Why doesn’t Blizzard just turn Beastmaster into the melee spec of hunters?
I am still adamant that I think hunter should be 100% ranged class, but if we insist it has to have a melee spec because a nostalgic group of developers, then fair enough.
But then let’s make it thematically and mechanically unique. Throwing bombs in your own face as you are in melee is just an awful spec design, unless you are trying to simulate a suicide bomber.
The good news is that you barely need to change anything about BM to make it work as a melee spec. Just swap barbed shot into a melee version of itself, cobra shot into raptor strike, multi shot is already getting changed, and you are like 80% there already.
Hell, you could remove harpoon and instead make flanking strike into a charge-like ability that makes you -and your pets- all leap at the target and root them in place briefly. No more issues with pet pathing.
Since hunter is a fairly squishy melee class and you’d probably want them to be a bit more tanky, add a passive that so long as you and your pet are within x yards of one another, you share part of the damage and/or reduce eachothers damage taken. You could even bring back aspect of the monkey to give you an evasion like effect, though fortitude of the bear from the endurance pet tree already gives you a battlemaster trinket (kind of).
Bam, that’s it! Then you just build the talent tree around that, with very minimal changes needed. You could even add aspect of the eagle so you still can do all your damage briefly from range, though I don’t think that this is honestly necessary.
Meanwhile you could turn survival into the bleed, explosive and poison spec it used to be, one that spams frequent different shots to wear their enemy down, while MM focuses on single but powerful shots. Now all the specs have clear, unique styles to them and you never need to rework them again.
Thanks for coming to my tedtalk
blizz please let that druid diva dress accordingly