Tag Archives: Hunter Pets

Hunter News, Hunter Pets

Broken Tooth lives! Hunter pets can have different attack speeds once again

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Before you read any more, let me TLDR this first: There is no appreciable damage difference between pet attack speeds because damage is normalized. For the most part, it simply adds flavor to different pets.

First, a little history. Back in Vanilla WoW, several pets had different attack speeds (you can see the original list here). The most notorious pet was Broken Tooth, a rare cat in the Badlands, because he was one of only two pets with a 1.0 attack speed (2.0 is the standard). This made him a pretty nice pet to have in PVP because of spell pushback. Mages weren’t getting any casts off with Broken Tooth clawing away at them (in today’s game, pets cannot do this anymore).

Eventually, Blizzard normalized all pet attack speeds to 2.0, and it’s stayed like that all the way from The Burning Crusade… until now.

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Hunter News, Opinion

These Battle for Azeroth Hunter pet changes aren’t so popular [Updated]

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I talked about some of these changes in my original alpha post, but now that people have seen the changes in-game, things have become a little more clear.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: You can no longer change pet specializations. Each pet family is locked to one of the 3 specializations. Mechanicals will always be Cunning, Ravagers will always be Ferocity, and — most peculiar of them all — Spirit Beasts will always be Tenacity. Those are just 3 examples, you can see the full list at Wowhead.

For the most part, the assigned specs of each family make sense, but I have no idea why they are doing this now. We’ve been able to change pet specs for over 5 years. Why take away this customization now? Was there something so terrible about a Hunter wanting to use a Ferocity Turtle?

The response to this has not been pretty, but I do think part of the uproar is because people think Ferocity pets will still do more damage than a Tenacity or Cunning pet. This no longer seems to be the case.

Update: Blizzard has made a post clarifying the new system.

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Hunter Pets

How to tame Lightning Paw

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There’s a new spirit beast to tame in patch 7.1.5! Lightning Paw is the first spirit beast fox and he has a unique lightning effect not seen on any other beasts. It’s hard to see this in screenshots, so check out the short video clip embedded below. Somehow, we all missed him on the PTR (too busy bickering over class mechanics I think), but someone discovered him by chance and posted in the Wowhead comments earlier today.

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Hunter Pets

How to tame Friender the Mechano Wolf

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I think it’s safe to say that Friender the mechano wolf is the first legitimate taming challenge discovered in Legion. We have Treble and Rush, which are found via track hunting, but Friender is something completely new. Shout out to Kyfus who was the first Hunter to discover this one.

When Blizzard first announced mechanical pets they specifically mentioned a mechano strider challenge in Gnomeregan. So far, we haven’t seen that one specifically, but it’s possible that Friender is the end result of that original idea. He should be tameable once the 7.0 prepatch goes live before Legion.

To begin, make sure you can actually tame a mechanical pet. Gnomes and Goblins can do so innately, but other races must obtain a Mecha-Bond Imprint Matrix from their local engineer. Unfortunately, engineers won’t be able to craft this until Legion, so only Gnomes and Goblins will be able to do this in the prepatch.

Secondly, the buttons can only be used by level 100+ players.

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Opinion

What’s wrong with the Beast Mastery fantasy in Legion [Updated]

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Alright, I know some of you don’t give a crap about class fantasy. That’s fine, but this post probably doesn’t concern you. This post concerns the Hunters like me who camp rare pets for days on end and agonize over the naming of their pets. I’m not going to be talking about mechanics or numbers here, I’m going to talk about what I think is wrong with Beast Mastery on a more aesthetic level.

I like the gameplay direction Beast Mastery is headed from a fantasy perspective. Summoning pets as a rotational ability? Awesome. Permanent second pet? Double awesome. Here’s the problem: Summoning pets alone is not why I like playing this type of Hunter. I like summoning my own pets, the ones I spent hours, days, weeks, months, or even years acquiring. Not just random beasts from the wild.

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Hunter Pets, Opinion

How Blizzard could bring back Hunter pet loyalty

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Hunter pets back in vanilla were convoluted by today’s standards. You couldnt’ simply tame a pet and use it. You had to worry about several things:

  1. Pets did not level up to your level. If you were level 60 and tamed a level 10 pet, you would have to manually level them up. Very slowly, since they weren’t able to do any tanking for you when they’d get killed in a few hits.
  2. Pets had 6 loyalty levels, which also had to be leveled up. The more loyal they were, the easier it was to keep them happy.
  3. Pet Happiness had to be kept up by feeding your pet regularly, if you didn’t keep your pet happy they would do less damage. If they stayed unhappy for too long, they would permanently abandon you.

In today’s WoW this simply wouldn’t fly, but there was something good buried under all that. Hunters tended to pick a single pet and stick with it (helped that we could only have 2 other pets in the stable at the time). Rak’shiri was my main pet through a good part of vanilla. Your pet was your best buddy because you worked so hard to get them there. Not like today where it’s almost become a collection mini-game.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy collecting pets, but I still think something was lost from the spirit of the class. Pets feel more disposable than ever.

It got me wondering if there was a way to bring back the idea of a hunter bonding with their pet, without all of the baggage that made it not fun.

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Hunter Pets

Pet of the Week: Chromaggus

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There’s a lot of hunter art out there, but the above “Taming Chromaggus” piece is, without a doubt, my favorite. Taming raid bosses is a rite of passage for any hunter. It’s all the more special if it’s a boss you’ve faced in the past when it was relevant content. Next on the list of tameable raid bosses is going to be Chimaeron in patch 6.0. I’m so ready.

Chromaggus is a Core Hound pet found in Blackwing Lair (level 60 raid) and at level 90 there’s really no trick to taming him. He’s the second last boss of the instance. Razorgore is the biggest obstacle (some people still have trouble soloing that one). If you’re currently farming Dragonstalker armor, you will need to give up a chance at the shoulders because if you tame this guy, he’s obviously not going to drop any loot.

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Hunter Pets

Pet(s) of the Week: Wolves that bark, growl, and howl

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That there is my Oil-stained Wolf named Void. They are no longer tameable with their oily coat intact — I thought I would get that out of the way first (sorry about that 😛 ). Aside from looking really cool, this wolf has a neat little feature of barking/growling when he is clicked.

It turns out there are a handful of wolves available in the game which will do this — some rare, some easy to find. Why is this such a big deal? Because when you click on them, you gain a stacking 1% damage buff from each bark (up to 20 stacks). Not many people know about this hidden buff as it doesn’t appear in your list of auras and…

Alright, I’m kidding. There’s really no point to this. I just like pets that make sounds when I click on them, OK?

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