Same problem here. I noticed it’s when I have “Petpassive” enabled. Definitely feels like a bug, and according to patch notes feels like the opposite of what they were trying to achieve.
Effectively if I have a pet (lets say a cat), send it into a mob, it will stay pinned on that mob despite the pet being on “passive”. This portion (main pet) is working as intended and is not a problem. As a side note in case developers arent sure why this is important: Passive is nice because we don’t need to worry about the pet deciding to have a mind of it’s own and wandering off to other targets (which can be especially damning in a raid or dungeon environment), and for many years most hunters have learned to leverage petpassive as the default.
However, as of this most recent patch, when sending a Summon Hawk in to attack while petpassive is active, it will hit the enemy once, then return back to the hunter’s side (despite the main pet still remaining engaged). They can be forcefully re-assigned to the target by using /petattack but this only works -after- the initial hit, which means it can’t be bound in a smooth way, and instead is something you are constantly micro managing as a hunter now.
I did find that if I changed my initial hunter pet engagement mode to be defensive or assist, the hawks do stay on target. For the time being in the beta I’ve set my macros to leverage assist mode instead of passive mode, but this has dangerous consequences as well, since if a hunter were to shoot a second target, say, to pull them to your party or a trap, the hunter pet and all hawks now pivot to the other target to assist the hunter.
Here’s hoping a dev sees this happening, understands the issue, and addresses it, but in the meantime to all hunters out there struggling, the best I could come up with was keeping the pet stance in assist mode.