I appreciate the team is busy with the 8 other classes, so to keep things simple and easy to work I’m proposing a smaller list of changes for melee hunters that should make them a viable option. Though bare in mind I am not a dev and don’t know how much time these suggestions actually take
Melee specialist - Allows traps to be placed in combat, at the players feet
Raptor's fury - Mongoose also stacks raptors fury
Cobra strikes - Applies to melee abilities too and moved to back rune slot
Cobra slayer - Mongoose activates on pet crit, counterattack now activates on
mongoose crit and gains extra damage equal to 60% melee attack power.
Dual wield spec - Mongoose also hits with both weapons
Catlike reflexes - Up from 50% to 70%, down to a 9s cd so we can maintain the debuff
Wyvern strike - Wyvern dot also has a mekkatoruqe arcanoshredder/serpent’s striker effect (perhaps a curse of elements effect instead)
Carve - Spreads and refreshes wyvern strike dot to nearby mobs (pestillence type effect)
Flanking strike - Raptor’s chance to reset up to 30% from 20% and Mongoose also has a 30% chance to reset flanking strike
These should tick some boxes
-2h trapper build
-dw pet owner build
-something to compete with TSA
EDIT
After testing some stuff in the hunter discord.
A 300s fight, with a average of 700dps and a total of 215.7k damage
During this fight we had 20 mongoose procs, at an average of 650 damage, dealing a total of 13k.
Introducing pet crit = Mongoose activation
With a 2.0 wind serpent, we had a 70 pet melee critical hits. 300s/70 is 4/5 seconds inbetween pet crits, meaning we can use mongoose on it’s 6s cd.
300/6=50, 50 x our average Goose of 650 damage
This puts mongoose damage up to 32.5k from 13k.
Introducing Mongoose bite hits with both weapons with Dual wield specialization
Simply doubling this damage from 32.5k to 65k as we use the slowest one handed weapons we can find. A total difference of 52k from the initial 13k damage.
With a new total damage of 267.7k, up from 215.7k. This puts our average dps over a 300s fight to 892.
Shy of 900 dps is still considerably low compared to what others are doing on the PTR, supposedly warriors are doing 1.5k dps as of now. However, this is not factoring in the other suggestions I’ve made.
With flanking strike down to 9s cd we can maintain the 3 stacks (Flanking strike did a staggering total of 5k damage during this test.)
Also, with more pet critical hits through Cobra Strikes and having Raptor’s fury working with Mongoose bite too would also increase our damage, hopefully bringing us in line with other classes.
BM DW spec would still suffer from the issue of not bringing any raid buffs or utility to the raid and would simply be replaced by a MM hunter in most cases.
'EDIT'
I’ve made a slight boo-boo, mongoose CD is 5s and not 6s. But you get the idea.
The new average dps would be 935 up from 892.
'EDIT'
As a contender against TSA and Wyvern stike’s Curse of Elements for the BM hunter, I’d like to see a Ferocious Inspiration type effect from TBC that is applied with either Bestial Wrath or the talented Frenzy spell and is attached to the glove rune Beast mastery.
Being either Frenzy or Bestial wrath would restrict it to purely BM hunters as these two talents don’t allow you to also get the capstone in the other trees. Bestial wrath being a pseudo bloodlust type effect and Frenzy being a consistent uptime
If the buff is applied through Frenzy I’d prefer to see it changed from 3% damage to 3% crit or something less impactful given the high uptime of Frenzy and I’d also want this buff to only have 1 stack of it at a time otherwise we’ll stack hunters again like we did in TBC.
If you've made it this far, thanks. I'd like to see some replies with thoughts and comments so we can get it narrowed down and pushed up through the 'hunter bad wtf' posts up to the devs