Pet utility, leech/dps movement speed/ health buff, offtanking capabilities in case tank dies, peels, or another defensive cd.
Lone wolf being baseline means you will want to always switch off pets. The way it is now is more optional. Adding another pet talent to choose from in that slot would work because you are picking petless option with more overall damage with no pet ai, vs pet ai, single target dot basically and a bunch of good utility.
Right now you can just skip that talent.
What you suggest makes that talent more unappealing. I suggest alternatives for people that like their pets.
It is currently baseline. DFâs is the awkward change.
Not if youâre doing any AoE. Both Lone Wolf and your suggested new Pet-AoE talent would be an AoE talent, and a huge one at that (+10% AoE damage).
It would be a must pick for AoE and any fight that screws over pets. That is not a choice. +10% damage in a single, 5th row, mid-path point is not âoptionalâ
Iâm literally suggesting that those who like their pets get the same total damage, in both ST and AoE, as those who take Lone Wolf without having to pay an extra talent just to do so.
Make Lone Wolf baseline. It now affects only primary target damage.
Move your choice of family passives and abilities to the Hunter itself.
Voila. You have actual choice as to when and whether to use a pet.
It is you take lone wolf and you get 10% bonus damage for not having a pet, you also get access to a talent that gives 10% crit if you do not take lone wolf you lose out on dmg and crit.
But having a pet that just does its normal attacks no way is 10% of our damage. And the loss of 10% crit for not taking lone wolf is garbage.
It is a great change if you want to use it. The way they made it makes it an optional thing. You can spec into pets with class tree and stuff like kill command builds if you want, but ranged options probably will still be more powerful.
Right now you skip that talent if you want your pet all the time, numerically lone wolf will always be higher dps if you want to make it worth losing out your pet utility, the other option would be for a dps boost, could be something like adding a beast cleave with multishot, or maybe something like a dot your pet spreads when you aoe, more damage to bleeding targets etc.
It is a less powerful option but one not forsaking utility. Right now you just skip over it.
This goes against why lone wolf was put in the game though. You might as well remove it if you do all that stuff⌠which is my point. It gives people with lone wolf options and people like pets other options and lets you go down that tree.
How is it âa great changeâ to be forced to pay for what was baseline?
Let alone to lock a 10% crit buff on your most important skills behind it?
That may be true for an RP player.
But for anyone else, in any situation with AoE, it simply means that you cannot choose to forgo Lone Wolf because it adds 10% AoE damage in a single talent.
With any AoE, that talent point is effectively just as forced as Aimed Shot.
How? How it could possible.
The point of Lone Wolf, you just said, was to let players play without a pet.
This would actually let players play without a pet. Not just dismissing and resummoning ad nauseum, but instead forming an actual option.
When you want something that actually has to do with using a pet, you summon the pet and lose nothing for doing so. When you donât want the pet and/or the pet might be screwed over by the fight, you drop the pet, and lose nothing for doing so.
Itâs 10% damage with loss of pet. Vs keeping your pet, your leech buff/movement speed buff/ all your pet utility and a pet can save your life with itâs utility.
Itâs one talent point. the 10% crit chance on stuff is alot of talent points to waste for just two spells buffed. When taking 3 talents point into other aoe talents is a good option. Wasting 3 talent points on no pet and only buffing two spells is sort of unattractive and not as fun as keeping your pet, pet buffs and buffing more aoe spells.
It is a blessing that you donât have to take lone wolf. Although it would be nice to see a choice node there with a pet buff. Right now though itâs looking like a good talent to skip.
Like being able to skip out on lone wolf and taking salvo and volley, trueshot, and wailing arrow is nice, for losing out on an annoying talent. For an aoe build.
Itâs a net ~13.5% AoE and ~6.5% ST damage buff for 3 talents. They are efficient to the point of being a non-choice in anything with AoE. That is not a âwasteâ.
And you know what would be better still? It remaining baseline. We make the choice already just by having a pet out or not having a pet out. We donât need a talent to restrict our access to a choice we already make.
It simply needs to be fixed such that taking or not taking a pet has no impact on our total damageâin ST or AoEâthereby allowing us to avoid using pets where theyâd be screwed over and to use pets without damage loss when we can actually get value out of their being separate units (i.e., with separate health pools, threat pools, and abilities).
Any AoE build is going to take Lone Wolf. Just as, for better or worse, it will be forced into focusing at least partly on Rapid Fire. Taking Lone Wolf in an AoE build does not cost you access to Wailing Arrow, Salvo, Volley, and even a fully upgraded Trueshot.
