Yeah even I would swap to BM with a Clefthoof to try soloing current dungeons, let alone raids.
8.0 World Bosses are doable as MM, but those are a joke at this point, they have the same health as the big rare elites in Uldum/Vale.
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Yeah, as I mentioned being gome for awhile, so I wasnât entirely sure if the gear increases over the expansion was making it possible to do more challenging content as MM or not, and for some reason was assuming that it had haha.
My apologies for the confusion.
MM is viable for soloing if you can kill it FAST, or if it is pure single target and not immune to pet taunts.
Beyond that, you need BM pets for the threat generation and additional survivability, MM pets simply canât survive long enough, nor do they generate enough threat on their own to keep aggro. You can buy some time with good use of Feign Death and Misdirection, but it very likely wonât be enough for anything truly difficult.
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Honestly, even with taunt, it can be a bit touch and go as MM during the first 15-30s on any given target. MM can and will rip threat off its pet unless it leads with MD (though remember that that threat vanishes after 30s), especially if the pet taunts before the hunter lands their first meaty shot, as the pet wonât have the advantage of âinheritingâ that shotâs threat until their taunt comes back up.
I tend to open with Aimed>Arcane>Essence, then send in the pet for the Growl bump, then FD, then Misdirection.
Misdirection on cooldown after that, watch threat meters closely and FD if its even remotely close.
Then itâs a race to see if I can kill it before the pet dies. Primal Rage helps here.
Thereâs a glyph you can get that makes your pet smaller. Been thinking of getting one myself since I didnât realize how big the cloud serpents were.
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Ya, sizing on some pets is odd. Like, take these for example:
Thatâs my active lineup of pets currently. The scorpid is tiny compared to the rest, especially compared to the spider (which is a super broad pet, horizontally, rather than tall) and the bird (whoâs just big period). And then of course the Clefhooves are massive, though theyâre still dwarfed by the matching mount:
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In BFA as BM, there was rarely anything I could solo with a Clefthoof that I couldnât solo as a Spirit Beast, and vice versa. With the size of Spirit Mend then, the ability for fairly large spot heals on me or the pet would sometimes outweigh the consistent healing of leech.
Which I would choose is just situational. For lots of AoE Clefthoof was better â the more mobs on the pet, the more healing Beast Cleave is doing.
Some solo fights lust made the difference. Others the extra tenacity damage shield and health (and resulting bigger mend pets) did. With Spirit Mend much weaker that might shift the balance. Then again, last I checked Blood of the Rhino is still missing in action, so that might shift the balance back to all Tenacity and Ferocity pets being pretty equal in survivability overall, depending on the situation.
Well, they took away arcane shot dispelling things.
A dispel from your pet on a 10 second cooldown is insanely powerful for pvp and mythic plus.
They also have a heal, which heals a lot, and can be used on the pet or any player. Iâve saved so many people on keys with it.
Itâs not really fotm. Itâs that good. Itâs been that good for a loooooong time.
Putting a dispel back on arcane shot would make it so you can pick a different pet.
I guess having tranq shot (I think they put that back in, havenât checked?) makes it a bit better⊠but being able to remove enrage and also a shield something puts up makes it even more viable to have a spirit beast. It gives us things we can bring to the table. Other pets donât offer that 
Clefthoof honestly were less about whether you could solo it, and more about that fact that you literally just never had to pay attention to the pet. The leech healing is so strong that your pet basically just takes care of itself in the vast majority of situations. Spirit Beasts, and really any non-Ferocity pet (again, though, only for BM), require a bit more active management to keep alive.
Blood of the Rhino was icing, not the reason clefthooves were used. Itâs the reason they are used over scalehides, gorillas, and corehounds (though corehounds have arguments for them too, they have a thorns aura, which helps with AoE threat, and they have a superior defensive family ability), but the fundamental reason clefthooves are used is simply that they are Ferocity with a DR cooldown. And weâll get Blood of the Rhino back during the 50-60 push anyway, if it isnât fixed before then.
Arcane Shot has never dispelled things, to my recollection (unless it was some weird PvP thing, but I somehow doubt theyâd add a purge to a spammable filler cast), and pets can no longer purge targets (that has been changed into a pet-only self-cleanse for those pets, ie. the pet can cleanse itself of debuffs, it cannot remove them from its target). They did, yes, add back in Tranq Shot, thatâs our purge now.
That heal got nerfed by 68.5% in the prepatch.
It did in fact have a purge baked in, but that was several expansions ago at minimum, maybe Cataclysm?
I can find references to such a purge in the context of hit having been removed as of October 2008, which would have been about a month before WotLK released.
Looking back at the patch history, it appears that it removed a single magic effect from patch 2.3.0, November 2007, until patch 3.0.2, October 2008. The same patch converted Tranq Shot into a magic and enrage purge.
So I stand corrected, Arcane Shot did have a purge at one timeâŠfor one patch over a decade ago. Seems odd to bring it up as if itâs a recent change. Would be like a post saying âWell, they converted hunters over to using focus, so [âŠ]â or âWell, Blood is now only a tanking spec, so [âŠ]â. âWell, Reagan is no longer president, so [âŠ]â.
Just to be extremely pedantic, it was 2 patches. TBC had a 2.4 patch as well.
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Lies. x.4 patches donât exist. Revisionist history.
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Yeah Iâm not a fan of nerfing hunter anything just so some can feel justified in not using it. That logic makes zero sense.
