Release the Hounds!

Core hounds! High on many a hunter's wish list since Molten Core was first released. Sadly we couldn't tame them as they were above our own level. When TBC came around a good few hunters tried and found they were marked as non-tameable. However, WotLK is going to change this. A new talent in the BM tree for hunters "Beast Mastery" allows for the taming of Exotic pets. Exotic pets are much like any other pet, and needs your love and caring like any other pet. (Or just the occassional whip and dog biscuit if you're that sort of person) Devilsaurs, Silithids, Chimerae, Rhinos(northrend only), Worms and Core hounds are all the exotic pets discovered so far. Moths and Wasps will also become tameable in WotLK. These two are not exotic and will thus be available to all hunters. Mania has a nice list of all the new pet models up at Petopia. There's some pretty sweet looking stuff coming. I don't think you'll beat running around with e devilsaur very easily though. You can compare all the pets and their abilities here on the wowhead list. Raids So, you may be wondering what will you end up using in raids? * Wasps look to be pretty awesome for a raid buff : Decreases the armor of the target by 1260 for 20 sec. Which has a 6 sec cooldown and does quite decent damage as well. * Worms will get a similar ability but less value: -785 (stacks 5x). * Spore bats got a skill which does -700 to target armor. * Wolves however get Party members within 20 yards of the wolf receive an extra 5% damage to their next Physical attack. Lasts 10 sec. Which is a lot better scaling than +40 damage would have been... Update: The howl got changed to an attack power value. That is..... If blizzard hadn't decided to change some debuff stacking. The wasp sting will not stack with the druid faery fire, acid spit (worm) won't stack with sunder armor or expose armor. So much for pet buffs being useful in raids. not. Some of the pets get a cast speed reduction (curse of tongues), some get thunderclap, some get a snare or a slow. Each pet will have a unique ability as well as a generic focus dump that does the same damage as all the other pet focus dumps do. (Bite, smack and claw) At least hunters won't need to worry too much about utility in raids. Just get the right pet to replace another member's debuff and you're set to go. Great for PvP as well. Also interesting to note is that pets, Instead of the previous -5% -7% +10%, all pets now only get +5% +10% to their stats. See here for old values and here for the new values. A decent improvement for most pets, especially in terms of armor and health. DPS? I'm not certain whether the pet instant attacks will scale with attack power, or how much. Some might, some might not. Previously only spells such as lightning breath and poison scaled with attack power. Hopefully blizzard has found time to implement a generic damage increase to pet abilities across the board. I can only speculate right now though, perhaps someone else will be able to shed some light into that matter? From what I see though the main contenders for highest dps pets would be: * Wasps. If you have no druid or warlock in the group. -Attack power is always quite powerful, and the wasp has a low 6 sec cooldown on it's special where most other pets have 10 seconds or more. The wasp also has a +10% base damage modifier. * Devilsaurs. Also blessed with a nice +10% damage modifier, and a self buff which stacks up to three times. Allowing an additional +9% total extra damage for itself. Self buffs are good for soloing, but generally less wanted for raids. * Wolves. These may be a pretty strong contender, depending if you can get your hunter into a melee group or someplace where your entire group will benefit from the attack power buff. Other hunters will do great since you'd also buff their pets. Again, a 10% base damage modifier for the wolf itself. Other than that most pets have gotten their utility abilities nerfed or changed in such a way that you'd probably be best not bringing them to a raid by default unless your raid is very unbalanced. Or more likely, you're going out for some PvP!