Let's have a discussion about petless hunter

[Raeln]

Since someone mentioned a 4th spec, and if something like that happened for some odd reason, I would like it to be a tank spec. Tired of DPS queues.

I am not opposed to this but we would need much better pet control options. Pets are still pretty dumb in the AI department.

[emidas]

I am considering boosting a hunter specifically to play petless @ Level 100.

The only thing that kind of sucks is that you have to give up a talent for this playstyle, but as long as it is balanced correctly that is more than fine. It would be nice to see petless as an actual spec, though.

[Raeln]

I am considering boosting a hunter specifically to play petless @ Level 100.

The only thing that kind of sucks is that you have to give up a talent for this playstyle, but as long as it is balanced correctly that is more than fine. It would be nice to see petless as an actual spec, though.

My guess is the other talents in the tier that the petless talent sits in will probably revolve around enhancing the pet somehow. So taking the petless talent will probably give about an equivalent damage % increase to whatever having one of the other talents would have given with the pet.

[Terrapax]

The only reason I picked Hunter as a main nine years ago was because it was the only archer in the game.

Same. Couldn't have cared less about pets at the start.

I do love 'em now for various things, but having the option to go petless - and it is just an option, as you can simply take a different lvl 100 talent - can't be a bad thing. Now, if the dps math behind the lvl 100 talents means that SV and MM have to take the petless talent, then I'm not on board. But as an option? Sure!

[Volitar]

Disengage is my favorite spell in the game.
Playing babysitter to some retarded AI 'thing' isn't fun.

[PickleballAce]

Blizzard has been "trying to improve pet AI" for almost ten years. It is always one step forward and one step back. It will never be perfect. I'm all for giving Hunters the option to bypass pets and not be slaves to bad encounter design/pet AI interaction when it crops up.

[Arhippa]

Pets take 90% less damage from AoE attacks if they even get hit at all by them how is your pet dying?

The thing with that is, that's what it says but it doesn't always work like that. Especially when it came out, there were more exceptions to it than there were times when it worked (almost like I've had this happen before - oh right, deterrence) or at least it definitely felt like that. As for more recent stuff, the blind cleavers before/just after shamans come to mind from SoO quickly.

[Renisis86]

Petless hunter will be nerfed in PVP

[Deleted]

Being the hunter the only physical dog class in the game, I find it unfair that we are forced to have a pet; I'd like to play a marksman, not a dog sitter.

Specs would feel much more unique if they took away the pet from MM and made SV melee imo.

[Deleted]

Well they need another Ranger class that is sure but for now they just preff to give to us a passive to play w/o pets just to see how that will hit the game

[Akuda23]

Hunters are a pet class. Not just a pet class though, we are THE pet class. The only class who has to tame their pet, choose its skin, and name it. I've been playing a hunter since the beginning and the reason I chose the class was because of the bond that the hunter shared with their pet.

I don't mean this to sound snarky so I'm sorry if it does, but just because that's what hunters are to YOU doesn't mean that's what they are to everyone. Personally, I became a hunter because I wanted to be an archer. Pets have, since I joined, been anything from a nuisance to just another dot.That said, nobody's personal mental image of a hunter is objectively better than anyone else's, so having the option to tailor your hunter to your own vision can only be good - unless they seriously screw up the implementation by, say, making it a needlessly complex talent that will almost certainly never be tuned properly, instead of just committing and making Marksman (the spec that's already about bows and archery more than pets) be a petless spec. I'm not a game designer (yet) but I feel that would be easier to balance - Blizz has (with BM and SV lately) shown themselves able to tune two specs to be very close to each other. If they could pull that off w/ a petless MM in WoD, I personally feel that would be the best implementation of a petless option. Nobody would be forced to do either.

Gimping hunters that were attracted to the archery/marksmanship aspect of hunters more than the pet aspect is no more fair than the other way around.

[Redpanda]

Funny thing is the times I complain about my pet is few and far between. Your pet is 100% manageable in the current game. So much abilities of our class is tied to our pet regardless of spec. I really hope the other options in the tier outshine petless talent or it gets scrapped all together. *sigh* all for the sake of people wanting to be hur dur ranger legolasxoxo....psh
so much "rebalancing" so much fixing so much fiddling all for the sake of 1 talent seems counter productive where all that work can go toward fixing real issues with hunters.

[Bullettime]

Funny thing is the times I complain about my pet is few and far between. Your pet is 100% manageable in the current game. So much abilities of our class is tied to our pet regardless of spec. I really hope the other options in the tier outshine petless talent or it gets scrapped all together. *sigh* all for the sake of people wanting to be hur dur ranger legolasxoxo....psh
so much "rebalancing" so much fixing so much fiddling all for the sake of 1 talent seems counter productive where all that work can go toward fixing real issues with hunters.

Oh no players actually want some variety! It won't take much rebalancing anyways. It's a flat % damage modifier, unlike GoSac for Warlocks, which makes it much easier to tune and keep it under control, pet CC is largely out the window (expecting it to stay for exotics and be gone for non exotics,) and Master's Call may even be removed as in a low CC environment, it may not be needed.

The only "re balancing" that would have to be done is to make Blink Strikes a different effect when you don't have a pet out and for Roar of Sacrifice to be a Hunter activated ability. They already use the exact same tech when handling GoSac for Warlocks so t's just a matter of copying it over to us.

The option is great since it seems like Blizzard is finally looking at ways to make our specs less homogenized. In the current game, we may as well not even have 3 specs at all. They all use many of the same core spells, cooldowns, all use a pet, etc. This is what they're trying to get away from. You want to be a Marksman and have a pet? Great. You can play Marks and keep your pet damage, take Stampede, etc. But if you want to play Marksmanship and be more of a ranger/sniper instead and forsake pets, that's now possible too.

