What about positioning mobs? Bosses have to be in a certain place. Mobs do cleaves and frontals…
Mechanics…
A hunter pet cant do that. Sorry.
That was initial idea of how a ranged tank would work, based exactly on Beast Master Hunter and Warlock with Voidwalker. But that only solves the first of the four bulletpoints.
How would moving the boss to a new location work? Players cannot move pets with WASD, so the only option would be to press the move-pet key shortcut and then click on where they want the pet to move. But that has problems of not being able to have as accurate positioning as with WASD as well as make the boss look at exactly one specific angle.
The 2nd idea I had regarding that would be to give an “eyes of the beast / possess pet” ability which would temporarily make the hunter control the pet instead of the character. Which has its own issues when the character also needs to be moving.
The 3rd bulletpoint regarding damage translation to the player, the easiest solution is soullink, ie ranged tank and their pet share a healthbar. So if the pet dies, then the ranged tank also dies despite not actually having been hit. That breaks immersion for a hunter, even though it could work for a warlock with a voidwalker under the guise that the Warlock signed a pact of life and death with the voidwalker. The idea of letting the ranged tank survive while their tanking pet is dead has implications on how combat rezzes would work.
But what happens with debuffs then? Do they also get shared? Do they all move to the ranged tank instead of the pet even if they are cast on the pet? That breaks immersion again.
TLDR: The issue with ranged tanks with pets is that they create some issues which cannot be solved with existing code or even with existing combat logic. Don’t get me wrong, I too am interested in the idea of a ranged tank with a pet, I just can’t see it working easily in WoW’s combat without massive revisions.
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It does feel like Eyes of the Beast is a vestige from attempting to have direct control pet tanking.
However the Survival spec is melee now, so we already have the possibility of melee hunter tanks.
Warlocks always have the possibility of a tree that makes them into a demon.
eye of the beast and similiar talents like farseer or how it was called for shamans years ago are vestigest of ultra classic rpgs like tabletop dungeons and dragons where any mob behnd corner of dungeon could potentialy end your adventure - kinda like wow hardcore but there its mostly due to random spawns of mobs regenerating not because mobs are ultra deadly themselves.
it was always just a flavour talent in wow though because wow because super ultra popular as mmorpg due to many factors - once of which was that you werent loosing your exp / levels when dying - that back in 2004 was literaly revolutionary approach compared to other mmorpgs which were on market back then .
Yes. And you could make a Survival hunter tank as well. No issues there.
But it would not be a ranged tank anymore. And the only thing it would share with a ranged BM hunter is the green outline on party frames.
its 2025 - AI is rapidly advancing.
in 1-2 years AI could easily do those things for us.
it is time to stop thinking about what we have no and what we had in past and embrace what AI will bring to mmorpgs in incoming years.
im honestly kinda shocked that blizzard ended their AI annncements on follwer dungeons - maybe brann in tank spec will be another try at AI ?
and no im not talking from perspective of someone who wants AI to repace players in dungeons - im talking from perspective of someone who sees what is happening in corporation i work for and how aggresively they try implement AI into many departments - why isnt blizzard doing this for their game is honestly shocking for me.
want examples - yes its from simple things like AI taking notes from meetings and preparing post meeting summaries to AI auto transalting to multiple languages when on company calls and many many many other things.
This is typical TED talk discourse from someone that dosent know how AI works. And its limitations.
I work with AI. And its not a magic wand that can do everything.
It can do some things really well, some others it cannot. Like any other computer program.
I can give you an example here: You heard about the AI that plays Starcraft right? Turns out that it plays very well in standard games. If you do wanky things in the game, like making 30 workers and rushing the AI it literally dosent know what to do. Its worse than a 1998 deterministic code at figuring that out. Because that strategy was not in its training samples.
Its the limitation of AI. And the fact that the word “intelligent” is in the name its not intelligent. Its a code that will follow a set of per-determined commands like any other.
In other words. Brann and Follower dungeons are already an AI. Nobody in Blizzard sat there and started to code lines of actions Brann would do 1 by 1. As if it was a boss or something. They trained an AI to do that. And that is as good as its gonna get.
What you expect AI to do is something in the realm of Science Fiction. Like the Matrix level type of AI is what you need to get the results you want. True sentient machines that are as random and emotional as human beings.
But even if that was the case and technology like that existed. What you are asking is to create a spec where the tanking “job” is taken over by a pet controlled by a machine and you (the player) just sit there as if you were a DPS. That sound REALLY unfair to all the other tanks. Dont you think?
Tanking is more then just pressing the class specific buttons, to name an example, do you remember the kite meta of tanking?
That was extremely unfun and had very little to do with the individual design of classes.
