A *Real* New tank suggestion! - Hunter Tanks -

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Hello there,

I am creating a suggestion to replace the very unused rogue tank, with a real tank that people will not only use, but will be highly enjoyable from my own opinion and I believe many others!

The topic here is: -HUNTER TANK-

Quick explanation: The hunter tank would be an exceptional choice for a tank. Since the melee dps hunter isn’t highly cared about or wanted by almost any hunter, it is simply a waste of a spec for 90% of hunters! Replacing this melee dps with a tank spec will not only have people actually playing this spec, but hunters are one of the most played classes in the game, and THIS will help resolve our lack of tanks in the game by a large number IMO!

The Details:
So let’s get into what could a hunter tank do? And why would this be awesome?

Firstly - The Pets. What pets do you normally see hunters with for pve? Cat… Raptor… sometimes dogs… But what about a Bear? What about a Turtle? The answer is never. Why is that? Because their damage is much lower than their damage counter parts. But if they were tanking, a turtle or a bear with more health and armor and shields would be a WANT/NEED!

This goes into our first New Rune: Spirt Bond (Could be our tanking rune)
Spirt bond shares the health between the hunter and their pet. Giving hunters a much larger health pool! Having our pet have a real taunt from Beast Mastery, gives hunters one taunt, and if we turned “Distracting Shot” Into “Distracting slash” (or something) then there is a second taunt, or an aggro grabber ability!
This Rune could also increase threat similar to the new rune abilities for the new tanks.

Second New Rune: Pet Mender
Turns Mend pet into an instant cast with a CD, but is no longer channeled. This will give hunters a Cooldown ability to heal themselves. With the combination of Spirit bond, healing the pet is to heal themselves!

For abilities; They are mostly already there! “Mongoose Bite” - Counterattack the enemy after you preformed a dodge. What a cool ability! In almost every case this is a useless ability because as dps, we don’t want to be hit! But as a tank, hit me all day! Not being able to use shield, we will rely heavily on dodge, and this will now be a very solid ability to be put into our rotations!

Disengage is great for DPS hunters, but we can turn that into a taunt for us instead!

Talents - How many hunters use the Survival talent tree? Answer: Not many; to none at all in most cases! But a hunter tank? That is an Amazing tree! Combine that with a few things from the Beast mastery tree, and you got one heck of a build for a tank!

There are many benefits that I haven’t gone over, or probably even thought about! There is so much potential here that I feel was was overlooked or missed!

Please let me know what you think; I know Seasons of Discovery is for them to try out new things, and I would give anything to have my hunter tank!

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Hunter tanks? They already have ‘tanking’ pets. Why not just have runes to enhance the tanking pets?

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Same reason why they made Tanking warlocks, and didn’t just enhance the blueberry to be a tanking pet.

A real tank would be much better in every situation

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Speak for yourself. Plenty of people want melee hunters

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The % of melee hunters in SoD is so low, it’s silly :slight_smile: I am speaking for myself, and based off of playing the game since launch and grouping with many hunters and have yet to see a single one!

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It’s low because it’s bad atm, just like shadow priest. Not because they don’t want to play it but because you’re griefing yourself for doing so, leveling/dpsing as ranged is better. Still, I had a melee hunter in one of my bfd raids surprisingly doing decent dps, but the current kit at 25 is still terrible. Mongoose bite wouldn’t be good even as a tank or dps, unless it was adjusted btw. It’s a cool idea but hunter’s can basically tank with the BM rune now through pets, they even nerfed it because the pets were too strong. Take a search through the forums of people discussing melee hunters.

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“It’s a cool idea but hunter’s can basically tank with the BM rune now through pets”

Exactly, so turning the melee spec into a tanking spec would make it complete, instead of half dps half tank. Why not just complete it and make them a full tank.

As you said the melee spec isn’t great now, and even after fixing, I don’t see it out performing the ranged specs ever. Plus, if melee is your thing - Rogue, Warrior, Shaman (paladin) Druid. There are so many options for melee. That out perform the melee hunter. Having the melee hunter turned into tank would just be a much higher choice than the melee hunter DPS in every aspect.

Even if you wanted to keep the melee hunter, and create just the runes to have hunters turn into full tank would also work! Giving hunters a 4th spec. Which would be a little crazy. 2 Ranged, 2 Melee specs.

If i’m not mistaken, the % of melee hunters in retail is also crazy low. and nowhere near either of the other specs. It’s just not a spec that many people wanted for hunters, where I feel a Tank spec would be taken way more and very useful to the world… of warcraft!

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I’d play melee hunter if Survival wasn’t such a bad tree.

