TL:DR version at the bottom
At 1am when I couldn’t sleep, this is what I realized I will no longer be able to do if my pet is taken away. I’m sure there are more, but I fell asleep thinking about this:
- Pull mobs with Eyes of the Beast - which I’ve done in dungeons both for fun and to help the tank round stuff up quickly
- Misdirect to my pet in solo content, helping me round up enough mobs so that my AOE will work efficiently (we don’t have a 2 tag AOE, so I always pull in a third so I can use AOE spells)
- Have my pet fetch loot (not super important, but still very fun and a function that will no longer be available. Most useful when mobs die on a cliff and you can’t reach them)
- Have my pet run to tag mobs to bring them into range when they are just out of range of my bow and I can’t/don’t want to move for some reason (I used this a lot while rounding up pirates to get my Insane title so I could utilize the 15% xp and rep guild banner where you can’t leave it’s range. More recently for just the banner’s XP gain while leveling alts)
- Have the pet that I spent months finding to tame
I think a lot of people who started in Legion or after may not even realize the utility of having your pet. Maybe you heard it’s too much maintenance to have your pet out all the time. That was taken out of the game, and you no longer have to worry about that. Back in the day, you had to first tame your pet, then train your pet up to current level (it was tamed at whatever level it was at the time), then you had to feed your pet constantly because it didn’t like you at first. After feeding it a lot over a few days, then it started to become your buddy and you only had to feed it once a day or so to keep it happy. If you didn’t, it would be become unhappy and not do as much DPS for you. I heard rumors that if it became unhappy for long enough, it would leave you, but there were no internet forums at the time to verify that. I just never let it happen, so I don’t know. But yeah, it was a lot of work, but that’s what we did and we had a true bond with our pets after all of that. I agree that taking that type of maintenance out of the game was a step in the right direction, and it’s much easier now. To maintain your pet now, all you have to do is summon it. So I don’t understand what people mean about “having to maintain a pet” unless they are just talking about using it for heroism. Intimidation was taken off the pet and moved to the main bar so you don’t need a pet out to use that one anymore. Only hero is left since every other special pet ability was removed.
Pulling out a pet as MM with LW does give you a 30% haste buff for 40 seconds, but I don’t know if it was ever supposed to be a viable raid mechanic. It’s great for soloing, but not in raids/M+. I don’t remember if it was Wowhead, Icy Veins or Method (those are the only three sites I go to now because Elitist Jerks doesn’t exist anymore), but according to my research a few months ago, you took a significant DPS loss by dismissing your pet after you summoned it for heroism during a raid, so anyone who has been pulling it out, hitting the spell, and then taking the time to dismiss it again before DPSing, you were losing a lot of DPS during hero. If you waited and didn’t dismiss it during hero, you were taking a DPS hit for the rest of the fight for having a pet out (which could negate the increase all together), or later during the fight where you took the time to stop and cast the dismiss spell. So there is really no great option. The only time it made sense (max DPS wise) was if you pulled it out in the last 40 seconds of any fight, or dismissed it during a phase change where people really aren’t DPSing anyway (like when the bugs come out during Ulgrax and the tank is rounding them up) which is pretty limiting and makes you really need to understand the fights. It’s probably still a bit better for everyone else in the group, but it probably wasn’t doing as much good for you as you have been thinking it did. Drums, which can be used by anyone, does 15% damage for 40 seconds but there’s no down side. That extra 15% only matters in high end content, not the majority of players. So use drums, and you don’t have to pull the pet out at all if that’s all you’re using it for. They are getting cheaper every day, and if you have the mats, you can place an order at the artisan’s crafting table for them for just a tip.
But I understand that some people just don’t like pets. Or just like being able to hit hero and feel useful. I also understand that Blizzard is trying to reduce the clutter in melee (maybe not add survival to that problem? Just saying…).
It seems that to make everyone happy, the most logical thing would be to keep Lone Wolf as a choice, and just pull Primal Rage out of the pet’s abilities and add it to the main spellbook like what was done to Intimidate. Then when Lone Wolf is active, you can’t access your traditional pets. You wouldn’t need a pet (or eagle) at all. If you want to use a spell effect of a pet coming in doing its thing and leaving, instead of an eagle, I suggest using the extra stable slot that is for BM hunter since it’s already in the game, and use the appearance of whatever pet is placed there for your special Lone Wolf ability. No one wants a generic eagle as far as I’ve been seeing. If your pet is only there for a few seconds, then I don’t see the difference. If you’re trying to reduce melee clutter, you could make the pet only visible to the hunter, not the whole group. Then there would be NOTHING in melee, not a bird, not ground animals. Birds blocked LOS so much that our guild asked all the hunters to never use them. If it’s not visible to anyone else, then it seems like a good solution.
Or, with or without Lone Wolf, you could keep traditional pets an option WHEN NOT IN A RAID/MYTHIC+. If you’re not in a raid or mythic+, keep the ability to summon our pets and let us choose to play with or without one. No one needs melee decluttering if you’re playing solo. Make the change only applicable to raids and mythic+ and then at least I know I’d be happy with the change. Just don’t take away the ability to summon my pet at all other times, or if I chose not to take the LW talent.
TL:DR
Make losing the ability to summon traditional pets only apply to people taking the Lone Wolf talent and make Primal Rage a main spell ability like Intimidation so pets never needs to be used
or
with or without LW, lose the ability to summon pets only during Raids and Mythic+ and keep the option available at all other times.
