I can also see a strategy where this will make it very hard on the healer. Positioning gets a lot much more difficult. We will need to keep our pet and ourselves in LOS for the healer, expose the healer, or risk losing our pet.
If the other team has a stun and a CD, we can’t risk sending our pet behind a column for even a moment. They will get stunlocked in a second. We can trinket and get away. The only pets that have a trinket, to my knowledge, are cunning pets, and they aren’t ideal for BM Hunters in Arena.
Actually cunning pets are still pmuch BiS even if you were playing BM just to have masters call but they pruned bullheaded in BfA which also worked as a 20% shield wall
But ya I mean even through heals it’s pretty easy to kill pets, they just don’t really have any good defensive mechanics
Locks still have fel dom and don’t need their pets on the kill target at all times in arena which is kind of funny tho
I wasn’t aware of this. Shows you how much I do arena. Want to do more, but I’m spending so much time maintaining my Hunter, one alt, and my wife I don’t have enough time - even with WFH COVID19.
Any comp where you’re not providing MW is effectively really bad as a hunter, your best comps and class synergies are with those who don’t have mortal wounds
Also, the thing with having your pet in those positions as a warlock is that let’s say you use an imp which is really squishy, you can have it constantly behind a pillar and your healer just positions himself in the open slightly, so that if he’s hit by CC he can get imp dispelled, but the imp can’t get attacked
Doing this with a hunter pet would mostly be pointless because it wouldn’t necessarily be parked where you want it to be, and it would still have to be out in the open, not really behind a pillar safely. It’s a very different scenario than what you can do as a warlock pmuch, who also can have their entire team position in a way that protects them when their pet is being attacked and set up a pre-emptive resummon too based on their positioning.
You wouldn’t need to use a macro either to do what you’re describing, it’s just that it wouldn’t be effective anyways. Also pet purge would require melee range to begin with, and is still most useful when being used off CD, and having your pet constantly move from the pillar to a kill target over and over would just consist of a lot of waddling that would make it really easy to kill anyways because it’s basically dashing in, then slowly walking back out. Any slow applied would just make it a free kill anyways so you accomplish pmuch nothing
4 second rez time is still too long. If they really want this crap to go live they need to add Heart of the Phoenix to hunter spellbooks and take Mend Pet off the global cooldown.
Edit: Actually, they should make these changes regardless of what they do. Come on, man!
And the pet does significant damage in addition to the debuff and Focus generation, so you really need it to be attacking something at least, all the time.
This is why I play MM. I’m fine having a pet be a part of my damage (though I prefer Lone Wolf for anything remotely competitive), but I don’t want to be even a little dependent on it to be functional.