Putting in my two cents. I love this rework, I love the idea of a pet that we don’t have to manage. I’m all for it.
4 Likes
yeah they should just let it sit and fester and let people be dissatisfied for the whole expac 
The marksmen hunter pet changes are a terrible direction to take. Allow the hunters to choose the pet they want to play with and bake the eagle stuff into that. Done, easy change.
The beast master pack leader randomly summoning pets that are not in their stable, have never tamed, is also bad. There should be an option that the player can choose that does not clog up the screen with random mobs.
This is a RP game devs.
You’re messing with 20 years of core fantasy of one of the most played classes for mysterious reasons that look from this angle very foolish.
21 Likes
Show me where I said they shouldn’t do anything at all.
3 Likes
“you dont need 3 ranged specs, you can play the other 2”
“you dont need a pet, you can play the one that summons a zoo”
13 Likes
My hunters are goblins and mechagnomes. They use guns and technology, and without a tinker class, hunter is the only class that allows me to play with those themes. I don’t want an eagle or more affinity with the natural world, and making me use an eagle permanently creates more discord with what I find fun in the game.
Editing to say, the option to change the appearance of this eagle or the sentinel owl to drones for those who want to embrace the tech fantasy would be a major draw for a lot of players.
2 Likes
MM change to only one non-chosen pet: NO NO NO NO NO NO.
I have never before threatened to quit the game, but this will probably do it for me. Playing a bow-wielding marksman hunter with a pet of her choice is THE fantasy I chose this game for.
18 Likes
@Kaivax I absolutrly LOVE the eagle pet and how it works, i’d like to see more animations for it in it’s descent and attacks and more interactibility like having it perch on your arm and stuff out of combat, as well as glyphs to make it have appearances that we can choose from.
Also, please bring back the ability for hunters to have their pet and choose to have either their own pet or the eagle to help you as a spotter. As a HUGE MM hunter player, this is the first ever change that feels like I finally have an MM hunter fantasy that fits the master sharpshooter. No matter what, please don’t toss the Eagle out. It’s amazing! Just also let the MM hunters who like their pets have a choice between the eagle or their favorite animal that they can summon as they always have, evem if it makes the lose the functionality of all the Eagle provides.
I have begged and begged for Marksmanahip to get more into the Master Marksman fantasy and even magic archer route, but a Spotter Eagle that feeds information to you from the skies is an even better route that I didn’t think of and I absolutely love it and wish I could play it right now in live.
I have many special pets that I love but I don’t use them because they dont fit in the MM fantasy at all and Lone Wolf gave a damage loss the second a pet came out but this eagle is amazing. Do not change it out, please keep it in the game no matter what
1 Like
Sir if you were a Marksman, your pet would make you stick out like a sore thumb. MM is a Marksman, a sharpshooter, a sniper. Your fantasy is to shoot from a distance and use massive shots to eradicate and remove high priority targets. Your pet wolf that bites their ankles isnt helping you or that fantasy, an eagle that feeds information to you is WAY better fantasy wise than having ANY other pet you want especially with all the added spotters marks that it provides because it feels like a smooth way to iterate a pet into a sniper class.
I have to disagree and I welcome this change wholeheartedly and love it, but I do wish they would let people choose between the eagle and their original pet but make them lose the spotters marks as its tied to the eagle, that way you keep your fantasy of a pet friendly MM and the rest of us can enjoy a sharpshooter fantasy the way it was meant to be
2 Likes
I just hope the ‘Rexxar’ animals aren’t forced on us, and we can opt to talent out of those if we like.
Not a fan of animals that don’t fit my aesthetic for my hunter.
9 Likes
You can quote them all you want but class identity has been split into specializations for every class but MM never had one because it functionally is the exact same as BM except for a different visual pet and you point sometimes intstead of fire your bow or ranged weapon of choice. If you want MM, then you want someone that is as close to a sniper as possible and a pet would ruin that fantasy instantly and Lone Wolf was a way to do both but it was boring and caused all MM hunters to lose damage by using bloodlust.
You have melee kindred spirit pet hunter and ranged exotic handler hunter, marksmanship is a spec that avoids a pet and choose smooth and heavy shots to eliminate your target, this is a class fantasy win for anyone that actually wanted to play MM the way it should be and should feel. Just because you wanted sniper hunter with a pet and wanted the best of both worlds doesnt mean everyone does. MM lived in a constant state of flux with having a pet as part of their utility but they lost damage for having one which makes no sense. Now you get an eagle that feeds information to you, doesnt give you away, and lets you do what you were supposed to. Shoot your weapon and go for kill shots, not pet your flanimal friend that helplessly and pointlessly bites their ankles
3 Likes
And Survival Hunter apparently means “stabbing people in the face while your pet chews on their ankles”. Let’s not pretend spec names make a whole lot of sense.
