Morgan Day mentions, in his interview with Preach, that Blizzard is trying to bring back Class Fantasy. So why are Hunters only getting Eyes of the Beast back?

Classes Hunter
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www.youtube. com/watch ?v=imTQW-PmFLY

So at 10:17, he states, quote:

“One of the main core goals of Shadowlands and some of the philosophies Brian was talking about is bringing class fantasy back. We really want to try to keep the focus on the class itself. There’s a lot of reasons for that …”

And from there he reverts back to answering Preach’s question about specific powers in Torghast.

And yet, as far as I can tell, the only “Class fantasy” thing that Hunters are getting back is Eyes of the Beast. And, let me tell you, we have been on the campaign to get that skill back for so long that most people just gave up. Because it just made ZERO sense that it was removed in the first place.

Just for reference, Blizzard, here are some of the class fantasy things that Hunters are missing:

  1. Any sort of real or meaningful interaction with your pets at all.
  2. Pet happiness
  3. Pet loyalty
  4. Pet hunger
  5. Arrows
  6. Quivers
  7. Reliable pet tanking
  8. Traps that actually adhere to the Survival Hunter fantasy

And here’s a list of all the things that could be added to improve Hunter class fantasy with very little work on your part:

  1. Give pets idle animations. Dozens upon dozens of minipets already have idle animations, and the grown versions of them (our pets) do not have these animations.
  2. Give Birds of Prey and other flying pets the ability to “fly” far above in the sky when the Hunter is not in combat, and they swoop down when the Hunter does enter combat.
  3. Give mechanical pets the ability to “hack” locked doors or other functions.
  4. The ability to make camp for the night. Only Vulpera hunters get to actually “survive” out in the wilderness?
  5. Give BM the ability to meld with their pet to become one unified being, to allow the BM Hunter to enter into tanking roles as their pet.
  6. Make BM pet sizes scale with time.

And etcetera.

Point being, there’s, like… 16 years of forum posts giving excellent suggestions to help give the class more “class fantasy” but almost literally nothing has been implemented. In fact, we’ve lost almost everything that gave the class it’s “class fantasy” over the years. We are sick of it and we are sick of this continual lip service to the players while other classes get cool stuff and we get left out in the dust yet again.

It’s cool that we’re getting Eyes of the Beast back, but that’s just it - we’re just getting Eyes of the Beast back. And it is just Eyes of the Beast, alright? It’s one spell that we can’t even really USE for anything. It’s just for fun. Why not give it some utility? Why not make it so that you can use it to actually fight with your pet? YOU become your pet for a few minutes, your UI changes to his action bar, and all of that.

I mean come on, we’re not asking for much but literally every time you take the easiest possible route.

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Completely agree. Blizzard returning Eyes of the Beast is essentially them just throwing Hunters a single bone while cookin up some feasts for everyone else. “Aaah just give the Huntards EotB back” is what I imagine they were saying behind closed doors. They have zero clue how to design the Hunter class and no longer even make any effort to try. How hard is it to just bring back more old aspects of the class? Tired of pet families being so meaningless these days. I remember back in the good ol days when pet family actually meant something. Now most of them just provide some lame duck mortal strike effect or a redundant slow.

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Unless it mind controls ppl in beast form mwahaha

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Why pad your list with annoying crap like this? Most Hunters were pretty happy to see these gone.

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Never saw a single hunter outside the forums complain about any of that. Never saw a single hunter, forums or no, say anything bad about it until it was gone.

My question to anyone who didn’t like that stuff, is why did you not like it?

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What exactly does this mean? It doesn’t even contradict what I said. People were pretty content to see them removed. In fact, for ammo in particular, there was quite a large push to have it removed in WotLK to the point where Blizzard said, to much rejoicing, that they would up the stack count to 1,000 for the rest of WotLK until they could properly remove it in Cataclysm.

People didn’t like that stuff because it was a bunch of mundane timewaster fluff that contributed nothing to the gameplay experience other than a tax for playing a Hunter.

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What does it mean? It means for all your talk, I never once saw anyone asking for what you’re claiming and didn’t see anyone bad mouthing any of it until long after it was removed.

Soo… RPG elements in an RPG are bad because they take time and cost money? I’d rather pay for ammo than fart arrows out of thin air.

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The problem is that in essence they were fun elements to the class, but in execution they were just obligations. They could have easily made them enjoyable and meaningful with just a few tweaks. Take ammo out of bag space, put it in a menu similar to reputation or something, so that we won’t need to use up bag space for it. Make different types of ammo rather than just ammo of varying damage. It could be like Exotic Munitions except instead of an ability we get the ammo itself. There could be fun ammo that explodes in confetti, ammo that deals magical damage, pierces armor, deals bonus damage to beasts, so on and so forth. The damage bonuses could also just apply outside of instances as well.

