Yesterday Ghostcrawler popped up to explain how the pet system is changing in Mists of Pandaria. You can see his post here.
- Every pet has 3 specs: Ferocity, Tenacity and Cunning. These work much like class specs, with a similar UI.
- Pets come with the spec you’d expect (Ferocity for kitties) but you can change it. If you want a tanking cat or a DPS crab, you can. If you have a favorite pet, you can just always use that one and swap the spec around.
- I hope to see A LOT of DPS crabs.
- Each spec comes with 2-3 active and 2-3 passive abilities. We took a careful look at what pet talents most hunters were taking and tried to take the best of those. Things like Roar of Sacrifice, Last Stand and Heart of the Phoenix made the cut.
- We didn’t think we were getting a ton of gameplay out of the pet talents on live — players interacted with them even less than the class talents — and we didn’t think pets needed the full tiered system like the Mists talent implementation, so we decided the best way to offer pet customization is to let hunters choose their pet mostly because of how it looks (and its one special ability) and not from its role.
This is pretty much what we expected to happen. You can now make any pet be any spec. That means Cat tanks, DPS Turtles, and so on. Personally I would have preferred that they expanded the current system by given our pets a talent system similar to the revamped ones they did for classes, but this will do.
If you raid, and all of your buffs are covered, you now have the option to bring whatever pet you want and not have to sacrifice and ounce of DPS. The exotic pets as Beast Mastery only is still in place, only now you can take that Spirit Beast on your extreme soloing adventures.
Overall this is a positive change to the pet system. It should be noted that this is not fully implemented yet in the beta. For example you can’t change your pets spec yet, and I suspect pet abilities have not been finalized yet either.
I like this, although I’m wondering about the following and while thinking about it, I found an answer to many people’s fears:
Many people on the forums are afraid that this will make all pets completely the same, you could use your cat for everything you want, or your boar, or your dragonhawk.
Right now, there are two things that influence the pet (make it different from another pet family):
– the raid buff / utility skill
– the spec
In MoP, the spec will become free of choice, so the only thing remaining is the family’s ‘special skill’, the buff or the utility.
If you want to tank with your pet, you will have to consider this:
– Do I need extreme damage mitigation? -> Use a turtle (shell shield)
– Do I need better DPS for myself? -> Use a cat (Roar of Courage)
– Do I need to provide X buff for the raid? -> Use the pet bringing that buff.
etc.
So, while it may look like all pets will become the same, and/or possibly the cat becoming the new WotLK wolf ‘best pet’, that is not completely true. We might be seeing many cats, because of their generally best buff, but it will not always be the best choice.
Yeah, these changes will close the gap between a Ferocity pet and a Tenacity pet in terms of DPS because buffs won’t become tied to specs. It’d be like switching from a Hyena to a Worm right now. Their buffs are the same so the only difference will be the spec. And unlike now, you won’t need to tame another pet; you can just switch your current one’s spec. This will only affect my PvP pets in that I can now choose if I want my pet to be Ferocity for Call of the Wild and Rabid, Cunning for Roar of Recovery and Bullheaded, or Tenacity for a Last Stand/Intervene combo.
I guess it’s OK, and will mean that I can have a stable full of turtles fr stampede…but it again just seems to “flatten out” the game even more….no need to tarin the pet, no need to tame a certain type of pet…..why not have some sort of amorphous blob for a pet ?? Maybe I’m just a grumpy old dwarf but I miss having to keep my pet happy and I still miss my ammo !
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