wow Blizzard on Pet Changes in Battle for Azeroth

[Plergoth 277]

19 minutes ago, Aegrotat said:

How is having 10% increased HP and an extra survival CD a bad thing in raids?

I thought the same thing at first, but the eternal question of 'what's the best pet?' will remain; if there's nothing truly separating each pet spec in terms of bottom line damage, then Spirit Beasts will likely end up being the best pet in most situations excluding every other pet, exotic or not. It's just the same problems flipped on their head, as well as making it all the more likely that further down the line they'll end up nerfing Tenacity pets, hurting SV as a result. If you remove options from other pets, then the ones that can still do pretty much everything will be considered the best. 

[Undeadxy 4]

1 hour ago, Plergoth said:

This was a really long post to deflect that, unless there's further changes, Spirit Beasts, the pets a Hunter player would have most likely spent the most time looking for and playing with, will essentially no longer be used for anything other than soloing, and perhaps some pvp, and that any pet like Netherrays, with an active ability situationally useful in pve such as dispels along with a powerful cd like Bloodlust, will still be the most desirable pve pet simply because they provide the most value. It doesn't matter if they add more pet families with Lust / Heroism, it still creates the same problem where you are still basically carrying at least one of them for the sake of having the best range of pve utility and damage available with you at all times over the other families. 

The abilities themselves are just woeful when listed like that too. Unique pet skills (that are useful) were always a bit rare and counter-intuitive to the class , exclusive to a mere handful of families from Vanilla to current day where the days of having unique skills and dedicated talent trees introduced in Cataclysm are long gone, and have always seemed to end up being homogenised, at least to an extent, until we end up with a list such as this, where active abilities that either deal direct damage (such as Bite, Claw, etc) are available on ALL pets and do normalised damage, or that provide a buff or debuff fall into the category of being useful or not so much. 

Take for instance, Shell Shield vs Thick Hide. On live, Shell Shield on autocast will cast the ability when your pet's health drops to the threshold, but is on half the cd that Thick Hide has... so despite Ox and so forth being tamable, they're simply just not as good as existing tanky pets such as turtles right off the bat. 

Ankle Bite is an ability to me that always seemed like the poor man's Charge that Boars used to provide in Vanilla, a minor snare that you would often overwrite yourself with your own abilities, with no real use for pve and outshone in pvp where snares are plentiful but damage, hard cc and utility are king, which means that pets with Mortal Wounds and Dispels would be superior choices, even over pets such as Spiders, whose snare can be applied from the 40 yard range, as opposed to Ankle Crack's melee range limitation, and it will be increasingly overshadowed if MM - the spec that arguably had the most to benefit from having a pet with a snare for kiting - will no longer have access to pets. 

Agile Reflexes may as well be called Rest or Play v2.0 for how useful it is in pve and pvp, and what it actually is too; an ability to keep non-Tenacity pets from dying while soloing. 

They could be a lot more imaginative and bold here without adding stuff like a 4 second placate or stuns, but like forgotten pet families that were once popular, such as Shale Spiders, who no longer have anything distinctive about them despite the fact they remain classed as Exotic, they don't seem willing to commit to what would now be a huge undertaking to provide more unique and useful skills (that aren't just bring the class buff to work pets either) or create a talent tree system for hunter pets again. 

I'm not the best hunter in the world, but I have been playing on it long enough to remember running around Azeroth taming higher level pets to learn the next rank of Dash and Growl and Bite and whatever just to dismiss them afterwards, and this is the sort of unfun tediousness that the blue post reminds me of, as well as reminding the cynic in me that many new rarer or sought after pet spawns typically belong to the more useful pet families, almost as if they know. 

In all fairness though, the hunter playerbase is a fussy and arsey bunch of customers. MM for example is split down the middle of people who never wanted to run with a pet in the first place and those who feel it defeats the entire purpose of the class they've played with for years, and I've wanted melee back ever since they took it away and am one of the biggest critics of the SV spec despite playing it nonstop since Legion dropped.

