Oh is it just that simple? Am I going to play my sentinel as BM in 11.1?
Only ones that don’t want pets are the ones that can’t dismiss them when they jump off spots in dungeons or wants to look to see what pet families can do what because it’s hard work.
They could make a new spec called archer instead.
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This is actually even worse. I would rather MM have no pets at all over a static pet with no customization. However if Blizz were to say add a glyph that turned the eagle into another flying beast that might be workable.
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Sure it does, dear. Bless your heart. /pat Now shush the real hunters are speaking.
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You know what I would have liked - for Hunter to be left alone, and for a new class to be added.
I’d like to see the Archer class. Three specs: Longbow, Horsebow and Kyudo Archer.
Longbow is your classic large powerful bow with appropriate strength and skill requirements who fights only on foot and gains an advantage at a greater distance. Horsebow allows the archer to fire while mounted on a special archer mount and Kyudo archer is a form of archery of a spiritual nature that uses special spiritual focus to increase accuracy and speed.
No pets, because they are not a pet class, they are a specialised archer class. I’d have been there will many bells ringing to make one of those.
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Same. It’s the eagle itself that I hate the most. It doesn’t fit the aesthetic of most of the races, and it especially doesn’t fit either of the MM hero specs.
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It seem logical at this point.
If only they hadn’t left us with so little choice.
One the beasts do all damage, one is melee, and one is doesn’t even have a pet.
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If it’s anything like the sentinal, I’m not loving that.
I already wasn’t a huge fan of the hunter hero specs because of how specific they are to certain races. But for sentinel I decided to roll with it - female night elf, MM, with one of those tigers from the emerald dream. I embraced the fantasy blizzard prescribed. Now they want to screw that up by taking away my awesome cat and saddling me with some dorky eagle. They keep foisting these random animals on us and ruining our chosen vibes.
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Yeah, it was more frequently seen on the section of ‘Classes’ → ‘Hunter’ forums rather than the General Discussion; however I’m sure it’s showed up somewhere around here time to time too 
But like I said, I’m not all too surprised they’re removing pets from MM in the slightest.
… Honestly, you’d think BM is an entirely separate class to the other two hunter specs, due to their playerbase lol
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You missed a few more quotes from that page:
“Beast Mastery: A master of the wild who can tame a wide variety of beasts to assist them in combat. Preferred Weapon: Bow, Crossbow, Gun.”
“Survival: An adaptive ranger who favors using explosives, animal venom, and coordinated attacks with their bonded beast. Preferred Weapon: Polearm, Staff”
“Marksmanship: A master sharpshooter who excels in bringing down enemies from afar. Preferred Weapon: Bow, Crossbow, Gun”
Hmm, it looks like only one spec fails to mention a beast. Which one could it be? 
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It also doesn’t say anything about an eagle.
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The eagle exists outside the gamespace, so narratively it might just be a manifestation of your hunting spirit. (Or maybe it’ll be a figment of your imagination.)
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Nah, I’m actually okay with Marksmanship being a mostly petless spec. I just wish the eagle could have cosmetic choices associated with it, i.e a black raven for Dark Ranger.
My gripe with Hunter in classic was always that you were forced to have a pet, I never wanted one in WoW, I wanted to be a ranger / archer archetype, when Legion hit, I finally felt that with MM and I’ve had a MM hunter as one of my main characters since.
I think this is purely preference, as much as someone wants all hunter specs to use pets, there’s other people that never wanted that to begin with, I think it’s important to be considerate of others and their preferences.
Beast Mastery is always there, and if you at some point it’s not “meta” and you feel the need to play Marksmanship, that’s on you. I played MM even when it was crappy, because I’ve never ever wanted to play BM or Survival.
This clearly grasping. Obviously Blizz is trying to force MM to be pseudo petless (but it’s really choice less) instead of giving us a real physical ranged class. To say MM is a fully petless spec is just false. There’s “pet” all over the talents. And what about pvp? Now it just removes choice and forces a empty version of a pet that is antithetical to hunter class fantasy.
I get that makes it obnoxious to balance and I know how annoying it is to have to trash your dps to summon a lust pet. It sucks. The answer isn’t to make MM a getto version of a petless spec. It’s to give us a real petless class and let hunters keep being the pet class they always have been.
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I never said it’s a petless spec. Obviously RIGHT NOW it isn’t.
I’m saying the OP’s attempted “gotcha” of quoting the Hunter page actually hurts their point, because from the start Blizzard only inherently tied a bonded beast to two of the specs even on that very page.
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Wish Blizz would take all the talent trees blend them into one. Let people have the freedom to chose what ever they want. Just to have the freedom to pick a spell or passive abilities without restrictions or having to switch talents. Then people could have thier dark ranger a blend of MM and Survival.
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Would be cool if my Undead Hunter got an undead Eagle
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I’ll be honest, this is the first thing I’ve read from someone about this that’s given me a slight sense of being ok with it. Not won over. But this did give me a momentary tingle of intrigue. So well done 
That said though, it would still sit a lot better with me if they made some effort to make it race specific. An eagle for everyone is just lazy. Or hell, at least go the whole hog and say it’s literally a vision of Ohn’ahra.
We really need some details on just how obtrusive it is going to be. I’m actually super mad at blizzard for dropping the announcement right before the holiday break. Just leaving the forums to fester and storm over all this speculation.
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It isn’t.
Marksmanship hasn’t been designed with pets in mind since at least Warlords of Draenor, when they introduced Lone Wolf. Furthermore the way that Marksmanship hunters describe the specialization in guides, social media, in-game; “we don’t have to rely on pet AI”, “sniper fantasy”, and “there’s two other specializations that focuses on pets, Marksmanship doesn’t.”
That’s been the consensus of what MM is for roughly TEN YEARS at this point, half of WoW’s lifespan.
Hunters is the physical ranged class, two options for pets - one melee and one ranged. And two options for ranged physical damage, one with and one without pets.
MM has been a petless specialization for longer than specializations truly existed in any real sense of the word. This is what you, and others, don’t get. MM is a petless specialization because people who play it don’t want pets - whether for gameplay or thematic reasons.
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