Growl ResistsFollow

Is there a stat or something that I can boost to help the efficacy of Growl? From time to time I am out fighting with my pet when I notice it is having a great deal of trouble keeping hate. When I watch for a while I will see that growl gets resisted. Unusually it's not that often but sometimes it can be several times a fight. It usually ends up with me either tanking or spending much of the fight with my back to the mob drawing the battle out.
Also, is disengage usually enough for dropping your hate a fair amount or is FD necessary? I usually save FD for when things are starting to get bad I am getting to much hate to survive where I would rather just disengage earlier on in the fight. FD just bugs me because of the noise I make so I would rather do that as little as possible.

Just for reference I am a level 41 NE.

When does the next rank of Growl become available to you? I noticed quite frequently throughout the leveling process that as I got towards the end of the "lifespan" of a particular Growl rank, the resist rate went way up. In those cases, it's usually only a level or two before you can get the next rank of Growl (might require taming another pet and learning it from that one so you can teach it to your main pet). I went through something very similar on my Warlock when I was one level shy of being able to get the next rank for Torment. Fighting same level mobs was painful, but once I hit the next level and trained the new Torment rank, everything was fine.

I just bought the level 5 (think it was 5) one at 40. As someone else mentioned it appears to be one of the things you can get from trainers and don't have to learn from another mob.

I am 41 so that makes my current pet (a gorilla.. been trying to learn thunderstomp 2 for so long it's now at maxed loyalty and I still haven't learned it lol) 40 and has the latest growl. I remember when I was messing around and really wanted a boar (I was in early 30s) I got bellygrub which is level 24 I think and his growls were resisted left and right by the 30-32 tigers and panthers right near STV so I thought it was just an issue with his level compared to the mobs. My gorilla shouldn't be having that problem because he is with in like 3 levels max of the mobs I am fighting.

I think those little robots some of the mining mobs spawn may be immune to growl completely or maybe just a high resist rate. I could sort of understand that since they are machines but don't know why I am getting resists on things like panthers or crocs.

have pretty much speced BM. I was MM before and was reading a lot that BM is much better for solo so I switched.

I guess do certain types of pets have a more effective growl then others? I don't think so because I know I have had some issues with my tiger's growl being resisted as well but I don't know enough about the mechanics of these things to know for sure.

Thanks for your help.

Edited, Dec 17th 2007 2:16pm by MrTalos

I don't know what spec you are but if you are MM you can frequently out aggro your pet if you aren't careful. I do it all the time if I'm not watching my meter close enough. Oddly, I was pulling aggro at 70-80% of pet last night, but I think that was a timing issue as I usually noticed a major crit after that and the mobs were just fast off the block coming to me.

BM has less of an issue because the pet does more damage, you personally do a bit less and damage is a great aggro generator. BM hunters have it a bit easier keeping under the aggro overhead. This also help to make them very good at soloing, going from target to target quickly.

I can't speak for SV. Some say they do more, others say they do less. Best benefit of the spec is for non-solo, but I have no idea how they perform in a group aggro condition. Then it's generally more of a tank problem than pet one.

There is no real solution to the issue. You have to watch your aggro as a hunter, especially when you are dumping the planet on your target. It's probable that every spec has the ability to outstrip Growl, but silly MM'ers like me do it very quickly if we aren't careful.

I just recently went from MM to BM at level 70, and what you said seems true in theory, but not in practice.

My pets generate MUCH less threat per second as BM than they do with MM. It's just the mechanics of growl. As several people have mentioned, the amount of threat generated per growl scales with AP. MM hunters naturally have more AP than BM hunters.

When I was MM, I had about 2100 AP, and my cat would generate about 1.5k threat in the first growl. Of course, I was still able to pull aggro off REALLY fast because I also had about 21% crit rating, and if a single one of my hits crit, then I'd gain a ton of threat.

As soon as I went to BM for raiding, my AP dropped to just under 1700 (it's even lower now that I have a few T4 pieces), but my crit rating stayed the same. If I have JUST growl on, my pet can't even generate 1k threat for a least a few seconds. Granted, since I have a ravager, I can keep on growl, gore, and bite on and generate a bit more. I can still pull aggro pretty easy if I'm not careful.

MrTalos, I think the only thing you can do at your level is make sure that you have the highest level of growl on, cower off, and any other skills (Gore, Claw, Bite) turned off. Also, since Growl scales with AP, get as much AP gear as possible, and go light on your crit rating for grinding.

I thought the Growl ability was treated like a spell.
My combat logs are full of "Cat casts Growl on <mob>"
Wouldn't that mean the to hit bonus from Animal Handler is worthless for Growl?
If that's the case, how do you improve your pets ability to cast spells?
A percentage of your stats get transfered to your pet, so, maybe, wear more +INT gear?

Speaking as a druid with regards to my own taunt ability. My taunt is treated as an attack, and the way to reduce resists is to get more +hit. So if the pet growl is treated any way like warrior and druid taunt, i would assume that it would benefit from +hit from the hunter talent. Not sure if the hunters hit rating somehow transfers to the pet as well

As far as learning Thunderstomp 2, Zeromatter is right, just keep spamming the ability over & over, it should be learned quickly. I do the same thing with prowl, dash/dive, screech, and any other ability that doesn't require a target.

