Pet Focus Bug Fixed - General Hunter Discussion - Hunter Forums

I'm sure a lot of you read Warcraft Hunters Union like I do, but figured I would post this just in case. Quoted from there….

One of the little changes that slipped in under the radar with the patch 4.2 hunter changes was a fix to a pet focus bug. This is a seemingly little change that can have an impact on pet dps, and alas it’s an impact in the bad direction.

The pet focus bug was that pet’s focus bar would fill completely any time the hunter’s stats changed. On the surface it doesn’t sound like a terribly big thing, but in practice hunter stats can change fairly often in a raid environment. Any time you get any kind of proc effect or temporary buffs from cooldowns that alters your haste, crit, agility, attack power, etc, you stats are changing. And your pet’s focus would then leap to full regardless of where it was.

This was clearly a bug and certainly shouldn’t have been happening, but the fixing of it is an overall nerf to pet dps at a time when we really didn’t need any kind of dps nerf, no matter how small.

I want to stress that this is something that affects all hunters, not just BM — and it affects only your pet’s basic attacks (claw/bite/smack) that cost focus. Technically BM is hit a bit harder, because their mastery makes their pet’s basic attacks hit harder, but it’s not affecting Kill Command or your pet’s normal melee attacks. This isn’t something that necessarily impacts how often your pet can use it’s basic attack, but rather impacts how much damage that attack does combined with the Wild Hunt pet talent — which lets your pet do more damage with its basic attack, but makes it cost more focus.

The exact amount of dps we’re losing from the focus bug fix is really hard to measure — it depends on how often your stats are changing, and how much focus your pet happened to have when they changed (and of course also on how many ranks of Wild Hunt you had).

People are reporting the loss of thousands of dps here and there, and that’s almost certainly pure fabrication. that is in fact just about all of the dps a MM or SV pet does, after all. But that it is a loss is absolutely fact. I haven’t talked to Zeherah yet to see how this bug is modeled on FemaleDwarf — I don’t know if she was modeling the bug before and has changed it since, or if FD never modeled the pet focus bug.

From my end with a bit of time spent testing, I’m not seeing a really noticeable difference in pet dps output, even in BM spec. Does anyone here have any reliable testing that shows anything different, or way of modeling the dps loss of this?