Marksmanship has been split on this for a while now, and I’m not surprised it’s happening in full now.
Half of the issue is that Survival is not a happy medium between the two specs since it’s now melee.
Not that I’m arguing in favor of or against petless MM, but that’s not much of a way to argue the point. The only tangible benefits provided by Lone Wolf over a pet currently are not having to handle borked pet AI and raw damage.
You’re basically saying “make Lone Wolf a completely dead talent node that provides nothing at all and see if people still use it”, which is nonsensical. Lone Wolf exists because no such option existed prior to it due to the relative value of the pets.
Note that I’m not saying MM going petless is the right solution.
Losing it or just getting a talent layout that doesn’t require it and is META?
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The current 11.1 notes indicate MM will fully lose existing pet functionality to be replaced with a secondary summon/whatever that fills the role of pets but only triggers off of abilities.
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There’s always been a group, ever since the dawn of Vanilla WoW on the forums, that has wanted the petless hunter/scout sniper LEGOLASXXX fantasy and it’s always been a fairly popular take.
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I could totally see something like Xuen that monks have for MM hunters. People who really are into pets play BM hunter, anyway.
Kinda like Xuen but without direct interactions. Basically abilities that have an eagle animation but use no pet/summon AI, or at least that seems to be what they’re doing.
Most of the lashback is that it’s removing the choice to use existing pets. Remains to be seen where it goes/what happens.
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You can still play BM, though right? BM pets aren’t going anywhere. If they take time to make sure BM had an attractive talent build to some people who used to MM and really want a pet, it would be fine, imo.
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Personally, I agree. I’ve always wanted MM to focus on the character and provide Hunter utility without the pets, but unfortunately going this direction is going to be a major point of friction with some portion of players.
Some of that also stems from the fact that Survival is no longer a happy medium between BM and MM because it’s a melee spec.
BM plays very differently than MM.
That is not a solution.
That’s like if they removed stealth from Outlaw rogue cuz “pirate” and then said “oh well you can just play sin or sub”
…not a solution.
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I don’t play MM much at all so if the MM hunters like this change then I’m happy for them, but from a distance it looks like if they buffed my pets and took away my gun as a BM and gave me rocks to throw to trigger pet talents.
That doesn’t actually sound like a bad idea. Make Outlaw a melee/range swashbuckler.
You have absolutely no knowlege of this.
Enough with people trying to make this a point of fact when you have no evidence at all.
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They already did, and if they remove enough of the Rogue kit it might as well not be a Rogue spec at that point.
I honestly don’t know that there’s a satisfactory answer to the pet vs petless problem with Marksmanship. So much of Marksmanship’s development and identity completely steps away from the pets that it logically shouldn’t be using them for utility, but then the pet system has always been part and parcel to Hunter as a class. How far do we go in separating Marksmanship from core Hunter aspects before it’s basically not a Hunter?
Removing pets from it entirely gives them room to expand on the spec and flesh out its utility independent of the pets, but then we approach a threshold where BM and Survival go from superior pet utility to arguably inferior pet utility in some regards, and then we’re back to square one trying to resolve pet utility disparity.
I don’t think so. I see no reason why a rogue can’t have a combat spec. It kind of used to have a combet spec that wasn’t very dependant on stealth back in BC and it kicked sass. Remember hammer rogues?
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Prove it with numbers and exactly how popular this is now.
Even in its iterations which least focused on stealth, Combat still functionally used it. Stealth for Rogues is akin to pets for Hunter. It’s just part of the class, and if we start removing class mechanics and identity in favor of completely distinct specs with little overlap, we start running into issues that are harder to solve.
I say this as somebody who greatly prefers dropping the pet as Marksmanship. These changes may run to my preference, but I can acknowledge this is going to cause issues.
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Okay, I can see that point. Like when the stealth is used only for non DPS-dependent tasks, then I can see the point where MM pet does the same thing. You can have it pal around with you and do some things but you don’t need it all all for max damage.
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Okay waves hands in grand gesture
Correct, and that seems to be the major sticking point for some people. Marksmanship will not have the option to utilize a pet in 11.1 as things currently stand. A passive on the spec will completely disable pets.
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