Nerf pet happiness so that it only affects the pet’s damage outside of instances so that is isn’t as essential for min-maxing, and remove the aspect of it that causes pets to leave the Hunter. Bring back loyalty, but instead of the ability to learn attacks/abilities, make it so that higher loyalty allows the Hunter to do various things with their pet, such as equipping them with special ‘buff items’ like collars that give them non-combat buffs. Make the ceiling for loyalty extremely high, so that the pets you see with the high prestige buffs have been faithful companions to the Hunter for a long time.

For pet feeding, again take it out of the inventory. Assign another stat bar to represent our stock of pet foods, up to a certain limit. We could either use a new ability to transform regular food into ‘pet food’, or buy pet food from vendors. Could still have all the different types; meat, fish, fruit, mushrooms, etc… But there could also be special food with bonus effects like increasing pet size, making them shimmer or shine, costing more but increasing happiness more and preventing happiness degradation for a while, or increasing their stats outside of instances.

Many ways these things could have been done to where they wouldn’t take up bag space or be obligatory for dungeons/raids, but where they would still be useful while being fun and engaging to the Hunter fantasy. Blizzard was just lazy, and continues to be lazy.

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That’s fair.

To be fair here, warlocks had it worse with soul shards as far as bag space was concerned and every class had things they had to stock up on in their bags to use specific spells.

I could go for these. Especially the different ammo types.

How about make it so your pet’s happiness doesn’t change and can’t be affected in instances. Then as long as it’s happy, which even if you aren’t min/maxing it should always be happy as it’s not that hard to keep it happy, you won’t have to worry about it losing happiness or throwing tons of food at it in a dungeon.

Why not both?

Better Idea. Keep the 1st 6 ranks the same and same basic ability to teach them. Then have a 7th rank that takes like a full month of happiness to achieve which unlocks a powerful pet family ability and then an 8th rank that takes a year which unlocks a cosmetic appearance for that pet.

I mean food doesn’t take up that much space. But how about if pets “eat” the whole item the benefit from well fed bonuses.

Agreed, they could do a lot more with pet food in general with different effects.

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Torghast ability: Petrified Pet Food (https://shadowlands.wowhead.com/spell=331338/petrified-pet-food)

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You also gave up a bag slot for them. And depending on how much you valued progression, you could be paying quite a bit for ammo.

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Yeah but your quiver/ammo pouch gave you a 10% attack speed increase.

Anyone who actually cared about progression was either an engineer or had an engineer friend/guildy who could make the good ammo for cheap.

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I completely agree. These features should come back, but modernized.

Like said prior, a quiver/ammo pouch would be awesome if it was separate from our bag slots. Customizable quivers and ammo pouches that would appear on our character (Like Thas’dorah’s quiver). Human NPCs in Waycrest Manor (I think) and the Dark Rangers in Darkshore have new quiver models players cannot use and it’s annoying.

We should have a modernized ammo system as well. Think the WoD talent that allowed us to lace our ammo with poison/ice/fire, but similar to how a Rogue’s poisons work. You choose the enchantment and then use it on your ammo to enchant it with poison/fire/ice, etc.

Pet happiness and loyalty being re-implemented and modernized would be amazing. I’m not sure on a way to implement this, however. Unless pets went back to a choosable spec/talent system where the longer and more loyal your pet is, the cooler things it could do. Similar to how bears have a family ability to rest, or owls do a little loop in the air.

Small touches like this would add so much to the class fantasy.

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Indeed, Locks and other classes with various reagents (like Mages, Paladins, etc.) should be given similar menus if their necessary reagents are brought back (though many of those reagent use abilities were pretty obnoxious, and just not having them require them would probably be better).

Might encourage people to AFK in instances. I don’t think it is that big of a deal to feed pets in instances. Just toss em a snack between pulls if they get unhappy. Even if they are unhappy it wont’ affect their damage in the instance anyway. I think it would be better to unlink the happiness damage bonus from instances outright. It would allow Hunters to not have to worry about it, and it would give pet’s a significant boost in usefulness outside of instances when they are happy. (makes sense thematically too, since beasts would likely perform better out in the wild)

While the method of pet training in Classic is interesting, I feel like it is too demanding and niche. It is a pain having to sacrifice a stable slot just to tame other beasts to learn their abilities. But at the same time it is cool to teach your pets these things without just learning them from trainers. If these sorts of ways to teach pets abilities were removed, then loyalty linked abilities should also be removed. There is also the issue of requiring specific pets for specific mechanics and what not, and then needing to grind out loyalty before you can use the necessary ability or passive.

