Get off my lawn!
/pet spirit kitty
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You are no more forced to use spirit beasts than you are a carrion bird or a serpent
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Youâre not being âforcedâ into using a specific pet. Spirit Beasts and exotic pets donât hit any harder than any other pet - while they may have one or two abilities to differentiate them from the standard pets, those abilities arenât anything that are going to substantially raise your DPS.
When I play BM, I use spirit beasts because I think theyâre cool and are an indicator that Iâm playing a BM. However, thatâs all they are - you donât need to use them.
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I never ceases to make me laugh that people seem to think âmandatoryâ means âliterally impossible not to useâ rather than âyouâre an idiot if youâre not using oneâ.
For the entirety of BfA, excepting rare cases where you needed lust (and probably PvP, no idea there), BM used spirit beasts. Could you bring whatever pet you wanted? Sure. You could also leave your healing potions at home and leave Turtle and and Exhil and SotF and healthstones off your bar. I mean, they donât improve your DPS, so who needs 'em, right?
Spirit Beasts in BfA literally gave you a second Exhil, except it only had a 30s CD, no GCD, and was freely castable on any friendly in exchange for being over 10s instead of an instant burst. Literally healed for ~30% max HP. You could choose not to use it, but when people say âmandatoryâ, they donât mean âthe game literally forces you to use thisâ, they mean âif you care even remotely about your performance, this thing needs to be usedâ (also, note that âperformanceâ != âraw DPS outputâ. Keeping yourself alive is as much your responsibility as the healers (arguably more so). Abilities like Spirit Mend were simply too strong for them to be âoptionalâ).
Can you imagine if Exhil itself, or Turtle, or Disengage were tied to a specific family of pet? Would yâall still be sitting here saying âwell, you donât have to use one, it doesnât affect your outputâ?
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Long time BM hunter(Read as Since BC) and while Iâve frequently made an effort to run a top tier pet and have a pet from nearly every family, I know that at the end of the day my skill in pet management and managing my rotations of my abilities and my pets abilities have always been more important in raiding than my pet itself. In my 5 I always have one Ferocity, Cunning, & Tenacity pet.
I have been known to manage entire raids with my Tenacity pet and gimped my DPS because managing my pets health was more important than the DPS it was generating. Why you might think well because if my pet was dying frequently and needing to be resurrected constantly I would be losing more DPS first on a dead pet and second spending that time to revive it.
A good BM hunter learns the raids and dungeons and alters themselves according to the challenge they will face. Different bosses offer different mechanics and some mechanics require different skills being used. Raw numbers are never enough ever.
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Sure, but pet spec no longer impacts DPS, at least directly. So pet choice is now entirely governed by utility, and there are huge swings in that. A Ferocity/defensive pet is neigh-unkillable for BM, while others are much squishier. Unless you have no shamans or mages, Tenacity pets are almost always the most useful option for raids, as a bit of max HP and a second defensive are much stronger, on average, than some token leech or movement speed.
And of the 6 family abilities, 4 are purely pet defensives (two direct DR cooldowns, a dodge cooldown, and a pet-only self-cleanse), leaving only two with potential impact in group content. While MS and snare arenât nearly as impactful as the purge was (thankfully), there are still situations where you might need them in PvE (and the MS is obviously needed in PvP). Ultimately, youâre almost never going to be able to justify running more than 1/3rd of the pet families (one of the three specs) in any given content and situation, and in most of those, youâll also probably want one of the pet family abilities. Itâs fortunately less critical in SL than it was in BfA, simply because the PvE use case for MS and snare is much lower than purge, but that drive is still there.
Thereâs just too many combinations that are flat worthless. The dodge CD is always weaker than the DR CDs, even when you need the pet survivability. Cunning is really only useful in PvP, plus niche usage for soloing old content and arguably for solo content for MM (since their pet damage is low enough that Ferocityâs pet leech healing is irrelevant), so combinations like the Fox and Serpent cunning + dodge are basically never useful anywhere. Those pets can only really be used by hunters that literally donât care at all about their petâs utility or survivability.
