The mend pet nerf makes leech unfair for BM hunters

Classes Hunter
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Hello, I am Durendil, hunter soloist.

When I woke up this morning, I was greeted by a rather massive bomb : an absoluely massive reduction of hunter self-healing - about 33% for Shadowlands (based on my Denathrius solo recount in S3), and far more (50%) for Dragonflight, since we won’t have covenants anymore and rely nearly solely on leech.

This nerf is the culprit :

Healing done to your pets from Mend Pet or Exhilaration no longer grants any healing to the Hunters from Leech.

I’m not sure if this is a philosophical change or if it is due to PvP.

I’m pretty sure it’s not meant to be a massive nerf to hunter solo capabilities, unless someone really didn’t like the Denathrius solo.

However, this change has serious consequences in terms of design philosophy. And is also a massive nerf to a core part of hunter class identity.

I’m not going to go all “change bad, reverse it” - which won’t solve the actual reason for the change. I want to explain what the actual issue is, both from a practical point of view and design philosophy.

Design philosophy - BM hunters and leech

Leech works differently in practice for BM hunters than nearly all other classes.

This is due to two main mechanics.

First, pets deal around 50% of the hunter’s damage, and do not heal the hunter through leech. This means 50% of leech is “lost”.

So, with this mechanic, a hunter with 15% leech only truly has 7.5% leech.

Second, BM hunters have two pets. Mend pet heals a lot, and affects both pets.

With leech affecting it, it also heals the hunter for a significant amount.

Exhilaration is another case : with a ferocity pet, it heals me for 30% health then leech heals me for 30% too. So it is actually far more powerful with leech.

Now, in a world before the nerf, the result still isn’t in the hunter’s favor :

  • on Denathrius, I did 3.6M healing, counting overhealing, on pets. Pets did 5.1M damage. So I lost around 15% value from leech compared to a hypothetical situation where I did 100% of my damage and my pet 0%, post-nerf.
  • using Mend pet every 10 seconds, with mend pet being on the GCD, is a dps loss.

But we need to consider three other factors :

  • trading DPS for Healing is something I wholeheartedly support. A retribution paladin can stop dps and spam healing. Same for a feral druid. Also, so many dps classes (warlock, mage, rogue…) have abilities with short or no cooldown to heal themselves. So hunters having one isn’t ridiculous.
  • hunters do take reduced damage from enemies hitting their pet instead of them. It’s a good advantage.
  • finally, BM hunters have 15% base leech. Note that some other classes also have some form of leech.

In practice, I want to offer a comparison between my solo of Sludgefist and a rogue’s, Qlfwow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lVsgQyKFR8).

He has a 10% leech talent, I have 15%. We both have some healing abilities.
Sludgefist hits two targets with his attacks, or the same target twice.
I was standing on my pet, because it would die if he took double hits, and I would lose dps.
The rogue took double melee hits.

It was, all in all, pretty equal. I had trouble surviving (both hunter and pet), and sometimes had to kite. He had trouble surviving, and sometimes had to kite. We both barely made it.

So the pre-nerf system was fair. And I believe that fairness is very important.

I know the data is outdated, but I’m using the data I have.

Post-nerf

However, after the nerf, this “balance” is broken. The designers answered to these questions in this manner :

  • should hunter’s leech heal through pet damage ? No
  • should hunter’s leech heal through mend pet ? No
  • should hunter’s leech heal through exhilaration ? No

Therefore, Blizzard has made the following decision, whether wittingly of unwittingly :
BM hunters get 50% less from leech than other classes.
(Note : Demonology warlocks are an exception, but they have drain life).

This is a design philosophy decision. Which gives us two options.

If it was wittingly, I really wish they would simply say it.
Lack of communication has plagued everything regarding pets since BFA, even after 9.1.5.
If they say absolutely nothing, we have no idea if they are reading our feedback, disagree with us or completely and utterly ignore us. And it feels we’re wasting our lives writing feedback.

If it is not, then something must be done.
As I explained, the issue isn’t mend pet leech per se, but that it was a solution to a significant problem.

There are many ways to make leech fair for BM hunter’s self-healing again. Pet dps could also heal the hunter through some kind of “shared leech”. Maybe just kill command ? Or the hunter could take double healing from leech. Or even take a third option and make mend pet also heal the hunter for 10% health, or buff spirit mend, or have a drain pet spell.