This too could be changed to be better though. First, instead of having to tame pets to learn their abilities, make it so that if your pet fights a beast that has that ability that it has a chance of learning it (a relatively high chance, like 10% per auto-attack or per bite/claw/smack or something) from that beast. This would also make it more meaningful to train particular pets, as the abilities one pet learns wouldn’t carry over to all other pets, making them more meaningful. Then just make sure that all abilities are able to be trained outside of instances and you’re good. There is actually a lot of potential here. You could have special encounters that could use Hunter pets with specific abilities that they learned from beasts that were also encountered in special circumstances.

Of course this is still a problem for those wanting to just dive into a raid/dungeon with a new pet. I’d be fine with some gatekeeping in terms of requiring a bit of bonding time/training with the pet, but the bar should be quite low to get them to a point where they are a reliable source of DPS in an instance.

As for loyalty, perhaps there could be a base amount for every level capped pet that is sufficient to train the abilities/passives necessary for optimal DPS output, but leaves out defensives, utility, etc…

I like this idea. I am of the idea that this powerful family ability be only used outside of instances though, so that it isn’t an obligation for raids or for rated PvP and what not.

That would be a cool idea, again outside of instances so Hunters don’t essentially need twice as much buff food. But I do think that it would be good to put it in a menu. Hunters in retail can have up to 5 pets at once after all, so having 2 or 3 stacks of 2 or 3 different kinds of food in inventory would be a pain, and most Hunters wouldn’t bother carrying around ‘for fun’ food if it took up inventory slots.

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I quite enjoyed these apsects of the hunter class as it made it more fun.

why? I mean i doubt they'll bring it back but if they did this wouldn't make sense.. I mean I get it, it's a game, but if you actually had a pet and didn't feed it ever, what do you think would happen? Having your pet leave you if you never fed it, made hunters give a crap about their pets instead of it just being there for extra dmg..

Now a days no one cares if their pet dies, when I tame and roll with a pet I don't have a connection with them anymore, hell, you can even buy scrolls to rename your pets now a days. There are just no negatives that really keep you attached to pets anymore. I get that it's not for everyone, but you guys always are always talking about the RPG elements of the game, yet don't want them there?

Ammo could’ve been handled better, as spinnerdh has suggested, but I at least don’t think it was a mundane timewaster. Unlike you, I don’t go around throwing my opinion out as factual evidence trying to talk for the whole hunter class. Some people hated it, some people loved it. I’m starting to see that you never liked much about the hunter class in the first place, why do you even play one?

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yea literally old aspects please

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Teehee! If this ever happens, I’ve got this in bag. Howler the Wolf has been my main pet (like, I run with him 97% of the time) since 2005. :wink:

But in all seriousness, I wasn’t sorry to see ammo gone; it cost quite a pretty penny.

I WAS sad to see pet loyalty go. Howler was my Best Friend (max rank loyalty), dang it! But I didn’t really care either way regarding the happiness system. It never bothered me, personally. :woman_shrugging:t3:

Although I DO think it’d be a great idea if we can get our pets’ “character sheets” back. It’s such a little thing, but I miss seeing my pet have his own tab on my character sheet.

EDIT: okay, now I’ve read the rest of this thread. Lots of neat little suggestions here. I do agree that we need some of the pet systems back and at least quivers/ammo pouches (without costing us a bag slot. Perhaps something similar to the old relic slot for shamans?), if at least for the RPG flavor.

Bepples also is right in that these old systems were sometimes rather punishing. But that doesn’t mean Blizzard can’t “modernize” these systems! :grin:

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Honestly, I was okay with them taking ammo away so I didn’t have to spend so much time making it, but I think having a quiver with some sort of benefit would be cool.
What if the equipped quiver type was what determined your ammo type? You could have a frosty blue quiver equipped for frost arrows, a red one for fire, that sort of thing. Kind of like the exotic munitions idea, but a toggled quiver let you quick select type.

I do definitely like the idea of leveling pet happiness for some sort of bonus, potentially something defensive or that kept my pet healed up and happy.

I like alot of these ideas though. Traps is the other area that I think needs a ton of flavor work. I’d like to see more offensive styles of trap personally. The sort of thing the enemy knows is there, knows it’s a trap, but he’s gonna have to wade through it anyways if he really wants to get to me. I could even see hunters being able to construct a spike wall or something, creating a mobile terrain artifact providing protection in one direction. Destroyable of course, but with effort.

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I really miss the quivers so it didnt look like i was grabbing arrows out of my neck.

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You can play CLASSIC right now if you enjoy 15 yr old, out dated rpg mechanics. The only element that I would like to see back is having harder tames give a measure of character power, especially for non BM specs.

And I’m actually agreeing with Bepples…

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