Exactly, separate the toolkit from the appearance.
Every “category” of pet should have a different normal attack and a special attack. Pet Talent tree could provide things like “your pet special attack causes X”, doens’t need to be complex… just unhitch KEY EFFECTS like mortal wound from pet appearance.
I’m even talking about abilities like the triggered/activated defense too. Doing open world/solo content having a ferocity pet with a defensive is the best option for that type of content and it’s exclusive to Gorilla/Scalehide (Clefthooves/Corehound for BM Exotics. Clefthooves are the superior choice because of their Blood of the Rhino passive). I just see no reason to limit anything to any one family when you can easily make anything work.
I think maybe we’re pretty close to saying the same thing, just in different ways. Same with Gunstrong.
I’m honestly not sure what the correct approach is, but I am sure what we have now isn’t it. I still prefer to have species and family-specific abilities, because I think visual recognition about what you’re going to tangle with is important (this from a PvP perspective.) If MS was tied to Hunter’s Mark (talented), you’d know you’re going to be dealing with that if it’s a Hunter (probably.) If you see a bear (my favorite pet on my classic Hunter is a bear named Lylegal, btw. Get it? GET IT??), you should GENERALLY know what to expect when you fight it. I think bears should have a focus dump like claw or bite or whatever, and then maybe a stun called Paw Blast.
Now that I’m typing out my thoughts, I guess if you then specced it for ferocity for like, say, a bleed in the tree, or a damage amp, what would be the harm? If the meaningful ability was specific to the species, why would it matter what the family was? OK, I agree with you guys haha!
EDIT: By meaningful, I mean functional and identifiable by species. Like this:
- Birds of Prey: Snatch, disarm
- Cats: Prowl damage amp, but without the dumb slow
- Wolves: Old howl kind of mechanic to increase next hit damage (or something similar)
- Boars: Charge
- Spiders: Web
And many more. There were so many cool things you could do with pets.
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This is the only justifiable reason I’ve heard to have pet families. I would argue you could just look at the hunter’s buffs, see he has Pathfinding/Predator’s Thurst/Endurance Training, and know what the pet is capable of.
I’m sure I could make any combo of pet/ability/spec work lol
Skills are not relevant enough to make it a problem.
That’s true. As long as the buff is obvious, there’s no reason the pet’s spec couldn’t be shifted around.
I just don’t understand why they are so dang resistant to just letting us have spec swapping again. I never heard anyone screaming about not knowing what kind of abilities the pets had. All they ever grumbled about was it was ‘automatic damage’ and ‘free wins’ because the Hunter toon itself wasn’t doing the damage.
EXACTLY, who complained about this? nobody ask for that.
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I think that the notion of how it should be possible to determine what you’re up against based on visual confirmation, in context of hunter pets, that this is a crappy excuse to justify locking our pet specs so that they cannot be changed.
Whether we are able to change pet specs or not, certain pet families are still going to have Mortal Wounds, as an example, and other families won’t. As for the specialization perks themselves, is there ever a time where you wouldn’t want to go for Cunning with your pet in PvP? I don’t PvP, so I wouldn’t know…
As for the argument of how it makes pet choice more meaningful, I’d argue not. If anything, it makes it less meaningful when we’re potentially locked out of the choice we would prefer.
Tame pet. Choose ferocity, cunning, or tenacity. Once chosen, that spec has a talent tree.
Boom.
Also…99% of exotic abilities are laughably bad. (Looking at worms and chimeras). Exotic abilities shouldn’t be worse than the pets auto attack.
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How do we know if a warrior is playing with Impeding Victory or Storm Bolt? How do we know if a warrior is playing with disarm?
We don’t, it just happens on pvp… you know if he is using storm bolt when you get stunned.
You know if he is using impeding victory when you notice he is hard to kill.
We don’t know.
“Clarity” has nothing to do with pet families.
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It’s either one side of the spectrum or the other. Worms/Chimeras are DPS losses in all cases and the worst. Clefthooves’ make them the best tank pets in the game, hands down. Carapids and Spirit Beast are pretty good and the rest are negligible or absolute booty.
Can we get some Community Council person to bring these arguments to Blizzard, god knows they probably don’t look at these forums.
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I realize now that I have been saying this incorrectly. It’s family categories and families. Sorry about that.
I don’t care so much if the category is spec-able; I want the familiy abilites to have flavor and be specific to those families, though. They should be agnostic of category and reflect a characteristic of the family (back to the examples I used above: Spider - web, Boar - charge, etc. etc.) It would pretty interesting to have a tenacious snake that applies a poison dot. Or a ferocious turtle with a shell shield. I will stress that my approach to this is contingent on other changes - it can’t be in a vacuum.
Thank you for the link to the thread, even though a lot of things were said by the blues without actually saying anything useful honestly.
I like what Watermist is saying but I think it would be best overall to have pets be completely agnostic. That’s just a personal preference but pets being able to respec is objectively what needs to be done. Gameplay shouldn’t be sacrificed to have something “make sense” in a world where celestial gods empower dragons, with the help of mortals who use the magical powers of light, darkness, arcane, and fel, to fight against C’thulhu minions to prevent them from corrupting all life in the cosmos.
All of that can happen but GOD FORBID a TURTLE biting someone and wounding them.
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Yea, I’m not a huge fan of the blue post in that thread. Turtles are big, armored etc… but Kill Command and Barbed Shot can make my turtle go 500 mph towards an enemy.
“Is that turtle you’re fighting against a tough, tanky turtle, or secretly a turtle with Mortal Wounds?”
This comment kinda made me lol. Is my bumblebee just a flying pet? Or can it secretly stomp on the ground causing a 360 degree earth shattering shockwave?
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Most likely, he/she either misinterpreted what the feedback was addressing, or they misspoke what they meant in their reply.
Yeah, that really wasn’t the best answer. Considering the primary subject of discussion was about pet specializations, not family abilities, it really did miss the mark. It wouldn’t matter whether your turtle was a “tough, tanky turtle” or a cunning one for that matter, it still wouldn’t have access to Mortal Wounds(as this is a family specific ability, not something that is tied to the pet specs).
He/she did post this in a follow up reply, further down the thread:
The comments above about pet specialization and pet family abilities are good. They were a bit lumped together in my reply above. Things can be made better, but I don’t want to promise any timelines or specific changes.
So again, it seems as if it was a misunderstanding at first, and that, while there wasn’t anything to announce at the time, things could be made better.
I choose to remain hopeful that they’ll listen to this feedback, both here, and in the CC thread by Watermist(and others).
The feedback here has been great a lot of great ideas I hope a lot of it eventually gets implemented but currently I’m just hoping for Changeable pet families and give it a new name maybe even add in more than 3 choices in the future.
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