About disengage: I actually use disengage if I am in an area with a lot of nearby mobs and gaining adds is going to happen quite a bit. I'll disengage first, the mob runs back to my pet (I almost never see it fail), I start shooting again. Then when I get a runner that brings back a whole party of mobs to dance with me, I still have FD. In my experience, I seem to have a better chance at FD working (not getting resisted) if I do it as soon as I see the mob pack coming for me, rather than waiting until they are on top of me.

my advice is get a threat meter addon like omen , yes it will not stop you from gaining aggro but at least you will see why you get it


i find as BM if i use auto shot it is fine if i use rapid fire it is fine or the talisman i have that increases attack power , all ok , depending on what the threat meter tells me i use other shots as and when my threat is not so high

it is better to take a little longer to kill than to try and blast an enemy to death , unless of course you can kill them before they get to you

Your pet's AP (or str) is the stat that first-hand modifies the threat of growl. Second-hand is your AP (or agi) since your gear scales with your pet. However, the only possible theory of reducing its miss rate would be +spell hit, which is only ever accessible for pets through a draenei party member. It's not sure it will give any impact though, but it works for Taunt, so it might as well for Growl.


In my case a Disengage is enough to get the mobs to hit the pet again, but I do use FD almost exclusively these days.

Also, what spec are you? If you're MM you can't really expect your pet to hold aggro. If your BM I'd find it strange if you did pull aggro, since I have to go all out on my shot rotation to even keep up with my pets DPS (Level 60, all that will change with Steady Shot though).




What the... Aurelius I thought you were a senior hunter...

The miss rate of Growl has nothing to do with the rank of it, but merely the level of the pet. A level 70 pet will successfully growl just as much with Growl (rank 1) as any other rank. And with a level 1 pet if doesn't matter which growl you have trained (this is theoretically speaking...), you'd still get almost exclusively resists even if you had Growl (rank 8).

You also do not need to get Growl off other pets. It's trainable at your pet trainer along with Cobra Reflexes, Avoidance, Natural Armor, Great Stamina and the Resistances.

In the end, all that a new rank of growl does is increase the base threat of the ability (the scaling value remains the same).

The same goes for Warlock pets, I assure you (although, to my knowledge, Torment doesn't scale with any stat).




You need to get Thunderstomp off another Gorilla (if you havn't already). Go just outside Booty Bay and tame an Elder Mistvale Gorilla. Use that pet until you see "You have learned a new spell: Thunderstomp (rank 2)" in your chat screen. Then go teach your main pet that ability (it costs 5 TP, assuming you already have rank 1).


I haven't met a mob yet that's immune to growl. Mechanical mobs are immune to Torment though (unless I'm sadly misstaken). If this resist problem really is as frequent as you say, and not just that you only ever notice when your growl fails rather than when it hits (also bear in mind that you should expect to have aggro on mobs if you're MM), I'd suggest you contact a GM.


I'm going through posts chronologically... Heh, so now I know that you're BM. Gief Armory link?


The only thing that modifies Growl is its rank, your pet's stats and level, and by extension your stats.




I'm a little confused to what you're actually saying here, but I'm going to assume you argue for Growl doing more threat as MM than BM. That is all true, but you need to keep in mind that Growl isn't the only ability your pet uses.

Now, if you went from 2.1k to 1.7k AP by respeccing I'll of course assume that 125 of that is TSA, and another odd 170 Master Marksman. Now, what you have to see here is that you did not only have 400 AP more as MM (transferring to 88 AP to your pet, or (assuming you have passed the Growl AP Threshold) 502 threat per growl)), but your pet also got TSA. That's a direct boost to the AP, and vastly superior to the scaling it gets through you (it also transfers to around 713 extra threat per growl, making it a total of 1215 extra TPG).

Now, at this time we could go deeper into what extent the pets uses growl to hold aggro, and calculate the difference between a BM pet and MM pet, but it's overcourse and not even asked for... so let's not.




While this could be true, I suspect it isn't. I suspect Growl is treated like a spell, just like Taunt. And the +hit from Animal Handler (tooltip-wise) does not apply to spells, although Blizzard have always been bad at formulating tooltips.



This is about all I can think of at the moment. Hope it helps to some extent.

That is because charge, the dash-like ability that boars have, which increases movement speed and stuns your enemy, also increases the boars attack power by a certain amount on its first attack after the charge, which builds up more threat.

I haven't had the gorilla for a long time. Was just something I picked up because I was bored of the "same old same old". I don't have an owl from the outlands but I have a white one from Winterspring that came with Claw 8, Dive 3, Screech 4. There doesn't appear to be any difference other than their color. I would like to pick one up sometime just because I don't exactly like the all white but if the stats will be the same I will just hold off.

Aye he's right. Spell hit was pre-2.3.

Edited, Feb 1st 2008 1:23pm by Xordon