“There were many fantasy and gameplay issues with Lone Wolf. Pets had legitimate utility behind them, such as Bloodlust, defensives, and mobility. Having to summon your pet and lose Lone Wolf to access that utility as Marksmanship often had legitimate experiential and throughput consequences. Why should a Hunter be frustrated to pull out their pet?”
Quoted from 11.1 changes to Marks. I can see this applying to high-end mythic raiding and high mythic key running marks hunters, IF they use Lone Wolf.
If they do not, it’s a non-issue entirely. I play as marks, love having my pet out, that matches my transmog!
And as a rule, I do not favor flying pets. An eagle? Oof, my goblin would NEVER been caught using this.
This to me seems like a solution in search of a problem to solve.
If dead-set on these changes, somehow specifically tie it to the Lone Wolf talent, if you take Lone Wolf, all the 11.1 mark changes apply to you.
If you pass over taking Lone Wolf, NONE of the 11.1 marks changes are applied to you, and you keep access to your pet stable.
No comment on balance changes. Marks goes up, Marks goes down, it happens.
This is completely unworkable - huge changes to the talent tree are reliant on the 11.1 changes, it is not physically possible to support current gameplay and 11.1 gameplay.
They should have a glyph to make the eagle a spell effect (not an animal, just a particle effect). Then make another glyph to replace the eagle with a pet from your stable (using the Animal Companion slot or similar). Then make additional glyphs for ravens, bats, terrordaxes, mechanical drones, whatever, literally any creature or object model could be used here.
They should also allow you to summon the pet we have now, but at a dps loss. Some of your damage is done by the pet instead, and the total is less, because the pet doesn’t do AoE or benefit from your mastery. Stick a 5% debuff to all damage, or a 10% debuff to autoshot, whatever is necessary.
They could also make the Cunning/Tenacious talent and the pet spec spells share a cooldown and the passives mutually exclusive (e.g. can’t get Pathfinding from the Cunning talent if you have a Ferocity pet out giving you Predator’s Thirst).
Disable Furious Bite (and similar) when in a group (or even don’t, this is not some game breaking thing since we have Concussive Shot and they don’t stack) and you have removed any incentive to use a pet beyond “Pets are fun”.
They should just make Lone Wolf work like Grimoire of Sacrifice, and call it a day. The ability to go petless while retaining the pet special ability literally already exists in the game. Just not for hunters, for some reason.
They should have done this back in WoD. They basically did, for what pets had at the time. The Legion version of pets and Lone Wolf did away with that, likely due to the broader pet ability and specialization changes.
With where we are at now, the utility and rotation changes for 11.1 look really good, it just sucks that the pet is being completely removed to make way.
Clarification to what you quoted: Take Lone Wolf talent, all 11.1 marks spec changes apply to you, including the eagle and associated spec changes.
Skip taking Lone Wolf talent, none of the associated eagle related changes apply to you. All of the general spec changes and balance changes apply to you, per usual. And you keep access to your pet stable. [Basically marks spec as relates to pets works as it did previously.]
It does seem like a solution only implemented for gameplay mechanics purposes without considering the full ramifications.
It’s gonna anger the pet people since they won’t be able to choose the pet they want and simultaneously anger the no-pet people since now you have to have a pet anyway.
Ouch. Though been thinking on this. Why locked into an eagle popping in to do ‘beneficial effects’?
My marks goblin hunter atm using an updated wolf. For it both goes with my transmog + lets me cast bloodlust for my group.
Why can’t my wolf slot in, in place of the ultra-generic eagle, and trigger those same ‘beneficial effects’ for me?
Blizz, an idea. Don’t throw away MM’s pet stable access. And don’t fixate on this one-size-fits-all eagle, either. Consider having the MM hunter mark or flag a pet from their stable to act exactly or approximately as this eagle does in patch 11.1. Would leverage the huge count of hunter pets added to WoW.
What I’m wondering is why are MM using a pet for in group content outside of pvp any ways. I mean if they are the only one in their group that can do a lust ok then that makes sense and their group leader should be teling them ahea d of time so they can pull when needed .
