Beta Class Analysis Part IV: Pet Scaling

Blizzard is asking for feedback on class balance in the Mists of Pandaria Beta. This article continues our coverage of hunter-related discussions in the thread. For previous hunter-related posts by Ghostcrawler see Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Jigsawe wrote, “A few questions/remarks about Stampede and the glyph for it:

1) Currently having 1 pet and the glyph to duplicate said pet (assuming Ferocity) does significantly less (about ~40-45%) of having 5 Ferocity pets on-call when using Stampede. Can you clarify if there is a bug currently with the glyph? [link]

Ghostcrawler replied, “The glyph required new code support, which may not be in yet. Regardless, it should cause no difference in damage, from just having 5 Ferocity pets naturally.” [link]

2) Assuming the glyph is being used and 4 duplicates of your current pet are called, are the 4 duplicates called with the baseline stats, or are the buffs from the original pet copied to them; i.e. is the design of Stampede intended for it to be used after AP procs and Rabid/Bestial Wrath to maximize the damage of the other pets? It seems to fit the niche of the Doomguard for Demo currently where lining up buffs causes the Doomguard to scale in damage and would add a measure of complexity to the CD. [link]

Ghostcrawler replied, “It doesn’t copy buffs from the current pet, but all of the pets do benefit from pet scaling.” [link]

– – –

Ghostcrawler wrote, “We knocked out a lot of bugs on pet scaling. You probably have some of these now and will get more updates over time.”

All pets get:

— Crit: 100% of your Crit (Melee/Ranged/Spell individually)
— Hit: 50% of your Hit and 50% of your Exp
— Exp: 50% of your Hit and 50% of your Exp
— Resil: 100% of your Resil
— PvP Power: 100% of your PvP Power
— Haste: 100% of your Haste (Melee/Ranged/Spell/Regen individually)
— Dodge: 100% of your Dodge
— Parry: 100% of your Parry
— Armor: Various %s of your Armor, based on pet
— HP: Various %s of your HP, based on pet

Some pets get, as appropriate to the pet:

— SP: Some % of your SP, AP, or RAP, based on pet
— AP: Some % of your SP, AP, or RAP, based on pet
— RAP: Some % of your RAP, based on pet
— Mastery: Warlock and Mage pets get 100% of your Mastery
— Mana: Mage pets get 100% of your Mana
— Mana Regen: Mage pets get 100% of your Mana Regen

[link]

Daetur wrote, “I’m a little confused about how/why this works. Why not just give pets 100% expertise and 100% hit and reflect the way I am gearing my character? They’ll have the same value for hit and expertise, and, assuming hit and expertise have the same cap now in Mists, I’ll need to cap both values to cap my pet…. why not just have them reflect my individual values? Allowing me, for example, to focus on one cap at a lower gear level.” [link]

Zeherah replied, “This threw me at first too, but then I realized the purpose of this is probably so that caster class (i.e. warlocks) pets can also be expertise capped, since they don’t gear for expertise but have twice the hit cap of physical dps classes. Perhaps it was easier to code it this way than to have it work differently for different classes?” [link]

Skhope replied, “That’s fine in PVE, but in PVP, hunters/melee pets are punished more severely than casters because there’s no true cap for expertise. […] To elaborate, PVP hit capped casters will never have their pet miss/get parried/dodged (since resistances no longer exist), but melee/hunters pets will get parried/dodged against agi based classes (hunters/ferals/monks/rogues/enhance). So, why the imbalance? A good approach would’ve been to apply hit to hit and expertise to expertise for hunters/melee to their pets. [link]

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading...Loading...