The pet AI is so useless it would be hilarious if it wasnt so sad

[daxia3]

All classes that has a pet, mainly locks and hunters and hunters in particular suffers from the "idiot pet AI problem". It seems to be worse for hunters in my experience, especially if you take the talent that gives you two pets, and if you can believe it, the AI of the second pet is even WORSE than the AI for the original one. Sometimes you have to wait for minutes for the second pet to spawn and sometimes it does not spawn at all. Sometimes it spawns with almost no HP.

What annoys me even more is when in a BG I feel that I need to retreat and camouflage so I set my pets to passive so they will stop fighting and get me out of combat. The second pet still keeps fighting somewhere on the other side of the map, while the first one comes back, and since Im still in combat, I cant do shit.

Another thing that is really annoying is that its super difficult to see where your pets actually are in many scenarios. I wish that you could mark them with a huge fu#cking blinking red arrow or something so that you know where they are.

Is it so hard to just have the pets "do" what you tell them to? I tell you to attack, you go attack. I tell you to stop attacking, you stop attack. I dont see how this can be a problem? And for the second pet, just have it do 100% exactly what the first one does without the special abilities.

The water elemental for mages can also be enormously painful. Sometimes it does not attack the enemies and sometimes it attacks enemies you dont want it to attack. I actually have to make macros for all my spells with a /petattack under the spell so that the pet actually do attack.

Its pathetic.

[Raugnaut]

Believe it or not, it was significantly worst in past expansions, especially on any bosses that was not precisely on the ground. Pet AI has SIGNIFICANTLY improved since then! But yea, still aweful. MoP came close to fixing it for hunters with a talent that gave pets a 20 yard AA range, but then blizz backpedeled on that for whatever strange, odd, and inconceivable reason.

Pet's are also pretty terrible about using abilities as often as they can. Some past examples include having to macro your pets special ability (I.E. Claw, Bite, Smack, Shadow Lash, ect) and spam it so that they didn't resource cap during BL or other periods of high haste (Part of the reason blizz added the whole "Consume double focus when over half focus to deal double damage" to all hunter pet main abilities).

And even now, you'll still want to have macros to ensure that your pets use their abilities the max number of times during I.E. CDs, procs, pots, ect. While it's definetly not a large DPS increase, there is still a small difference between letting your pet attack as it wants, and maximizing the amount of time your pet uses it's specials during a proc.