Again, a flat damage modifier for us is far easier to balance and tune than GoSac was for Warlocks which added different effects and only boosted certain spells which caused stat and scaling issues.

I fail to see how adding variety is a bad thing. If you want pet, you simply don't take the talent or you play Beast Mastery where petless isn't an option.

[Akuda23]

Funny thing is the times I complain about my pet is few and far between. Your pet is 100% manageable in the current game.

I agree with Bullettime. Pets are generally manageable now, with a few exceptions of bugging out, but that's not really the point. Many hunters look at their pets as nothing more than an uninteresting set-and-forget DoT. That's not compelling. Furthermore, many hunters, myself included, are more attracted to the archery/marksmanship aspect of huntering, so pets are just "meh" at best.

So much abilities of our class is tied to our pet regardless of spec. I really hope the other options in the tier outshine petless talent or it gets scrapped all together. *sigh* all for the sake of people wanting to be hur dur ranger legolasxoxo....psh

Very few of Marksman or Survival's abilities are tied to our pet, at least in PvE, and those that are could easily be turned into hunter abilites. So at the very least the "regardless of spec" part is untrue. Hoping that the other options outshine the petless talent or that it gets scrapped simply because you don't like it is kind of childish, to be honest. "I want what I want and nobody else should get what they want because it's not what I want!" Dismissing people who want the petless option with the "hur dur ranger legolasxoxo" thing is of a similar caliber of maturity. Your opinion is not better or worse than others, and since a significant number of hunters are clearly interested in petless (and I'd wager very few of us want to pretend to be Legolas) wouldn't you agree that the best option would be to HAVE options? Wouldn't the best outcome to wish for be equally viable pet and petless options?

so much "rebalancing" so much fixing so much fiddling all for the sake of 1 talent seems counter productive where all that work can go toward fixing real issues with hunters.

I agree that the balancing will be difficult, if it is a choose-able talent rather than just making MM or SV petless baseline. However, I don't know what other "real issues" you're referring to, because in my eyes spec homogenization is the 'realest' issue there is for hunters and if implemented correctly, this could do a lot to help that.

[Deleted]

I don't understand why people would not want a pet at their side as a hunter, it is part of who we are!

[Darnash]

I'm honestly incredibly excited for this. The pets always turned me off of the hunter/warlock classes; it seemed that they were awesome for solo purposes, but I never really liked them in dungeon/raid environments. If I end up resubbing for Warlords (which is looking very likely with all the changes, including this one, that are fixing problems that contributing to my unsub in the first place), then I will almost definitely be rolling a hunter thanks to this talent.

[Deleted]

I don't understand why people would not want a pet at their side as a hunter, it is part of who we are!

Being able to instantly switch 100% of your damage from one target to the next is a really powerful option for us. I've been playing hunter as a raiding main for many, many, many years and this change can't come soon enough. Them Serpent Stings gonna tick like a bomb.

[morislayer]

Pets take 90% less damage from AoE attacks if they even get hit at all by them how is your pet dying?

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I have never had a problem with pet pathing and I never had a problem with my pet on Magaera

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Instead of a Hunter without pets why doesn't Blizz just make a Warrrior Spec that can use range weapons?

90% reduced aoe was not always the case. You quoted me, did you not read "over the years many of these have become an non issue" or did you read one sentence and hit reply...

You used to have to call your pet back whenever melee had to run out of certain boss abilities, or if your pet was afflicted by a certain debuff.

You never had a problem with pet pathing, plus your previous comment make it obvious to me you have played the tail end of Cata. Pet pathing was a major issue for many years. Blizz even said they had trouble fixing the AI.

[Arhippa]

Pet pathing was a major issue for many years. Blizz even said they had trouble fixing the AI.

If I had to guess, I'd say they've just become better at making/fixing the terrain rather than improved the AI. I can't remember any patch notes referring to pet AI changes in the recent years at the very least, though it might be one of those things that they wouldn't mention in the patch notes anyway.

But yeah, mimiron especially loved killing pets. In my mind I like to imagine that boss alone was one of the biggest factors that made them rethink the whole "pets are your responsibility" policy.

[Retron]

I don't mean this to sound snarky so I'm sorry if it does, but just because that's what hunters are to YOU doesn't mean that's what they are to everyone.

Quite simply, the hunter class was designed around its pet, which was designed to tank whilst the hunter did damage. Thus at first glance, as someone who rolled a hunter years ago purely for the pet, it seems odd that anyone would even consider ditching it. At least this way those who want to be petless can be, while those of us for whom the pet is a big part of the class can continue to use one.

FWIW, the Vanilla manual I have here says the following. It's a reminder of just how much pet-related stuff has been dropped over the years.

"Pets are a key component of the hunter class. After the hunter gains some experience he can learn to tame the wild beasts of Azeroth. Using the beast taming spell, the hunter can select a beast in the wild and turn it into a loyal companion. The hunter’s pet can then attack the hunter’s target and keep it occupied while the hunter engages in ranged attacks.

A hunter's pet must be kept happy, or it will leave you or even turn on you. A hunter's pet has a happiness rating that you can see by clicking on your faithful beast's icon. As the pet fights, its happiness decreases, but happiness can be replenished by feeding your pet regularly.

Nearly any monster with the beast type can be tamed and turned into a pet. After you gain a new pet, you can train it in new abilities you acquire with the beast training ability.

If you find new pets you would like to tame, you can stable your current pet so that you have a selection of pets to choose from when you adventure in the world. You can only have one pet accompany you at a time. When a pet is not with you, it is kept in the stables, which can be found in most major cities."