4 Tank Pets

I didn't play in Vanilla but I've multiboxed since Wrath, but I just want to check that I'm not being naive in thinking I can just blast my way through this Classic lark.

My planned team:
Mage lead with 2 locks & 2 hunters.

My aim:

• Farming resources & gold to fund other activities like twinking & professions.
• I would prefer to avoid the traditional tank/healer/3dps setup as I want to farm resources in the open world and find having a melee class to be annoying and slows me down as opposed to running around with pack on dotting mobs up and letting pets handle things.

My questions are:

• Will 4 pets be sufficient to complete most if not all dungeons?
• Is there a big difference between the tanking effectiveness of warlock & hunter pets?
• Should I stfu and just go with warrior/priest/3dps?

I can't imagine trying to do dungeons without a healer or rez, but I'll let others with more pet experience speak to the viability.

I can’t speak to the effectivity in dungeons, but I intend on a similar plan for my first team: 5 warlocks to aid the simplicity. The mixed composition certainly adds fun complexity though.

You would lose a tank pet, but if soloing dungeons is a huge goal, adding a healer might be worthwhile. Adds another set of buffs as well

Clearly the most slam dunk solution is tank+ healer+ 3 dps. The single melee character won’t slow you down as much if you intend to loot, as you’ll still have to run to every single body

There isnt' any /focus in Classic and there are multiple discussions on the negative implications of that for pets, especially multiple/all pet parties.

I think a Hunter Pet with mend pet (which also cleanses) can be the most resilient but running multiple hunters can be problematic due to dead zones.

I would at least take a healer (ideally a Priest who can do an AoE heal or an AoEish heal like Chain Heal from a Shaman). A healer should help the pets last longer and/or allow you to rez folk and helps enable the use of Life Tap.

I haven't been able to test anything myself but am also planning on trying 4 DPS pet classes with a shaman healer.

I would think with the right pets such as owl/carrion bird for screech, a nice tanky pet like a boar/turtle along with an imp for fire shield/stam, VW for aoe taunt, and a shaman for totems or priest with bubble it would be doable.

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The single melee character won’t slow you down as much if you intend to loot, as you’ll still have to run to every single body

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I didn't consider this to be honest, kinda forgot about the whole looting thing. Good point.

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There isnt' any /focus in Classic and there are multiple discussions on the negative implications of that for pets, especially multiple/all pet parties.

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I'm pretty sure I don't use focus when multiboxing as I prefer to use an assist by name method using Isboxer, or are you referring to something else in Classic that I'm unaware of? I haven't subbed to Wow at all this year so can't really remember what I did.

Hmm, you've given me plenty to think about guys, thank you all.

As I really do want to run dungeons, as well as farm in the world, I'll probably scrap the 4 pet tanks idea and run warrior/priest with some mages, it's familiar territory for me and keeps things a bit more straight forward.

Cheers.

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Originally Posted by nodoze

There isnt' any /focus in Classic and there are multiple discussions on the negative implications of that for pets, especially multiple/all pet parties.

I think a Hunter Pet with mend pet (which also cleanses) can be the most resilient but running multiple hunters can be problematic due to dead zones.

I would at least take a healer (ideally a Priest who can do an AoE heal or an AoEish heal like Chain Heal from a Shaman). A healer should help the pets last longer and/or allow you to rez folk and helps enable the use of Life Tap.

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I leveled a group of hunters up pre cata, and it was very easy. The hunters will basically never pull agro, the pets just pingpong the threat between them, if a pet goes down, just have a res pet in your rotation macro, so that if the macro returns the pet dead, it res's the pet. Unless you go crazy, and pull too much, it's just very unlikely that you will get all the pets killed before you can res any dead and put them back in the fight. That and having all that DPS makes quick work of pulls.

My group was 4 hunters and 1 paladin, so I was healing with the paladin, but frankly, you kill so fast, my paladin wasn't having to heal too heavily. I will say, I was running mostly a full set of 'looms, including dwarven hand cannons, so, the DPS output was pretty optimal, but it was so stupidly easy clearing dungeons with this group that even having to actually get drops to equip your hunters, it still wouldn't be that difficult.

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Originally Posted by Mercbeast

I leveled a group of hunters up pre cata, and it was very easy. The hunters will basically never pull agro, the pets just pingpong the threat between them, if a pet goes down, just have a res pet in your rotation macro, so that if the macro returns the pet dead, it res's the pet. Unless you go crazy, and pull too much, it's just very unlikely that you will get all the pets killed before you can res any dead and put them back in the fight. That and having all that DPS makes quick work of pulls.

My group was 4 hunters and 1 paladin, so I was healing with the paladin, but frankly, you kill so fast, my paladin wasn't having to heal too heavily. I will say, I was running mostly a full set of 'looms, including dwarven hand cannons, so, the DPS output was pretty optimal, but it was so stupidly easy clearing dungeons with this group that even having to actually get drops to equip your hunters, it still wouldn't be that difficult.

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Yeah retail is braindead mode though, this is Classic :)

You're aware that classic was never difficult, right?

I main tanked dungeons when I was leveling at launch, with an enhance shaman. The first jump in dungeon difficulty in "classic" was Diremaul. Before diremaul, everything that was 5 man content, was literally face roll.

People have this perception that dungeons in vanilla were hard. They were not hard. That perception comes from private servers that cranked up the difficulty by making the mobs much harder.

People 5 manned every instance in vanilla, DURING vanilla, with 5 shamans. 4 Hunters + a healer will plow the content as well.