Brainy pets

As cunning as a fox what used to be professor of cunning at Oxford University, but has moved on, and is now working for the UN at the high commission of international cunning planning.

But are our pets as cunning as that? Do they live up to the name? Is there any point actually taking a cunning pet?

First things first, in patch 3.0/WotLK there is no such thing as a bad pet all pets have a focus dump which is the main hindrance for pets in the current version of the game and no pets have a negative to their stats (well except casters *sigh*) No-one will laugh at you for taking a spider anymore, no-one will look upon with shame when you walk around with your sporebat, and no-one can force you to take a damn butt-ugly ravager squicky-buggy sorry excuse for a pet which deserves nothing but to be squashed under the neared fel reaver!

I have been asked, certainly not at gunpoint, to mention the Pooky is not deserving to be squashed by a fel reaver, and in fact deserves hugs, treats and love!

Now, as for cunning pets, well a lot of people seem confused by them. Ferocity pets are obviously the dps pets of choice, tenacity are clearly the best tanks, so whats cunning there for? Well people like to say things like utility, others like to say pvp, which certainly suits a lot of their abilities, personally though I think they can be called the "burst dps" pets, this is down to 3 talents: cornered, feeding frenzy and wolverine bite.

Cornered and feeding frenzy both give a damage boost, although cornered clearly gives the bigger boost, to make use of it you have to ride a dangerous wave of keeping your pet at 35% health or less, is it possible to get the 50% damage bonus from cornered all the time? sure, get your pet killed and res it, so long as you have 1 or less points in improved revive pet your golden. Is it feasible to deliberately have your pet at 35% health at any time? Well, actually sometimes yes, if you know that the creatures your attacking have no aoe attacks that will kill your very fragile pet, and your healers know not to heal it, and you have someone tanking for you, sure go for it, but make sure you know the abilities of what your fighting, it only takes 1 or 2 hits to incapacitate a pet at such low health!

Feeding frenzy is the far weaker, far safer version of cornered, its probably what most people will go for, though its under 25% of the bonus cornered gives it activates when the enemy is at 35%, and that's when you want a dps boost in general, at the end of a fight.

Wolverine bite gets a special mention simply because its the most damaging pet ability of all, I have seen this happy fellow crit for over 1000, and that's as survival spec! I want to see a Beast mastery hunter use this with cornered, bestial wrath and kill command all up and once, that will be a big big number for a pet to be putting out.

I suppose the other thing that should be mentioned is roar of recovery, 30% of your mana back over 9 seconds is quite nice, but the cooldown is a whopping 6 minutes, fortunately survival hardly has to worry about mana outside of pvp, and BM have enough pet talents to take everything they want as well as talents to reduce the cooldown, so its only really marksmanship who this doesn't really help out. A 3-4 minute cooldown would seem more fair to me, but don't expect them to change it for me, ghostcrawler hasn't been returning my calls!

The rest comes down to exactly which cunning pet you choose, many are tailored with pvp abilities, others have more pve centered attacks. It down to you to pick your pets with all the cunning that they will exhibit after you tame them.