So in the PTR patch notes (that may or may not go live) we got this:
All pets now receive 40% of their master’s resilience and 100% of their master’s spell penetration. In addition, if a player is at their appropriate spell hit chance or hit chance maximum, their pet will be at the maximum for spell hit chance, hit chance, and expertise. If they are below the maximum, their pet will be proportionately below those maximums.
Because this appears to be worded to cover both warlock and hunter pets, it’s caused a lot of confusion about how it actually works for hunters. Here is a quick translation for us hunters. Note that I was not able to get onto the PTR last night, so I have not yet verified this; however, I’m pretty confidant this is the structure:
Your pet’s hit chance, spell hit chance, and expertise will scale proportionately with your (hunter) hit chance.
Thus if you are at the Hunter Hit Cap, your pet will be at the hit cap and the expertise cap. Don’t worry about the “spell hit” part — that’s just for warlocks. We’re hunters, so we worry about our normal hit.
What is Expertise?
Expertise reduces your opponent’s chance to dodge and parry your attacks. A level 83 boss has a 6.5% chance to dodge, and around a 12.5% chance to parry.
However, your pet automatically attacks from behind if it doesn’t have aggro, and attacks made from behind cannot be parried! Thus you only have to worry about dodge. If you are expertise capped, you will reduce the boss’s chance to dodge by the full 6.5% — which is fantastic for dps increase.
My hunch is that the boss’ parry chance will only be reduced 6.5% – so if your pet is tanking, it will still be able to be parried, though that’s a pretty minor concern and still doubles the dps and threat effectiveness of this new scaling.
Basically, if this goes live and our pets really do gain expertise along with our hit chance, this is a very nice little dps boost, and an especially good dps boost for BM hunters. And it makes our hit rating more important than ever before!
Animal Handler
If you’re first thought on reading this was “But what about the Animal Handler BM talent?” then grats! Good question!
If this change does go live, then Animal Handler immediately becomes a pretty irrelevant talent, since the majority of the effect that we care about is the increase of Expertise. I’m sure Blizz will modify the talent to make it do something worthwhile
I wonder whether Focused Aim would contribute, or this is specifically gear-related. While not needed for folks in solid raid gear, some folks still use Focused Aim as a “bridge” til they reach hit cap.
I hope by “scaling proportionately” they mean that they will stop the drop-the-decimal nonsense for pet hit and expertise. I.E. if we have 7.85% hit, our pets are at 7.85, not reduced to 7% as they are currently.
Otherwise, thanks for the clarification. Gemming for expertise would’ve sucked.
Focused Aim currently passes along to the pet, so I assume that they would keep that passing along. I certainly hope so!
btw frost, you missed something for hunters in the PTR notes… down under bug fixes. whole section for hunter crap.
All ranks of Sonic Blast now properly have an 80 Focus cost.
Black Arrow Ranks 5 and 6 training costs have been lowered significantly.
Lock and Load: The tooltip for this talent has been updated to indicate that it also works with Explosive Trap.
The tooltip for Improved Tracking has been slightly re-written to indicate that it only works on the hunter, and works on melee damage as well.
T.N.T. (Rank 3): Now indicates that the talent works with Black Arrow.
Aye, I left it off on purpose — all info that we already know, just tooltip updates, so doesn’t change anything for us.
And lowering training costs? Srsly? Who cares?
The cool thing about proportional scaling is that if you’re sitting 262 hit for some reason, you aren’t losing a full% of pet hit. BMs especially should like that bit.