With the upcoming Marksmanship pet deletion, I’ll be forced to choose Beast Mastery to keep my beloved pets.
I’d like to set up Beasts to play as much like current Marks as possible (a pet, me, lots of shooting). This seems like it would be straightforward: Pick the “shot” talents, avoid the “random animal outta nowhere” talents, and of course choose the upcoming “just one pet” talent once it’s in. Obviously Kill Command and Bestial Wrath are unavoidable but I’m going for the “feel” of Marks not a carbon copy.
That being said, I’d still like to solicit advice from the forum. Am I missing something that will make this really unworkable? Any talent gotchas not apparent to someone with limited experience in the spec?
I don’t think there is anything that will do this. The reactionary rotation doesn’t exist in BM because it was designed to be dead-simple for beginners.
You’re a better person than me for trying. Good luck.
I’m not expecting it to be a true replacement; it won’t be. But I just want less “wild pack of randos” and more “me and the dog.”
Having not really played it though, I don’t want to get caught out picking something that seems reasonable but that people running BM know doesn’t work right.
Doesn’t seem like you are really gimping yourself much. This build has 5 points free in the class tree that you can flex wherever you like, but it’s taken all the damage talents. In the BM tree, once you’ve eliminated everything that summons extra pets, you are left with very few options.
Ideally I’d like to not make her unplayable. If it turns out that she can’t keep up with anything without those random animal talents then perhaps she gets shelved; that is the least attractive option.
I realize I’m putting a square peg in a round hole here, but I don’t really have much of a choice.
You’re a hunter, adapt. One spec players always make the game harder on themselves over some sort of pride or fantasy about what their hunter should be. I play all 3 specs in all the highest content and always choose a spec that performs the best in X situation and swap when needed.
i mean, lets be real. the average pug player is really really bad. a real good hunter can blast these players out of the water in whatever cooked build. consider this as incentive to log and improve as a player.
For me the Hunter is defined by the pet, this is indeed my “fantasy” of what they are.
For my gameplay, I take your premise even one step further: If I want range without pet or in-your-face melee, I just pick a different character. I have a mage or priest for the former and monk or enh. shaman for the latter. For me these classes better encapsulate those experiences.
I realize some players treat their characters as simple damage delivery avatars that need optimization and use words like “fantasy” and “play” as pejoratives. I am not in that camp, and accordingly do not expect Maximum Performance™ at all times.
That being said I do want to play the game and see the content, and so I’m here looking to preserve the feel of Hunter as I’ve come to expect it (pet, gun, distance) inside the only spec left that will do so.
I fully expect they realize they are doing something dumb and revert this moronic change, so i think you should wait out a bit.
If not, either change spec or fully unsub and find another game that treat players better and dont cater to only one game mode cause BM is still 100% dependant of the zoo playstyle
I think you are underestimating the amount of people excited for this change. MM is going to pump in representation numbers after this patch.
With that same logic then maybe you should just play warlock once they remove pet from MM. People wanted a pure bow\gunner spec for a long time without annoying micro managing pets that do absolutely nothing but require 4-5 buttons just to use utility and rez them and micro management them.
Were you around for Legion? This isn’t actually a new concept. Blizzard had MM as a petless spec, and it lasted for a patch.
This is actually from Blizzard:
Originally Posted by Celestalon (Official Forums)
One of the most common points of feedback we’ve heard is that all of the specs are cool on their own, but none of them maintain the existing “Hunter + Ranged Weapon + Single Pet” archetype that people have grown attached to (Survival is now Melee, Marksmanship has lost its pet, and Beast Mastery has added a ton of additional pets).Marksmanship losing its pet has been one of the most impactful, but contentious changes we’ve made this expansion. We’re going to try returning the pet to Marksmanship, baseline, along with Lone Wolf as a level 15 talent (and very competitively tuned), so that this is a choice again.
So, why this change? Want to blame Blizzard for caving to casuals, etc. Those people have to remember that just because they may not see this feedback readily — or hear it from prominent Hunters in the community — doesn’t mean that it’s not there. For one, there is the in-game feedback tool that ptr testers can use. All of that feedback is invisible to everyone but Blizzard. Not to mention all of the player comments and tweets that get buried under everything else.
So, even if there appears to be a huge want for MM to be petless on the forums there is a possible even larger crowd of non vocal people who will voice their opinions on the ptr.
This is History just repeating itself. LW was introduced in WoD, and Blizzard said it was so popular that MM was being redesigned in Legion to be the petless spec. Same response to it, and it went live only to last the first patch then MM was given back its pet.
Which is why this time they’re aiming for the middle ground with the eagle. I think it’s stupid, and I’m not confident it will actually work, but I can see what they’re going for, at least.
I think the better middle ground would be them recognizing how some hunters use their pets, we go pet less in group content but for solo/world (more and more world only with other changes, like Tank Brann) we use it as a tool like the traps and CC shots.
For the life of me I do no understand why they don’t just make Lone Wolf work like Grimoire of Sacrifice. The ability to go petless while retaining the pet special abilities literally already exists, just not for hunters for some reason.
