This is yet another Spark Post off something over at Aspect of the Hare today... and its not even a regular post! No, its something from the comments section on this post. And I couldn't agree with Pike more. I tested out a gorilla for three levels. Its just not to my liking, I felt that it was actually too easy to play. I mean the AoE grind is fun, I will admit that... but um, that's why I have a paladin. No joke. Di is an AoE Prot Paladin because I like to drag her out and go AoE things. It also is a nice break from dealing with three hard hitting things at once on a cat because the hunter accidentally got in a little over her head - it happens more frequently than you'd think with Tzia and Ruka.
When that happens I have to carefully de-tangle the mess before the fourth and fifth adds jump in. Ruka can handle three, even four if we manage to lock it down in a trap, but five will end up getting the kitty killed even if we've dropped three already. I know that's her limit if I don't have a heal ticking on her from the start... and pulls like the one I describe are not planned a lot of the time, usually because I misjudged the social aggro radius of the mobs and got more than what I wanted.
Threat management without killing pet... its something every hunter learns and at times hunters will really push the limits and see just how far one pet can go before you know you are at your skill breaking point. And it can be different for each pet. Back before boars lost the ability to hold threat against a kara geared 70 hunter, I could go up to seven or eight if I really pushed it on the pig. But I built that and learned it over time.
Those with gorillas throw the pet at seven or eight to start off, and it works. It works really, really well. However, I fear we may see so many new hunters using a crutch called gorilladin that when it comes time to try and raid and the like they will have a harder time understanding aggro management. Aggro management from a pet that really can dish out a ton of threat versus a tank who may not be able to generate as much (for reasons of bad rotation, or just not understanding his/her role very well yet) will get the hunter in trouble.
In my experience, it was damn near impossible to pull mobs off the gorilla after a little bit of aggro was gained. This is not the case in longer fights in raids or bad pulls in instances where the hunter jumps up the meter in leaps and bounds and is forced to FD just to keep from yanking the boss or heavy hitting trash onto them. I learned that very early on when I was working with a cat. Sometimes I would get ahead of Ruka or Lilith and I would have to scale back a bit to keep it from coming to me. I quickly learned the same thing in most groups if I had a tank that couldn't quite maintain what the pet could for aggro while I was soloing.
Some hunters in the past, prior to the introduction of gorillidans didn't learn that concept. I remember arguing with one hunter that supposedly had a 70 warrior, who said that a pet or a hunter could not pull threat off a tank. I almost died laughing. I flat out told him his hunters were bad, sucked at their jobs, and if they couldn't pull threat off a tank, they weren't playing right. Hunters definitely can pull threat. A large chunk of the time we are working to maintain steady DPS without pulling aggro.
Gorillas are hard to pull aggro off. Most tanks aren't. If new hunters never really learn that, things could get very messy very quickly. And since hunters already deal with a giant mess called huntard, I can see a few hunters screwing up royally (who am I kidding - a lot of hunters) which would make it harder on the rest of us to actually be accepted in groups, and we already have a hard enough time as it is.
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