[Bugs] Beta Hunter Soloing Detailed Analysis

#1 - Aug. 7, 2014, 4:51 p.m.

Hello. My name is Durendil. A few know me for the hunter wordfirsts of LK 10, Ragnaros 25H, yogg-saron, proving grounds tank 30 waves... Let's just say I'm one of the main hunters as far as extreme soloing is concerned. Which is why I decided, when I got the beta access, to test hunter soloing and give valuable feedback to blizzard.
I solo'd/tried a lot of bosses on live and beta of Wotlk, cataclysm and MoP raids, and extrapolated data.

First, the bugs I encountered during soloing sessions:
-Mend/rez pet: many bugs.
First, it sometimes switches to rez pet while your pet is alive - if it happens, you can't cast mend pet on the move and have to stop, cast, then start moving again. If you're trying to kite a boss/add, it can wipe you.
Also, if stampede is active you can't rez your pet.

Finally there's a bug shared with spirit bond: it heals the pet for 5%/sec (respectively 2% sec) despite the blood of the rhino talent and glyph of animal bond (+40%/+10% healing received). Also, the glyph didn't work on me - spirit bond healed me for 2% and not 2,2%.
Therefore there may be a bug that makes it so that +healing received% does not affect percentage-based heals. If it's the case, it's a nasty bug for everyone. If it's just hunters that are victims of this bug, it's a 35,5% loss for pet survivability and a 9,1% loss for hunters, and I really noticed it during my beta adventures.

Other bugs I noticed:
Gunship battle was really bugged. Maybe it's because I feigned death at the start? Either way, there were no adds at the start, only on sergeant appeared in 2 portals, no mages or goblins, and 4 axethrowers that didn't move into position.
Many debuffs in old instances still dealt full damage to me - examples: blackout (theralion and valiona, OS'ed me even in 25-man mode with 50% deterrence), the debuff in frostmourne on LK 25H, the ice sphere's debuff on LK 25H, the shadow prison on blood princes, and the magic debuff on ignacious/feludius.

#9 - Sept. 18, 2014, 2:27 a.m.

This is entirely by design, and we view it as fixing an exploit/loophole. Abilities are given cooldowns and tuned accordingly, with the intent that they can be used once per X seconds. The ability to cycle through multiple copies of the same pet to bypass those cooldowns is something that we've wanted to prevent since Mists, but it was not a simple task technically, so we weren't able to cleanly implement it until now. I understand it removes what you saw as fun and harmless tricks in your repertoire when soloing encounters (and which were indeed fun and harmless in that context). However, the ability to do this did cause balance problems in a number of situations and often limited the diversity of hunter pet-taming by causing the "right" answer to be stacking multiple copies of the same pet.