Hunter Pet Raid Buffs and Debuffs — A Handy Chart

I’m in UR Woods, Shootin’ UR Mobs

For the last few days I’ve been leveling my Hunter and oh man, is it ever fun!  I’d almost forgotten how easy everything seems as a Hunter.  Round up a dozen mobs and nuke them down?  Why yes, I can do that.  So far my pet has only died once to an overzealous pull, and by that time there were only two mobs left so I finished them off myself with no problem.  Run across a Pandaria rare spawn?  No worries!  I don’t even have to bother about most mechanics because my pet eats the damage while I stand safely at a distance.  I’m not even Beast Mastery — I’m specced Survival and just use the Glyph of Misdirection to keep aggro on my pet.  It’s awesome!

Not to mention all the taming of new pets, of course.  Whoever convinced Blizzard to expand the pet stable to 50 slots has my undying gratitude!  I randomly came across tracks for Savage,  the Hunter-only rare spawn white tiger, and totally managed to tame him!  It was an adrenaline pumping experience — the dark green tracks were so hard to see on the green Jade Forest background and I kept getting jumped and dismounted by nearby mobs — but I eventually caught him in my flare and got him.  I was so excited!  I renamed him Penumbra and he’s my new favorite pet.

I’ve also picked up a few other pets, but I won’t bore you with a full list of them.  Suffice to say that I’m starting to worry that 50 slots won’t be enough.

Oh, and I went out and tamed one of every color of Pandaria tiger, just so I could have a rainbow Stampede.  It’s hilariously epic.

Of course, getting them all to face the same direction is like… herding cats.  *Ba-doom TISH*

Yeah, Yeah, Enough With the Stories, Where’s This Chart You Promised?

So as I was running around collecting 10 different colored Cats, I started to wonder what pets I really need for providing group buffs.  I mean, what if I fill my stable with adorable Cats and then discover I have to abandon a bunch of them to make room for Sporebats and Spiders?  To find out which pets I still needed to collect I decided to make myself a handy-dandy chart.  This chart includes the minimum number of pets a Hunter needs to cover every necessary raid buff or debuff, which buff/debuff each pet brings, what other classes/specs bring the same buff/debuff and then, for my own reference, which pets I have that could cover each one.

Before I post my chart I need to acknowledge the two sources of information that I combined together:

1. The Hunter Pets Buff List and the Best Hunter Pets by Frostheim of the Warcraft Hunter’s Union
2. Mists of Pandaria Buffs and Debuffs by Zarac on WoWhead.

This may not be the prettiest formatting ever, but it’s concise and (hopefully) easy to read.  I hope someone out there finds it useful!

Click to embiggen.

If you want to download the Excel spreadsheet for your own use, click here: Hunter Pets and Raid Buffs Downloadable.  If it opens as Read Only just use “Save As” and you’ll be able to edit it.

A Few Additional Notes

There are three Buffs/Debuffs not listed on the chart:

1. Attack Power (+10% melee and ranged attack power). Brought passively by all Hunters, so if you’re a Hunter and you’re in a group, good job.
2. Weakened Blows (-10% physical damage done).  This is provided by every tank spec.  If your raid doesn’t have any tanks then, um… good luck?  But if you really want to have your bases covered then a Bear or a Carrion Bird can provide it.
3. Mortal Wounds (-25% healing received).  I figure this is more of a PvP debuff, and if there’s ever an encounter that requires it you can cover it yourself with Widow Venom.  But, again, if you want to cover your bases a Devilsaur will provide it, but you’ll need to be Beast Mastery to tame one.

If anyone who plays a Hunter as a main sees any errors, please let me know.  Also, I use Open Office instead of Excel, so let me know if the spreadsheet gives you any formatting errors.