Community Council discussion on Hunter design

[Bepples-barthilas]

From the community council forums:

@Mispeled-benediction

Pets on retail completely lacks the attachment that pets have on older expansions like the classic ones.

You don’t need to feed them, you don’t need to train them, you don’t need to level them up, you don’t need to spend time with them to make them your best friend, they don’t have talents, you can rez them in 5 seconds with barely any cost (some focus that you regain over the cast duration versus half your mana pool on classic) or negative effect (loss of happiness on classic) when they die…

I’m just gonna say it… Pets are boring as heck on retail. I could just abandon my current pet and not care one bit. Hell, I can’t even name one of my pet because you can’t rename a pet that had a unique name.
I don’t even care enough about it to remember the name I gave it, yet I can remember the name of my pet from original WotLK. I don’t feel any emotional connection with a pet that has as much personality as a death knight’s ghoul.

I really don’t like this argument that they need to tack on a bunch of annoying chores in order to feel “attachment” to them. Making pets cumbersome in this way mostly has the opposite effect on players and see them as a burden which leads to demand for things like Lone Wolf. It was especially egregious when they had a happiness penalty tied to Dismiss Pet meaning you were directly punished for Blizzard’s bad pet pathing. It’s enough to allow people to pick whatever pet they want and choose a name for it, while also allowing playstyle options (i.e. BM spec) that have close operation with a pet.

After all, for all that “levelling and training” you did on Classic you did just set the pet on the target and forget about it as there was 0 real gameplay interaction with the pet during combat, and like 90% of Hunters on Classic and BC just pick the highest DPS option. If you look around on BC classic most of them are just running Ravagers, many of which aren’t even renamed away from Ravager.

I do agree that they shouldn’t require a Certificate of Ownership to rename away from a unique name. However I have no problem feeling a “connection” to my pet in retail and I don’t need a bunch of pointless busywork to establish that connection.