dismiss pet nerf?

This change was intentional. Unfortunately, it didn't make it into the patch notes.

Dismiss Pet was frequently being used to bypass cooldowns on certain pet abilities, such as Roar of Sacrifice, or to swap out a dangerously wounded pet for one at full health. Neither of those were intended behavior. Furthermore, our design is that choosing your pet should feel similar to choosing a glyph or talent during pre-match preparation.

With this change, Hunters are able to switch pets during the pre-match preparation period, but unable to dismiss them once the match has begun.

As a followup: we've got a hotfix in the works to lower Revive Pet's casting time to 2 seconds. Our goal was to remove the awkward gameplay of dismissing/swapping pets to bypass cooldowns and debuffs, not to make it harder for Hunters to have a pet active. With Revive at 2 seconds, you should have a much easier time getting your pet back on its feet.

We're also investigating the reports of Revive Pet being interruptible through Deterrence.

Just as an FYI - the hotfix to reduce Revive Pet's casting time to 2 seconds has been applied, but will need realm restarts to take effect. I'm working on finding out when those will be and will update as I can.

Quick comment to clarify since I've seen this suggestion come up a lot:

12/12/2013 11:56 AMPosted by Massai

could have just made RoS share a cooldown no matter which pet one has out.

We'd considered doing something like that, but there's actually major technical hurdles with the way Dismiss Pet works that make it a much bigger task than it sounds. We'd have to make some pretty scary changes to the way pets work (in the underlying code, at least) to be able to implement a shared cooldown on pet abilities. We may end up revisiting the idea sometime in the future, but we simply did not have time for it in the 5.4.2 development cycle.

I'm seeing the Revive Pet hotfix active on my Hunter.