I just wish they had just been more honest; "Right, listen boys and girls, hunters are the most popular by far class in WoW, but less than half of you know that Growl can be turned off. We've had enough and took pets away from MM entirely and if you keep this up, we'll make you play with Wands that can't be transmogged, and if you don't believe us, ask the one weird person in your guild who's always been a BM hunter where their Spirit Beast is next time you're raiding. Yes, we will add new pets to tame that you can PVE with that aren't Netherrays, but it's not on a high priority list when the majority of your arrow wanker kin just want to be able to tame a giraffe for no other reason than the fact that they currently can't. Seriously. Stop asking for giraffes. We're horrible and won't do it." 

 

I'll say it's still alpha and cross my fingers that they still have more changes coming, or that they will address more of what you said about the pet abilities to make the non-unique into unique, at a later time.

Edited February 14, 2018 by Undeadxy

[cmnights 11]

how are ppl complaining? 

how i see it, we went from being stuck with 2 pet families with bloodlust to like 20 or something). i just see upgrade.  

heck, removal of brez also gives me more options, before i always had to being a lust pet and a brez pet, each only had 2 pet families. it's another restriction on pets being removed. 

i like the changes, dont see how ppl are so against it.

it makes sense logic why anyways, why would a bear be cunning, and owl be a tank pet?

 

[Undeadxy 4]

50 minutes ago, cmnights said:

how are ppl complaining? 

how i see it, we went from being stuck with 2 pet families with bloodlust to like 20 or something). i just see upgrade.  

heck, removal of brez also gives me more options, before i always had to being a lust pet and a brez pet, each only had 2 pet families. it's another restriction on pets being removed. 

i like the changes, dont see how ppl are so against it.

it makes sense logic why anyways, why would a bear be cunning, and owl be a tank pet?

 

Exactly.

[Daedrik 4]

With all the people complaining about this change, what I'm basically hearing is that they want to just have a screen where they select from all the possible pet abilities with a slot or cost system, then choose a skin that they like to look at. Just a build-a-pet workshop that allows them 100% choice on everything. That's absolutely absurd.

The whole point of these pets is that they're animals with natural abilities that you can choose to bring or not. I always thought the spec system for pets was silly, because moths would make terrible tanks. I think it makes way more sense to just even them out for the basic template, then add abilities that make them more tanky or have more damage, because that's how they work in the overall world in game. This change definitely makes a lot of sense to me, both thematically and mechanically. With 5 slots to work with, you'll all be completely fine.

[Undeadxy 4]

9 hours ago, Daedrik said:

With all the people complaining about this change, what I'm basically hearing is that they want to just have a screen where they select from all the possible pet abilities with a slot or cost system, then choose a skin that they like to look at. Just a build-a-pet workshop that allows them 100% choice on everything. That's absolutely absurd.

The whole point of these pets is that they're animals with natural abilities that you can choose to bring or not. I always thought the spec system for pets was silly, because moths would make terrible tanks. I think it makes way more sense to just even them out for the basic template, then add abilities that make them more tanky or have more damage, because that's how they work in the overall world in game. This change definitely makes a lot of sense to me, both thematically and mechanically. With 5 slots to work with, you'll all be completely fine.

EXACTLY! xD

[Oafkad 1]

On 2/14/2018 at 9:54 AM, Plergoth said:

You tell that to Ditto! 

I would have gone with Mew. Ditto can only use the moves of the Pokemon it is currently observing.

Mew can learn every single TM.

^{(And yes, I am so pathetic I made an account just to mention this).}

As for the topic at hand! I don't know how I feel. It feels like these changes just kinda move the problem around rather than resolve it. For me, I'm mostly about aesthetics. But if I had to make changes mechanically, I'd rather my pets level with me and I choose their skills as they level.

I recognize we'll probably never see something that nuanced.

Edited February 23, 2018 by Oafkad
I used the word "but" more than I like. Cut it down to one, much butter.

[Huntersdave 0]

Hi I tamed the beast Gara for my hunter can I have another Gara pet so I can have 2 of them thx

dave