And again, the point is irrelevant. You say itâs an annoying talent. The solution to that is not to make it a must-pick talent for yet more builds.
The solution is to make it so MM is free to use a pet, or not use a pet, to the extent that the literal central feature of a petâa separate unit with separate HP and threat valuesâis either an advantage (Mortal Wounds, oGCD snare, Growl, etc.), or a waste (canât reliably path to target, gets CCed, etc.).
Show your full build. Your build would have more dps potentially. But say in a mythic plus setting youâd value some of the utility. You can less afford to not offer your pet utility in dungeons where there are less people. And you have more damage sacrificing your pet for raids.
While i agree with this I also think they have developed the spec more and more away from âyou and your petâ. Leaning more on the sole sniper theme.
Now this might mostly be a need to try and also cater to the people who adopted/like the lone wolf style. To an apparent cost to all the other Hunter players who prefer to play with a pet, but now wont spec MM because MM with pet is bad.
In my opinion it was a mistake. The single most unifying and identifying part of Hunter was its use of a pet. Its a pet class. If they felt a need for a petless physical sniper iâd rather seen them change combat into it or some other solution.
What a Hunter is has been so watered down and removing pets for one spec and butchering/simplifying the pet for the other two specs just removed way too much from what made you feel like a Hunter.
I really hope, still, that they will add back more or our pets functions. Like pet specs and utility from pets. And Also that they make MM with pet more viable and more evolved.
Edit: if you dont like to play with a pet or dont think any utility, damage or synergy for the spec/class should be linked to the pet then⌠Perhaps Hunter isnt for you? And that is not a bad thing. Blizzard tries to hard to make specs and classes appeal to too many players IMO. They must have at least some clear and big things that make a class what it is. And if you dont like it for class A then fine, you will probably like class B, C, D, E or F.
I have a hotter take. Remove specs for Hunters and give them one big talent tree that lets you focus on your pets, your ranged attacked, melee attacks and GG we no longer have the issue of Blizzard struggling to make each spec unique.
I posted this in the old âLone Wolf-topicâ, thought Iâd post it in here as well.
The primary issue with Lone Wolf, if theyâre putting it back in as a talent option, is that it must be designed to provide you with a decent enough boost to damage, to be worth the point spent on it.
On live, where itâs a baseline passive that gives you 10% damage if you donât have a pet out, this isnât a 10% damage gain. As an example, on ST, itâs a 10% gain, minus the damage your pet wouldâve dealt if you would have it out instead. In multi-target scenarios, itâs going to be closer to a 10% gain.
If they go back to it being a talent based choice, then it must be tuned to provide you with the benefits it did while it was a baseline passive(the 10%), but it also needs to be tuned even higher, in order to be a worthy talent pick relative to other talent options. Unless ofc they think of it as a talent to pick for AoE, where again, the gain would be higher if you donât use a pet, compared to ST.
I see many people mentioning how, when theyâve now put it in as a talent, you now have a choice to not pick(use) it. You have that choice if itâs a baseline passive effect as well.
Lone Wolf exists specifically because some hunters hated pets. Iâm one of them, and Iâd even prefer if MM didnât have pets AT ALL, and instead had more CC to keep enemies away. I want to play an archer, not an animal trainer. Play BM if you like the animal theme.
If they add a separate âRangerâ class that uses bows and has no pet at all, then Iâd be all for removing Lone wolf from hunter.
OK, but not taking LW should then also NOT reduce survivability and control. Pets do more than just ST dmg.
Lone Wolf trades a lot of utility for slightly more AOE. Both have the same ST. If you want to give the pet the AOE, then itâs only natural to also give the archer the utility.
First off, yes it is. It is a choice of whether you want to use a pet or not. That doesnât change.
Second, I assume you based that on an argument of damage/througput. If so, how would turning it into a talent make it any different? I assume that even if it was a talent, for AoE, you would always want to pick it?
The main issue is that for ST scenarios, players are effectively having to choose whether they want to spend a talent point on roughly a 2-3% damage gain, if even that. And yes, Iâm basing that on numbers that donât include everything we get from borrowed powers(which do promote the idea of playing without a pet, since said powers generally donât do much to boost pet damage as MM) in Shadowlands.
No, Hunter doesnt imply pet⌠if anything it more commonly would imply the archer or ranger archetype.
MM should be no pet period in my opinion as a default baseline attribute, it shouldnt even be able to call a pet.
BM and SV, sure, but nothing about MM says pet class.