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Scattered Shots: Cataclysm pet design pass
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. After endless waiting and so much patience it tried even the saintlike souls of us hunters, the pet design pass has finally come to pass. Probably the most important change was Blizzard's finally giving in to hunter demand and creating a dance ability for our fox pet, but there were several other lesser changes that are probably worth noting as well. Specifically, our pets are now providing a variety of raid buffs, as promised. But instead of giving minor versions of the raid buffs like we thought, our pets are actually providing the full raid buff: armor debuff, 5 percent crit buff, physical damage debuff, and even Heroism/Bloodlust. Join me after the cut for the full list of new pet special abilities.
Pets to scale from resilience and other stats
I don't PvP, so I'm going off the reports of others here, but apparently Warlock and Hunter pets are often proving ineffective and short-lived in PvP. Until recently, this was often the case in PvE as well, but pets have much more avoidance now in a PvE environment. It looks like an improvement will be coming in PvP as well: Ghostcrawler said last night that they "think it's probably time to let pets scale, to some extent, with resilience and spell pen." In fact, he says they have a new pet scaling system, and "assuming it works" (which seems like something they ought to be able to make work), they should be able to make the pet scale off of "all relevant stats" of the master. Players have been asking for more pet scaling for a long time, especially resilience. Obviously how big of a change it will be depends on what "to some extent" ends up meaning, but it can only help pet classes.
