TL;DR Forcing players into a specific set of pets doesn’t feel good. Please let us choose hunter pet specs. I miss my bear
The very first pet I ever tamed in WoW was an Ice Claw Bear in Dun Morogh back when I started in BC and I have the very same bear to this day. His name is Fang and he’s my favorite pet. Bears are also my favorite animal irl and I can’t use my favorite pet because for whatever reason we can’t change our pet’s spec.
Ferocity pets are just objectively better at tanking and general usage than tenacity. Why is tenacity, the pet spec that is intended for tanking, worse at tanking than ferocity? In solo play, with BM pets doing a majority of damage and the leech buff healing the pet, the pets self healing is a lot more valuable than a small max health boost. Even in group play where pet healing is next to useless, having the leech buff for any hunter spec provides a lot of sustain over the course of the content. On top of the leech buff, you gain access to heroism/bloodlust, a mandatory buff for any type of PvE content.
Tenacity pets get comparatively nothing. You get Endurance Training (5% health boost passively) and a Fortitude of the Bear “FotB” (20% health boost for 10 seconds). To be fair to FotB it does heal you for the 20% health gained so it can be construed as a 20% HP heal/absorb but that’s a bit of a nebulous way to look at it lol. Regardless of its intention, the outcome is an inferior ability with very nieche real world usages.
Because of the disparity between ferocity and tenacity, it forces certain types of content into very specific pet families. Solo content: Clefthooves & Core Hounds (both exotic) or Scalehides and Gorillas are the clear superior choice due to them being ferocity and having tanking pet abilities. Clefthooves get an extra shoutout because of their +10% armor and +20% healing they receive. In group content, any of the ferocity pets will be good unless you specifically need a mortal wounds or slow with a slight advantage to families that can use stealth for the bonus damage on the first hit they get.
The main opposition to letting us choose pet specs is the idea that not every animal can be cunning and ferocious and tenacious so it doesn’t make sense that we can choose. Setting aside the fact the realism of someone playing as a magic-wielding, armor-clad dragon riding another armor-clad dragon at mach-10, I would argue that I isn’t realistic that we couldn’t choose what spec they were. Are you saying a BEAR can only be tenacious and ISNT ferocious? An apex-predator BEAR? Where if you ran into one in real life, the only options you have against said bear are to have bear spray, hope it’s not hungry, and to pretend to already be dead?
I would argue a lot of pet families in wow could multi-spec into other families if they wanted to.
Wolves, cats, Wind Serpents, ect could be cunning and ferocious.
Bears, Celfthooves, Crocoslisk, ect. could be ferocious and tenacious.
Aqiri, Boars, Gruffhorns, ect. could be tenacious and cunning.
I could probably find a secondary family for each of the pets to fall into but I feel like it would be a lot easier overall for everyone if any pet could be any of the specs available.
The only reasonable argument that could be had against this is for PvP knowing certain animals can do certain things. That falls apart when you realize your asking players, on top of having to know everything else for PvP, to memorize 77 different pet families and what each pet can do. I DOUBT anyone will memorize them and be able to identify them. I also feel like it would be easier to have every pet be able to be cunning and then only have to figure out which pet ability they have (usually a slow, dispel, or mortal wound). If Blizzard really cared about the visual clarity of being able to look at a pet and know instantly what it can do, then you wouldn’t be able to transmog your gear in PvP so you could look at your opponent tell what they’re capable of. The last time I checked you could transmog your gear in PvP so I’m not sure visual clarity is a good reason.
In summary: Ferocity is objectively better than tenacity. Since it is so much better, it forces hunters to use certain pets over ones they might prefer visually. The restriction doesn’t make much sense that pets would be pigeonholed into one family when they could be multiple. Restricting pets doesn’t improve visual clarity in PvP. So remove the restriction and let hunters choose what pets they want.
That is EXACTLY the reason the give historically (see also, removing the warlock Observer.) It’s absolute BS and everyone knows it, but that’s how they keep trying to spin it whenever the question gets asked.
Never mind the fact that people can choose from lots of different talents now and you don’t know what they took just by looking at them.
You’re just guessing they are likely using the common a pvp talent build. Just like you would guess a hunter is likely using mortal strike and freedom on their pet, unless they have MS on their team then they probably went with health.
No secrets there, the argument doesn’t hold water. But they still won’t change it.
The pet talent tree return is insanely overdue. It’s mental that the overseers at Blizzard don’t get hunters want the class fantasy at the expense of reality.
Pick WHATEVER pet you want. Its just a skin anyway.
Then pick any tree and micro tune your pet.
“Oh a snail can’t be a ferocity pet lulz” - who cares… give us hunters our freedom dammit.
I wish more people were talking about this and wanting changes, it’s a huge oversight in logic and really put a damper on the game for at least me. I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same, I just wish I could count them up and get Blizzard to make the change.
Pet talents would be awesome to have but I’m wanting the ability to swap specs as a minimum. Maybe implement swapping first then work on long-term pet talents. Probably too hopeful.
Yep it’s ridiculous - you already have no idea what the person has up their sleeve based on class why are pets magically different?
