I come again with a reminder on the state of hunter pets and runes in SoD. You can check my last post here, should you want to read more about it.
Hunter pets
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Allow Furious Howl to scale in some way and fix the bugs associated with it.
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Improve scaling on Screech so that bats are competitive DPS-wise.
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Fix Scorpid Poison. Its scaling was broken despite the original blue post stating it would be fine at 5 stacks. It’s never used now as a result.
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Give all pets Dash/Dive.
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Make Bite competitive with focus dumps: use all remaining focus for higher damage a la Ferocious Bite or reduce its CD in some way so that pets like spiders or crocolisks don’t focus cap.
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Give more love to families with little to nothing: spiders , hyenas, tallstriders, crabs, crocolisks, etc. We’re still using the same old cat/wind serpent with no change in sight . SoD was meant to spice things up and help specs or classes that need it.
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Make wyverns scorpids or give them their own family with poison/claw/bite/dive/anything else you might consider. Let us tame any wyvern with the rod so that we can get recolors and higher level ones .
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Give us more tameables and make them their own discoveries : chimeras and thunder lizards for wind serpents/own family, darkhounds for wolves, gryphons and hippogryphs for owls/own family, threshers and sharks! , devilsaurs, hydras (could have poison, triple bite…), pterrordaxes, kodos, diemetradons, giraffes, zevras and horses, etc… as well as more colors of existing families such as the unused white vulture skin or the venomhide ravasaurs.
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Let us befriend dragonkin as a new family : faerie dragons, whelps, drakes.
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Discovering new tameables (either families or special individual pets - recolors or otherwise) should be one of the core aspects of the class .
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Give us 5-10 more stable slots .
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Follow on the idea of the datamined pet abilities and implement something similar.
Hunter runes
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Make Kill Command a 6s CD attack that deals damage and/or has effects based on family and benefits from BM and Arcane Shot talents. I’ve explained it before in more detail here. Move the rune to the glove slot.
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Relocate Beast Mastery to the chest and have its effects require active input from the hunter instead of being fully passive. For example, the extra focus regeneration could partially work like the talent Go for the Throat from future iterations.
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As a result, make Heart of the Lion baseline through a book and remove the personal hunter buff (unless scaling is a concern in the future).
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Move Cobra Strikes to the legs and fix its buggy interactions. Let it proc from any critical and not just shots. Can also be reworked to be more interesting.
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Create a new chest rune for melee that allows Mongoose Bite/Counterattack to actually be usable.
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Less passive runes, especially for BM. The BM hunter needs to have a rotation besides multi-shotting every 10s. We want to enhance and interact with the pet(s), not auto shoot passively. For instance, if we get a 2nd pet or Dire Beast, make them engaging.
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Give AP scaling to stings, Arcane Shot and traps.
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Give Sniper Training a grace period so it’s not so punishing and maybe let it buff auto shots.
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Rework some of the newest runes: Invigoration is moot due to no scaling to use mana on and the existence of Aspect of the Viper, Steady Shot deals little damage and can’t be used well with current weapon speeds, Expose Weakness will be good with more agility in the future but is a bland passive, etc.
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New runes/passives/abilities should not all come from retail/future expansions. Create new things for SoD .
Are there any other ideas you’d like implemented in regards to hunter pets and runes?
9 Likes
great ideas, this needs more likes
2 Likes
The things you suggest cannot be done without changing the pets in Era client, which SoD uses
Also passive runes should stay passive. BM hunter is the only spec for braindead people like me that allows you to relax and play with 1 hand without really losing much DPS. At least 1 spec like that should always exist
They said they couldn’t change anything due to Era and yet they did. So it is possible. This argument is not acceptable anymore.
Also, I disagree with the notion that a spec needs to be braindead. Ranged BM hunters play exactly like original vanilla right now. We don’t even use any new pet families after the scorpid nerf. It doesn’t have to get the most intricate of rotations but it shouldn’t be so soulless either.
You can still go AFK and do decent damage when farming stuff but there’s other people that want to enjoy the pet-focused spec more besides multi-shotting every 10s and keeping a non-scaling Serpent Sting up if mana allows due to having nothing else to do.
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I like the ideas but some of these arw not fair to be implemented. For instance you cannot have the best buff if the game for free. Without sacrificing something. Would be unfair.
You cannot have the rune that rewards good positioning with… grace period. It is like allowing casters to continue casting while moving for a grace period. No. If there are bosses that requires movement, don’t use the rune.
