I am swapping to Hunter for DF and want to get familiar with all the specs. Right now I am really stuck against the grain with BM because I have always hated having two pets.
How much am I losing for not taking Animal Companion as a talent?
1 Like
Probably quite a bit.
Every current talent tree on WoWHead has it picked:
I think you’d seriously gimp yourself if you didn’t take it.
1 Like
You lose a significant amount of damage, now and in DF. If you want to do group/competitive content (M+, raid, PvP) it’s basically required unless you want to play at a handicap.
I am wondering why you dislike animal companion? It’s annoying at times but I barely notice it.
1 Like
Boo, that’s disheartening. I’ll learn to live.
If the glyph to diminish the size of your pet made it half as small I wouldn’t mind. I just find being flanked by two janky npcs to look really dumb. This is 100% an aesthetic choice.
I’ll try to find something quiet and small!
6 Likes
I recommend bee pets. They’re very cute and fairly petite for a hunter pet, and they have bloodlust + mortal wounds.
6 Likes
It is unbelievably redundant to give options, but you are stuck into one build or be impacted severely in damage. What was even the point of the revamp system when we are still forced into one optional course?
5 Likes
That happened in every xpac that ever had talent trees.
Sooner or later only 1-3 specs are used depending upon the content you are doing.
I put my feelers out thinking it may be a matter of single digit %, but yeah it’s really a staple of the spec.
Makes me wonder why it is where it is in that case.
And that was the reasoning behind change in MoP. Why have multiple branching paths when it just simple to give some options, but not really have any options?
If they wasted time creating this mess than there should be ulterior options that give same potential. At least two different paths for each spec then we could have alternative play-styles.
At a minimum, there will be preferred builds for Single Target, AOE, and PvP.
There may also be preferred builds for Heroic vs Mythic+ raiding as well as builds for farming/questing.
Play what you like, test for yourself and your play situation.
3 min samples against single target dummy. Main pet was a core hound. When used AC summoned my wolf.
-
Single pet Brutal Companion, 11.8k DPS
-
Animal Companion without Brutal, 11.5k DPS
-
Animal Companion plus Brutal, 11.6k DPS
Kept 3stack frenzy up entire time on each. BW on cooldown. Just how I would normally play when soloing rares in Zerith Mortis or something like that. Didn’t use bigger cooldowns though: Wildspirits, Primal Rage. All 3 pretty much within RNG of each other.
I personally prefer a single strong pet build for asthetics, the lack of a 35% penalty (I like seeing bigger hits) and increased effectiveness of Brutal Companion. I personally find that the addition of Brutal Companion really buffed single pet play.
2 Likes
It would be the bug pets that would be able to lust and have mortal wounds lol
I guess I’ll go tame some bees since I just got the mount.
1 Like
I did say in another thread that I would revisit this idea though I thought since it was super obvious by now that AC is absolutely a major DPS gain post the Brutal Companion changes/nerf I guess now is as good a time as any. This time around though we have functioning sims. Sims make this a very simple analysis because they do the math for us but they also include the damage gained by moving that talent point elsewhere.
One quick note about these sims because I want to be as fair as possible. This is using the Dire Command leggo on chest and Dreamweaver (I never did max out Kyrian on my hunter), the optimal setup is Kyrian ATM. Your pet contribution is going to be a higher portion of your total damage without Wild Spirits so the gap between AC and no AC will be even larger than what these sims are showing.
Dungeon Slice:
With AC: 32,556 DPS
Without AC: 29,492 DPS
DPS gained by using AC: 3,064 (10.4%)
Patchwerk - 1 target
With AC: 27,285 DPS
AE build w/AC: 24,652 DPS
Without AC: 23,708 DPS
DPS gained by using AC: 3,577 DPS (15.1%)
Using a single target build without AC is so bad that you can run your multi-shot build (throws away 4 talents into AE that doesn’t get used at all) and lose a CD (Bloodshed) and you will still come out ahead.
1 Like
i forget what he said but some streamer made a good case for this talent system being much easier to improve upon, and offer horizontal progression with or something idk, it made sense at the time
I have the same issue with 2 pets. I know this is a bit of a necro on the thread but someone might be searching for this information as I did and the dps parse info is usefull. Anyway, I have a found running dual cats helps as one sits in stealth and is barely noticeable… But by now you probably know this anyway.
Good hunting.
1 Like
Would be neat if AC was a cleave talent and made another called Twin Predators or some garbage like that which was purely for ST to help alleviate some wonky AI issues with 2 pets.
1 Like
Well the only real way they can create choice is buffing weaker options in choice nodes and to add in more choice nodes and have all end caps of the tree competively do same damage or be made to fill a different certain role competively. And i notice a lot the branch off choice are single target/bleeds/dots vs aoe/cleave vs cc/pvp talents so for most trees unless there are talents you never picked in any build the current trees don’t have enough in them to give choice beyond that so some talents need buffed but for most part unless they start releasing more talents this is as much as any of the trees can offer.
Honestly they could probably make an addon thats swaps talents based of a websites choice and all player has to click is pvp, aoe, single target mode as options.
I am basically new to a hunter (I mained one in vanilla until our MC guild needed a priest and never played one since).
Are all cats stealth? I leveled this toon in Cata Chromie time for some nostalgia, and picked up the STV named cats. All 3 of them are stealth.
You can turn off stealth for the pet and it will remain off after the next attack by the cat.
1 Like
Oh, good to know! I don’t particularly mind the stealth, I was mostly just surprised all 3 had it when none of the named cats were stealthed before taming. Just the panthers were stealthed while questing.