Do you believe that your pet should be at your side (casting Howl) or attacking the boss? Do you invest talent points into its survival? Do you buff it with scrolls and/or juju?
If you have a wolf keep it at your side. It won’t live long attacking the boss and healers shouldn’t be prioritizing pets ever.
A lot of us don’t even have pets visible on our raid frames. It would add too much clutter having pets visible. So at least from me, a pet wouldn’t be getting a heal cause I straight up can’t see it.
I have them visible outside of raid, when I’m playing my lock, or if I’m trying to Heal Parse for fun.
4 Likes
You shouldn’t
be using a wolf?
Don’t be using a wolf, unless you’re raid isn’t using world buffs. The howl will push stuff off tanks and melee. You should be using either a bat or owl with screech. You can use a cat or ZG serpent if another hunter is already using screech.
You need your pet to have max resist and stam for the raid. I have a pet for MC/BWL with FR and shadow resist, and a pet with max NR for AQ.
If you’re playing the correct hunter raid spec, 20/31 then you need to be able to send your pet in and out on mechanics (Firemaw).
If you’re just using howl, or sending your pet in till it dies, then your a bad hunter and you’re gimping yourself. The wolf was fine during MC when getting hit capped was hard and you needed the talents in survival. That shouldn’t be the case anymore.
Dismiss your pet in raids. Even Warlocks don’t bring out their pets in raids unless it is an imp for the stam buff, or a voidwalker for fights like Garr. Otherwise, the pet stays put away, or sacrificed.
Just keep it dismissed to keep it from going crazy and pulling mobs that wipe half the raid.
You have to be a special kind of idiot to wipe a raid with a pet. The only spot I can think of where it is even a possibility is the first jump in MC and I have yet to see that happen despite doing MC since the first week and eventually in many pugs and with multiple guilds.
A hunter pet can contribute fairly decent dps and it is worthwhile to keep it alive. Healers should never prioritize the pets but when healing is slow you might as well toss a heal if there is little to no risk of someone else dying because you were busy.
Probably wouldn’t bother with jujus or scrolls though and imo its best to not be that hunter who begs for pet buffs constantly.
You can, but typically that mana is better spent DPSing, or waiting outside the 5 second rule for regen if its gonna be a mana restricted fight IMO.
I have tested repeatedly this idea both ways. Any fight where my druid has had the free time to dps or heal a pet, my druid has contributed more damage over the duration of the fight than the pet would have if I had healed it.
There really isn’t a reason to heal pets. The mana is better spent dpsing. If you have incidental healing getting the pets, that’s good. Like chain heal, or judgement of light or totems. But directly healing them is a mistake. Just do damage yourself instead.
Its not like you have to commit to spam healing it like a tank. A single heal can sometimes save a pet for the entire fight. A couple 1.5 second casts can cause thousands of damage if it saves a pet early in a fight.
But is it worth it to let them make your raid ui ugly, adding another group to set them visible?
My opinion is no. Cleaner UI > all.
My experience is that either pets get rekt and need constant healing, or they need just about no healing. There isn’t much inbetween. That’s just classic raid design. Otherwise if I could just toss a rejuv a few times and thats all they needed for the fight, that’s a no brainer. Just toss them the hot and let them go cause they’ll do a decent chunk over the duration.
I’ve seen it happen in MC, BWL, and ZG. Each time, it was a Hunter that forgot to take their pet off Aggressive. Pulling a bunch of mobs as we were setting up for the Suppression Room was… wonderful, really. Those AoEs going off in the raid while we were listening to the raid leader going over the strat was so great.
They aren’t called ‘huntards’ for nothing.
I forget exactly what screech and those do but wouldn’t it be a debuff that could box out another more important raid debuff on the mob?
For a Warlock Pet, i know mine dont last long if I leave him out. He dies almost every boss lol. I am specced demonic sacrifice, so i just burn them. As a hunter I would want my pet out.
If you’ve done any dungeon soloing it should be very easy to translate pet management to raids for any mechanics that are broken by line of sight.
Put your pet on Stay in a safe spot, hit Passive when it needs to get out.
dude imagine that ur pet was so bad that not using it would only reduce ur dps by 3 to 4 % And every tier set try to make you care about it but you should not.
Like let put weird fix on problem that would need a lot of work is how i see it
I use a Wolf because my RL requested us to. Sometimes we have world buffs and sometimes we don’t …depends on how cranky the Horde get. 
I keep my wolf with me in some fights and others I send him in and occasionally I send him in and pull him out if he gets low. It’s a case by case basis.
I keep him on passive with no growl so the only time he pulls something is if I do something stupid. Which I, like, totally, NEVER do. Lol.
As a rule, I don’t expect my healers to keep my pet alive. That’s my job. I did give a healer some extra change to see the dps difference in a fight, with and without the pet and it was significant.
However, I’ll say my pet has often received heals without my asking. And I’ll also say I will always send my pet after rare stray mobs that may go after my healers, so that may be a factor.
You know, respect your fellow team players and they’ll respect you, kind of thing. We help each other.