lol might wanna revisit that talent tree and see how much of it is meant to be for range apposed to melee.
I didn’t say it’s original, I said they could add it to MM tree ti would be much easier for them. Explosive shot could be tweaked or something. But again it’s much easier to add it to MM tree.
A bit late with this post, was busy with some irl stuff. Anyway…
In general, I’m in the camp of us getting a type of talent tree for our pets, and with that, allow us to switch load-outs, same as what they are doing with spec talent trees and similar in DF. In short, I hate how pet families are now locked into specific specializations – and we can’t switch between them, essentially forcing us to sometimes play with pets that we might not, for X reason, want to use.
As for what such a talent tree could look like, for pets, there are many ways to design it, and many different traits/effects that you can include.
Here’s one version(example):
Details/tooltips can be found further down, below the image.
Introduction
Essentially, this example for a talent tree will allow you to obtain all of the abilities that are tied to individual pet specializations(Primal Rage, Survival of the Fittest, Master’s Call), in their base forms. These will be available in the ‘octagon choice nodes’, where you can pick whichever you want, unless you have already picked it before, higher up in the tree.
Once you’ve chosen an ability in an ‘octagon node’, you will unlock ‘paragon traits’ which are directly tied to the ability you’ve chosen. After you’ve spent enough talent points on a set of ‘paragon traits’, you will unlock the next bracket of passive effects for you to progress further down the tree, as you level up. Once you reach the next ‘octagon node’, this process repeats. And so on…
Ability details/tooltips
As always, any numbers mentioned below are ofc subject to change. They aren’t meant to be taken as final.
Octagon Choice Nodes
Fairly straight forward. Every time you unlock an Octagon Node, you can choose one of the following abilities, but only if you haven’t already picked it before.
Primal Rage - Instant cast - 6 min cooldown
Increases haste by 30% for all party and raid members for 40 sec. Allies receiving this effect will become Sated and unable to benefit from Primal Rage or similar effects again for 10 min.
Survival of the Fittest - Instant cast - 3 min cooldown
Reduces all damage you and your pet take by 20% for 6 sec.
Master’s Call - Instant cast - 45 sec cooldown
Your pet removes all root and movement impairing effects from itself and a friendly target, and grants immunity to all such effects for 4 sec.
Paragon Traits
These are extensions to the Octagon Node abilities above. Depending on which ability you choose, you will then unlock 2 Paragon Traits to pick from. You need to spend a total of 2 talent points on these before you can move further down in the tree.
Endless Rage - Increases the duration of Primal Rage by 20/40 sec if used when you’re not in a group.
Rapid Recuperation - Reduces the duration of Sated effects caused by Primal Rage by 2/4 min if used when you’re not in a group.
Wilderness Survival - Increases the damage reduction granted to you and your pet, by Survival of the Fittest, by an additional 7.5/15%.
Adapt and Overcome - Reduces the base cooldown of Survival of the Fittest by 45/90 sec.
Animal Handler - Reduces the base cooldown of Master’s Call by 7.5/15 sec.
Call of the Wild - The remaining cooldown of Master’s Call is instantly reset if your pet is stunned or feared.
Other talents/effects
The first bracket of passive talents all have 2 total ranks each. The second bracket only have 1 rank each. If a talent has multiple ranks, you need to select all of them before you can move further down to the next talent.
Predator’s Thirst - You and your pet gain 5/10% Leech.
Endurance Training - You and your pet gain 3/6% increased maximum health.
Pathfinding - You and your pet gain 5/10% increased movement speed.
Hunter’s Advantage - When you use Misdirection on your pet, your pet takes 10/20% less damage for 10 seconds. The base cooldown of Misdirection is reduced by 10/20 sec, if used on your pet.
Great Resistance - Your pet takes 10/20% less damage from Arcane, Fire, Frost, Nature and Shadow magic.
Superior Mobility - Your pet’s movement speed cannot be reduced below 75/100%. Reduces the base cooldown of Dash by 5/10 sec.
Bloodthirsty - Whenever your pet critically hits an enemy target that is bleeding, the pet instantly heals itself for 3% of its maximum health.
Natural Armor - Reduces Physical damage taken by your pet by 15%.
Lionhearted - Reduces the duration of all Stun and Fear effects used against your pet by 30%.
Blood of the Rhino - Increases the effectiveness of healing received by your pet by 20%.
Intervene - Your pet runs at high speed towards you, intercepting the next melee or ranged attack that would otherwise be lethal to you. When this occurs, this exhilarates you, instantly healing you for 20% of maximum health. Can only happen once every 10 min.