Option 1: spirit beast to strong so you choose to use it over other petsâŠit benefits you
Option 2: spirit beast is to strong so you choose not to use it as youâd rather use a different petâŠtherefore you are weaker
Option 3: spirit beast is nerfed to make you feel good about using a different petâŠyou are still weakerâŠexcept now youâve also forced all other hunters that wanted to use spirit beast to be weaker as well
You are wanting option 3 from what Iâve read of your comments in multiple postsâŠur option is selfish does not offer a fix to pet locking and is all about ur personal feelingsâŠ
If one said other pets should be buffed to be as strong as spirit beast was without nerfing spirit beast I might listen. But nerfing our strong pets only nerfs us as a class/specâŠso I canât agree with you. Now Iâve seen ur tenacity in posts and know you will have some self glorified answer 20 pages long but Iâll save you the trouble. You canât convince donât waste ur time or mine.
Itâs a simple matter of balance. If one pet is so strong that not using it is tactically unsound, thatâs an issue. Ideally, all of the pet should have equivalent reason to use them, meaning you can choose whatever the heck you want.
Frankly, spirit beasts are in a much better spot now. They are no longer the âuse it or youâre dumbâ option, but the heal is still a unique perk, even nerfed as it is. I think the pet self-cleanse is a positively dumb ability, of course, and Iâd rather see it become something like a Curse of Tongues ability (useful, but roughly in the same band on power and applicability in both PvE and PvP as the MS and snare abilities), but Iâm still glad to see it at least not be something so overwhelmingly strong as to be effectively required.
Really, the goal here isnât to have spirit beasts be an inferior option. Just to not have them being the staggeringly superior option anymore. Peeps that like them can use them, peeps that donât, donât have to.
So, no, itâs not selfish to want to have options aside from spirit beasts, unless the person in question literally wants to invert the dynamic and make spirit beasts actually bad. The thread title suggests the OP may be in that category, but most of the other peeps in this thread are not. They simply donât want to be effectively forced into spirit beasts themselves.
Nerf one, buff the others, it amounts to the same principle: balance them against each other. Whether it manifests as a nerf to the top end or a buff to the bottom end depends more on where they are compared to where they are intended to be by the dev team. In this case, it seems clear that they felt spirit beasts were too strong relative to where they want pets to be, and so it was nerfed.
Sure, nerfs kinda suck. One of the first lessons of psychology is that humans place about an order of magnitude more weight on losing something they have than on failing to gain something, or in fact on the inverse on gaining it in the first place (ie. if I gave you $10, then turned around an hour later and took it back, youâd be at a net negative on emotional effect, because the loss of the $10 you had actually outweighs the enjoyment of getting it in the first place, even though you netted to where you started from).
However, you canât just constantly buff everything. Thatâs how you get Diablo level power creep, where players are doing literally hundreds of times more damage now than they were a couple years ago. They adjust the outliers, either up or down, and which it is depends on where things are compared to where the devs want them to be.
For example, if spirit beasts were simply doing too much healing for what the devs wanted, and if they were barred from nerfing it, their only other option would be to buff the health and healing of all player characters and pets. And then theyâd have to buff the damage of player characters to compensate in PvP, and buff the damage and health of all hostile mobs game-wide to compensate as well. Ultimately, they wanted the heal to be weaker relative to health pools and other sources of healing, so it doesnât much matter if they do it by nerfing spirit beasts or buffing literally everything else, because it amounts to the same impact: spirit beasts are no longer monumentally strong compared to other pets, or in isolation as a survival mechanic for the hunter.
Well thatâs a brilliant way to handle a conversation. âIâm right, youâre wrong, I canât hear you, LALALALALALAâ. What are you, 6?
If youâre so close-minded as to insist that buffing everything else was the only fair way to address this, then itâs youâre prerogative to hold that belief, but it doesnât make you correct. Blizzard acted correctly with this nerf. They may have gone too far, due to how weak the new self-cleanse ability is, but they needed to nerf Spirit Mend regardless.
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No Iâve just seen ur post so often I know how arrogant you come off while argueing with others. So thereâs no point getting into it with you. Especially on this subject. You write novels and most is geeked with your opinion of how your right no other pet usable bs. In pve I and most others didnât even use spirit pet they used hero pets. And in pvp we used spirit pets like 45% of the time in arena. Rest was ms and freedom pets. Nerfing it doesnât fix blizz not changing pet specs to a better option and unlocked. So I choose not to argue.
I ensure Iâm being clear about what Iâm saying, rather than vomiting on the keyboard like itâs a tweet. Just because you have the attention span of a amnesic goldfish doesnât mean everyone else does. If you donât like reading responses to your drivel, maybe the forums arenât the best communication medium for you. I hear you can get short and sweet posts out on Twitter. Maybe try spamming WatcherDev with your silliness instead.
Spirit beasts were largely an issue in PvE, not PvP, yes. However, even aside from that, when one pet family, out of 59, is used 45% of the time, thatâs a problem. How can you not see this?
My goal is for you to be able to use those spirit beasts youâre so infatuated with, and others to be able to use anything else they want. Pet choice shouldnât be being forced on us.
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Man⊠i must be getting old, because these constant âconnected to player powerâ complaints are just not speaking to me.
Do you really play hunter for itâs meta? Tbh I bet most people who play hunter enjoy having a pet or two, and I can guarantee the stable size increase is for fellow pet collectors who enjoy taming different types of petsâŠ
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