anyway it’s the same as always. use one of you damage reducing cooldowns and kite. Most classes have a wall. Everyone has mobility in some way. Then you have healers like evoker and priest that can grip you away. There is a lot you can do. Yes if you wave the white flag and just take the damage you will lose but if you use your toolkit you can definitely combat it.
They need to buff unstable affliction dmg when dispelled by like 200% so put these filthy rets in their place when they dispel it. That will put a stop to them.
What’s really fun about UA backlash is that it royally screws over all passive dispel mechanics. Hunter cannot run improved mend pet into aff because you can’t make it not sometimes dispel UA and kill you randomly. This is a bad design for hunter and there has been legitimate feedback from way higher rated players than me to just remove the dispel mechanic on improved mend. I personally think all of the passive dispel mechanics like that just need to go bye bye across the board, it’s not good for anyone.
Any of the above would be better. Buffing the base heal would also help out marks pet because you can’t comfortably take improved mend even in situations where you won’t kill yourself with it as marks, and it’s pet dies faster. I still think the best thing to do is keep/make dispel mechanics active instead of passive, so like a choice node that increases mend cooldown but also dispels your pet right then (instead of randomly on the heal tick). Or just replace improved mend with choice nodes of bullheaded/phoenix res/cower.
I really don’t see why they don’t do this. This is how it used to be back in the day, like a 50% or more reduction in damage. If they want to make ret a bursty class they cannot be balanced properly with an immunity that lets them still do full damage.