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Would be an amazing tree for a hunter tank! :slight_smile:

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Honestly I thought hunters were going to be a tank class when I was level 19 and my boar had 1600 hps and an absurd amount of armor, it really did feel like an intentional path. I even pet tanked Deadmines at level 22. It wasn’t that bad really, if you use the pet taunt as a regular ability rather than automatic. I was able to toggle 3 mobs and keep their attention. I don’t think hunters need explicit tank runes to fill the role, just less runes and nerfs that bottleneck the possibilities.

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Just revert all the pet nerfs and you have hunter tanks.

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I love that! To me that is awesome! But see, you can’t say “Hunter tank LFG” Because… we aren’t “tanks”

That’s sort of what i’m getting at. Even if we make it to where hunter pets ARE the tanks, to make them actual viable tanks, would be awesome. I think a “ranged physical” tank would be… a bit too powerful. Hence Melee Hunter tanks would just be so cool.

Being able to taunt off your pet, or your pet taunting off you, and being able to hold aggro better ect. The idea I put is just an idea/suggestion.

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I get it, I just can’t see them adding another tank midway and I think they were asked this question on the community council interview thing around 13:00 but it might be elsewhere SOD + Wrath Community Council Chat Devs If anything we probably need another healer and no other current classes can fill that role unless we get some wacky first aid/bard/tinker thing.

My ideal hunter format of runes/talents and class fantasy is BM is the ranged or preferably melee hunter focusing on pet damage with the hunter damage. I prefer this melee hunter over the survival melee hunter redesign in retail. Flanking strike already points to this as stronger melee focus, but also lends itself for meleeweaving. People hate hunter pets doing so much damage also because the hunter isn’t in range too, so forcing the BM hunter to be melee and synergizing both pet and hunter dmg feels more friendly to other players. OP pet npcs soloing people feels terrible. MM being the talent tree obviously focusing on ranged damage and staying at ranged. Survival being the talent tree moreso catered for pvp, survival/defensives, cc, mobility. Survival should be a hunter that melee weaves and it doesn’t matter whether they are in ranged or melee.

Class fantasy of BM involving beast master oriented abilities, summoning crows sending a pet from your stables to do an ability as part of your rotation, the rexxar of WoW. MM is the stereotypical archer/hunter/ranger it really needs no explanation, you shoot from far. Survival using poisons, traps, bleeds, nets, throwing weapon spears, polearms, etc. Found a good post of what survival class fantasy should be here : https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/y6f1m5/on_survival_hunters_class_fantasy/

They made a mistake not redesigning BM to be melee.

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See this is great. I agree, I feel they missed their mark.

For me, the hunter working with their pet in melee is awesome! But I don’t see it as damage. I see it as “Survival” or tanking! Being able to work with their pet as BM and mixing that health pool and such just completes the fantasy for me!

I just can’t ever see myself wanting to play a melee dps hunter… But a melee tank hunter sounds so fascinating to me… and I would much prefer that over a rogue tank as well.

If they made BM Melee tank, I would be all for that as well!

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Why does this need to replace rogue tank? I’ve been playing rogue tank and loving it. Lost me here.

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Even if you keep rogue tanks, for all the many many rogue tanks out there that you see…

one of the purposes of adding warlock and rogue tanks were to “remove the need for LFM tank” spams. This hasn’t resolved this issue nearly at all… since rogue tanks are… next to non-existent atm. Sure they “should” get better, but hunter tanks would be everywhere. And they would have sooo much potential.

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I believe there’s three main reasons rogue tanks seem rare:

  • They are arguably the most time consuming spec to unlock, as their runes are gated by the rep grind and the Grizzby grind
  • Their tanking rune abilities aren’t nearly as visible or useful as say, metamorphosis in the open world or PvP. This means that in the open world, tank rogues blend in with all the other rogues. FWIW I haven’t been in a single group with a warlock tank, and they would seem “nonexistent” to me if they didn’t have the visual effect in the overworld.
  • There aren’t a ton of players that choose to tank. This will somewhat remain the same regardless of how many tank specs are added.
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Besides Shaman, the other class that should have been given the ability to tank should have been hunter.

Id like a rune where it buffs your pets survivability, gives it good threat generation, and makes mend pet useful. As the hunter you’d play it by micro managing your pet while trying to keep yourself and the pet alive. I want it to make the class a fully capable tank for any group/solo content.

Id play the wheels off of it.

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I agree with this 100%

Even if you drop Warlock and Rogue tanks. Hunter tanks would have helped all around and been such an amazing spec to play/enjoy in SOD!

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Hunters have personal tanks via the pet why not let the pet be able to tank for groups?

Someone needs to get ahold of the right people on twitter lol. Shamans did and are getting something for 2h enhancement next phase because of it.