I’m probably a dying breed, but I find racial/faction identity an important part of my immersion in the game.
As none of the hero specs looked appealing to me, I initially moved away from my trusty troll MM hunter.
Yesterday I started lvling my Nelf hunter for Sentinel and I actually like it (just make the owl follow a target pls).
The problem is that it feels like a Nelf only spec, but that can easily be solved with glyphs!
A glyph to replace the arcane owl with a bat that does shadow damage, a nature dps (lightning) wyvern(H)/gryphon(A), mana wyrm (also arcane), etc.
That way it would just make sense.
An option where you replace the owl with any other arcane looking flying pet is also an easy fix.
It just looks wrong for my other hunters to summon the most Nelf looking owl in the existence of the game.
I don’t know if we’re a dying breed, but I am too very much into faction / race / class identity.
Hunter has probably the highest fantasy variation within a single class, to fit all the existing flavors we objestively need 10 + hero specs, here is my point.
Sentinel - fits Night Elves (and perhaps Nightborne)
Dark Ranger - fits Blood Elves, Void Elves and Night Elves.
Leader of the Pack - maybe fits orcs, trolls, taurens and worgens?
Okay, so that’s 7 races at most with only 1 race being legitimately linked to more than 1 hero talent. What about other 18 races with access to hunter class?
What about shadowhunter theme for trolls?
What about spear / axe thrower for trolls?
What about ranger (not dark ranger) for Blood Elves and High Elves?
What about rifleman theme for dwarves (and possibly for gnomes, goblins and humans too)?
The rifleman deserves a separate spec altogether to be honest, splitting MM into ranger and rifleman , for example.
But you can’t play leader of the pack lone wolf MM. That way, you’re forced into something. The point is that if your favorite spec and race don’t match the Hero spec, you lose connection with your char. A simple glyph, to make that owl a bat, makes a huge difference. Out hero specs are just too race specific
I adresses some of this in the thread I made today, “Beast Mastery is in a state of crisis”, but the bottom line is that I agree so much with what everyone has said here and I think Dark Ranger was extremely shoehorned in comparison to how narrow/niche it is.