Hey all, Arth again with more of the WHU’s ongoing pet tanking guide. This time we’re covering an ideal tanking spec.
Remember that in our Hunter Pet Tanking Talent Spec we’re interested in pet damage and health, not hunter damage. Dps, for a change, isn’t our concern. If it doesn’t help our pet, it has no place in the tanking spec, since tanking is all about our beloved companion.
There’s tried and true dps talents that aren’t being taken, yes. But everything in the spec benefits your pet in some form or another, which is all we’re worried about.
Hunter Pet Tank Talent Build: 59/12/0
Click to view the Hunter Tank Pet Talent Bulid.
Mortal Shots is our dump talent – this is the only talent that isn’t helping our pet do his job in any way (and we only have it to get to Go For the Throat). If you aren’t hit capped, take points out of there for Focused Aim. Remember, the hit cap for heroics is 7%, not 8% like it is for raids.
Animal Handler will be getting changed in 3.2, but will still be useful, so the spec won’t change. Until then it is the single largest dps increase talent for a tank pet, reducing the opponent’s chance to dodge and parry our pet’s attacks.
Lethal Shots is a very important talent, because our pet will gain focus from our crits, though Go For the Throat. We don’t care about the Mortal Shots below it - we only have 2 points in mortal shots so that we can get to Go For the Throat.
Aspect Mastery: why no Aspect Mastery or Improved Aspect of the Hawk? Because we’re going to be in Aspect of the Beast the entire time — so these talents won’t actually come into play at all.
Improved Revive Pet: Really?! Yes, really. I’ve actually rezzed my pet mid-boss a couple times to save my group. Heroic bosses aren’t always as unforgiving as raid bosses and you can have time to rez your pet, get a quick heal or two, and taunt the boss back under control.
Tanking vs. Soloing
A quick look over in Frost’s extreme soloing guide will show you that the specs are similar. You can probably even get away with using a soloing spec for tanking, or vice versa, though I wouldn’t advise it.
We’re all about paying our dues here. Whatever your role or your goal, you want to do it as best as you possibly can, be it raid dps, soloing, tanking, etc. So my advice would be to pick a focus for a BM off-spec, and center your spec and gear around that rather than trying to do both well.
But the mentality between pet tanking and pet soloing is a bit different. We want our pet to stay alive in soloing, but are less concerned with his damage and threat, so pet-dps talents will sometimes be swapped for hunter-dps talents. With tanking, we’re only concerned with the pet. Our total dps, which will be higher than other tanks, is just a pleasant side affect of being a great dps class.
At the end of the day however, we’re a tank. It doesn’t matter how much dps we do — what matters is that we hold aggro on the bad guys and let our group handle the rest.
Just curious, why one point and not two in Imp Revive Pet? If your pet is tanking, I would think you’d need him back in action as soon as possible. no idea where you’d take taht point from, though.
“Remember, the hit cap for heroics is 7%, not 8% like it is for raids.”
I did not know this, and it will make a huge difference as I consdier gems, spec, and consumables. Thanks!
Just wondering, to what point is this useful? Is it for just PVE, dungeons, heroics, or raids?
Have you considered using Eyes of the Beast and it’s related glyph to help gain initial aggro? Just an interesting thought I had while messing around with glyphs on your talent build. Assuming you have a decent healer, you don’t really need to throw Mend Pet up immediately, and this is a max pet agro/survivability guide… Would be very interested on your thoughts on this.
Whoops, no edit function. I really need edit functions.
I also noticed that you didn’t get into Glyphs at all, and maybe that’s reserved for a future guide, but I was curious as to your thoughts on the following:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#cVbu0tgRiuhest0eMb:cMVMc0
Obviously FD, Mending, and BW are pretty much required, but do you feel others are more suitable than the rest I’m looking at?
Fawatam:
Yes, Glyphs will likely show up in a future guide. The Pet Tanking tab on the main guides page has everything that has come out so far about Pet Tanking. As for Eyes of the Beast, what I’ve found is that even with the damage boost, it’s rather clunky. When you consider that we can’t control our hunter during it, we’ll be in danger for any large pull where thunderstomp can’t cover all targets at the beginning. The damage boost also doesn’t last long, because you run out of focus in a hurry, since a lot of our pet’s focus regen comes from our criticals. So a misdirection followed by either a multi-shot or a couple arcane shots will yield similar threat results without the risk. EotB is only useful when you absolutely need to manually maneuver a boss.
Papare:
I’ve gone as high as heroic DTK with this build and lived to tell the tale. Don’t raid as a tank. We’re a dps class, first and foremost. But low-to-mid level Northrend heroic instances are tankable by hunters.
