I have been a Hunter since BC and have played the majority of all expansions and coming into Dragonflight as I made level70 anything I did in the open world destroyed my pet and I had to make Pet Mend apart of my rotation. I got gear then did not have to do this anymore and now with Forbidden Reach here I now have to do this again when I show up and have to use my pet to tank bosses.
Healing your pet in general just feels bad, nobody wants to do it unless they have to then you have the added negative feeling of it also being on GCD and for what reason is it in the GCD?
3 Likes
it could be worse. it could be a channel
4 Likes
It is on the GCD for pvp balance. If your a bm hunter, and someone is killing your pet, healing it is a big deal.
Cuz you could just macro it into all your abilities and never worry about your pet dying 
3 Likes
pets are paper this expac they may as well take it off the gcd so we have a chance
Why is barbed shot on the gcd (if anyone mentions macroing it, i will laugh at you, thats now how BS works)
Why is bestial wrath on GCD
Why does BM use focus? (to force downtime into an already gcd locked and clunky spec)
Why
Why
Why?
We can go on for days with the horrible design choices with hunters if you want.
Bestial wrath being put on the GCD back when BFA launched, is a decant part of what made me quit BFA, that and azurite gear lol.
You guys way over exaggerate. Ferocity pets almost never need to be healed unless it is a situation where any player beyond a tank would need to self heal. I rolled up a new hunter recently and when 10.0.7 hit I was able to solo a majority of the rares out in the reach around 372 ilvl. There are a few that are designed to need many players and those are not solo friendly for anyone but a couple of tank specs that are well over the gear expectation for the area.
If mend was taken off the gcd it would need a much longer cooldowns to compensate. Having to cast it every now and again on gcd in appropriate situations is not an issue.
Because otherwise our optimal behavior would be to just spam it every 10 seconds, at which point (we all just macro it in and) the skill would then be balanced down to where it lacks potency enough to actually save our pet.
You could give it a Focus cost instead, ofc, but depending on how the GCD’s opportunity cost is converted into Focus cost its use could be potentially even more costly, especially for MM.
Because the spec would be less interesting if it didn’t, since there’d be absolutely no conflict opposite its core maintenance mechanic from which to give the spec more than the shallowest bits of complexity.
Now those are much better questions.
BW being on the GCD would be fine to me if, being on the GCD, its direct damage at least exceeded our average ppgcd¹.
- ¹ effective %AP dealt per average GCD
- No, I don’t find BW supplying its free Barbed Shot 1 GCD later and therefore being less able to bail us out of an earlier mistake in Barbed Shot management or a particularly bad span of luck as a massive fault in BW’s design. I just dislike any CD-GCD feeling, it the course of that GCD, no stronger than a filler GCD (e.g., Cobra Shot).
Additionally, if the spec is to always be GCD locked anyways², then what purpose does Focus serve, given that we don’t have any more Focus-expensive options to absorb the excess with?
- ² It isn’t, though. Our ability to act as if GCD locked is balanced around a particular effective rate of Barbed Shots [i.e., not counting where they overcap Focus], each, for AoE and for ST, which we may fall short of.
- Nonetheless, there’s essentially no agency involved, as we’re not about to risk wasting Barbed Shot charges by trying to avoid excess Focus generation, not when they’re individually powerful (especially if able to multi-DoT) and maintain our core buff, Frenzy.