It would be pretty bad if they’re done before 70 premades. I’m not leveling up for spec testing and I know I’m not alone. I did test abilities at 60 but I’m not going to put in 10 hours of leveling to test at 70.
Sadly I do think you are right though. This would leave BM without a major CD and 2 of the most uninspired capstones imaginable. Neither side capstone has any meaningful interaction with BMs kit and they are both VERY minor and mostly single target damage increases (Call of the Wild is purely single target while the Dire Beasts do Stomp on spawn but for very low damage).
Set and forget single target capstones are bad design. Even if they would just give them interactions with Beast Cleave, Stomp, Kill Command, etc. it would be better but still a set and forget ability. Maybe I’m alone I’m thinking this but capstones on the spec trees should alter gameplay in some way even if it’s minor.
Wild Spirits did that by making us want to fill every single GCD even if it was technically a bad cast. For example, you wanted to cast Cobra Shot even when Kill Command was under 2s CD; wherein outside of Wild Spirits that would be considered misplay and a waste of focus.
Not sure who suggested this (maybe Tanais?), but now would be the prefect opportunity to introduce pet affinities into the Class tree to choose the flavor of Command Pet/passive ability you get. I mean, CLEARLY SotF had no reason to be linked to a pet. Probably could get away with the same things for the other families?
I agree with this e-specially Master’s Call. We, the hunter, USE to have Master’s Call as a base line ability, I remember freeing a lot of players from the ice traps in PoS back in Wrath and durning Cata in VP, I would free those hit by Static Shock from the last boss by having my, back then white tiger, break the root. The root break was then moved into a talent for Disengage BUT it’s the HUNTER only. In LIVE, in order to have Master’s Call we need to switch to a cunning pet which takes damage away from the boss, we have to STOP, DISMISS, which is STILL A CAST btw, re-call our cunning pet, hit Master’s Call to free the person, DISMISS the cunning pet for either tenacity or ferocity THEN finally go back to attacking the boss.
That was me, yes, but in the sense of using just a single baseline ability with Fly-out Sub-Actions. We’d see only “Affinity” on our bar. Clicking it would expand to show “Affinity: Ferocity”, “Affinity: Tenacity”, and “Affinity: Cunning”.
You click whichever one you want and that gives access to the passive of choice, along with the respective ability from among Horn of the Hunt (Hunter-version Lust), SotF (or Hunter-version FotB), and Netcutter (Hunter-version Master’s Call).
Or, ideally, remove Horn of the Hunt (Lust) from any affinity, providing it wholly baseline, and give Ferocity a form of utility befitting its theme…
…such as briefly causing all strikes against a given target to act as if the attacker had X% more Leech, to a cap of Y total healing provided, not including overhealing.
Your pet would then inherit your passive or stack its own atop it (perhaps with diminishing returns for Leech, since that’s the only one with real sustained value for the pet itself).
Or we could scrap broader pet types (F/T/C) and Affinities altogether, and then put a pet-less, usable-on-self Master’s Call and, ideally, a shorter-CD ally-and-self-targetable external defensive on a shared cooldown.
Or we could even just go “screw it,” not constrain them at all, and just plug that much more situational utility into Hunter.
Anything works, as long as it retains at least as many utility options as we have now and won’t be annoying to actually use or swap between.
I’d like to see a talent by which to enhance one’s chosen utility or, if we go with that stacking passives on pet option, to also inherit your pet’s passive, but I wouldn’t want to have to talent-swap just to choose between, say, Lust and Call. I certainly hope we won’t ever be able (and thus obliged) to swap between pulls in M+, which would then mean we’d be effectively losing Call and FotB if our group has no Mage or Shaman.
I was talking about this before, also. To me, it would make the most sense to just unlink Mortal Strike and the three family abilities entirely and put them in the class tree. I feel like an MM Hunter should, if they choose, be able to go full solo without any punishment.
At the moment, LW feels like the right choice always, but you lose SO MUCH utility. And also, realistically, they will never be able to balance them fully, so one will always be the wrong choice for any given patch. This is why I was advocating for full petless MM - balancing would be so much simpler.