I mean does a few seconds of calling a pet for lust/hero then quickly dismissing it screw up their perfect little world so much that they have to piss and moan like Karens and Kevins to Blizz ,resulting in ruining it for those that are actually smart enough to use mainly in open world?
To them, yes, it’s the biggest deal in the world. They are hyper-focused on running / pushing keys. It’s what they do. Something like “wasting” a global cooldown is a big problem. If they can find a way to catch even the smallest incremental gains they will do it; whatever the cost it is worth it.
Their play revolves around their raider. io score, class rankings, and damage output. They’re playing the leaderboards game. Ultimately, that’s fine. It’s there to be chased and if they want to do it, so be it.
The issue here (in this debate) is that some people playing that way no longer recognize or consider everything else in the game as something people are doing. If we want to be charitable, we can attribute it to them becoming a bit myopic; they’re so steeped in the M+ race that they’ve just lost sight of the remainder and can’t fathom a world outside any longer. If we want to assume the worst, then they’re pursuing those gains mentioned above knowing it comes at others expense and they simply don’t care. Given the acrid nature of some posts here I’d bet a lot on the latter.
There have been a pile of good suggestions made within this forum on how to support the ranking / leaderboard players and people playing the rest of WoW. I would love it if Blizz would listen, but I suspect they will not.
What confuses me is this…if pets are a nuisance in Raids and Dungeons…why aren’t fellow players respectfully asking hunters to put their pets away or turn off aggro? I play a few hunters and I’ve been asked a few times to put my pets away. I don’t get offended, because it’s the Tanks job to keep aggro. My job is to shoot things.
Communication is so important, especially when you’re in a PUG. Just express expectations while buffing up.
It shouldn’t matter what spec you’re playing as hunter, pets are what make that class so favorable because you can solo many things.
I think the devs are focusing on the wrong thing, here. Maybe… just maybe…if they focused this much attention on fixing things that they break with every patch, I could see why they would turn their attention to this. But, c’mon…we still have broken mounts and battle pets in various realms that are unattainable because the code is broken. We have quest lines in multiple realms that are broken. The devs keep saying it’ll be fixed at such and such patch, but it’s not.
This seems so trivial compared to fixing what is broken.
You aren’t clarifying, you are fundamentally changing the content.
That’s not workable and you know it. That would require Blizzard to design effectively two different specs. 11.1 Aimed Shot is a 3s cast baseline. Trueshot does not increase cast speed. Proccing an eagle with Streamline and a couple other talents significantly reduces the cast time for AiS, but you wouldn’t have access to those without the eagle.
It is much simpler to make all the 11.1 changes, and then let MM continue to use Call Pet, but the pet can’t do anything except growl dash and basic attacks. Then just disable Command Pet for MM, and have the pet passives override the Cunning/Tenacious talent passives if you have a pet out. Balance it so using a pet is always less fps single target, and you have completely solved this problem.
Game is software. Extremely mutable and changeable. Marks spec before 11.1 was already designed by Blizz. 11.1 wise, they already designed the Marks + eagle changes.
Basically, they have two mark specs already. Just make it official in the game. Druid has 4 specs, Hunter can have 4 specs too. Or 5, bring back ranged survival with explosive shot as it was some time ago. Ha.
Because they’re more of a nuisance for the player than for the group.
Even when i play tank never have i asked a hunter that.
Either the pet will pull some trash mob off me, get meleed and die while i save myself some damage, or literally nothing happens.
Basically its people wanting to be like Legolas from lord of the rings. When lone wolf was brought out thats what it was compared too with having a pet vs not having a pet.
Blizzard then said MM was the Sniper of the game and off to the races with making Lone Wolf the must have in MM talents.
THing is even though Legolas never had a pet , people forget he still had his trusty companion most of the time .
Gimli .
Also if you think about it most of Legolas’ fights were close range multi targets. If anything Legolas was closer to the old Range Survival play of Cata-mid Warlords.