The bolded part I found really interesting, actually. I don't quite understand the flying pet thing, but the other 2 make much more sense. Granted, I don't want to go back to the wolf, raptor, cat days; but having pets give personal buffs that only the hunter and pet will see is interesting. They'd have to do a hell of a job balancing it, but I think it would be pretty cool if they did. As long as one pet didn't become the best for any certain spec, (like SB for BM, Scorpid for SV, and Wolf for MM for example), then I think it could do great things for the class.Slickrock wrote:Well, look at the options warlocks have with their pets with the tier 90 talent. Would be intresting for BM to have a "merge with pet" MM to be petless and take on some aspect of the pet, not sure what SV would get.
The thing it needs to do is offer choice. I wouldn't want to remove pets across the board from MM, but what if it was an option, probably through a glyph?
The real problem I see is that our pets, especially with the recent round of nerfs, in actual gameplay are really indistinguishable from other pet classe's pets. Our pets do no enhance us in unique ways anymore, and that's where the real flavor could come in.
Think about an MM hunter taking a flying pet to increase damage at max range, or an SV hunter taking a scorpid to increase nature damage, and a BM taking an exotic for other special boosts. Might be hard to balance, but would make things more interesting.
All that aside... I don't think we'll see anything done with this until 6.0, for the rest of this expac we are gonna see hard nerfs and bandaid buffs.
As I see it now, hunter pets' buffs hardly matter. In anything less than top tier, the buffs are just extra, everyone just brings who they'd like. Even in PvP, with the nerfs to CC, the special attacks are just flavor. This is great from a pet-lover standpoint, as they can literally bring whichever pet they want, spec it into the proper spec, and pew pew. As much of a pet lover as I am, I'd like to see hunters having to at least make a little bit of choice based on situational merit. If there's a boss with exceptionally high armor, why not pick a pet that renders it? Or you get into a BG with a ton of casters, why not a pet that increases Magic Resist? Or slows casting?
These sorts of abilities are kind of what the pet buffs were when they initially came out, but then they got rid of a lot of spare buffs, consolidating them into bigger buffs. Then a FEW people figured ways to gain an edge with certain pet abilities, and they're all getting nerfed now. So basically, we have no choice, because none of them really act differently.
TL;DR- Pets are very homogenous, which is good for people who enjoy taking whichever pet they like, but bad for class diversity.