12759 hunter changes

[Firebyrd]

think you missread the GC quote, it was "pets should do 20-30% of the players dmg, except for demo/BM, their pets should do more 40-50%" so it's a dps gain compared to the pet dmg of BM hunters now.

Nope, you're the one misreading. The relevant quote, taken from the news post on the front page, is as follows (emphasis mine):

In general, we want pet dps to be 20-30% of player dps. Note that this is a lot lower than current BM and Demo lock numbers. Pet damage as BM will still be higher than Marks or Survival though, and we want BM to be competitive overall with Marks and Survival. (Ditto for locks.)

He states outright that they're going to be lowering the percentage of pet damage compared to the numbers on live for BM. Their goal of pets doing 20-30% of the damage has actually been stated a number of times over the past year (at least, I wasn't following the news during BC, so it could have been longer). They've also stated why they have that goal, which is because of the way it hurts a pet user if the pet dies when it's doing most of the damage, as well as wanting the player's input to be the reason someone's damage is good rather than because of a pet. To be fair, I think I remember hearing that pets were doing up to 60% of a BM hunter's damage in BC, and if that recollection is correct, I would agree that's too high. But I think a 30% maximum given the nature of our mastery bonus is too low.

[deadman80]

What I'm waiting for is at least the first real pass on our pets... They are going to account for about twice the amount of a hunter's dps as they do on live, but I doubt that any of our beta-hunters can give actually reliable/relevant feedback on the actual feel of the class until pets are at least in a working state. I'm not talking dps numbers, I'm talking mechanics, scaling, talents (both hunter and pet), etc.