Neilaren has posted four videos testing several aspects of the new hunter level 87 ability, Stampede.
Part One: Stampede with Large Exotics
Neilaren: As of 4/13/12, hunter pets are bugged to be their original size pre-tame. Stampede is the level 87 hunter ability, that brings all 5 of your active pets out to smack the foe for 10 seconds, on a 10 minute cooldown. A hunter’s Army of the Beasts, if you will.
Part Two: Spirit Mend
A quick test of my “Spirit Mend Me!” macro with 3 spirit beasts in my active set shows that I got 3 different Spirit Mends cast on me at once during Stampede! By the way, if you’re not specced Beast Mastery and you have exotic pets in your active five when you use Stampede, the exotic pet(s) will not be called.
Part Three: Beast Cleave
The verdict here, after checking combat logs, is that only the main active pet gains Beast Cleave when I use Multi Shot. I guess I can file this under “working as intended”, since I’d assume five pets being able to aoe-cleave is too much burst, even for a ten-minute cooldown ability. By the way, Beast Cleave is a new Beast Master passive ability (and no, sadly, the name is not finalized), where when the hunter uses Multi Shot, the pet gains the ability to hit all targets around it with its basic attacks.
Part Four: Bestial Wrath
Does Bestial Wrath affect all pets during Stampede? Thankfully, for everyone who isn’t me, it does not. I wish [Stampede] was just a little longer, especially since it may take pets a few seconds just to reach the target. I guess I always need to make sure I’m in melee range before I cast it, for minimum downtime.
Something else I noticed. See how my Skoll pet wasn’t attacking in the last few videos? He was set on Passive mode as an active pet, hence, for now, it seems calling him through Stampede calls his “active” version, which then behaves passively. So, hunters in beta, make sure your pets are not on passive before you use Stampede.
Visit Neilaren’s (Coxyko’s) YouTube channel for more hunter videos.
Hopefully they’ll change the passive stampede problem. It would be a hassle to each time, before you dismiss, put your pets back on assist/agressive. At the same time, you can’t realy keep your pet on either of those, as you’d lose the control over it.
I’m BM so I should like Stampede but I just don’t like it. I feel like it will either be OP or get nerfed to useless. It just seems like a gimmick ability.
I’ll say the same thing I said on hunter forums:
Dislike the idea of having a whole tier based on AI pets, 1: it tends to be buggy which can make it useless, 2: it’s too easy to counter, 1 nova and all the crows/beasts whatever are out of the game. Wasn’t massively found of the trap tier that the pet tier replaced but transmorph trap was good, I wish they would make a tier based on longer cooldowns (damage cooldowns etc) as right now we really don’t have much with the removal of rapid recup (no more focus from rapid fire).
Stampede is really lame, looks bad too imo (a clusterf**k to be honest). Will make targetting really annoying in PvP, but beta is still in early stages so can’t complain too much, hopefully they will sort some things out