World of WarCraft’s pets have notoriously bad eyesight, leading to bumped heads and low accuracy in combat. If anything, their indentured servitude to players was doing the pets a favour because now at least they’re being led out of the path of lamp posts, glass doors, and other things that could cause them pain, and all the Azerothians ask in return is that they fight to the death in regular blood sports.
Blizzard are stepping in with patch 5.3 and giving all the wee critters contact lenses, increasing each pet’s accuracy in fights and also giving players more information on the hit chance of each attack.
Blizzard wrote in a short blog post that “Once patch 5.3 is live, you’ll see “hit chance” listed for all abilities, and this value will update if the pet is affected by abilities that increase or reduce the chance to hit.” Which should give players a much clearer idea of which attacks to employ in battle.
On top of this Blizzard have “removed the base 5% chance to dodge, and reduced the chance to miss opponents of higher levels from 5% per level to 2% per level”. Overall this will mean that pet attacks will be significantly more accurate.
To avoid having attacks with a 100% accuracy (which the base chance to dodge alleviated) Blizzard have tweaked a few abilities to give “them greater damage in exchange for a reduced chance to hit”. Blizzard have left one ability for each pet type that is a low damage but 100% hit chance attack for players who want “to opt-out of the randomness if you prefer a less risky strategy.”
Critical hits remain unaffected. There’s still “the base 5% chance to gain a critical strike (for 1.5x damage), and +/- 10% damage variance on all abilities”