Lone Wolf is a dangerous concept for a rune because it completely removes one core aspect of the class. I have a feeling that those that want it desire to make MM the best spec for DPS and get rid of the pet, which makes me wonder why they would choose the pet class in the first place.
That said, it’s Blizzard’s fault for having only one class with ranged physical attacks so while I personally disagree with the rune, I hope the devs find a way to make it work for that sniper fantasy without overshadowing the other specs or play styles hunter has. SoD was (maybe still is…?) the perfect opportunity for rogues or warriors to get a ranged specialization.
The entire point of SoD is to spice things up and “make everyone OP” as the devs themselves said, which means bringing up those specs or play styles that could never flourish in the original vanilla and in most cases became viable or even strong in TBC, when their downsides were fixed.
Therefore, pets must scale and they must be relevant so that Beast Mastery can be a competitive DPS raiding specialization.
The main issue with BM as a spec and pets is that their contribution is entirely passive. The BM rune is strong because it’s active all the time regardless of what the hunter is doing.
So in order to be able to have sufficiently strong yet not oppressive pets (just like retail and future iterations of the game have), what we need is to shift the passive components into active interaction.
Kill Command, for example, could work as it does in retail or TBC, an active short cooldown ability that would become the main “shot” of the spec and benefit and interact with talents (e. g. Arcane Shot talents so that stuff like the trash MM one that reduces the CD can become useful) and runes, such as Cobra Strikes. The BM rune could have had an active component by requiring the hunter to do something in order to give the pet focus (a la Go for the Throat in future expansions), damage, etc.
By requiring active input from the hunter and spreading the damage profile to different abilities, procs, etc. you make the spec less of an auto-shot bot and reduce the issues in the environment that promoted the recent nerfs, PvP, because that’s the one and only reason why pets have been nerfed so much.
The early overtuned scaling would’ve been relatively fine if the BM rune didn’t give pets so much passive power but by getting both, it became too much.
Yet the nerfs are handed out poorly, as scorpid poison is now entirely useless because it doesn’t scale at all, despite the original blue post directly stating that the damage would be fine with 5 stacks of it. This is not the case, so we lost the option of having a new, different family pet being competitive as a DPS option, and not the eternal cats, raptors, wind serpents…
When it comes to tanking, the talent tree that has the most tools for it is survival. It even comes with its own tank CD in Deterrence. That said, a possible tank spec in which the pet helps in some way would be fine, I just don’t want it to be pigeonholed into BM because the spec (as well as melee hunter) should be able to deal DPS just like MM does.
MM has always been the main spec in all versions of vanilla. SoD is meant to spice things up, and so BM and melee should be competitive and as good as MM when it comes to raiding. Otherwise, what is the point of this season? To play the exact same way as always?
Right now, the most pressing matter is the awful state of hunter runes. They’re all bad. HotL blocks any other choice and the rest are strong enough to make the other runes in a slot situational or just worse regardless of spec (BM) or mostly useless (all leg runes except for Flanking Strike).
Just to give an example, KC provides around 5 or less DPS when used optimally. The dedicated BM leg rune is that terrible.
I think I’ve given enough of my own point of view and feedback on the matter. If you want, you can check my previous post on hunter feedback and pets here.
You have some interesting ideas. Things like Arcane Shot or Serpent Sting definitely need to scale off AP or be improved in some way.
I just hope Blizzard learns from the absolute fail that has been the implementation of hunter runes and fixes the existing ones as well as the future ones from P2 onwards.