This could kill your pet.
Cornered - Whenever your pet is rooted, slowed, or otherwise snared, it takes increasingly less damage over time, starting at 20% and quickly increases to a maximum of 50% reduced damage taken. Once your pet has broken free, or is no longer snared, this effect disappears.
Active abilities
Last row provides you with choices of active abilities. You will only be able to choose one of these at a time/per load-out.
Lick Your Wounds/Emergency Repair - Channeled - 3 min cooldown
Your pet heals itself for 100% of its total health over 5 sec while channeling. Only usable out of combat.
Heart of the Phoenix - Instant cast - 8 min cooldown
Resurrects your pet, instantly returning it to life with 50% health remaining.
Discourage - Instant cast - 20 yard radius - 1 min cooldown
For the next 12 seconds, whenever your pet Growls at a target, this causes nearby enemies to attack the pet, and reduces the damage they all deal by X% for 10 seconds. Only works on enemies that are susceptible to Growl.
The theme and aesthetic were as important. Flayed Shot isn’t as deeply rooted in Hunter history as Explosive or Aimed. I don’t care for it.
Just let survival have the option to range play and duel wield and il be happy.
Ah, like the old “new” incarnation of Explosive Shot that was so bad it joined the annals of Lightwell in being overpowered and completely ignored by the player base.
One day they’ll give us RSV back, but it’ll be “Thrown Weapons” ranged and we’ll ride on top of our pets like mounts and every ability will be based on a combo system.
You could just rename Flayed Shot to Black Arrow and keep everything else identical then.
Kill Shot has been a part of the class for as long as Explosive Shot, so having your DoT reset KS instead of ES doesn’t come off as a big loss to me, unless you were bringing back old RSV where almost everything was a DoT rather than DD.
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Hey as long as it isn’t in melee range , then throwing weapons would be an improvement
2 Likes
This is a pretty good idea for a pet talent tree. However there are a couple of issues.
- This doesn’t solve the problem of useless pet abilities.
A cat (or any pet with a dodge) is going to be less useful than a Scalehide when soloing because the Scalehide has a 1 min Shell Shield. A Cat is going to be less useful than a Raptor in PvP because the Raptor has a Mortal Wounds effect. The same is going to be applied for all pets that don’t have those two abilities in soloing or PvP. In dungeons or raids, non-BM hunters can use whatever they want because all the pet abilities are useless in those environments (or have VERY situational use).
BM Hunters have an extra problem. In dungeons and raids, the ONLY pet they can use is a Spirit Beast because the heal is the ONLY ability that is of any worth in that environment.
- Pet spec choice would be non-existent.
If you put the active and passive effects of the specs on a single tree and have all the active effects be obtainable, why have a pet spec at all? I think it would be better to have the older talent trees back so that the spec actually means something. I would also go back to having Tenacity be the tank so you use it out in the world, Ferocity being DPS so it is used in dungeons and raids, and Cunning being for PvP.
lol good. melee survival was like the perfect girlfriend… when she was ranged. then she cheated on you with your best friend. now you dont care if she runs in traffic.
3 Likes
That is true. My proposed redesign for pet talents/specs isn’t meant to solve any issues we have with pet family abilities. It’s purely meant to allow you to move away from the idea of locked-in specializations, and to also provide a little more variancy over what you can get from each individual pet spec, in terms of active abilities/passive effects, etc. on live atm.
I’m of the opinion that pet family abilities, such as:
[Defense Matrix]
The Mechanical contraption creates a personal defense matrix around itself, reducing damage taken by 50% for 12 sec.
[Acid Bite]
The Hydra bites the target with corrosive venom, causing the Mortal Wounds effect.
- Mortal Wounds
Grievously wounds the target, reducing the effectiveness of any healing received for 10 sec.
[Nether Energy]
A pulse of excess energy releases from the Ray, removing 1 Disease, Magic, and Poison effect from itself.
…abilities such as these, they are very much designed around the theme of each individual pet family. You can ofc reimagine themes for some overlap, for certain families, like they have done already. But not every type of ability necessarily fits with every single family.
Again, though, while the concept I proposed in my previous post wouldn’t allow for complete freedom of choice, at the very least it would allow for more families/combinations, compared to what we have currently on live. I’m not saying that you can’t take another look at the family abilities, look at ways to further explore how to adapt them for a wider array of families. I just think that placing themed family abilities in a common talent tree’esque design would not be the ideal way to do it.
