I would say BM is best for soloing, since you want your pet to be an active participant in the fight and you want all the survivability talents so the pet is an effective tank. For grouping and raiding, Marksmanship is going to be better, as you can concentrate more on your personal DPS than have to juggle you and your pet, plus you don’t need those survivability talents. I haven’t played with Survival much, so I can’t speak to its usefulness.
Still, when looking at pets for group DPS, from what I understand Devilsaurs provide the best DPS hands down, but they’re a pain in the ass for groups because they’re so big. Wolves appear to be the most effective choice for groups, as you don’t need Beast Mastery to use them and Furious Howl buffs both the wolf and you, which helps if you’re Marksmanship and focusing on your personal DPS.
Although I’ve more or less given up on my Hunter, I had tamed Ironjaw for my DPS pet. Best coloration for a wolf I’ve seen, and he’s not hard to find.
I disagree that Tenacity Pets can’t be groupers. That’s not true, but it depends on the pet and instance. Worm acid spit? Heck yeah! Got a takn who uses bleeds? Rhino. Turtles and Warp Stalkers make good off-tanks at times, with Growl and Taunt and impressive defences.
Meanwhile, Skoll is more of a PvP pet, Ferocity or not. Spirit Beast abilities work very well for ambushing, acting as a super-cat. I might recommend a Core Hound or Wolves for parties - the former has a ranged attack (though I don’t think the spellcasting interrupt works on bosses) and the latter, of course, is the nice party buffer. Also, look at http://wow-petopia.com/html/families/family_wolf.html for all wolf appearances. Some are a bit flashier than others (cough Zul’Drak cough).
I’ve never really played Marks, but the folks I know that do enjoy it. I’ve been Survival since lvl 70 or so - that’s what I know best.
Really the best thing if you’re going to stay BM and do group runs would be to head to Un’Goro and tame a Devilsaur. They will provide a lot more DPS than your worm (and more than a cat or wolf too) and the ability to tame them is one of the nice perks of being BM.
Yeah, that’s the downside of the Devilsaur - they are huge and noisy. A bit annoying to be sure.
As far as tenacity pets, I’m sure they have uses in dungeons, but I’ve really never seen the benefits outweigh the loss of damage. Maybe in a 5-man if you want to have them tank a bit for fun. Or maybe a few specific boss fights they could round up some adds I guess… never tried it.
My wolf is actually the first pet I tamed, way back in Mulgore. Now that they are the primary raid pet it’s nice to have my long-time friend with me again, even if he looks a bit mangy.
The acid spit is pretty useful, yes. I am going to try taming tonight, once I decide what to tame, but it is hard to choose. Wolves look good, as do devilsaurs. I’m preparing myself for the post-tame shrink. When I tamed my worm, he shrank down quite a bit, as tamed beasts do, and when I mentioned it in guild chat, people made several Seinfeldesque “shrinkage” jokes.
Huh. In the 5-man PUG I was with, the remote dropped on the first kill, and I’d swear my chat box showed everybody in the group getting one (who didn’t already have one).
I was having a problem in BRD that I didn’t have when we ran ST, and I don’t know if it was because of the level discrepancy or what (Keliraeda was lvl 53 when we did ST, but lvl 61 for BRD, several levels higher than everybody else in the group): I’d target a specific mob and start attacking it, and it would keep running off to fight somebody else. Usually this meant it would run straight into the middle of the main melee, and I would completely lose track of it because I couldn’t see its red target circle in the middle of all the red-colored spells going off in the scrum (between the mage and the shaman, there seemed to be a whole lot of red flashy stuff flying around, not to mention me and Rillian both spamming Consecrate all over the place).
Then, once I did get the mob down, I was having a hell of a time finding a new target. I guess it’s one of the disadvantages of fighting dwarves - they’re shorter than my allies, so when they’re all bunched up with the belf tank and an orc shaman, I couldn’t even see them. I gave up on trying to click them and just started blindly firing off random Judgments and attacking wherever the Judgment landed.
I may have been guilty there as well, either with a Consecrate or a Divine Storm - probably the DS, since it’s such an automatic part of my attack rotation. On the other hand, I’m still not sure how you and I managed to survive the previous instance where somebody accidentally aggroed the neutral dwarves at the other end of the bar. What did we have, something like 30 spellcasting dwarves blasting away at us?
Anyway … by next week I expect to have Keliraeda into her mid-to-high 60s, maybe getting too high to get any benefit out of BRD or any old world instances. I was at least still getting some XP from some of the mobs in BRD, but I don’t see that continuing much longer. And she’s technically my main now on Cairne, not my alt, since she’s now my highest-level toon there (I pretty much abandoned Chimtahna, my tauren hunter, a long time ago at level 50, and my troll DK is still level 58 because I just can’t seem to get into that class at all). After that, among my other toons in BDL, my orc warrior (Pinezensuuz) is the highest at level 27.)
After BRD I headed back to Hellfire Peninsula, where I proceeded to get extremely pissed off. I was fighting arrakoa and ravagers and those ugly humanoids with claws in the ravine below Falcon Watch, all mobs that ranged from one level below me to one level above me. All my freakin’ spells — Exorcism, Judgment of Light, Hammer of Wrath — were missing over and over and over. So it seemed to take forever to kill anything because I was having to do almost everything “by hand”. My weapons are kind of lame at this point as well - there seems to be a dearth of 2-hand weapons amongst the HP quest rewards. I’ve seen two 1-hand swords offered, but not a single 2-hander. Plenty of armor, but very few weapons all around.