Or just decide that mend pet is OK because it’s a dps loss, but exhilaration isn’t. Whatever makes sense and is easiest to code. Not to mention maybe they want it to affect some specs and not others.

Conclusion

I’m not going to say hunters aren’t still the best raid soloing class. I still plan on soloing all the bosses, and I will make sure hunters stay at the top. I can do bosses with high damage on hunter in MM and bosses with high damage on pet in BM. I can adapt my talents to maximize cobra shot/barbed shot damage. I will do a dungeon 150 times until I win a tank trinket with greed, then go get a second trinket.

But philosophically, the main issue is you’re telling BM hunters that they get 15% leech but - surprise ! - it’s actually 7.5%, and now it doesn’t get compensated for by pet healing leech. Which kind of sucks for us. 1% leech should be 1% leech, and not require an Excel spreadsheet to get the “real” number.

And that feels both bad and unfair.

And it affects all hunters - not just extreme soloers, any form of solo content, be it the future spiritual successors to Thorghast and the Mage tower, or just a hunter trying to solo an Elite/Rare - which has been a part of the hunter class identity since the beginning. And already took a hard hit with the removal of tank pets, pet talents and pet spec switching.

27 Likes
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I’ve had someone notify me that overhealing isn’t meant to leech.
That is absolutely true.

Frankly, as I said, I 'm not asking for mend pet leech back.
I just want something that takes into account how we rely on leech for self-healing but our pets do 50% of our damage, so leech is worth half for BM hunters compared to other classes.

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Your pets are doing quite a bit more than 50% of your damage. In M+ it’s closer to 80%, if not more. On ST it’s still a really really high % too. Swap over to Kyrian and you will see what the ratio is going to be like for DF.

Kyrian is also just doing more damage than NF.

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What a great post!

I would recommend posting it in the feedback thread but unfortunately it looks like once again communication has broken down. I doubt it, but I hope Nimox and other devs notice that the tone of the posts got far more toxic once Nimox abruptly stopped interacting with the thread entirely. Even when many of the earlier talent changes weren’t well-received at least there was a sense that the feedback was being read. Someone just posted in that thread a post that amounted to saying Nimox should be fired. That wouldn’t have been tolerated by the other posters just a few months ago but now it got many upvotes.

On that note:

This is the one part I disagree with, because lack of communication hasn’t plagued everything regarding pets since BFA… it’s plagued absolutely everything about the class and even beyond! I would even say it’s been a chronic problem since and including WoD. All across the game we run into extended periods of radio silence, or worse, outright dishonesty. It creates a cycle of increased toxicity on the forums, which makes devs not want to post, which makes people more desperate and toxic, etc. I think the first few months of the feedback thread showed that the cycle can be broken.

On the topic of the thread I think Spirit Bond (the healing component) should be a classwide talent again, perhaps replacing Binding Shackles. Then they can replace Survival’s mastery with something better. Spirit Bond before BFA had always been either BM-exclusive or classwide. That made way more sense than having it as exclusively Survival. As for this leech change, I’m of the opinion that it needs to be completely reverted. We do not have the self-healing and survivability to justify this sort of change. Leech should work as advertised.

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I doubt Blizzard will listen or care. We’ve been posting about the [+damage] issue for years and they haven’t even hinted that they’re aware of the issue. Hell, the issue with Animal Companion existed for four years before they gave any indication they knew about it.

For those wondering what the [+damage] issue is… Anything that gives a player +damage, rather than increasing stats, doesn’t apply to pets. Things like the Night Fae capstone conduit (Dream Delver) that adds up to 3% damage, is actually less than half of that for BM Hunters. There are a lot of buffs like this in the game, but BM Hunters get a half the effectiveness. The current fated raid affixes are another example, with some of them giving +damage buffs.

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Other examples of this include the flamethrower buff on Brackenspore in Highmaul and the Benthic gear crit damage buff in Eternal Palace. It’s a frequent occurrence and Blizzard misses it every time. What’s worse is that it’s entirely passive so it’s not clear to a player that it’s happening. This is the sort of issue typical of Classic, not 9 expansions in.

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tldr…
BM pets are squishy.

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No, idk how you got to that conclusion.

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I’m hoping that the developers realize this nerf was maybe a bit too hard handed. I mean, was anyone really complaining about the leech from mend pet during Shadowlands? Was it a PvP issue? Even with this ‘passive’ method of healing, hunters were still arguably one the squishiest classes in Shadowlands even though I realize some fights could allow their toolkit to thrive.

