So one of the changes they’ll be making is a 35% reduction to pet damage when Animal Companion is specced in.
Animal Companion: Your Call Pet additionally summons the first pet from your stable. This pet will obey your Kill Command, but cannot use pet family abilities and both of your pets deal 35% reduced damage.
Why? I legit cannot understand the reasoning behind this when we do lackluster damage as is, only barely doing decent damage in sustained ST combat. Even that’s about to change because a bunch of classes that did less ST damage than us will be getting buffed, meaning we’ll be overtaken even in that area before even taking this change into consideration.
Worse still, our cleave damage has been very, very poor as it stands, and since it comes exclusively from our pets they’ve effectively decided that BM simply doesn’t need cleave at all.
The one spec that needed help most, and instead they nerf us deeper into the grave…
That’s nothing but a tooltip change. The 35% deficit has always been there, ever since they first added the AC talent back in BfA beta.
What they have changed with it is that it no longer affect your other summons, in addition to your main pets. In the past, any pet or guardian you summoned also dealt reduced damage as a result of Animal Companion. Obviously not intended but, it was a matter of a flawed implementation, the deficit aura was applied to all pet damage, which includes any and all of your summons, not just your main pets.
For some reason, last I checked, BMs new ability “Call of the Wild” is still affected by this reduction, which it shouldn’t. Although I haven’t checked in a while so that might’ve been fixed.