Post by Neffi
Last I checked, the base movement speed for hunter pets was 115%. I'm not sure if that changed, since I could find no hunters that would confirm or deny it. With a 30% snare, that puts the reduced movement speed at (115*.7=) 80.5% speed.
Cunning pets have an
additional 30% on top of the 115% base speed, which is multiplicative. That puts their normal base speed at (115*1.3=) 145.5%. With a 30% snare, that's (149.5*.7=) 104.65%.
Ferocity also has a speed boost..
Needless to say -- since you see for yourself -- Frost Armor just is not very effective. Theoretically it makes sense to put up for pets specifically, but as you can see it just doesn't help much. As for kiting melee, we have many more effective measures for that.
Use Molten Armor and Mage Armor. Both provide a non-negligible amount of extra damage. Meanwhile 6% reduced melee damage and 25% reduced spell duration is nothing to scoff at. That -25% duration counts for spell-based crowd-control to boot. And the
Glyph effect is additive, not multiplicative, making that 16% reduced damage and 35% reduced duration respectively.
Way more powerful than a weak snare that requires the target already be on you (at which point you have more than a few tools to cope or kite anyway).
Frost Armor is practically useless in comparison. Even unglyphed.
Edit: Though I haven't run the numbers myself, 5% crit and 3000 mastery should also outperform the 7% haste provided by Frost Armor. Mastery is your go-to stat for DPS. Crit should also be very good up until the soft-cap (crit while frozen). Haste just isn't competitive damage-wise with these stats (hence why the armor was altered to give even more of it to compensate). Some well-rated arena mages do prefer haste, but it seems their reasoning is primarily utility and not DPS. In any case, no aspect of the 7% haste and 30% snare outperforms the other armors in PvP.
Edit: I got feedback from a hunter. Apparently, the base speed is now 110%, not 115%. With the +30% speed passive ((110*1.3)=143%) that makes Frost Armor's 30% snare reduce their speed to (143*.7=) 100.1%. So it pretty much perfectly negates the snare. Based on how the talents look and the fact that hunters can now choose pet talents (instead of being limited per-family), Cunning is most likely the go-to pet spec anyway. So you can bet just about every hunter pet you interact with will have that +30% speed.
According to Petopia, Cunning pets also have Dash now. Which only reinforces that Frost Armor is totally ineffective against them.