The new increased healing from the mend pet talent was probably taking things too far with leech, but I feel that if the developers just applied a 50% reduction of leech effectiveness to mend pet / exhilaration, then the talent is still worth acquiring and it will put hunters back on par with combat sustainability as they are in Shadowlands.

Just my thoughts as I was planning on having a hunter as my main for starting Dragonflight.

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Honestly I compare it to other classes having some kind of consistent heal of some kind.
Mend pet gave us a decent hot. It wasn’t amazing, but it did help in a crunch. I know I used it constantly in high keys.
Now we have to rely solely on exhilaration which has a long cd.

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You aren’t solely reliant on exhil, and it’s new CD reduction talent makes it roughly a minute. Fortitude is also a new self heal and you’ve got your spirit beast heal.

The nerf is definitely too harsh when warriors can get 6%/sec basically passively in PvE or warlocks and DHs are getting several thousand HPS without even thinking about it but let’s not go blowing things out of proportion.

The change single handedly makes leech a completely dead stat for BM and needs to be addressed, especially considering one of our pets specs give us leech. Blizzard won’t though because, as always, they aren’t actually listening.

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Big issue is if you want a nice solid heal, it forces you to run spirit beast. I don’t. I am the “hero class” in my key groups, and sometimes in raid as well.
I loved being able to hit mend pet when I knew damage was coming out as well as something when exhil was on cd.

This doesn’t sound familiar, I’ll have to take another look. I tend to focus speed over survivability since a lot of things are movement based to avoid. But when you get hit with a dot… it WAS nice to hit mend pet just as some damage ‘mitigation’.

Is it fortitude of the bear? “Increase the maximum health of you and your pet by 20% for 10 sec.”
If so, it’s a simple hp increase, not heal. I also don’t see info on wowhead if you get to keep the hp gain once the 10 seconds end…
Sounds like a shoddy ‘replacement’ for the lack of leech and mend pet hot.

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I had not read the recent hot fixes but i noticed in game… it was simply habit to throw a mend pet to get a bit of self healing, now its gone. If the spirit beast heal had not been destroyed in SL this wouldnt be a big deal.

I mean its pre patch and they are already nerfing hunters. I quit in s1 of SL due to them gutting BM if they kill the spec again before DF goes live im really going to be unhappy.

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My idea to fix this is Change Mend pet to have a secondary effect called “lick wounds” and you gain 50% pets healing on you and its adjustable heal that can be tweaked for balance and the mechanic is your pet trys heal you back.

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Thanks for all the great ideas.

Most of the proposed fixes are new mechanics. They would make hunters work differently than other classes. I fully support them, but they would be complicated to put in place, so I wonder if Blizzard would just consider them not worth the development time up.

I wonder, if we just made kill command heal the hunter, would it be enough ? Since it is the centerpiece of BM rotation and isn’t affected by leech, it would probably be the smallest change yet still massively impactful - we’d probably go from 50% “true” leech to 80%.

Maybe beast cleave too, if we want to be super fair, since it’s our AoE spell.

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I think the only fair fix is for the devs to make pet damage apply to leech for the hunter.

Either that or change Aspect of the Beast to increase Predator’s Thirst, Endurance Training and Pathfinding by 100% instead of 50%.

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It is both a health increase and a heal for that increase. When it ends you don’t lose the heal portion, just the increased portion, and it can crit heal you for double the increased amount. It works the exact same way as Last Stand.

It is a pretty potent heal but honestly even with it and everything else we have to use we are still lacking compared to every single other class in the game.

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Yea, it sounds like a decent 20% heal, but yea… Most classes have some kind of short cd, on demand heal.
I much rather have a hot of some kind tbh. More consistent healing. Granted those are nice OH NO healing lol.

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So I did some tests on the Beta, and it’s a disaster.
Pets did 75% of my damage.
I had less survivability in 403 ilvl than in september, with 300 ilvl (tested on Wrathion Mythic)
Leech for BM needs a fix.

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Great post. Just a couple things I wanted to weigh in on.

It’s closer to 75% in Dragonflight, which just makes it worse.

Mend Pet still requires a GCD, so it’s not much different than any other classes instant HoTs. Using that GCD to cast Mend Pet affects our DPS to a degree, though minimally.

I think my biggest gripe about their decision is the history of Leech itself. They specifically made Leech work for healers so it would be a useful stat for everyone in the game. With this change, they’re essentially saying Leech needs to be fair for everyone EXCEPT Hunters that use pets.

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