I don’t think I ever remember such a big walkout of tanking from a lot of players I knew as tanks as when kiting became the meta to tank.
Its very unfun to chose the role to be the beefy damage spongue of the tank only to then need to adopt a playstyle of forever running away.
Right now, I would say that the busdriver element of tanking in m+ (responsible for routing and the % clearance bar) is one of the less fun elements of tanking that people either begrudgingly force themselves to care about or check out of tanking as a result. But that might be highly opiniated personal bias.
tl;dr
Things other then design of the tank specs can lead to making tanking less fun, the meta of how one should be expected to tank also plays a large role.
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The problem is that we either have routes in dungeons. (Meaning as the tank tends to lead the group, they need a route) , or we make dungeons so linear that every run is the same, making them boring.
There can be a middle way, in my oppinion. Make it a bit more intuitive to have a normal route that leads to 100% while also giving some alternative options.
I’m going to be honest here chief.
I don’t think the routing takes away from the boring element repetitiveness of dungeons.
Instead of trash group #12 we for this week we’re going for trash group #13 this week because of the interaction with this weeks affixes and I’m counting sheep already in an attempt to force myself to sleep
I would honestly prefer ‘boring and linear’ over a system that requires me to do homework.
Knowing your spec and knowing the boss encounters and what trash spells are must interupts and which are interupt bait should be enough.
The whole point of routing is to optimize the time you spend killing things. Or to avoid particularly dangerous things that will wipe you.
IMO there should be MORE routing. More variety. But, an extended timer, no dumb thing like -15s per death, and less lieutenants. And have HP scale faster than Damage.
If you do that, tanks at lower levels could literally A-move and pull half the dungeon to 150% and it would still be on time. That would only become an issue in higher keys where 150% of mobs is a ton of HP (which would scale faster) and your DDs simply cant pull off to time it.
But… at high keys people that tank dont do it for “fun”. They should know what they are doing by then. Same for healers and DDs. Tanks at high keys would also be forced to take bigger and bigger packs to optimize DPS in order to time the key. And that is how you make damage scale faster in higher keys with out having to mess around with some % that also affects lower keys.
I support the idea of having 2 routes where one route has deadlier enemies but is slightly faster to clear, while the other has less punishing enemies but take a bit longer to clear. The difference in clearing speed should be something like 3-5 minutes over the entire dungeon.
This would also allow people who push to go for the hard path and people who want a more relaxing run to go for the easy path.
Personally I am not a big fan of how much weight M+ has on trash. There is a reason we call them trash mobs, they are not liked or wanted
Fair enough. But the alternative are bosses.
Do you prefer more weight on bosses instead ? And if so, what would be the difference between a raid and a dungeon then ? 
you forgot word “yet”
the technology might not advance and lightspeed but the capabilities we have now compared to what we had 20 years ago ? yeah those are crazy .
i recently watched some old old tv sf series . but old i mean from 90s and its fun to watch even from the standpoint that what they imagined in 90s as "ultra futuristic technoologies " nowadays look like old outdated junk which you would never use on things like spacecrafts .
most of people cant even imagine how technology will exactly advance in next 20 years.
When I look at old science fiction it’s amazing how little the internets explosion was predicted.
Star Trek uses mainframe and terminal designs for how thier in ship computers work, old hat when the show was made (albeit with a posh ui)
Space 1999 does this too, though as this was from the 60s they might of thought that’s how computers were always going to be.
Back to the future still had crt in 2015, but they did have hoverboards.
No one knows what ai will look like in 20 years just as we didn’t know ai would exist as it does today then, so we have to use the facts we have now, and the picture is more like the one Uda paints.
There are things you can predict. For sure.
Will they one day invent a new AI powerful enough to mimic players in WoW?
Maybe.
But we wont have the same computers. Or the same code to make the games. Or even the same type of internet connection… Or we might even re-invent the whole concept of bits… Something along those lines… That I am 100% sure of. Because you need all that to advance technology. You cant just advance one little bit of it.
We need WoW3. Basically that.
And I am sure of it because its the same exact reason why inspite all our modern advancements, there is absolutely no chance to make WhatUp (to name just 1 thing) work in an IBM from 1982. Absolutely ZERO chance.
So from the point of view of someone living in 1982, he can imagine a thing like WhatsUp but there is no technical way of making it a reality. You needed all the tech advancements between 1982 and 2009 to make it happen. Which is what happens today with AI.
So I can be 100% sure that there is nothing they can make today to improve Brann or Follower Dungeons. You will have to wait for WoW3 for that.
This is less about what they can do and about how much they want to do it based on cost and benefit (to them).
Shaman paladin is already in god mode. I think we should delete the other classes.