Boz:
There’s nowhere in the BM that we can take point out of for another Imp. Revived. We could, technically, but it wouldn’t be to our benefit.
“Boz:
There’s nowhere in the BM that we can take point out of for another Imp. Revived. We could, technically, but it wouldn’t be to our benefit.”
4/5 Frenzy maybe? Typically 4/5 provides *near* constant uptime anyways.
Good point. But like I said, “technically” we can, but it’s not needed. It’s still just Imp. Revive. Like the notes under the build say, it can come in handy but isn’t going to be the cornerstone of your spec. I see it as the most expendable talent after Mortal Shots. If you feel safer with two points, anyone can tweak their own build. I actually run with a point in Pathfinding because I’m a dork who likes the mounted speed boost, despite knowing that it provides no real value for me as a hunter.
*Bonks himself on the head* Aspect of the Beast! How could I have forgotten it?! I suppose it’s from endless days of only really needing Dragonhawk and viper.
Yeah will tanking your want to be in the aspect of the beast for sure thanks Arthemystia for the talent build its different from mine so hopefully this could improve my tanking skills, looks like im picking up a croc this weekend to level, changing my build and going out for some tanking fun lol thanks again.
So, as far as tanking heroics goes, it should be pretty easy right? By that I mean, there’s not actually much you have to do other than keep your pet healing at all times and make sure the pets abilities all go off? Then just a bit of DPS to help it along?
It sounds pretty easy… It’s probably not but I’ll be finding out for myself soon anyway.
Thanks again for the guides
Another nice article Arth, I’ve been enjoying the series.
Thanks Myr. From a fellow guest-contributor, that means a lot.
And easy, Stokes? Well…
It’s not easy on the healer, for sure. And you’ll be surprised how much different it feels from dps. No, if it were easy, people wouldn’t be incredulous when we ask to tank. But a lot of the “hard” stuff is in the prep work: spec, rotation, macros, gear, talking to your group, etc. If those aren’t in place, it IS hard.
Yeah that makes sense.
New to the site and loving it. The idea of ACTUALLY tanking heroics had never occurred to me as a hunter and I find it an interesting alternative to pure DPS. Just curious if you had found a particular pet talent setup that worked particularly well. I have only begun to try and learn the basics of pet tanking and am curious to see how a pro does it.
Pet spec is actually one of the few I won’t be formally covering, but Frost and I have talked about it and came to similar conclusions separately. The “Best Tenacity Pet Build” guide on the main page will likely be getting tweaked at some point to cover that reasoning. It’s still a good guide as it is: http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2009/01/best-tenacity-pet-talent-build-level-80/
…but Last Stand and Intervene just aren’t used that much (for me at least). So I take the tree down to the bottom and have 2 points in Wild Hunt. Helps with both the health and threat aspects of tanking, is up 100% of the time, and it’s supposed to be getting a boost in the next big patch.
But various builds resembling Frost’s will work well, since most of the pet spec is a necessity, with only a little room for customization.
I have just read through all the info on pet tanking and have a question. Could the two points for mortal shots be put in focused aim and thereby apply 2% more hit to your tank? That would cap hit faster leaving more options available for AP/Stam. I may not have the whole picture here but at a glance it looks like a good idea
The notes for Mortal Shots under the build suggest just that ( :-p ), but yes if you need to reach the hit cap, Focused Aim is much more important than Mortal Shots, which is essentially a dump talent in order to get to Go For the Throat.
Most players won’t have a hard time reaching the heroic hit cap (7%) with gear alone, so Focused Aim can be left out of most builds. But if not, it’s an excellent idea.
Sorry about that last post. Ocbviously, I lack very basic reading comprehension skills
I’m going to take the Focused Aim as suggested in the notes for Mortal Shots. I am only 71 at this point and it will help my Hit Rating 
Thank You for the great information. I will post after my pet successfully tanks an instance.
Wow this is helpful. I usually just go for soloing, but recently I’ve been swapping to soloing spec, throwing on my soloing gear, and calling my Turtle when the DK tank in greens with spirit says he can’t do it. Tanking is a lot of fun, and it’s nice to know the differences clearly stated between that and soloing. I just wonder if it’s worth while to jumble up the two suggested talent trees so I can do them both in one spec… I already have two turtles.
Pet re-specs take no gold, so they’re easy to accomplish. Or you could just level a tanking pet (croc, bear, etc.) and keep one turtle for soloing. Our hunter spec changes are the pricey ones, though, and there’s no easy answer. I PvP, raid, and tank, so I’m respeccing 3-4 times a week anyway.