effective Health is a calculation that tanks have been using for years to help them make their gearing decisions.  Simply put, it’s a mathematical calculation of  HP and armor that calculates how much raw damage the tank can take before dying.  Where HP is your pet’s maximum HP and Ar% is his armor mitigation percentage, the formula for effective health is:

For example, if your pet has 75% armor and 50,000 HP, he can take 200,000 raw damage before dying.

Effective health is generally a good representation of how easy it feels to heal a tank; the higher a tank’s effective health, the more unavoided hits in a row they can endure between heals.  Since we’re not able to increase our pet’s avoidance with gear, effective health is the main way we’re able to improve out pets.

How to use EH:
What knowing how EH works lets us do is compare the benefits off additional armor vs. additional stamina.  Lets look at the case that came up in the comments recently.

Lets assume a pet with 50,000 health and 60% armor with one empty trinket slot.  That’s an EH of 125,000.  Adding the Glyph of Indomitability with full armor talents and raid buffs brings the armor up to 61.03% for an EH of 128,304 or an increase of 3,304.  If you instead added the Bitter Balebrew Charm the HP goes up to 51,733 for an EH of 129,333 or an increase of 4,333.

In this case, the Balebrew Charm comes ahead on EH, but depending on your stats, build, and buffs which trinket would comes out ahead can change.  Knowing how to calculate your pet’s EH will also help you make decisions on which pet talents to take if you need to choose between HP and armor.

When not gear for effective health:
Traditional tanks have one major reason to not rely solely on effective health that we don’t have to worry about, which is they have the options of choosing between EH and avoidance when picking their gear. We really only have two reasons.

1.  A large percentage of the damage in is magic damage.

The more of the damage you take is magic based, the less your effective your Armor is and the lower you’re your effective health.

2.  The damage in is steady, but too high for the healer.

The main purpose of a high effective health is to smooth out incoming damage.  If the incoming damage is smooth, say from DoTs or multiple light hitting mobs, it may be worth dropping EH for armor to reduce the total amount of damage.  A prime example would be in soloing when your healing output is capped at what you can do with Mend Pet, Silverback and possibly 2-piece T5.

Overall, effective health is a great tool to help make your pet both as durable as possible and as easy to heal as possible.  As always though, there are always exceptions to the rule, so its important that it be just one of the factors you take into consideration.

The good folks at MMO champion have dug up the newest drool-worthy pet tanking item in the latest version of the PTR for patch 3.3

This little baby screams pet tank for three fantastic reasons.

1.  Best in slot for stamina.  Duh.

2.  It can be bought for Emblems of Frost, the new emblem for patch 3.3.

3.  If it does drop, no traditional tank worth their salt (except maybe bear druids) will want it.  And if they don’t want it we will happily move in to snatch it up.

For traditional tank the procs or on use abilities of a trinket are every bit as important as the passive stats it provides.   Absorbing 3200 damage on use is pretty terrible for a normal raid tank, just take the on use ability of Juggernaut’s Vitality for example.

Juggernaut’s adds nearly 2k more HP to the tank’s health pool than the Key absorbs, so its already better just in terms of the amount of HP that the ability saves or adds.  Then add to that the fact that that extra HP stays for the next 15 seconds to give healers that extra wiggle room, and Juggernaut’s is head and shoulders better than the Key.  Unlike normal tanks though, we don’t care about any of that.  Most tanking trinkets’ procs and on use abilities don’t provide any benefit for our pet, so moar stamina = moar better.

Now before we get too excited, the on use numbers are probably just place holders until they do some in house testing (it doesn’t even have a cooldown listed afterall), but it looks great so far.

One of the biggest challenges for a hunter tank is keeping aggro.  Compared to the abilities of traditional tanks a hunter pet’s threat generating abilities just don’t match up, and this greatly reduced threat output can be a major challenge for new hunter tanks and their groups.  Fortunately there are things that we and our groups can do to prevent our favorite squishies from meeting an untimely demise.

The first step to ensuring our healers don’t pull threat is to understand how they generate threat.  At a basic level a healer will generate threat on each mob in combat equal to half of the total healing they do to all friendly targets in combat.  That means that whatever we can do to reduce the amount of healing they have to do, the less threat they’ll generate and the greater the chance that they’ll still be standing at the end of combat.

The easiest way to reduce your healer’s required healing output is to reduce the unnecessary damage your group takes.  Simply making sure people aren’t standing in the fire can greatly reduce your healer’s threat.  On fights with a great deal of AoE make sure that you’re using any available resistance buffs through paladin auras, shaman totems, our very own hunter aspect, and Mark of the Wild.  On fights with frost based AoE your group can throw on some frost resist gear (the DPS will likely be holding back a bit anyway, so they won’t really miss the stats much).  Finally even though your healers might complain at first, putting Dampen Magic on the raid will reduce the damage they take and thereby decrease healer threat, just make sure they don’t put it on your poor pet.

