Hunter Pets in BfA

Community General Discussion
1

I don’t know why and I don’t know who thought it was a good idea, but please add back the ability of changing our pets’ specialization.

Because being forced to use pets that don’t match your character, be it racially, transmog-wise or roleplay-wise because they’re more viable than others is really sad.

For example, when I play a Zandalari hunter in the future, I want to be able to have a raptor pet that is equally as good as any other pet in PvE, but they’re not. They’re mainly PvP pets because they’re forced to be Cunning.

And even in PvP they’re not the best, no, Silithid take that spot (in comparison) due to their Exotic Ability “Dune Strider” that give them 30% more movement speed. Pair that with the spec ability “Pathfinding” and it goes up to 38% and with the talent “Aspect of the Beast”, 42%.

Raptors could easily be brought up to par with Silithid by giving them an Exotic Ability like “Predatorial Swiftness” that also increases their movement speed by 30% and then add similar exotic abilities to other pets it would fit (cats, Bird of Prey (they fly, duh), hyenas and so on), rather than giving it to just one family.
And this goes for similar abilities like “Blood of the Rhino” for clefthooves. It could easily be applied to direhorns, hydras, scalehides, riverbeasts, etc.

And while these abilities are tied to exotic pet families, that shouldn’t stop them from being applied to standard pet families as well, because the only spec that would have access to them anyway, would be -you guessed it- Beast Mastery.

But the main issue is specs, I want to be able to have a Ferocity-specced raptor because that 15% Leech is actually quite useful in PvE while 12% movement speed is not. Especially in solo content because Leech helps pets stay alive alongside Mend Pet.

So please, let us choose pet specializations. It may seem minor but it does matter and it adds a lot to individual characters; whether by matching their race’s lore, their transmog set(s) or their roleplay.

14 Likes
2

While it would be nice to choose, it’s not really a big deal in my opinion. Pet damage was normalized a long time ago… Cunning, Ferocity, Tenacity, they all do the same damage. So I just stick with whatever matches my hunters mog.

I do just fine with my black dragonhawk, but I’ll swap to a spirit beast for dungeons/raids.

But, still. I agree with you, at the very least choosing which “boon” our pets provide would be nice. The stamina from tenacity is okay but leech from ferocity is amazing. Sucks all my pets are tenacity lol

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Player choice? What sort of game do you think this is? :upside_down_face:

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4

There should be no situation outside of high-end content (such as organized raiding / mythic+) where you need to have a specific pet because it performs better than others. You can solo viably with any pet type, your pets will have the same DPS on average with very little difference.

So yes, you will be able to solo and DPS effectively with a raptor if you want to. I say this as someone who has 3 hunters, one of which uses a Bird of Prey (Cunning with Slow) as the default pet without any significant issues. Also, the leech from Ferocity is only 10%, not 15%.

5

I’ve never let anyone tell me which pet to use, fel even back in BC when every hunter and their grandma used boars because that was “the best pet.”

That being said, I do agree with bringing back the ability to choose, I’d love my pterradax to have a bit more health . . . least pets don’t loose aggro so easily this expansion.

3 Likes
6

Of course there shouldn’t be. However there are pets that perform better outside of those areas. Damage was normalized, which is why I did not bring it up in my OP but rather, there are still pets better at solo tanking. Such as Clefthooves who have 3 tanking passives.

They’re a Tenacity pet so they get 10-15% leech depending on your level 100 talent.
They have the exotic ability “Blood of the Rhino” which increases their armour by 10% and all healing effectiveness by 20%, which buffs not only Mend Pet from 35% to 42% but also the leech amount from 15% to 18%.
Then they also have “Tough Hide” which reduces all damage taken by 60% for 15 seconds when brought below 40% (2 min CD), which is hard considering the above.

As someone who has 3 hunters, I find it odd that you don’t know the effect of the currently best level 100 talent for BMs, unless that is a spec you stay far away from of course.
Aspect of the Beast
"Increase the damage of your pet’s abilities by 30%.

Increases the effectiveness of you pet’s Predator’s Thirst, Endurance Training, and Pathfinding passives by 50%."
Predator’s Thirst: 10% -> 15%
Endurance Training: 5% -> 7.5%
Pathfinding: 8% -> 12%

Either way, minor thing but yeah. Issue isn’t damage, issue is that there are pets that are far more survivable (thus viable) in solo instances (and Silithid being much better than any other Cunning pet when it comes to PvP in terms of movement speed + a slow). Good luck trying to solo the tougher Zandalar/Kul Tiras/Arathi/Darkshore rares with that Bird of Prey and Mend Pet, its many deaths will be mourned.

In the meantime, a Clefthoof will shrug off everything because of how ridiculously tanky it is (which compared to some other pets who based on their looks would be even tankier, such as direhorns, but that’s just a flavour thing anyway), and basically any Ferocity pet will generally do much better than any Cunning or even ironically… Tenacity pets because that 15% leech is more powerful than 7.5% more health and a damage reduction ability.

The issue I have is that in the past, players were able to choose whether or not they could make any pet they wanted to be as tanky as that. If I wanted a tanky raptor in WoD/Legion, oh boy I could have just that. Now? It has a far greater tendency to die because of being strictly a Cunning pet. Mend Pet is not going to keep it alive for long unless you’re pulling very few mobs, which personally I don’t when I can pull 15+ and just have my Ferocity pet leech HP off of all of them from Beast Cleave and heal itself to full with pretty much every attack, barely even needs Mend Pet. And a Clefthoof is thus a Tenacity pet on steroids basically.