While it does ofc provide some benefits, and would continue to do so with the proposed concept, Spirit Mend nowadays isn’t as much of a “big deal” as it was in BfA where it essentially healed you for 40%+ of your total health with each use.
Having said that, I don’t think the issue with something like the benefits of Spirit Mend should be addressed through a central/common talent tree.
In the way we think of pet specs, as they work today where they’re essentially designed like Core Specializations are for classes, yes.
In short, because all three of the current active abilities we have that are tied to pet specs(Primal Rage, Survival of the Fittest, Master’s Call), none of these have a conflict with eachother in terms of design or niche. They all have their area of usefulness, and would provide for a neat character progression path, for you, as you and your pet level up.
As for the passive effects you’re referring to, they are, in my concept, placed on different paths in the tree. You wouldn’t be able to get all of them. I think the easiest way to explain it would be what you see in the images below.
Let’s say you’re in the process of leveling up, or you’re out questing at max level. Then this might be your chosen path of talents:
In a case where you’re trying to solo an elite, perhaps you would instead pick Heart of the Phoenix, over Discourage.
On the other end, when at max level, when inside a raid, you might instead want to go for this path:
For PvP, you might prefer either of these paths:
Perhaps another one?
The point here is that this would be possible to do on a single pet, if you so wish. Obviously you could achieve that part by simply making it possible to switch between the specs we already have. But IMO, the above would be a lot more fun to play with, than what we have on live atm.
Note that what you can see below here, this should not be possible. If you select/start putting points in one passive, then you cannot continue by selecting talents to the left or right of that one. You should only be able to continue further down towards the bottom.
1 Like
thank you thank you! the only disagreement i have is bring back Legion MM. missiles shooting out of my bow when the class fantasy is a sniper should never be spoken of again!
I know these have already been mentioned but I wanted to reiterate anyway; the most important things for me would be:
-
Pet talents - we should be able to tailor the pet of our choice for situations instead of being limited based on what a certain species provides (i.e. if I need a cunning pet with mortal wounds, it’d be nice to spec whatever animal I want into this instead of having to use raptor/hyena/rodent).
-
SV dual wielding - keep the 2h also, just make dual wield viable as well.
From the community council forums:
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.
10 Likes
People just want to use their favorite pet and have it be viable if blizzard can do that it would make folks happy. People want switchable pet families and pet training.
1 Like
Oh man, I’m still mad about the time I busted a hump taming Humar during BC as a level 20-ish alliance hunter on a pvp server, had to go afk after hearthing back to Ironforge for IRL reasons, and came back to discover my new rare lion that was a pita to tame (so many gankings!) had gotten hungry enough to run away. great gameplay that. not frustrating at all.
Yes being able to choose what pet you want is critical to developing attachment, and the funny thing is classic and BC actually did a pretty bad job at that. Of course there’s the argument that classic and BC were easy enough that you could make a lot of unviable choices and still get by (although that’s a common denominator for every expansion), but the pet system back then established a clear hierarchy of best pets and worst pets and since there was a lot of investment to get a pet up to speed (levelling + loyalty), there were only 3 stable slots, and there were just fewer unique pet models available, it encouraged the Hunter to just pick the very best option and stick to that. And you can see how it plays out in classic and BC. In Classic almost everyone is using a cat, in BC it’s a ravager, and in WotLK it will be a wolf.
Back in classic (in 2005) I liked Raptors but people always told me not to use them. I really wanted to train Stealth to one because I found a raptor in Wailing Caverns that used Stealth however I found the training system didn’t let you do that. It had a lot of stupid restrictions like that which makes one wonder why it exists in the first place.
I love turtles and hippos but rarely do dungeons or raids I miss being able make them ferocity for the leech for tanking and healing. Legion did pets best then undid it cause people complained stuff like it makes no sense i want realism over fun.
I would agree with this.
While I do understand what they were going for with things like having to continuously feed your pet to keep it happy, or the training system. In practicality, these features became tedious, more than anything else. To a degree, it would have to do with how I play the game ofc, where my focus is, and was, on raiding. If you play the game for the reason of taming, leveling, feeding your pets, where your interest is more on the RPG side of playing as a hunter in the world, then obviously, you might see things different.
In short, what one feels about features/functions like the above, it would likely depend on how one plays the game, and why.
As an example, for me, the pet training system boiled down to nothing more than a second talent-system that required more of your time, compared to the regular talent systems that we had. But that’s how I saw it. It doesn’t mean that everyone felt the same way, I’m sure that some players love/loved it.
This is good, good systems (but those kind of systems that we all loathe) design thinking. This is the kind of proactive thinking that the team at Blizz need more of!