Great post with which I agree. There’s still tuning to be done in regards to hunter pets as well as the viability of families.
One way of balancing bite would be to perhaps reduce its cooldown or allow it to consume extra focus to deal more damage, similar to ferocious bite. Other abilities such as screech don’t seem to scale too well either, thus reducing the viability of pets like bats.
Furious Howl, as a 60 focus ability with a 10 second cooldown, should definitely scale. They’d have to tune and crunch the numbers but it has to be a thing so that wolves are competitive, even if only in niche scenarios with a full melee party. The bug that has the buff be consumed by anything but only apply damage to white attacks should be fixed as well.
Scorpid Poison’s change made the ability completely useless. The dev commentary alluded to the fact that it would deal more damage with 5 stacks but right now the damage isn’t even a fraction of what it used to be. It was too strong and now it’s too weak. I liked the fact that a pet never seen as DPS could be competitive due to its special ability and I’d like that back without it being broken for PvP or PvE. It has to be bugged, so I’d like the devs to tune it so that scorpids are a valid option.
Pets families overall need love when it comes to abilities. As you say, we need them all to learn dash and dive and some kind of focus dump. They could create new abilities for this purpose and even new families. It makes no sense that raptors cannot dash, and it’s weird that spiders, a DPS family, is an awful option besides looks due to only having access to bite. Where’s the web or poison for them? I see these as signs of rushed development and no time to finalize pets properly years ago.
We also need way more new tameables, both in recolors of existing families and new ones. We should be able to tame ALL wyverns and not just the young pridewings. Otherwise, we lose access to higher level beasts as well as the two recolors that exist for them. Wyverns should also “be” scorpids, unless a new family can be created for them. It fits them way more than being a wind serpent (all wyverns use poison, never lightning), which by the way would have been a fitting family for chimeras. Darkhounds would also be perfect for wolves. I feel like gryphons and hippogryphs should be their own family, but they could easily be owls as well.
Faerie dragons, whelps and drakes as a dragonkin family to befriend would be awesome, too.
I would also like the BM rotation (and hunter in general) to not be so passive. Current retail has a lot of interaction between master and pet and I think we should get runes to reflect a similar idea. I’d prefer if they made new abilities for SoD and not copy future versions though. However, I dislike the current Kill Command. Its changes make it obvious that it’s lacking and that it should be reworked altogether. Something like the WotlK/Retail version or something entirely new. Someone on Reddit suggested different versions of “command” that would make the pet do different things such as stun, bleed, slow, etc. which I believe would be a good idea.
Bringing the “zoo” build with Dire Beast is something I would like as well but it’s not something that can be done right now due to the early power hunters have. I’d be fine without it anyway. What I would like though is having a 2nd pet that can only use dash/dive and benefit from specific talents/abilities. But again, I’d rather have a meaningful and active rotation than a 2nd pet.
I’ve been giving them feedback on the matter in some of my previous posts both in the forums and on Reddit, so feel free to check them out below if you see anything interesting and want to discuss what other additions or changes pets could have! Thank you for your posts on Reddit, too <3
Hopefully this’ll make them act on the matter ASAP and not too late!
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/18bjkv2/feedback_on_hunter_pets_and_the_new_tameable/