WotLK FAQ: Other Changes
- Has anything changed with happiness?
- Do I still have to feed my pet?
- Can I feed my pet in combat?
- If loyalty no longer exists, can my pet still run away?
- Have they added any stable slots?
- How does pet aggro feel? Can pets hold aggro?
Has anything changed with happiness?
Yes and no. Happiness still mostly works like it always has, with some small exceptions:
- Happiness no longer increases pet loyalty, because pet loyalty no longer exists.
- Food is no longer the only source of pet happiness.
Now keep in mind that happiness still controls how much damage your pet can do. A happy pet does an extra 25% damage while an unhappy pet loses 25% of damage. So you definitely want to keep your pet happy.
Do I still have to feed my pet?
Feeding your pet is still the primary way to keep it happy, and especially at low levels it is pretty much the only way to keep your pet happy. So yes, you may still need to feed your pet.
However, for higher level hunters there are other options as well. First off, there are pet talents: Carrion Eater (Cunning), Bloodthirsty (Ferocity) and Guard Dog (Tenacity) all allow you to increase your pet's happiness without having to carry around stacks of pet food. In addition, the Glyph of Mend Pet causes your Mend Pet ability to increase your pet's happiness slightly. For many hunters, these methods allow you to ditch pet food entirely.
Can I feed my pet in combat?
At this point, no. You must still be out of combat to feed your pet. In response to a suggestion about feeding pets in combat, Ghostcrawler posted on the WotLK Beta Hunter forum
that:
There are talents in all 3 pet trees that you can invest in if maintaining happiness is a problem (or just annoying) for you.
We're also trying to give you a few more options to keep your pet alive, such as more Avoidance and reduced spell damage, and even more ways to heal your pet. Of course you can always choose to focus directly on more damage and hope your pet survives long enough to make good use of it.
If loyalty no longer exists, can my pet still run away?
As far as I can tell, pets no longer run away. I haven't seen this officially confirmed yet, however, and my tests were pretty basic. So take that with a grain of salt.
Have they added any stable slots?
Yes! The Stable Master will now sell you 4 stable slots (up from 2). The new stable slots cost 50 gold (for the third slot) and 150 gold (for the fourth slot).
Adding this to the pet that is with you (and not in the stable), that means that we can now keep up to five pets at one time. And because pets know all the skills they need to know, and they learn new ranks as they level, you will never again have to tame a temporary pet to learn a skill. And that means that you can fill up all your pet slots with permanent pets -- you do not need to keep one open for learning new skills.
How does pet aggro feel? Can pets hold aggro?
Right now in the beta things are a little rough. I'm not doing too badly, but some better-equipped hunters are having a hard time of it.
But Blizzard poster Ghostcrawler posted on the WotLK Beta Hunter forum to reassure us about the future of pet aggro:
We haven't done a major pass on threat generation yet for any of the classes. We realize it was very easy in BC for hunters to pull aggro off of their pets. You can probably tell from some of the pet talents (including the ones that just grant more pet dps) that we want pets to be able to hold their own threat against a hunter. This is especially true when it's just you and Bitey out on your own, but ideally a tanking pet with the proper spec will be an effective offtank for 5-player instances, or even a main tank under some circumstances (say a group quest perhaps).
To sum up:
- Blizzard hasn't had a chance to tweak threat generation yet, so the current state of things will most likely be changing.
- Blizzard wants "pets to be able to hold their own threat against a hunter".
- Blizzard says that "a tanking pet with the proper spec will be an effective offtank for 5-player instances, or even a main tank under some circumstances".
All of which is good news for hunters!