I’ve got a pet taming question: My level 20 dwarf hunter has a cat, and while questing in Loch Modan I decided to add a bear to my stable. So I dismissed my cat and attempted to tame a bear … and failed repeatedly. The bear I was trying to tame was 4 levels lower than me. Do I need to actually go stable my cat before I can train a different pet? i.e. simply dismissing the cat is insufficient? (One of my addons suppresses the onscreen error messages, which I normally like - I get extremely tired of seeing “Target is out of range” scrolling up my screen every time I click on a mob, but the downside is it suppresses the occasional useful error message, like when I click on an ore or herb node that’s too high - I don’t see what skill level I actually need for that ore or herb).
You need to either stable it or abandon it. Dismissing only kind of puts it in your pocket…you still have a pet, it’s just not active, so you won’t be able to tame another.
Well, if I saw you taking the aggro from one of the mobs, I would target them to come after me; that’s probably why they ran past you. I was just doing my job
Also, if you didn’t know, hitting your Tab key will rotate through enemy targets. So if I’ve marked particular targets you can hit Tab until the marked one comes up; if none are marked just hit tab to acquire a target. Make sure it’s a target we’re already fighting, though, and not one across the room
I know! that was pretty cool. We pallies were the last ones standing!
You’re probably right. You’re free to bring the hunter or DK if you want to, but it’s up to you. I’m hoping we can finish BRD next week and then move on to Dire Maul - East.
I’m confused. Keliraeda’s Retribution, right? And Rillian’s Protection? Rillian would have been tanking, so the enemies should be running off to fight him, because he’d be taunting the crap out of them and building threat. In a group situation, you shouldn’t necessarily be handling enemies on your own. The tank is there to soak damage.
It seems to be a frequent problem when someone playing a tanking-capable class isn’t the tank for an instance; they forget themselves and try to take on the enemy head to head. Hell, I’m guilty of it myself.
Last week, too, I helped Yeti Jr. get a few BOP blues from Razorfen Kraul; at level 53, I was perfectly capable of mowing through the enemies as a cat. But Yeti Jr., used to playing his Paladin, kept taunting enemies off me. Even though I was building threat ten times as fast as he was, taunt immediately jumped him to the top of the list and yanked the enemy off me, whereupon he started to get knocked around. Neither of us ever came close to dying, but it was a bit of an annoyance chasing the mobs around.
Welcome to the wonderful world of melee DPS, where where the tank walks, you need to follow. I tend, once the first enemy falls over, to just mash my next attack button and let the autoattack land where it will; sometimes I’ll tab around until I’m attacking whichever target has the most debuffs on it, which is probably the one the tank is hitting.
Yesterday I did my first heroic in a while, and the tank (while generally very competent) liked to move around a fair amount for no apparent reason, so I often found myself out of melee range and having to run to catch up. Tanks: if you don’t HAVE to move on accounta poison or whatever, please stand still so us melee dps can get around behind your targets. kthxbye
My approach, which admittedly is easier as ranged DPS, is to throw up a unit frame for focus target and set the tank to focus. Then I can just click whatever mob the tank is targetting and blast away. Of course if mobs are marked then I follow the kill order, but at least this way I’m not pulling the next group or putting high-threat shots on minimally tanked mobs.
This also makes my “/cast [target=focus] Misdirection” macro work.
Yeah, tanks that play like PvP rogues are a pet peeve of mine too - pulling mobs around and dancing (even jumping!) for no apparent reason. You are a tank! Just stand there and get hit (unless you have to move to get a caster or avoid poison or something of course)!
Often the problem is that as a tank you want all the mobs in front of you, and making that happen is a lot harder than it sounds, specially since the client and server don’t always agree on exactly where everything is. Mob moves through me to stand behind me I back up so the mob is in front of me Mob follows and moves through me, again Repeat :mad:
I hate moving as a tank, especially since I play a bear tank and find myself staring at a screen full of ursine ass more often than not if I move just wrong, and that means I can’t see where any targets are. (And I don’t like staring at it any more than you do.) Ticked me off when I tanked a heroic instance and we had 3 hunters as the DPS. 3 hunters who didn’t necessarily like assisting, and who ran the spectrum of Misdirect usage (never, sometimes, all the time). I have the BigBrother add-on running - it tells me when a hunter Misdirects (and to whom), who breaks a CC, that kind of thing. I was subtle that time after one of the hunters took a whole lot of heat and pulled something out of my tanking/taunting range. (“So-and-so, are you Misdirecting?” “Sometimes. I forget.” She hadn’t been. She’s a heavy PvPer so she probably rarely touches that button.) The next time I ran an instance with her and another hunter in, I just announced “hey, I’m a crappy tank* so you guys better love Misdirect” and I saw much better usage of it.
*It was an all-guild run and we’re shy on healers and tanks. My husband was healing. DPS tend to just be happy they get a group going and don’t get scared off by statements like that until you prove it.
Ya know, I actually get more crap about using Misdirect than not using it. I pretty much always use it followed by Multi-shot to get some snap AoE aggro on multi-mob pulls. But I’ll relatively often (in PuGs) get tanks that say “Hey man, I’m a good tank - don’t Misdirect”. It’s like they think I’m insulting them by using it…
Although I will admit that sometimes if the tank is moving too slowly I’ll do multi-shot misdirect pulls just to get things moving along (but generally only if I know the healers and dps and know it won’t cause a wipe). And I can’t say I’ve never misdirected a mob to a healer or clothie that was annoying me…
And really, the bigger complaint is a hunter that won’t Feign Death. Instant 100% aggro dump? And you don’t want to use that? Um, ok…
That seems silly. I’d think anything that puts more threat on the tank and none on the DPS would be helpful, even if ultimately unnecessary. It’s not like it hurts, right?
