Spirit BondFollow

Your a scholar...

Hit Search Forums- Spirit Bond, there is your answer

I may be a scholar, but the search feature is limited to premium members and I'm cheap.

My personal opinion on this is that for solo play, Spirit Bond is one of the most subtle yet beneficial investments of 2 talents you could hope for.

The reason for this is because any decent solo Hunter with an appropriate tanking pet probably isn't going to be taking too many hits, but they're going to be fighting almost non-stop. This means the hits you do take can be very slow to regen, since your HP doesn't regen while you're in combat. Also, when you're in a tough fight and you've got Mend Pet going on your pet but he's still losing more HP than he's regaining, when you see those insignificantly low seeming numbers flash in green over your pet's portrait, you're grateful. Believe me.

That, however, is the only practical use for Spirit Bond. Since I like to do the solo grind at a pretty quick pace, I loved it. I pause to feed my pet when his happiness icon goes yellow, and that's about it. There were times when I would have the same food for my Hunter in my inventory for so long I'd end up feeding it to my pet because I never needed it...it was so rare that my HP go so low that I needed to stop and top up that HP restoring food was moot.

As far as saving your *** in a tough fight, that's a big fat maybe. It's a shame I never had a damage meter running during my time in the solo grind as a BM Hunter. I'm sure I'd be pretty amazed at how much HP Spirit Bond returned to me and my pet over the course of a 2-3 hour grind. Nevertheless, it'll help in a close fight, but it's not going to save you in an epic conflict.

For group fights, I would say it's really not worth it. You could probably bring more utility to your group by putting those 2 talent points somewhere else. (Imp. Revive Pet seems to be a popular alternative, especially in Outland instances where pets have a disturbing tendancy to die very quickly).

(Sneaky side note: I downloaded the PTR Client today and during the install I read through the 2.3 patch notes that it showed me. Blizzard is planning to make it so that when you engage a pet on a target in group play, your pet will automatically try to move and remain behind the mob throughout the fight to avoid frontal cleaves :D)

Spirit Bond is a very subtle talent ability. It's not going to wow you, but I found it very useful.

It's a great Talent, if you have 2 free Talent points to spend. And there are piles of better things in the BM tree to spend those 2 points on.

Sure, it helps for solo grinding. But the Hunter is one of the best classes at solo grinding, and so we don't need any help there.

In PvP, do the math as though you were fighting yourself: Each Auto-shot or Steady Shot does about 600 damage, and you fire one of each every 2 seconds. How many additional seconds of life would Spirit Bond give you, were you fighting yourself? None, because you'd be dead before the first tick of SB Health came in. If that first tick did come in, you'd be dead before it made a difference.

Against classes which don't do damage as fast as you, it might give you a second or two of additional life, but is that worth offsetting your damage through the loss of the 2 Talents SB will replace? Nope.

In PvE, Hunters don't take a lot of damage. When we do it usually comes in fast and kills us, or we FD and avoid death. Not something SB will prevent. SB will help against the odd AOE effect or damage from random chargers or DOTS or whatnot. But so will a competent healer. Or a Heal pot. Or a Bandage.

So, no, it doesn't make a large enough difference with 2 points in it.

QFT for me anyway.

I missed the fact I never had to bandage or eat when I speced away from it. I like the idea that while solo grinding if I get an add I can sit there and take the hits from a spell caster while my pet is killing the original mob (Im only taking the hits for like 3 or 4 shots if needed but it keeps my FD for something more important.)

Then when I am done and killed both mobs I can heal while I am fighting something. I never really ever noticed my health below half unless I was mounted... then I got kind of cranky and got off my mount to kill what ever was in the area while healing.

With aspect of the viper, I don't ever drink, but I also do not have spirit bond and have never missed it. I can grind pretty much continually, and if by some bizaare chance I actually lose some health, a 5 second bandage takes care of it.

I am back and all the more astonished at lazy people, but here you go:



http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/class.html?wclass=5;mid=1191264205143895988;num=13;page=1

TOP POST on the damn 4th page!

Now I am going to take a nap because of the hge amount of effort that took me, and in all of what? 5 seconds?

I am getting tired of the whole SB thread coming up every 2 pages...

No one can argue the fact that it helps. That's a given, every little bit of health returned is helpful in some way. But your numbers are all base numbers. 12% every minute, 720% every hour, but how much of that is actually usefull. You aren't low on health every second of every minute of every hour. So of that 720% of your health returned, how much of that was returned when you already have full health.

To me it becomes more of what I would be giving up to take that talent. My oppinion is there are other talents available that I wouldn't be willing to give up, just for a 2% health return every 10 seconds.


Edit:


Woot a thread I created was linked woohoo :-P

Edited, Oct 16th 2007 3:10pm by SynnTastic

SB doesn't Tick if your at full health. You or your pet has to be damaged for it to tick at all. This is one of those, you feel I feel, things that really can go based on what your opinion is.

In my opinion it's worth it for "ME"

In your opinion it's not worth it for "YOU"

Pure and simple. Try it for a bit with and then try it without that will let ya know if you like it better or not.

The point is, you can't say it's useless because it's not. Scatter Shot while grinding as a BM Hunter? That could be classed as useless as well, since you've got pretty much the same thing on your pet in the form of Intimidate. I like Spirit Bond, you like bandages. Your cost in bandages (or lost income from selling them) is my repair bill and ammunition cost covered for a prolonged grind.

You can say it's not to your liking, or that you prefer to put your talents into something else, but when you say it's "useless", you make yourself seem narrow minded and really not on the ball. Wording is key, and there are a great many people not unlike myself who would find benefit in it but would be turned off from trying it by such a vehement stance to the negative.



2. Out of 61 on a level 70 Hunter. I'd hardly call that massive.



AoE. Adds. That momentary bit of aggro you pull on a caster who melts your face a bit before your pet gets things back under control. Never anything major, but adding up over time having it taken care of automatically is nice for some people.

Lastly, you're getting out of hand with the accusations of laziness. There's no ******* way I would ever read through 4 pages of thread titles to see if something was discussed here 2-4 weeks ago. Behave yourself. You've enjoyed a certain amount of leeway with the, "Ya, that's North for ya," but now it's time to get real and get back in touch with reality. Don't like the topic? Don't click on the thread. If you do click on it when it's clearly labeled as a topic you don't want to see because it was covered 4 pages ago, try to be an adult about it and recognize that if it's not on the first page (maybe second), it didn't happen. (Excluding, "Wut is teh best pet!?!?!" threads, of course.)

Wait, excuse me? Was that posted towards me? I do believe you are thinking about someone else right here. I mean, sure I'm not your nicest playmate in these forums but I am most certainly not the only one tired of lazy posters. But to my own chagrin I haven't even posted anything about that for quite some time.

You are referring to Caldone's answer, yeah?

I always behave. Whether it is good or bad behaviour just depends on the people posting on these boards. When you think about it, it is completely out of my hands. I can't help it if people decide to post smacktarded crap here, so I am pretty much Scott Free on these matters. Fuzzy logic saves the day!