I doubt pet-less hunter is ever gonna be a thing with Heart of the Lion and Lone Wolf rune being on the same armor slot.
With my current gear I get the following stats:
With Lone wolf rune:
R-Damage: 145-179
Attack Power: 372
Critical Strike: 12,7%
With Heart of the Lion Rune:
R-Damage: 142-172
Attack Power:434
Critical Strike: 14,3%
That’s not including that Heart of the Lion also increases all the base stats by 20%.
So while Lone wolf rune give slightly more ranged damage, Heart of the Lion give more melee/ranged attack power, crit, health and of course the Pet.
And I doubt any raid group will want a hunter that can’t bring the Heart of the Lion buff to the raid.
So for pet-less hunter to ever be a thing in both pvp and pve, the Lone wolf rune need to be moved/swapped to the Leg armor slot. The hand slot still have useful runes for a Lone wolf hunter.
Swap it with Sniper Training or Serpent Spread, those two are barely used anyway.
Flanking Strike and Kill Command are pet runes, so those two can be on the same rune slot as Lone wolf.
My hope with Season of Discovery was to be able to choose between pet hunter and pet-less hunter. Right now pet hunter is the only viable option.
I just don’t understand why you would play hunter and not want a pet? It’s there whole class identity, I’ve never heard anyone complain about this before
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That is exactly what the rune “Lone Wolf” does.
We have pet-less hunters on retail and Blizzard introduced the rune Lone Wolf so that players can play without pet.
Because it is a thing in retail. And probably around 20% or even more of the population playing SoD right now are retail people.
Lone Wolf was a mistake that should never have been put into the game as a rune. Classic isn’t built in a way where Lone Wolf works. It’d be far better to just yeet it and replace it with a completely different rune. If you want to play without a pet then you got plenty of other classes to choose from.
Blizz ought to just change it to Aspect Of The Wolf and have it increase some kind of Melee oriented statistic as there are no melee runes on Chest anyway.
Or Wolf’s Charge, you and your pet charges the enemy at the same time for an ambush strike that does bleed damage over time.
Literally anything melee oriented would be a better rune than pet-less Hunter.
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Because its the only class that uses a gun/bow consistently and some people dont give a f about some stinky beast following them around.
Ranger fantasy exists.
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Right, but how do you use your ranged attacks with the deadzone when a pet doesn’t keep the enemies at a distance?
Thats why rangers are typically very good at melee combat, hint hint.
Why? It’s just a question of tuning.
Hunter above anything else is the only physical ranged dps, maybe people just want that. And in the later stages of the game pets felt more like a burden than helpful in many cases.
And SoD was meant to spice things up and change things for the better. Pet survivability and scalability is one of these elements.
Otherwise, hunters are going to be playing the exact same way they’ve always done in vanilla. Lone Wolf on its own would simply substitute the wind serpent/wolf next to you shooting bolts/howling for… nothing. Just you.
Still, if people crave a sniper fantasy, more power to them. I hope Blizzard can deliver without making Lone Wolf MM the best option, because then that’d be an issue. A rune deleting one core aspect of a class should not be the default best option, imho.
There’s also the issue of there being only one class in the game with the ability to deal damage with ranged physical weapons. Rogue or warrior should’ve gotten a ranged spec to spice things up. I hope stuff like thrown weapons get reworked for such a build.
Hunter’s by design are always in a group setting of a minimum of two. Someone else has to keep the aggro of the enemy in order to maintain a deadzone distance, that other part also happens to contribute to a huge amount of your base damage.
Let’s say you remove that part of the damage. Then you’d have to scale up Hunter’s base damage instead.
Simple enough. Except for the fact that Aimed Shot exist and can do massive damage.
So Lone Wolf would have to contribute a huge damage buff (my pet did 43% of my damage in BFD so I guess 40% damage buff?), make Concussive Shot and Wing Clip do more movement reduction (80%), a new ability to pin the target down completely for a few seconds, either a base movement speed increase or for Cheetah to do 20% speed but no more daze and finally Disengage launching you backwards. All just to deal with the fact that the deadzone exists.
Alternatively, remove the deadzone. But then enemies will be standing face to face whacking you with their sticks while you ploink arrows at them. Might as well just go melee at that point.
Only then could it possibly be useful in any solo content.
However considering how much Hunter’s keep getting nerfed cause of PVP complaints all of this is going to infuriate the PVP crowd.
Again, Hunter’s by design are ALWAYS in a group setting of a minimum of two. You and your pet. That’s how the entire class is set up with its damage scaling and abilities. It isn’t meant for you to run around without a pet.
It would be viable in pve if it was tuned correctly. It’s simply trash on SoD that’s why it’s not.
Hunter was never built to act as your typical ranged physical damage in this game.
What most people would want to play is an archer and, unfortunatelly, hunters will always be the walmart version of that archetype, as the community could never be fine with it and they will always be in the nerf category no matter what.
Just accept that the class will never shine, play at your own risk or switch to superior classes like mages, rogues warrior and warlocks.