Currently there are 59 pet families available for hunters to tame, but due to the way Blizzard implemented the pet system, only a handful of these pet families are viable for max level content, and these are the pets that provide:
Mortal Wounds - essential for PvP
Shell Shield - essential for soloing harder content
Spirit Pulse/Catlike Reflexes - useful for high end PvE, though very rarely at best
This makes only 11 pet families a viable choice, which is a waste from both the fantasy and aesthetic points of view. Every serious hunter playing this game can cover everything by taming a raptor, turtle and a cat, or a spirit beast if you’re playing BM.
This renders the other pet families currently in the game (as well as all the future pet models that will be added to these families) completely obsolete, which is kind of funny considering WoWs focus on personal identity and customization options in recent years. Every hunter I see is running one of the above mentioned pets, with the only differentiating factor being the different models/reskins of the same pet skeleton.
My solution to this would be to add a button in the Stable Master UI to switch the family ability the pet comes with with any other family ability, so instead of hundreds of thousands of hunters running around with raptors in PvP, we can “train” for example a bird of prey, or any other cunning pet to apply the same effect, and hunter’s would be free to chose their pets based on their in game race, or match the pet models with their transmog, while still being able to have access to the only useful family ability for the type of content they’re running at that time.
This would incentivize the hunters to go out into the open world and tame any cunning, ferocity or tenacity pet they like the look of, maybe even camp some unique looking rare spawns like we did back in the day, and finally stop hunters from running the exact same pet family they’ve been running for OVER 8 YEARS (which was when this iteration of the pet family system was introduced).
I do not know if Blizzard reads these forums, but if you agree with me that it’s time for these outdated (and in my option badly designed) systems to go, like the post and leave your thoughts on this below as well, and let’s start a pet revolution people! We deserve more from the pet system than what we have right now.