Well, except that feign doesn’t drop combat during raid boss encounters, or if your pet is currently engaged on the target.
Pull the pet back for half a second or have pet FD?
In pvp it’s more than doable, and for MM hunters they will be able to run lone wolf and not worry about it.
I would like to see the old aspects return. You could even make them more interesting by giving them an active if you are already in that stance. Swapping stances could incur the GCD and each one would have its own on use active if you are already in it. Consider this…
Aspect of the Cheetah
instant cast
Passive:
30% movement speed increase. Being struck causes you to be dazed.
Active while in Aspect of the Cheetah
X second CD
Increases movement speed by 60% (or w/e sounds appropriate) and removes all snares and dazes.
Monkey could passively provide dodge and the active could double that and give a chance to resist or “dodge” spells
You get the idea? it would make stances fun and interactive IMO
Don’t even need to make them have an active effect. Simply also include Aspect of the Hawk, giving a bonus to damage done, and the problem is solved. Using other Aspects innately involves an opportunity cost in DPS, just like Defensive Stance does for Arms right now. This automatically makes them interactive and interesting, because you have a vested interest in minimizing the amount of time spent in Aspects other than Hawk.
Also, let’s make them a bit more relevant in this day and age. Rather than Monkey, providing a dodge bonus, give us Bear, providing us straight DR. Fox can provide us the ability to cast while moving, just like it did previously, giving us a solution to the peeps wanting Aimed Cast while moving, but still having it come with the opportunity cost of not having Hawk’s damage bonus active. Cheetah can go back to the WoD implementation of increasing our movement speed permanently, without drawback, because it would innately come with the drawback of reducing our damage done. Not sure if Viper has a place in the current resource system, though.
The key is tuning Aspect of the Hawk’s bonus so that the opportunity cost is high enough that we really do want to minimize it as much as possible. In MoP, Aspect of the Hawk was a 25% increase to (ranged) AP, which was a solid chunk of damage back then. In BfA, since all abilities deal pure AP for damage, this would actually be even more significant. Lacking Hawk up would be a flat 20% reduction in damage done, which is plenty significant enough to justify us going out of our way to minimize the time we spend in other Aspects. If those other Aspects are also fairly strong, and swapping Aspects has a short shared CD (say 10s), then we have a very strong incentive to be judicious about our Aspect usage.
It would greatly deepen the class and provide us with a much more dynamic self-utility system while having an innately balancing knob to ensure that these indefinite Aspects don’t become default always-on (like Cheetah was in WoD with the glyph that caused it to be removed rather than daze you if you took damage).