To be fair, you also have this topic in the CC forum: Fluffy and You: Hunter Pets
The response left some things to desire ofc. But at least it’s a genuine discussion regarding the pets, that also links over to the hunter forum.
Hopefully they reconsider the current design that is meant to increase throughput. I hope that they make it so thay we’re allowed to manually call out two pets at once, and if we do, the Animal Companion acts as a passive aura that reduces the damage dealt by your two main pets by 50%, allowing the total to remain at 100% still. Similar to how Lone Wolf automatically takes effect when you dismiss your pet as MM, just with a different effect, and trigger.
Granted that if we spend 2 points on Natural Mending, it will now be every 12 Focus spent, down from every 30 Focus spent, like on live atm. This obv equates to it coming off CD faster. That aside, I would love it if, like you said, the pet heal effect would be brought back to being the default, and the Improved Exhil would simply give us the additional HoT effect that we’ve used for a while now.
Yeah, considering the positive sides with the new talents, both in terms of mechanical functionality, but also the aesthetics of it all, I really hope they rework Animal Companion before it all goes live. Otherwise it would essentially all be wasted anyway…
I would argue that they shouldn’t serve as talents att all, but as baseline passive choices.