I agree with letting you have more pets, more interesting pets etc. Hunters should get this. But since noone wants to see a new p1 again (with pets soloing players and be better tanks than actual tanks) I think they will not dare this. It would require testing. And we are the testers. In production environment. My guess is they will further transfer damage from pets to the hunter
I didn’t say BM needs to be a braindead spec
I said there should be at least one braindead spec in the game
And currently now the only such spec is BM. So unless any new appear, please no new active abilities to BM
Then which Leg rune are we supposed to use exactly?
Then Lion has to be removed completely as it negates all other choices.
The problem with Heart of the Lion is that it invalidates every single chest rune option unless there’s more hunters in the raid or you happen to have kings on the Alliance side. This change is needed and pretty much every hunter wants it. Simply remove the extra personal 10% stats for the hunter unless scaling is a concern.
This rune is already bad even when you meet the requirements. Right now, several bosses in Gnomeregan force you to move frequently, thus breaking the rune. And ranged have no other options in that slot unless you melee weave because Kill Command is terrible. You can’t stand still for too long in PvP either.
Which is why I say that there has to be actual input from the hunter. The reason that happened in P1 is because the power was fully passive and permanent. The hunter could hide but if you need the hunter to do something and you spread the damage through different effects and runes, then it’s different.
Right now, pets are not in that state anymore and they are not as tanky either, particularly because everyone got more tools now. I remember a lot of doom and gloom in this forum about how overpowered Bestial Wrath was going to be yet there’s barely any complaints on the matter.
Other classes like SP can easily kill anyone with just two DoTs and one SWD.
You can literally be braindead without any talents as hunter, as the lovely farming bots show.
There’s plenty of (almost) 1-button classes in the game. There’s no need for one spec to be damned into a no-rotation playstyle.
1 Like
Yes there is lol
Plenty of people want to just chill and play with 1 hand
The number of such people is obviously bigger than the number of people who play hunter, choose BM spec and want to increase their current APM
You can already do that without screwing a spec, as I just replied to you.
Yes because currently now runes are passive
So please do not screw the spec with new active runes
Ranged BM hunter is already screwed. This take is extremely weird.
It only is screwed because it deals too little dmg, it should get numerical buffs, not an overhaul. Stop trying to make classic BM into something it has never been.
SoD was meant to spice up specs and classes that need help. BM was not brought to raids at max level and was mostly a leveling spec.
It needs to be able to raid and it needs to be able to do something beyond multi-shotting and the pet doing literally everything with no input or interaction. Hunters also need to be able to use more pets than the eternal cat/wind serpent.
You can already get the braindead play style that you want.
We’re going to agree to disagree here. I will not reply to you further on this.
Not “it needs”, “I want”. What you are asking for is against the core idea of vanilla BM and against what people have appreciated in it over the last years.
BM hunter was more than fine in phase 1 because it dealt decent damage, there is absolutely no need in any core adjustments, only numerical buffs.
There hasn’t been any fundamental rune overhaul yet. Rest assured, BM will remain autoshot simulator - just the way it has always been and as it should be.
So it turns out that they are able to create new families. See this link and its comments for more information.
Assuming this is legit, it is quite sad that Blizzard has waited this long. Why aren’t wyverns made its own family, for instance? Why can’t we still tame its other color possibilities or higher level mobs to make leveling them less painful?
And no stable slot increase in sight…
good ideas i hope the devs will take feedback into account
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The feedback from this post is still relevant for P4. Some of it has been taken into consideration such as HotL becoming baseline and its spot being replaced by a MB rune but the implementation of said rune is a bit dubious.
Additionally, Kill Command has been removed instead of remade into a rotational BM ability and Invigoration has been removed instead of reworked as well. So not only there’s zero new BM-centric runes but two of them have been removed as well!
To the devs that might be reading this: please, consider the OP and don’t let BM get nothing. The spec (especially ranged) needs more love and interaction with the pet, not more passive bonuses.
Melee hunter is dead they made runes to help him with mobility but made his raptor strike a non isntant 6 second cd when enha shams got 2 instant 6 sec dmg cds instant heals and anti cc tech, while hunter has a pet that’s so nerfed it’s basicaly more like a fly those shamans i mentioned can two shot 
but hey fk hunters am i right bois?
Melee hunter may still have decent rotation on raids if the rune stay like this but surely no good for pvp anymore.
6 sec on raptor , if procs , if misses if dodges , you are so dead.
I dont know how this will work after lock and load proc will both raptor strikes account for 30% chance on one extra or just second one.
1 Like