I wish players were able to choose more pets freely to be that tanky, because we could in the past. Heck I even want pet talents because because pet customization is something I really love the idea of rather than forcing them to be one thing and one thing only.

And as such it does to a degree limit your options. I’d love to have a raptor out at all times (two actually, but Animal Companion is absolutely horrible) but when it does come to soloing current content, a raptor is a very terrible choice and that saddens me.

…sry for long post, welp

2 Likes
7

:+1:

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8

I support this.

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9

I miss pets being unique.be nice to have each family have its own special ability not the same thing over different families {like a slow} just renamed.maybe they should look at pets like players and make a talent tree for them as well.just an idea

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10

Dial a pet is missed.

I caught the old way even with my late legion start. Get the pet you want for whatever whims you have, make it how you wanted it.

I’d gather they wanted to diversify pets making us have to choose a family for feature X. But…for many when it doubt ferocity it out works well enough in most situations. Various open world stuff it does me fine. More than fine.

My alliance BM hunter is 30 ilevels below the rest of cast of chars since younger as it were. Also happens to be a second solid place for best open pve runner for me. I may even make the horde hunter BM. I tried to make MM work. But yeah…the answer seems to always be go BM lol.

the horde havoc DH wins top spot only because I can pull in lots of mobs then eye beam-dance combo for usually quick clean up strikes after.

11

hate to take off topic but quick question: what is the frequency of sabertron WQ? I would like a mechanical cat for theme reasons and only recently back to BM spec. Have not seen this WQ pop up though. Does it follow any kind of frequency? you know like once 1 week, once every 2 weeks?

12

Most of the rares in Darkshore/Arathi aren’t soloable yet. The ones with only around 200k health are (and I’ve soloed them with said hunter multiple times) but the ones with over 1000k health? Nope, they will ruin your pet regardless of whether it has bonus tank passives or not. (you will however be able to rez said pet and get it fighting again before the rare gets to you provided you have the focus)

Also, here’s the thing, back in the day when you could swap pet specializations? You still couldn’t tank effectively with certain pet types because even though you were giving them bonus health and some additional passives/threat generation, they still didn’t have any unique abilities to make tanking easier, meaning that if you wanted a pet to tank effectively, you grabbed one with a shielding ability, like a turtle or a mechanical pet. If you could swap pet specs right now and tried to solo Arathi/Darkshore rares with a Raptor? They’d still get murdered over and over again.

As for Animal Companion? Just put the second Raptor you have in the first stable slot and you will always have two raptors, unless you have the ability glyphed to do something else, you should always get a second raptor.

13

My hunter got a purple crabby so I’m good for the entire xpac.

Sent my Alliance hunter to Nasmir but she was too low level to tame one so pooh.

14

Damage is normalized among all pets, the only change is the active ability you get and the pasive abilities the pet gets from it’s species.

15

Get rid of the restriction on exotic beasts while we’re at it, tbh

I would like to play Survival but I’m way too attached to my exotic pets to ever change.

16

If that happens, what is the point of BM?

What makes them a beast master? Can we get pet-talent trees back? Or get access to some kind of pet repated awesomeness if we lose Exotic pets?

1 Like
17

Agree op. Just another needless change imo. Even though I do agree with, imo I wish they would fix pet pathing issues first. Especially in older content. Annoying having to constantly dismiss pet especially in instances, because the pet decides to take a route around the instance pulling every mob lol.

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18

For claiming to be someone that plays 3 hunters you sure don’t know much about their capabilities, sure you didn’t mean to say “demon hunters”? Go get a clefthoof pet and try again, I’ve been soloing those 2M hp rares for a couple of months now without my clefthoof pet ever dying to them.

My devilsaur died a few times however, but that’s because it only has 1 out of 3 of the tanking abilities clefthooves have, and a watered down version at that.
(Aka devilsaurs have 15% leech while clefthooves have 18% due to their Blood of the Rhino passive.)

It’s odd that we have such differentiating experiences in regards to hunter pet tanking, not just in BfA but as far as MoP even. I never had any issues with pet tanking, especially in MoP/WoD where all you did as a hunter in solo content (if you knew how they worked) was putting Misdirection and Mend Pet in the same macro and spam the heck out of it due to the Glyph of Misdirection that removed the CD of Misdirect when used on your pet paired with the Glyph of Mending that made Mend Pet heal every second instead of every two seconds while also increasing the power of Mend Pet by 25% of your pet’s total HP, paired with the Blood of the Rhino passive that all Tenacity pets had, making Mend Pet even more effective as it increased all healing received by 40%.

It was ridiculously good and I was sad to see the glyphs go in Legion. But even then it wasn’t an issue, sure you may’ve needed a pet with a defensive a little bit more but not to the extent where they weren’t effective.

I know how the talent works, however, the talent itself is horrible and pretty much a DPS loss.

Did you know:
The pet from Animal Companion can take between 2-30+ seconds to actually spawn in the first place. When I used it, I often found myself having killed mobs before it spawned.

The talent itself reduces all pet damage done, this includes basic attacks, pet abilities and even the “Stomp” talent, by 40%. Now imagine the second pet not being able to even use their standard ability (Claw, etc) until that was changed just recently. Hell, they didn’t even benefit from Mend Pet until 8.1 and did not Play Dead and as such, it had a tendency to die often and loved to pull aggro.

It’s a terrible talent outside of pure roleplay aspect, and I wish they looked into that because the idea of the talent itself is great. But right now, it’s just a complete waste of a talent option.

If I could, I would’ve had three or even more pets as a Beast Master. But alas.

19

Just give in and be like the rest of us who use Corehounds.

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Corehounds are pretty ‘meh’ now since Primal Rage is tied to all Ferocity pets.