there’s people that are unhappy with the reduction in effectiveness of lone wolf. i’m not among them, as i’m in the pro-pet-mm camp.
having that said, i still feel that it’s been changed in the wrong way, namely a flatout nerf without adressing the core of the issue.
my very simple suggestion would be to make lone wolf only affect damage on the hunters primary target akin to what’s been done with wildfire bombs:
Hurl a bomb at the target, exploding for (78% of Attack power) Fire damage in a cone and coating enemies in wildfire, scorching them for (156% of Attack power) Fire damage over 6 sec. Deals reduced damage beyond 8 targets.
Deals 40% increased damage to your primary target.
the last part is what i mean.
let the damage bonus of lone wolf only affect the single target damage, so all of the damage can be properly balanced for both, aoe and single target. let’s say the pet deals 5% damage. that’s on single target. now lone wolf with its current 5% isn’t worth taking. in aoe, i.e. m+, that 5% of lw are multiplied because of it applying to aoe damage aswell.
due to this interaction it simply isn’t possible to properly balance its value against the pet.
of course, as long as LW is a talent point in the tree it needs to provide value over the baseline. therefore it needs to have then with that change additional +% over what is being lost due to the pet damage and its utility to compensate.
due to the nature of it being a %buff, it still has multiplicative stacking with other buffs and cooldowns, that need to be accounted for. but all that becomes much simpler when aoe has not to be weighed in on top of the pure numbers game.
if this change is done, then the effects of multishot, trick shots, etc need to be adjusted accordingly. but then both options become truly equally worth choices, instead of being locked into one of them based on whatever the numbers are currently calling the highest dps option.
i know that none of the devs will ever see this, unless somebody from the community council forwards it to their forum, but i just needed to get it off my chest while we still have the chance for a change however slim it might be.
Absolutely agree with the direction you’re mentioning, but it can be done in an even better way, that’s almost perfectly balanced, yet simple. I’ll probably make a more detailed post by myself, but for the moment, take a look at this post from US forums.
That’s the perfect approach for everyone
TLDR:
“pet playstyle” vs. “pet-less playstyle” is a completely cosmetic decision (i.e. Lone Wolf gives no throughput advantage)
this decision/toggle (“Lone Wolf”) is available as a baseline
if you decide for “pet-less playstyle”, your auto-attacks (i.e. single-target only) are buffed to match the missing pet damage
when you decide for “pet-less playstyle”, you select which passive pet-type buffs you get and you get access to pet utility (even without a pet)
As a side note, I love playing with a pet even as MM, so that’s my personal choice, but this approach is the only one that shows understanding and flexibility needed for both playstyles.
Though I think there should still be some slight benefit to playing with a pet, for the increased complexity of managing it, maybe something like slight buff to the passives/pet utility, or shorter CDs, but nothing major.
I hate to use the pet in my hunter character do not EVER REQUIRE ME TO USE THIS I HATE THE PET I HATE MARKAMAN IS NOT ALLOW TO DO THE LUST SPELL AND other SPELL IF I DO NOT use pet charafte
That’s exactly the point! You said it nicely, requirements are bad!
“Pets” OR “no pets” need to be a “cosmetic” option, not a requirement or a forced choice! An option not tied to throughput or locking unique utility in any way, so that anyone can play what they want!
Thanks for supporting this perspective!
while that is entirely the goal, it is basically impossible to achieve. e.g. having your pet tank and you being able to heal it while outdoors solo could only be substituted by adding the pets hp on top of yours and then have the heal apply to you (or even just the pet-portion of it), which would be op af in every other circumstance aswell.
but the suggestion is to reduce the pigeonholing of people into either option, regardless of their preference. that, in your linked post, is achieved imo quite well.
That’s definitely a good point , though I would argue that there is a “needed/healthy balance” and then there is a “100% perfect balance (aka impossible)”.
We’re currently living in a world where the disbalance between “pet playstyle” and “pet-less playstyle” is so ridiculously large that everyone in PvE plays pet-less. But that’s a world of min-maxing, which people expect from themselves but also from others. So it matters.
If my suggestions are implemented, this kind of disbalance is reduced by like 99% to only the issue you’re pointing to (or similar tiny disbalances). Which would be barely noticeable/relevant compared to the current disbalance. So this first step should happen no matter what.
Then it is the question of how much problematic this “solo outdoors imbalance” is:
solo outdoor content isn’t really core of WoW (anymore), is less represented than the end-game pillars (raiding, mythic+, PvP) and is absolutely trivial in most cases
the min-maxing isn’t really important there, maybe not even present at all
it is also a different context, because in end-game, a pet is (for some people) a point-less obstacle without its role, but in solo outdoor content, pets have a clear role - they are another physical target for enemies, so even such people might accept pets into their playstyle in that context, because pets have a clear meaning there
to balance this for the outdoors content specifically, there could be a passive that indeed increases your health while out-of-instance without a pet
So in summary, you’re completely right, but the mentioned “imbalance” would be basically non-existent, compared to the current situation. And the majority of people probably wouldn’t ever care about such imbalance (especially if they’re ok with the situation these days )
You said it nicely, requirements are bad!
, though I would argue that there is a “needed/healthy balance” and then there is a “100% perfect balance (aka impossible)”.
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