I like the idea of that still being provided by some pets, but at least in a way that’d be redundant with capacities already available to the Hunter itself.
For instance, I could have sworn we were once able to apply Mortal Wounds on Aimed Shot. What if each spec had its own way to apply it?
That being said, we could also go an altogether different route, such as by dropping Mortal Wounds from Hunter entirely and replacing it with something of equal but seemingly less obligatory value and buffing and increasing the variety of other pet skills to match.
I don’t think it would be, just because you still ultimately have to balance MM (both in terms of total throughput+utility value and in utility, specifically) also against SV and BM, both of whom oblige pet use, which means its replacements will end up likewise constrained.
I get your overall point, I think, and appreciate the goal; I just think simply making pet-use / LW itself intuitive would be the easier and cleaner approach than, say, attempting to make LW variants for each of those pieces of utility.
Make baseline/on-Hunter anything extrinsic to actually using a pet, and then just go from there. We needn’t make MM a non-choice to those who like using pets by forcing LW.
I truly do think, if they just actually dealt with the matter intuitively (no bundled utility on pets that would have nothing to do with actually using pets), they could get them to a point where they’d have no significant difference (i.e., no greater than between two runs of the same side, LW or w/ pet).
Lonewolf = 10% All Damage, gives access to Bloodlust, and +Attack Power (or crit buff)
You cast Master’s Call, Bloodlust, and Fortitude of the Bear to instantly call out the pet and gain the buff rather than calling out the pet first and then using the ability. Basically removing the call pet GCD
This seems a strange half-measure, though, no? Why not just separate them from the pet altogether?
None of those utilities, after all, have anything to do with using a pet except that, at some later point, our previously baseline hunter utility was trimmed and squished into mutually exclusive groups by pet type (a.k.a. some dev decided their beloved broader pet types weren’t influential enough and decided to steal away previously baseline, no-pet-required functionality into them).
Yes I agree but that’s not the case right now. Pets are part of our toolkit, period. The “half measure” is the compromise to letting, at the very least LW hunters, access to bloodlust if they still intend to keep these abilities tied to pets but more streamlined.
Either way my first example was to tie bloodlust to LW.
Testing Survival of the Fittest (SotF) on the PTR. With the choice node in Lone Survivor, both versions have the same cooldown. The Lone Wolf version tooltip says the CD is 3 min, but it shared a 2 min CD with the talented version. Only one can be used at a time. This makes the Lone Wolf version of SotF obsolete.
I recommend that the SotF for Lone Wolf be changed to allow for a MM Hunter w/o pet to use bloodlust instead.
Thanks, I haven’t been keeping up where the most appropriate place to leave feedback is.
To elaborate a bit further on my issue with survival lacking, well, survivability:
With the push to higher melee engagement with abilities like mongoose bite, spearhead, coordinated assault and flanking, I think there could be some simple fundamental changes that could make survival a bit more engaging and a bit tankier spec more suited for a melee spec.
If I could change things up about the spec related to this, I’d do 2 things.
Disable/remove pet growl when specing surv. Seems counterintuitive, but would open the door at a fundemental level for the hunter to be the primary threat in melee combat and as a result, build around them taking damage.
Give better passive/active damage reduction/healing. Making the hunter the primary damage taker opens up the spec to accept better damage mitigation talents or outright baseline improvements for specing survival.
This would also make the spec a bit more engaging to play in solo content. In group content, it would give some more flexibility in survivability and take some burden off healers for keeping you up, much like other melee classes have. In pvp content, we all know how it goes if you try to play survival in melee range against any other melee class. You can’t engage them for any length of time to put out damage. You will get demolished because while you might be able to keep up in damage, you are still a mail wearer with access to 1 heal on a long CD.
The defensive tools we have now are more suited for ranged specs. Turtle shuts down all offense to allow repositioning/giving a reprive from damage to help healers top you off. Exhilaration is nice, but long cooldown and limited heal. Survival of the fittest is a welcome addition to our kit, and while these are sufficient for ranged specs, a melee spec needs a bit more.