Dealing with your Pet after the Patch

Patch hits. Managing pets is totally different.

What's a girl to do?

Start with BRK's wow insider post about pet trees. Good stuff in there, although I ended up going my own route with the talent points.

Also, major kudos to Petopia. Excellent response time, seems to be a new interface/layout/template from the past. I found it way way easier to navigate and really liked how she presents the new trees and the different families. /fantastic

Picked up Bubbles the Gorilla in Ungoro crater. Fiddled around finding the pet talent point screen. Pretty obvious tab on the personal hunter talent point screen, well, pretty obvious once you find it. lol.

Bubbles is level 65, so she doesnt have the full complement of points to distribute, but I went with some picks that I think will help her primary job.

She's mostly going to be tanking groups of mobs in Azeroth dungeons. As such, she wont be overly concerned with damage all that much, until she gets to BRD and higher. Mostly concerned with threat generation, so I went for talents I figured would buff that capability.

Went to Hellfire Peninsula for the two dailies by Doom Lord Kazak. When her growl doesnt get resisted, she's a threat queen. Since she's got some leveling to do, she misses a lot, so threat is a little bit of an issue, but I can tell she's gonna be awesome.

Multi target situations are very nice. Tried her out in Nagrand on some packs of Clefthoofs. Thunderstomp, FTW! These are lower level so she hits consistently. First mob, I gotta watch the threat. By the second target, she's already built up so much threat, its just vunderbar.

And I discovered a big mistake with my personal talent choices for Amava.

FOCUS!!!!

I was a little concerned with how she was doing at first. I yelled at Bubbles. She tried to growl at me, but couldnt :-(

So she walked me through the talent trees and showed me that I'm 51/10/0 and no longer taking 20 points in Marksman.

And in the BM tree, I followed my previous template and skipped over Bestial Discipline. And then in the MM tree, I only had 10 points to play with, and as such, could not reach Go for the Throat.

So no focus. Ima have to respec tonight and find two BM points I can switch over to bestial discipline.

All in all, Bubbles is an outstanding tank. Once I get my points straightened out for Focus generation, and get her up to 70 so she'll miss much less often (if ever, since I hear she'll inherit my hit rating), she's going to be a monster.


On to Kill Command

WTF? I don't really get it. So its now an attack that you just use every minute? And it boosts something about the next three attacks your pet makes?

I guess for solo action, or trash during raids, just use KC whenever the cooldown is available.

For boss fights, I'm thinking there's going to be some thought about when is the optimal time to trigger this. Probably would want to coordinate its use with some of the bigger attacks that your pet can do so you get the best damage output. I'll probably wait for some theorycrafter to give us a fancy macro to make it less involved. I've got enough on my mind during a raid to have to worry about these things :-)

Food

What do you mean, Gorillas don't eat meat? I'm no Dian Fossey but I'm pretty sure real gorillas eat meat.

So I had to make a silly macro, and use up two extra bag slots for two new stacks of pet food (luckily my mounts and vanity pets had freed up a bunch of space already)...

#showtooltip
/cast Feed Pet
/use [pet:gorilla] Skethyl Berries
/use [pet:ravager] Smoked Talbuk Venison

One other point to note: Seems like the defensive attitude for a pet is a little different.

Doing the dailies in Hellfire, the one where you use some fel blood to ematiate a siphoner or some such. Usually I start channeling the fel blood, and once that completes I send my pet in.

However, post-patch, seems the my pet would attack immediately upon my initiating the channeling.

Likewise, I went to do the Sunfury Attack Plans, and I fired a pull shot to try to grab only one Blood Elf out of a pack of four. Bubbles charged in as soon as I fired my pull shot.

Not sure if this is bug or planned feature, but if it stays like that, I'm gonna be a passive kind of guy.


Ok, there you go. Pets FTW!!!