The purpose of this post is to provide feedback and discussion on the state of hunter pets as well as the runes of the class. I have written about it before (e. g. here, here and here), in case anyone is interested, although I will also add my thoughts on the new things the class got in P2.
Hunter pets
As far as I know, phase 2 has brought us a total of one addition regarding hunter pets: a red raven carrion bird skin from the Expose Weakness rune. Anything else that we got was part of the original vanilla and thus unavailable until then due to the level cap.
While I am grateful to the developers for including a never-seen-before tameable in Vanilla, this is not enough. P1 was already a bit scarce in my opinion due to adding only one new tameable “family”, the wyvern, as well as some previously unobtainable colors such as Carrodin’s.
Why can’t we tame any wyvern we want with the rod? There are higher level wyverns than the Young Pridewings as well as re-colors that we could get.
The datamined pet abilities ended up being something that was created a long time ago and was simply discovered recently. There’s still very little variety in pet usage : cat/raptor and wind serpents continue to be the way to go in 99% of the cases. There’s some other families that may see some use such as boars while leveling or for the root in PvP but that’s about it. This is literally the same as original vanilla.
Scorpids could have stayed as a competitive addition in PvE but after the nerf to Scorpid Poison, the ability was broken. It is barely scaling, if at all, despite the original blue post stating that it would be fine when fully stacked to 5 so that the damage would ramp up and be less immediately deadly in PvP. But there’s nothing deadly about it; its damage is very low.
If new families cannot be created, why are wyverns wind serpents and not scorpids? Chimeras or thunder lizards would have made more sense added as wind serpents. Why can’t we have more tameables or families? Still waiting on things like hydras, darkhounds, gryphons, hippogryphs, faerie dragons, whelps, threshers and other aquatic beasts…
Everything that I wrote weeks and months ago remains true. There’s a lot to do in regards to hunter pets: many cannot learn Dash/Dive, Furious Howl doesn’t scale and is still bugged, Bite needs to be reworked in some way so that pets without focus dumps such as spiders can actually use their focus to deal damage, Screech needs to scale better so that bats can be competitive, Cobra Strikes is still bugged, the current amount of stable slots are not enough, etc.
Hunter runes
Hunter runes are still in a terrible state because the P1 runes were not fixed.
Heart of the Lion should be learned from a book and have the personal stat increase removed (or returned in later phases if scaling is a concern) so that there’s actual choice in the chest runes. This would allow them to create a chest rune that lets Mongoose Bite and Counterattack actually be usable.
Kill Command should be converted into a 6s cooldown damaging ability that becomes part of the active rotation of the BM hunter, with additional effects and damage based on family and benefiting from BM and maybe Arcane Shot talents. It could also interact with other runes such as Cobra Strikes.
Some of the Beast Mastery rune effects could require active input from the hunter instead of being fully passive.
Beast Mastery should be moved to the chest and Kill Command to the gloves so that the latter slot is only for active abilities. Cobra Strikes should be moved to the legs as a result.
Sniper Training is still terrible due to the fact that there’s no grace period to move before losing the buff as well as its lack of auto shot benefit.
Flanking Strike is a rune that feels satisfying due to its synergy with the pet and its role in the melee/weaving rotation. Ironically, one of the strongest melee builds uses Lone Wolf with it, thus removing this interaction entirely.
As for the new runes in P2, we have gotten a mix of good and terrible.
The melee runes are both strong and will likely have their numbers adjusted. I find it a bit problematic that going DW is way better than 2H but considering the state of 2H enhancement shaman and that going 2H Melee Specialist in PvP with Trap Launcher is great, I guess we can’t complain.
Speaking of Trap Launcher, why can’t our traps (alongside Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting) scale with our AP? Rogue poisons do and it’s just bizarre that so many core abilities in the hunter’s kit are bad because of no proper scaling (possible SP hunter memes aside).
Steady Shot was added, even though it’s, imho, a boring ability and that the devs said they would not implement into the game (someone please correct me if I’m wrong on this). Wasn’t there something more interesting to introduce?
Invigoration is nice but we got Viper as a book and is made redundant, plus the extra mana would only be useful for more Arcane Shots or Serpent Stings in ranged builds, so not very good. We also got the PvP trinket providing mana, thus giving us three different sources of mana regeneration when we only needed one.
It would have made more sense for Invigoration to have had some kind of different pet interaction when dealing damage. For example, adding the Go for the Throat effect that gives the pet focus when the hunter crits, although I’d rather have runes change/improve our existing kit or give us more active interaction.
Finally, Expose Weakness is an alright but yet another passive rune that will scale better later on when more agility is available from gear.
All in all, hunter keeps getting passive runes and effects. Only the melee builds play differently than vanilla and have several options for talents while the ranged BM hunter still goes with the same fully passive rotation as it always did.
I would like the developers to be more creative instead of copying so much from retail and future expansions. If we’re going to be taking abilities this way, they should at least be interesting ones like a Dire Beast zoo build and not more passives.
I hope they really listen to and act upon these concerns because otherwise P3 is going to be the exact same and feel terrible when it comes to hunter pets and runes.