10 Likes
I missed the part of that fantasy that makes them a falconer all of a sudden. Feels like a separate fantasy that you personally combine into MM.
If I’m playing MM to be a sniper, I don’t want to be commanding a bird, I want to be a character relying entirely on their skill in marksmanship and personal tricks (i.e. trick arrows, caltrops, etc).
But maybe I just want to play a hunter with a pet that isn’t A) up close in melee or B) throws a whole zoo at an enemy to defeat them.
19 Likes
While I understand why everyone wants the ability to call their pets still, I disagree entirely with this statement. I very rarely am forced to call out a pet for any content. I think it is just not true that we wouldn’t be able to do solo content anymore. Even when I first started doing delves I never felt like I needed a pet. A pet makes it easier, but I never felt like it was a requirement or a brick wall.
1 Like
Alternatively for MM and pack leader, how about we choose the pet? If you want MM pet to be flying, why not let us choose a flying pet? Instead of an eagle, which I find quite boring, let us choose an owl, a flying serpent, a bat, a raven, etc? For pack leader, instead of using those set pets, let us choose the pets. Any flying pet instead of a wyvern, any pet instead of a bear or boar.
A large part of the hunter class fantasy is finding companionship with your pets that you picked and named yourself. Some of us have been using the same pets since we started playing this game. Why take that away from players? Removing player agency is almost never fun.
9 Likes
They mentioned at the bottom there will be customizable options for the eagle they don’t want to reveal yet.
THIS. Absolutely. I play a mechagnome BM Pack Leader hunter engineer with a very tinkery aesthetic. My pets are exclusively mechs, bugs (which I RP that I have mechanized under their chitin), or anything from Zereth Mortis. The only thing my character would have to do with a bear, boar, or wyvern would be to run away from it… or direct my mechanical pets to attack it. And the turtle on the head? Also… no thanks. I’m a gun toting engineer, not a crazy zookeeper with turtle poop in my hair.
So just become a BM Dark Ranger you say? Uh… I really don’t want to have to use shadow magic. I’m a nice person, not a dark and edgy dead elf. I do not want to “embrace hatred and strike from the shadows”. Holy moly heebie jeebies.
And on the topic of MM. I agree with the people who suggest having Lone Wolf work more like the warlock sacrifice. Instead of shoehorning the entirety of the spec into having a weird random eagle and never having that ease of solo play with a pet, have it be an option still.
All of these changes seem to take away from player choice and the class flavor of the pet bond, which feels bad to me. We end up stuck with random eagles, bears, boars, wyverns instead of the pets we’ve tamed and loved for ages. PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS, BLIZZ.
7 Likes
Yes, they are. I am glad you won’t be taking that away from them.
I never cared if I lost 4% dps for having my pet. I always used my pet, because I’m a hunter, and that’s the entire identity of the class.
17 Likes
This. It feels like by cutting out player choice, and customization of class fantasy, Blizzard is catering only to players running high end raids/M+ which are always the minority of any mmo. And at the expense of the rest of the player base which usually choose their class based on what feels and looks appealing to them.
Players asked for the talent tree back, but Blizzard didn’t stop to ask why players wanted the talent tree back. Players wanted the freedom to choose their own style of play and the flexibility that should come with that. Forcing the player into a few barely distinguishable branches and then trimming away anything that appeals to fantasy or customization defeats the point of the talent tree.
It’s supposed to be a talent TREE not a talent stick.
Let MM players CHOOSE whether or not to have a pet. Let BM players CHOOSE how many pets they want to have out at a time. Let the players choose. This feels like a change being made for the convenience of the devs without taking into account any of the actual players who developed and grew with their hunters and their pets over two decades.
Is only appealing to players who don’t care about anything but bigger numbers on their meter really the direction devs and leadership want the game to go in?
15 Likes
Gonna be blunt here, this is awful and I hate this. Taking away a core concept of the entire class and an expression of individuality to replace it with the same, cookie-cutter eagle is shameful.
I love playing Marksmanship as the concept of a skilled archer/gunner always appeals to me in games, I love having an animal companion I’ve chosen and bonded with assisting me in battle. What I don’t love is having the companion chosen for me. WoW has so many incredible options for pet models available, so to tell the players who play hunters for the pet aspect and play Marks “actually, sorry, you don’t get to have one of these” is frankly insulting.
Secondarily, don’t remove Barrage from the class talents. This is just a personal thing but I love raining a hail of arrows on my enemies.
21 Likes