6.x Raiding Pets

Here I am, swapping back and forth between Exotic Munitions and Focusing Shot depending how much I actually need to move during a fight, when I have the option to just not use a pet.  Depending where you look, either Focusing Shot or Lone Wolf is the way to go for Marksman, but I haven't even tried Lone Wolf yet.

Why not?  Two words:  battle rez.

That's right, I'm raiding with a Crane.  Some raids, we have no druids, no warlocks, and our only death knight is one of the tanks.  If that tank drops, it could easily mean a wipe, and no one likes repair bills.  (We're saving for a yak. Ahem.)  Gift of Chi-Ji gives me the option to bring up a raid member without having to switch to Beast Mastery to bring a Quilen.

Now, there are downsides to this.  I have occasionally worried some people as I wandered into the maze of the Twin Ogron's flames to find a dropped tank and pick them up.  The cast has a 40-yard range, but in practice this means you may have to send your crane to stand closer to the unfortunate's corpse in order to reach them.

Optimal DPS versus raid utility is a trade-off you make sometimes; nowadays, with pet DPS normalized regardless of what buff they're bringing, you can focus on bringing the best pet for the raid - if you need to bring one at all.  The buff redistribution that happened with the 6.0 patch means that no longer am I bringing a sporebat to every raid (regardless of how amusing Stampede was with one).  The nine standard buffs are almost always covered now, and on the occasion that we've been missing multistrike, one of the other hunters has been able to bring that.

One of the reasons I've opted to go with the crane is that I don't frequently die early in a fight, my DPS is usually just kind of average, and I'm good at watching what's going on.  (The third is likely feeding into the second.)  This means I'm generally still alive and not in immediate danger of dying if a tank drops, since it's been quite a while since I regularly rode just under the tanks for threat, and I notice when a tank or healer drops.  I also notice how much mana the other healers have if it's a healer, I've got a Weak Aura set up to monitor how many battle rezes we have available, and I not infrequently can easily pull up Recount to check either the healing or DPS meters without too much affecting my output or immediate safety.

So if we've got two battle rezes up and three DPS down, I'll pull up Recount, see who was riding highest before their demise, and burn one of the rezes on a DPS, saving one in case we have a tank or healer drop.  Some fights you get to know you're more likely to lose one or the other - most of us only raid about six hours a week at the most, and then maybe LFR, so we expect folks to die sometimes.

As our raid pool slowly shrinks due to interest attrition, the people who need a battle rez aren't coming as often, and our raid group is getting to know each other better, so on non-progression fights, the tanks don't die as often.  I'm still not really inclined to go pet-less, though, since Focusing Shot helps make me stand still more (for the mastery buff), and Exotic Munitions means fire arrows that I've wanted since forever.

Dragon Soul meant raiding with Coby, my armor penetration ravager; Siege meant raiding with Clarence, the spell haste sporebat; so far raiding in Warlords means raiding with Lucius, the green crane with the Gift of Chi-Ji, who was originally acquired to be part of the Aesop's Fables stampede group.

Battle Pet: Bob

I know, I know... the Ghostly Skull is supposed to be named after @CM_Zarhym, but... come on, Dresden Files.  If you've seen any of the one season that made it to TV, Terrence Mann as Bob was amazing, and Bob in the books is generally always entertaining.

My undead pet family always feels like one of my weakest, so part of how I picked ones to level up after the initial few (Andrew, one of the shades from Deadwind Pass, and Hilde, my Val'kyr) was I went with ones pet tamers used that I found annoying to deal with:  the Scourged Whelpling, the Crawling Claw, the mariachi dude when I could get him, and of course the Ghostly Skull, because Ghostly Bite can dish out some serious damage.

The Val'kyr may be a more commonly used undead pet, due to the "howl bomb" configuration - with the Pandaren Water Spirit and anything, usually Chrominius, that can cast Howl or a similar damage-doubling ability - which can be very effective versus a single boss pet, but I've found Bob particularly useful in two of the NPC battles: Tarr in Nagrand, with his triple murloc team, and the Diablo trio in the Menagerie.  I think I've used him versus the Goren and Gronn Menagerie teams, as well, but the last time I did those was before I started taking notes, so I'm not completely sure.

What I do know is that, despite Ghostly Bite's stun, it can be devastatingly effective, especially when timed with something (for example, Geyser) that is going to stun your opponent, so the stun rounds line up and become moot.  This can be particularly useful against Gromli, whose Haymaker is as likely to miss and stun him as not, and against Murkalot, whose Falling Murloc will stun him.

Another benefit of Bob is that the one I've got is breed #7 - H/P, which means he's got a lot of health and a power rating over 300, so Ghostly Bite usually hits for over 700.  On humanoid pets, it's amazing, and if you've got it combined with a damage doubler, it can be way out there.  (Not as mind boggling as Chrominius's Surge of Power with Howl up versus a flyer, but still nothing to sneeze at.)  The stun frequently doesn't matter if you're using him as a closer.

If the stun makes you too nervous, you can substitute in Spectral Strike, whose miss chance isn't as much of a hindrance against the Diablo team, since you know Tyri is going to throw out Darkness.

I frequently team Bob up with the Scourged Whelpling and the Crawling Claw for these teams - since the Lord of Terror is a magic pet, the Scourged Whelpling's dragon abilities are useful, and then Death and Decay and Plagued Blood give your later pets some healing.  Like Bob, the Crawling Claw hits hard, so it can knock things down fast, and the undead family's extra turn doesn't hurt.

In the end, only one question remains:  Where in Draenor did Tarr find three murlocs?

Playlist: Bronze Dragon

As awesome as the Awesome Mix (Vol. 1) was, let's face it: mix tapes are dead.  No, nowadays, with all our digital music and its fancy players, now we have playlists.

If, somehow, you've gotten tired of the soundtrack in Draenor (or, more likely, just need something with words to sing along to), here's a bronze dragon themed playlist culled from my library.

• Back in Time (Huey Lewis & the News) - Just from the first verse you can tell this was written for the Back to the Future movies; it is probably the most bronze-dragony song on this list.
• The Longest Time (Billy Joel)
• Time (Pink Floyd)
• Time is Running Out (Muse)
• Suspended in Time (Olivia Newton John/ELO)
• A Good Idea at the Time (OK Go) - I'm sure Kairoz thought it was a good idea at the time, too, but we know what happened to him.
• This Is the Time (Billy Joel)
• All Kinds of Time (Fountains of Wayne)
• We Have All the Time in the World (Louis Armstrong)
• Rocket Man (Elton John) - If the connection isn't clicking, "And I think it's going to be a long long time..."
• Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is (Chicago)
• The Right Time (The Corrs) - I didn't realize this album is so hard to find nowadays!
• Haven't Got Time for the Pain (Carly Simon)
• As Time Goes By (Casablanca)
• Time (Hootie & the Blow Fish)
• Closing Time (Semisonic)
• Mr. Sandman (The Chordettes) - Not time, per se, but...  Hourglasses, sands of time, all of that.

Now we just need to be able to pipe these into our garrison's jukeboxes...