huntering observations

So there has been some changes i have noticed with huntering since the patch came out, and others seem to be bringing them up as well, so i figured i might as well give me two sense directly.

Ok so exotic pets are cool and all, but are they really that awesome as they are. I would say that the answer is only a conditional yes. If you are going to be fighting a lot of casters, corehound will own them. Just ask vadecent the boomkin. LOL. As far as DPS goes, devilsaurs are fine but a cat is probably just as good (i personally am holding off on a devilsaur). Everyone knows how awesome a gorilla is but thats not exotic. If the damage of the ferocity exotic pets was increased sure they may become more valuable, but then BM would again be the sole raiding spec and i dont think Blizz wants that to happen right now. I like having a MM and Surv hunter ina raid now because of trueshot aura and the expose weakness. Bottom line, have exotic pets is cool more for their abilities in certain conditions then they are for overall lvling etc.

Another thing which was brought up in Grai's blog was that pets seem to be running wild now in raids. This is mostly due to the altered "defensive" stance that pets have and not bad hunters. Previously a hunter would have to tell his pet to attack a target, but now the pet is more intelligent and will attack what you attack automatically so you do not have to continually be tabbing and resending the pet to attack. It will do it automatically. This is good except it seems that the pets get a little over zealous sometimes and start running after mobs they have no business attacking. During the nerf you can normally overcome those wrongful pulls, but with Wrath that will mean a wipe so i fully expect the huntard name calling to be back in full force. The three very good hunters in our last Kara run were all having issues with pets attacking targets before they were really supposed to be. I personally think that the improved defensive stance is much better when multiple mobs are there. It was just a pain to always have to tab, then send pet since it was running back to you after last kill, just to start shooting again. I had gotten to the point where once a mob was about down to 10% i would switch my pet and start shooting at the next target to avoid losing dps time for it to return and be resent. Now those issues are solved. So in conclusions, pets are smarter in attacking what you are attacking, BUT they sometimes need to be reigned in because they are more powerful now and can aggro a lot more then they used to. Example. You would think that a gorillas thunderstomp would be ideal when pulling large non elite trash mobs in the banquet hall before moroes to do max AoE damage. The PROBLEM is that pets automatically go behind the target, and unless the trash was pulled far enough down the stairs, that thunderstomp will generate a ton of threat and pull another group and then go running off into them. So in a perfect AoE fight i couldnt use my pets strongest AoE because it pulls too much. Ghostcrawler was even asking for peoples opinions on the new pet defensive stance which you can find the link to by going to maniasarcania.com.

On a side note, my gorilla (Sepharose) hit 70 last night after doing a bunch of dailies. So now i have 4 lvl 70 pets. DPS machine- Qiagen (cat). Tank- Sepharose (gorilladin). Tank on the bench cuz he is worthless- Blink (warp hunter) and Casters Doom- Char (corehound). My plan for now is to probably replace the warpstalker with a worm as a single mob tank since it sunders armor and will do much more then just warp at mobs. Also a devilsaur could be in the future as well but i may be content with my cat and pick up a Rhino since everyone knows, baby rhino= win and stampede would be fun in PVP. I may take a few days off from WoW just before the X-pac because i have some work to do thats needs to get done, but other then that i will be tearing up northrend.