A good example of this is one of the other threads out here with peeps complaining that their pets are squishy during the prepatch, but at least one of them has acknowledged that they were using a spirit beast for BM solo play, when a clefthoof (or frankly, any ferocity pet, but especially a ferocity/defensive one like a clefthoof, gorilla, scalehide, or corehound) is literally head and shoulders more survivable. Those players are trapped between using a pet they may not like, or having to suffer with pets that are annoyingly difficult to keep alive.
This pet locking system needs to go. Lemme pick my pet utility completely separately from my petâs looks.
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Please tell me what Spirit Beast offers other than Spirit Mend that you feel you canât get from any other pet. Spirit Mend is by no means required, itâs just a nice to have additional heal. It was also heavily nerfed in 9.0.
If you want to make an argument that BM canât reasonably take a non-Exotic pet, sure, Iâll buy that (to some extent).
There is no reason you are forced to take the specific pet that the âmetaâ favors at any given point, they all do the same damage anyway.
I will dispute this. Ferocity is far better for MM, specifically due to the leech healing - MM does so much more personal damage than BM that Ferocity healing is essential because the likelihood you will pull aggro from your pet, particularly in AoE scenarios, is far greater.
I have been using Scalehides almost exclusively for soloing since they became available, for three reasons - Leech healing, Primal Rage, and because I can run around with a freaking Stegosaurus and thatâs just awesome.
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Is there anything we can use to make the clefthooves smaller? I have never used them since they are so big but feel now, after this patch, that Iâm going to have to use one since I went into islands and could barely keep my spirit pet alive and I even died myself. /sigh
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For personal healing, sure. I was talking about for soloing, where the idea is your pet taking most of the damage. So most of that leech will be wasted. Thatâs why I generally prefer Cunning pets for soloing as MM, because frankly the movement speed is almost always more applicable.
Ferocity is only really amazeballs for BM because the one taking most or all of the damage (your pet) is also the one dealing most of the damage, and thus getting the majority of the leech (and they also have a talent for boosting the potency of that leech by half again). For MM, you deal most of the damage, but your pet, ideally, is taking most of the damage, so that leech is just overhealing you and not doing squat for your ~10% dps pet.
Iâm also talking about soloing.
My pet canât keep aggro on AoE pulls as MM. The mobs WILL come for me, and that Leech healing is essential if I want to keep DPSing rather than ping pong with Feign Death.
I generally bring a pet for soloing single enemies not because I need the pocket tank, but because Fetch exists. If I was an Engineer on my Hunter (never thought Iâd say this, but I miss WoD making it easy to maintain two crafting professions) Iâd be Lone Wolf almost 100% of the time, using the Loot-a-Rang. Iâd swap from Leatherworking, but I have unobtainable Vanilla patterns and I donât want to lose them.
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Ya, I guess I simply donât solo enough as MM, never really saw the point of pulling teeth like that. Like, I prefer MM over BM just as strongly as you do, but I also acknowledge that at least from the perspective of soloing, BM is hands down the best, especially when soloing elites and such.
And on that note, at least SL doesnât have artifact weapons forcing that choice on me.
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The cadence of soloing as MM is nice, very rhythmic. Things die fast, there is more risk/reward, compared with BM which is objectively easier but IMO less interesting. I find myself using traps, Disengage, generally much more of my toolkit overall as MM, where BM I basically just stand there and do my dps rotation until everything falls over.
Depending on what content youâre trying to solo, youâd want to be BM and using a ferocity pet anyway. Specifically a clefthoof.
For MM, Iâd also suggest ferocity anyway. Because the pets are weaker, if youâre dedicated to soloing challenging enough content as MM the added leech will still help your pet, but also help you in the case of juggling threat to trade tank.
Though for most situations, that probably wonât be necessary anyway. Things that you can solo as MM typically wonât be too crazy, and things you canât youâll probably be playing as BM anyway.
Well, that I agree with, itâs just way more annoying when youâre constantly having to fight against pulling threat, and keeping your pet alive.
That said, with the addition of Kill Shot and Dead Eye and the increase to base regen, one of my core complaints about MM soloing is fixed: that it is too slow to recover between mobs, both spending time waiting for AiS charges and waiting for focus. Dead Eye in solo play virtually guarantees that youâll have an AiS available within seconds for the next pull, and the low-cost finisher and much higher base regen help offset the need to wait for focus.
