Hi Watermist, thank you for bringing that up! I had a look at the CC forums and I agree with your first post in the Exotic Beasts thread.
I’m not really a fan of the other specs getting exotic beasts - I think they’re as iconic to BM specifically as Avenger’s shield is for prot pallies. The fact that people want access to them on other specs indicates that they’re doing their job of being literally the only cool thing BM, as a spec with notoriously muted animations/spells has to offer.
I’m also not sure I agree with Maizou’s basic equation of ‘exotics suck now so all specs should have them’. I do agree that exotics are weaker than they should be - and trapped in undesirable specs - which is why you don’t see BM using them so much nowadays, but I don’t think the solution is to let survival hunters run around with devilsaurs, I think the solution is to buff them (and allow pet respeccing!) so beastmastery hunters like to use them again.
I really would love the ability to respec my pets back again - I love my cats but sometimes I’d like to bring out another pet and still be able to use lust, you know? I also think that ‘bm hunters can chop shop their pets’ thing sounds pretty clunky; I’ve never once been back to Storm Peaks to play with the Hati customization thing because it’s just too much of a trek to be worth it.
Maizou mentioned making heart of the phoenix a tenacity thing; I’d go a step further and ask why hunters don’t have a long-CD instant user-activated pet rez as a baseline thing available across all specs when warlocks have it and their summon demon also takes 3 seconds to cast? The warlock version is on a 3 min CD - is it a pvp balance decision not to grant hunters a similar option? If so, could that be solved by making hunters unable to instant rez in arena, or granting the hunter version a longer CD? (Genuinely asking the hunter pvp population on this forum, I haven’t touched a random battleground much less rated for 10 years).