I still have my Auberdine Thistle Bear called Mauler that I tamed back in 2004 on release week as it had a knockdown making taming hard and it became a personal challenge to tame one.
He has been with me every raid, every dungeon, every step of every expansion.
It sucks having him nerfed for being the “wrong” spec now they’ve taken that away.
The classifications don’t even make sense. Bats and horses don’t strike me as being particular ferocious animals. I wouldn’t consider a toad to be that tenacious either.
It is pretty bad to be forced into using specific pets just because of content. Hunter pets should get their own little pet talent trees to allow hunters to pick a pet they want.
If the argument is PVP and letting opposing team know what pet spec they are up against, this is a very easy solve by giving each pet a little glowy outline pending on the spec the pet is. Red, Blue, Green.
I find it interesting with a dev team and expansion so focused on removing labels, that they lock down hunter pets with labels and hide behind pvp as the excuse why. Made worse by the fact pvp would be fine allowing us to change a pets spec. Also the devs went overboard making a lot of pets cunning this expansion.
If I could get the 5% leech with lone wolf I would go petless. Right now though you lose to much not to have a ferocity pet.
I’ve been playing with a Tenacity pet (Bear of course) as a BM hunter for the past week now and the amount of times my pet has straight up DIED in situations where a wolf (my usual go-to) would have just passively lived is INSANE. I’m tempted to compare pet health to another resource bar the class has but it just worse in multiple ways.
The content that actually threatens you/your pet winds up not being a question of IF I can keep my pet alive but WHEN it will die. Mend Pet is 50% max HP over 10s (5%/sec) which on my current tenacity pet (800k rounded up) is 40k hps which is fine for questing or most world content but my pet dies every time I do the last phase of the Superbloom because I pull aggro with my dps and my pet just can’t take 10 elites bashing his skull in. Mend Pet alone isn’t enough unless you waste 2 talent points on the Wilderness Medicine talent which is possible but is something ferocity pets just DON’T have to deal with.
If your pet dies, not only are you put in IMMEDIATE danger but you have ZERO damage and loose all of your buffs. The only way to recover is to hard-cast a res (2.5s and 35 focus) and this sets you BACK to zero and you have to re-ramp while getting aggro back over to your pet. If you goof up on other classes you have to go back to square one but with BM hunter in particular your pet dying is like being set back to square negative 1. It’s a much harsher punishment for something (that being ferocity vs. tenacity) that isn’t a fun or interactive element to game play. Choosing tenacity over ferocity is not a fun or remotely interesting choice, it’s an objectively worse experience (and this is a key issue) FOR NO BENEFIT.
PvE instanced group play (Dungeon/Raids) is the only time when tenacity pets are not a burden to your performance and could be encouraged. The max HP passive and buff are nice but not needed or very impactful to performance, which is how I feel like the choice should be. The +8% HP passive (with AotB talent) at 1 million HP is about 80k HP so you’d have to balance whether you can get 80k healing from the ferocity leech over the course of the fight vs. the extra HP. That could provide a more nuanced thought process even though I believe tenacity wins most of the time, this being in direct contrast with solo content where it’s just a clear-cut issue.
I think one of the more insidious issues with this topic is how unintuitive the system is. Imagine you’re a new playing WoW for the first time and you’re figuring everything out for the first time. You have the choice of whatever pet you want and you choose the pet you like to look at the most or the one you RP bonded with. Setting aside the issue of if the game even educates the player on pet families or specs (it’s been so long idk what/if they do that nowadays), you’re presented with two choices of pets:
TENACITY or FEROCITY
Having no prior knowledge or 8,000 hours of Hunter experience, you would assume the pets (Bears, Turtles, Oxen, STONE HOUNDS) labeled as TENACITY (Synonyms: strong, stout, sturdy, stalwart, tought) would be a tanky option.
You would look at the pets (Cats, Dragons, Wolves, RAVAGERS) labeled FEROCITY (synonyms: fearsome, vicious, violent, hellacious) and think that pet is used for damage. “Wrong”
Pets do the same damage regardless of their family/spec (This is good, we like this) BUT FEROCITY PETS ARE THE TANKS AND TENACITY ARE USED FOR PVE GROUP CONTENT?
It’s completely backwards, incentivizes people to make the wrong choice, then punishes them harshly for that choice.
I wish blizzard would acknowledge this and make the system more open to everyone.
I agree with this as well. we should bring it back that back and maybe make it more interesting you know, make it so e train it what to be and do in each fight we need them. Fits well with class fantasy and makes it much more interactive.
Combine all three trees together and be done, this way you can just play and use the pet you want. Nothing that a pet brings aside from the leach is that amazing anyways.
Honestly Blizzard treats hunter pets like they are super unique, they aren’t, adding the tenacity perk to ferocity would unbalance nothing. Hunters are already the weakest class defensively anyways.
i agree remove pet specs and families and bring in pet training where you choose the buff and the talent and BM hunters get choose 2 talents from a bigger pool of talents and they get more pet skins
They could do a small tree that looks like the Hero Talents tree where you commit to one of them and be done with it. Literally anything but what they have lmao
