What happened here?
I recently leveled up a hunter in hopes of going BM/pet focused and upon reaching max level I cannot see a reason as to why anybody would go BM. BM is great for leveling, but even at 60 with dungeon gear my maxed BM cat with max rank skills and pet runes can’t hold aggro on 1 mob while questing, just imagine how it will look like when you get decent gear. Also, there are very few runes that actually support a BM playstyle:
- Head, gives the pet… dodge? (which serves zero purpose in dungeons/raids) and reduces cd of flanking strike (which is more or less proc based anyways, making the cd reduction non-relevant and forces you to be melee to take effect)
- Chest, one of the few decent runes. Beast Mastery. However, I really do not think that +15% dmg and +50% focus reg to the pet is anywhere near Lone Wolf strength (+30% multiplicative dmg to hunter if no pet is around, which becomes insanely powerful in AoE situations since pets generally provide 0 AoE)
- Waist, Expose Weakness. It indirectly buffs the pet by boosting your own stats.
- Legs, flanking strike. A melee ability that increases your own dmg and triggers a basic attack from the pet. Does nothing if you’re ranged.
- Feet, nothing.
- Wrist, Focus Fire. Increases pet atk speed and 5 stacks can be consumed to give it a meager 20 focus. Also has diminishing returns when combined with Frenzy talent. One full effect of these 30% atk speed bonuses makes broken tooth go from 1.00 atk speed to 0.77 (23%), while two effects makes it go to 0.59 (18%).
- Hands, nothing.
- Back, Hit and Run. A small armor debuff.
TLDR: runes that buff pet damage for ranged BM hunters: Two that directly buffs pet damage (Beast Mastery + Focus Fire), one that indirectly buffs pet damage (Expose Weakness), and one that debuffs the mob for the entire raid to benefit from (Hit and Run). So, 4 out of 8 runes in total are actually beneficial for the pet in dungeon/raid content, if your focus is single target damage.
Gear wise. There is no real gear that greatly buffs hunter pet damage. The ZG set is a joke (low stats which makes your pet benefit less AND a set bonus that barely does anything. Compare +20% focus reg (5 piece hunter set ZG) to frost mages 5 set (+65% DMG on their main skill). The only set piece that seems to be worth using is the AQ Ruins 3 set (+100% focus reg). Now compare that to the +20% focus reg for ZG 5 set which worse stats on the items as well.
Ability wise. Everything, and I really mean everything, is passive. Why are there no active runes that give our pet a huge thunderclap/cleave/other AoE ability (or single target skills), that needs to be manually activated by the hunter and requires positioning with the pet to be good? Would be nice to not be forced to go T.N.T. or Explosive Shot for AoE (let’s face it, nobody uses improved volley).
TLDR: Please make BM hunters viable, perhaps by adding some of the changes below:
- Active skills that the hunter has to manually press in order for the pet to do an attack (which also becomes very impactful, requires pet management and scales with the pet’s damage instead of the hunter’s)
- More ways to scale pet damage (runes, set bonuses, gear)
- Maybe even add a ring rune that increases pet hit chance by 6%
P.S. if you are afraid of BM/hunter pets becoming too powerful in PvP, just add a static “-% damage reduced to players” on hunter pets after you have fixed their PvE damage.
or when the Scorpion poison could 1v10. good times