Its time to take a serious look at hunter pets

[Sylverah-crusader-strike]

@Kaivax

Hunter

• Beast Mastery rune bonus health and damage provided to Hunter pets reduced to 20% (was 30%).
• Beast Mastery rune bonus Focus regeneration provided to Hunter pets reduced to 50% (was 80%).
  • Developers’ notes: We remain concerned that Hunter pets are still too powerful, and believe that the best way forward is to reign in the Beast Mastery rune while compensating via the Hunter’s main spells.

@Kaivax

January 4, 2024

Season of Discovery

• Boon of Blackfathom no longer applies to pets.
  • Developer’s Note: We are essentially removing the ability for pets to get Boon of Blackfathom for now. Now that pets scale with stats, allowing them to get certain world buffs would effectively let them “double dip” on these effects and gain far more damage than intended. We’ll continue to review this as we move through the content phases and make adjustments to how world buffs interact with pets as needed.

@Kaivax

December 12, 2023

Season of Discovery

• All damaging Hunter pet abilities now gain damage from Attack Power based on their Focus costs. Hunter pets no longer gain any spell damage.
  • Developers’ notes: Pets that cast spells such as scorpid poison or Lightning Breath were scaling too well and pets using physical abilities were scaling too little. We’ve now normalized the amount of attack power gained, to scale with the focus cost of individual pet abilities. This means that abilities with a higher focus cost, that are cast less often, will receive more benefit from attack power per attack than abilities with a lower focus cost that can generally be used more often. Overall this should level out the damage and reduce situations where some abilities were scaling too much or too little with hunter attack power.
• Scorpid poison now distributes the additional damage it gains from attack power evenly over each stack of Scorpid Poison on the target.
  • Developers’ notes: Previously, Scorpid poison received most of its benefit from the Hunter’s attack power in the very first stack. Now the additional damage gained from the controlling hunter will not be gained until the full 5 stacks of poison are on the target. This increases the ramp time a bit and makes it less immediately deadly in PvP.
• Pets now gain 30% of the hunter’s armor (was 45%) and 20% of the hunter’s stamina (was 45%).
  • Developers’ notes: Hunter pets were gaining far too much durability from hunter stats, to the point where some pets could get more than double the health and armor of a well-geared level 25 player. We still want dedicated hunters to have the ability to tank certain dungeon and raid encounters, but pets shouldn’t be so effective that they become the objectively correct choice.

Do shut up now