OutDPS!

This post is about survival hunter pets now. Not pets after the next patch, which will probably change everything again.

As as survival hunter, you can expect your pet to be a very minor contribution to your damage. In fact, if a pet dies in a boss fight, it typically takes him 5-10 times as long as the revive pet spell cast time to simply replace the damage you would have done had you not stopped to bring the little guy back. Still, 10%-20% of your damage comes from it, so if you respecced from beast mastery, count your blessings. The one skill you bring over to survival that many survival hunters never bothered learning is keeping a pet alive.

Lets talk about specific pets. Most min/maxers take one of the following:

• Wasp
• Cat
• Raptor

The wasp is very popular simply because it causes a minor armor debuff that will buff the whole raid’s damage. It’s not much, but it’s larger than the delta between the cat and the wasp. One caveat- it doesn’t stack with faerie fire. It also doesn’t stack with curse of recklessness, but I’ve never ran with a group that used that. Little regular wasps are currently the only tamable wasps, however before the last patch, everyone was going out and taming that (now untamable) hive queen in shalozar.

Cats and raptors are you best choice if you know you’re running with the faerie fire debuff, or if you have a bleed debuff available. The bleed debuff comes from feral druids and (snork) arms warriors. I haven’t actually seen an arms warrior in about 4 months, but feral druids can still be found hiding between the tank and warlocks in the damage meters, pretending to be a hunter pet. Mangle will make cats and raptors the highest individual damage pet in the game.

As for whether to get a cat or a raptor, I’m going to take the safe way out and not make any definitive statements here. The elitist jerks hunter DPS spreadsheet (and its ban-happy moderation goons) will loudly proclaim from the top of their hill that raptors are the way to go. I believe this this is because when you model raptor DPS on a spreadsheet, you average the damage over the time of the boss fight and it looks better than a cat. The problem is that its special attack is on a long cooldown, and if any of your boss fights happen to end right before the cooldown finishes, you’ve lost DPS compared to a cat.

I have a cat. But since my feral druid is usually drunk or playing an alt on raid nights, I usually use my wasp. Conveniently named “TabTarget”. The bastard’s taller than a stomp-o-saur. He makes noise when he’s not moving too. This is a perfect example of “externalization“, by the way. I play with the sound off so I can clearly hear our tank talk about aliens in vent (please, send him an in game tell asking him about whether he thinks visitors are real), and taming this loud, large, annoying, and blindingly colored pet allowed my to grind one less level to get it ready to raid. It was a simple decision for me, but I’ve been told I’m a real arse-hole.