hunter’s dead zone revealed

The Cunning pet-type was originally designed to be optimal for PvP use, however, most World of Warcraft hunters feel that the Cunning pet-type falls short. hunter’s dead zone - How do we feel about the current state of what Cunning pets are offering, and are there any current plans to make improvements? We made an effort in 3.1 to get the Cunning pets up to speed by giving them talents like Roar of Sacrifice, and normalizing all of the pet stats so that Cunning pets had the same stats as the other two types, modified by pet talents. Crabs are still fairly popular and they probably should be a Cunning pet given their crowd control ability, but the carapace also made them feel like they should be able tanks. And selfishly, I had no problem with seeing a lot of crab pets. (No, I’m not serious.)

In regards to the survivability to WoW hunter pets are there plans to make additional improvements? The resilience change should help somewhat in PvP, however in end-game PvE environments, the WoW hunter’s pet can die pretty easily, especially given the specific encounter hunter’s dead zone. One suggestion made by many World of Warcraft hunters was to add a passive ability that healed the WoW hunter’s pet when the WoW hunter received a heal from a party or raid member. Honestly, we aren’t happy with some of the current solutions to keeping pets alive. In particular, the area damage avoidance mechanics just don’t work well. They are frustrating for other players in a PvP setting when Bladestorm or Arcane Explosion can’t really hurt pets, and they don’t keep pets alive on a 5 million damage Mimiron missile. What we really need is a system where certain PvE attacks just don’t hurt the pet (maybe they can’t set off Mimiron mines for instance). We don’t want players to have to pay the price because the pet AI is in fact just an AI. This is something we’re working on. read more …