It really wonât, though. In fact, Iâd be willing to wager that youâll always see more pet healing gain, as MM, from the 5% HP from a Tenacity (which increases Mend Petâs healing by 5% as a result) than from the 10% leech on the literally ~10% of your total damage output that your pet constitutes. The leech simply isnât significant enough for MM for Ferocity to make sense from a pet healing perspective. Thatâs why I typically use Cunning instead, if Iâm soloing as MM, as the movement speed is usually more impactful. I run BM for anything that might actually threaten my pet anyway (ex. elites).
My apologies, I wasnât entirely clear with my initial post. I was speaking more so in reference to ferocity vs cunning specifically since you had brought up cunning earlier ^^. You also cannot write off the self healing leech provides for you.
In general, you probably wouldnât want to be MM for content that is meaningfully challenging, other than it just being personal preference.
Iâll admit that I skipped out on most of this expansion so I am not entirely aware of all the various dungeon or raid mechanics
that could be soloed this expansion. Though I will say generally speaking, most cunning pets arenât great for soloing. Thereâs a few with the dodge CDs though those only help the pet so much. Leech can help with any ambient damage you might get, and the health + damage reduction CD from tenacity are going to help you survive any mechanic that might have tons of burst you canât avoid for one reason or another while also increasing healing from mend pet as you mentioned.
The movement speed could help you avoid certain mechanics, but generally speaking you shouldnât be in a position where that movement speed is the make or break point for avoiding something.
I addressed that earlier, in theory your pet should be taking the damage, so that leech on you would be largely wasted. Or should be. As Adreaver points out, keeping mass AoE threat on your pet is rather painful as MM, so the leech not null, but still, I donât think Ferocity is nearly as âclearly the right answerâ for soloing as MM as it is for BM.
I mean, there are Cunning pets for every family ability as there are for Ferocity. The only difference is Lust versus Masterâs Call (rarely relevant, though Masterâs Call arguably has slightly more use in solo play, if for no other reason than the cooldown), and the movement speed versus the leech. The movement speed is useful for getting around, both over distances too short to be worth mounting for, and in areas where you simply cannot mount. That time savings does add up. Itâs less about whether you need that 8% speed bonus (you never do), and more about the fact that itâs the most generally useful of the 3 spec passives, at least in my opinion.
Note, however, that Iâm talking just about soloing here. In group content, Tenacity is almost always better, due to the DR cooldown, unless you donât have another source of Lust. Also, on the note of that DR cooldown, reminder that the dominant form of pet DR is the family abilities that provide a DR cooldown, not Survival of the Fittest. There are roughly equal numbers of pet families that have those DR cooldowns for all 3 specs.
I think I realize we might be talking about very different ideas of soloing, given the part of your post about mounting? Iâm thinking more so soloing for current expansion dungeon and raid bosses. If weâre talking more so world content, then yeah I could absolutely see your point about cunning since youâll have more room to potentially kite and keep distance.
For what itâs worth, I was talking about world content (including rares, elites, and AoE farming), and I still favor Ferocity heavily.
Pet threat for MM in anything beyond pure single target is just terribly inadequate, and Iâd rather bolster my personal sustain than worry about buffing a pet that is going to be a pretty poor pocket tank anyway.
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I personally think I would too, but it has been a year and a half since I really last played and only just came back a few days ago. I can understand the reasoning behind possibly preferring cunning for world content.
Yes, my apologies, when I say âsoloingâ, I almost always mean world content like WQs, questing, invasions, elites, etc. Soloing old raids is another activity, and one that obviously caters to using Cunning, since thereâs virtually zero danger and lots of running around.
Soloing current content is in the same realm, or beyond it, as soloing some of the harder elites in the open world, where I honestly regard it as foolish, in most cases, to use anything except BM + Ferocity. Thatâs the difficulty level where pet damage intake and survivability become of paramount importance, and frankly, nothing MM can bring to the table can hold a candle next to the survivability advantage of a Ferocity/defensive pet under BM.
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