Myzou wrote:To be fair, they could make Spirit Beasts retain BM only, with a book like Dinomancy, which requires being in Beast Mastery spec to learn and require Beast Mastery to take out of stables/use them. (and have anyone who currently has a spirit beast auto-learn the skill)
They are really the only pets that do have a Beast Mastery feel to them.
And Devilsaurs and Silithid and Corehounds .... "feel" is subjective.
To be fair, SpiritBinder's post in that thread is probably the entire reason you may not have a new exotic family in Legion.
And no, it's not redundant. I didn't see a post from 2 months ago, that was 3 pages back. God forbid. >_> And no, a search function for exotic would not do much, because well, that'd pop up pretty much every thread.
Off topic: Thread cycling is just a way of life here. If you're here any amount of time, you'll see the same things over and over and over and over and over like exotics, tameable cloud serpents etc etc. Much like these topics, thread redundancy ain't going away any time soon
I've never really been a die hard BM hunter although my Horde hunter is BM currently but I'm kind of on the boat exotics have lost their purpose as a whole. Like others have said giving BM hunters a different ability to empower their pets with special beast master only unique spells would be a more viable route while still keeping the element that something their pets do is unique to the beast master hunter alone. It would also help the hunter feel like they're not cornered into a specific pet type like spirit beasts just because they have a heal or corehounds for heroism. Could always add something similar to the warlock green fire tome that enables hunters to unlock exotic taming via a series of trials or something similar while giving exotic taming baseline to the BM hunter and requiring the tome to use the pets on the other specs.
I think that exotics might be a bit outdated. Hunters have changed so much, and we're down to only two pet specs. (MM should have been a separate class, maybe called...oh..rangers?) that I have to agree that keeping so many pets for one spec that I frankly think is totally botched doesn't sit right. I don't think the changes to BM are going to win it many fans, so there are going to be alot of benched exotic pets
BM is sounding less and less appealing, and Survival is something I've wanted for a -very- long time. A large chunk of my stable is getting just so I can take a spear and slap some demons with it, and I'm really not happy about it. The "only BM would have the knowledge/skill to tame this beast" doesn't make very much sense, I think after all this time our characters (in Blizzard's eyes) have become almost like demigods. The only exception I could see, like some other people have said, are spirit beasts, and even then we have a few ghostly models among the other pet families and I know it's probably not quite the same, but...
I agree with the OP, don't give BM a larger selection of pets. I just feel obligated to use exotics when I go BM (partly because my favorite pet is a rylak) because they have more to offer. Spirit beasts boost crit and mastery and have a HoT. If I just said screw it and brought any other cat or wolf or whatever then I'd be gimping myself and the only place I feel like I could get away with it is maybe a raid, and even then, I want the spirit beast for that extra little bit of healing to help pull my ass out of the fire. Let ALL pets do a little more in the hands of a BM hunter.
Edit: And yeah, I've argued reasons that new pets like mana sabers COULD be exotic, but that was mostly for my sanity. The only thing that makes it exotic is that it's a mana-addict like a blood elf oh my goooodneeeesss Blizzard pleeeeaaaaase
And yeah I guess hunters are a little bit magical and maybe a BM hunter could tap more into Azeroth's natural wells of magic easier than the other specs to feed his mana-addict cat but COME ON don't they sell mana crystals over the counter these days?
Edit 2: Maybe letting BM just have a new exotic pet to themselves for THAT expansion, then lift the exotic tag in the next expansion and explain it as the BM hunters sharing their taming methods and showing the rest of us how to, say, tame a mana saber after Legion.