Don’t group with this guy.

The other major way of reducing the necessary healing is to reduce damage in on your pet.  Beyond armor and avoidance talents, there are several class buffs and debuffs that will reduce the damage your pet takes.  Stoneskin Totems, Mark of the Wild, and Devotion Aura improve your pets armor, decreasing damage taken.  The attack speed lowering debuffs other tanking classes bring, attack power reducing abilities of several classes, and the his chance reduction from Insect Swarm of Scorpid Sting combined together hugely reduce the damage your pet will take in melee.

Finally, the most effective way to reduce your healer’s threat…

Remember this?

Crowd control is your friend.  There hasn’t been a lot of CC since WotLK launched, so much so that people forget that it can be a valuable part of a group’s toolbox.  If you can cut the number of mobs hitting your tank in half, you reduce the damage in half and your healers threat in half.  Be careful though, in some circumstances when you break crowd control your healer could have a large pool of threat built up on CCed mobs, so be ready to taunt if needed.

So here I sit, staring at a strange new interface littered with buttons and toggles that I’ve never seen and mostly don’t understand.  Only once before have I ever written for an audience (a satirical article on professional eating competitions) and I’ve never written on, maintained, ect. any sort of web site.  So here now I run into a nexus where two difference types of incompetence and potential public embarrassment intersect.

As such, it’ll probably take a couple posts for me to get into stride both in terms of using the wordpress interface and in finding my own writing style, so I’d appreciate any ideally constructive feedback people have to offer in the upcoming weeks, hopefully without me destroying anything in the meantime.  Hopefully my first true post will be ready in a day or two.

Durante!

Durante has expressed the desire to write some articles for the site in my absence, we are working out the details of getting him added as a contributing author. In the future sometime I may decide to start writing again, or just pop my head in from time to time, but for now it will just be durante. So be sure to give him a warm welcome when he makes his first post

Let the Hunt begin!

A little over one year ago I started writing this blog. It developed naturally out of my involvement on the ptr and my love for pets, and of course a long time dream to use my pet as a tank. Over this time we have seen buff after buff to pet tanking, and only a few nerfs. Of course, the taunt nerf hurt alot though.

I have not been writing as much lately due a major change in my work schedule, mixed with normal business of life. And now, quite un-relate-ed-ly, (word-check?) my life is changing drastically. Alot has changed for me, and I intend to change even more of my life. One change is to put wow on the backburner permanently. I will still play, but in depth theorycrafting and writing are right out.

I have enjoyed my interactions with all of you, and I have enjoyed watching your interactions with each other. I am not going to kill the site or especially the forums, as I know they are useful to those who use it. If any of you who are more involved with the site are interested in writing articles for the site in my absence, shoot me an email. (But be patient, I’m not big on checking it lately)

LET THE HUNT BEGIN!!!

-Picture Unrelated- Well, I havent written but once this entire month. I have been going through what is easily the most difficult time I have ever gone through. Good news is i am still intact, both physically and mentally.

One thing I did want to mention is that if you haven’t gotten a chance to tank a brewfest run yet, get on it! It’s not very challenging, my turtle wasn’t taking much damage, especially with shell shield up. I threw on some pvp gear and an ap flask and tried to maximize threat. Overall it went very well, only losing aggro once or twice, with a quick taunt to fix that. Of course, it was with all guildies so yeah, they knew the drill.

It was fun, and maybe it did some good on the ‘political capital’ front, but mostly it was just fun. The great part is that there is no pressure because its not seen as a serious encounter, and its just a tank and spank with an extra mob thrown in half way through. The encounter is short enough that if you just ask people to wait 3 seconds, they shouldn’t be able to catch you. Also, there is no gear requirements, so half your group won’t be able to catch you ever.

Anyways, anyone else take a crack at tanking this guy?

Well, Durante has done it again, and frankly I am impressed and inspired. He has done a full write up in the forums and you can watch the video below and see the awesome in action!

Durante has been eyeing this fight pretty much ever since we first got the details on the ulduar bosses. He had some trouble getting his guild to give this a shot, as we all do. I was especially impressed with his gear layout. Full pvp gear and frost resist set mix with stam trinkets, all gemmed out with epic stam gems, save the meta and meta-requirements. Thats alot of cash and time put into the preparation for this fight. The cool thing is that hopefully he can use the gear on some other fights.

I haven’t heard yet the reaction from his guild, but my hope is that the success of the encounter will open their minds, and the notoriety that the feat will bring for the guild will be appreciated. I can assure you this is the first time hodir has ever been tanked by a pet!

Let’s hear it for the dynamic duo!