Ghostcrawler on Spirit Beasts & Pet Choice

[Nimizar]

I've always been of the opinion that Spirit Beasts were put out there purely for us crazies that love to track down a rare.

This is actually far from the first time Blizz have said that spirit beasts are specifically for the Pokemon types rather than the min/maxers.

[FuzzyDolly]

I agree that furious howl should be available to all ferocity pets. As a BM hunter, I'm usually berated for not using a wolf and being specced MM. What most people don't seem to remember is this is a game. It should be played for enjoyment. My enjoyment is not using a pet that everyone else has, hence the BM talent. Other people's are to max out dps and work towards endgame. That's fine too. If the howl was turned into a talent, then maybe people who like endgame content could have the pet they want instead of the one they're almost "forced" to have. Honeslty I think if furious howl would be made a talent, it would go a long way in stopping the prejudice against BM hunters.

And as for spirit beasts... isn't the "show" factor the reason we have them? Isn't it purely cosmetic? God knows the moonfire, I mean spirit strike doesn't exactly strike fear into the hearts of elites. And why not have spirit pets have a little boost over natural pets? Our dps is lower than MM and SV. Amybe if Blizz gave the spirit beasties SPirit strike IN ADDITION to all the normal pet abilities we'd be better in raids. Imagine Skoll with furious howl... Imagaine Arcturis with whatever bears get lol... Make the CD on spirit strike longer if you have to to "even" it oput a bit, but honesly, BM hunters always get the short end of the stick, so why not give us a little boost to come more into line with other trees?

[Ryai]

And as for spirit beasts... isn't the "show" factor the reason we have them? Isn't it purely cosmetic? God knows the moonfire, I mean spirit strike doesn't exactly strike fear into the hearts of elites.

Tbh the only thing that strikes fear into the hearts of the elites is a giant wasp, bigger than a cow.

I mean...

That's still no excuse for Spirit Beasts being made originally, to do worse/less damage than a cat. And no excuse for them to not be in the top five pets. Blizzard tried to claim it was to make it where BM didn't feel boxed in, to only use exotics...

But the only exotic that made the top five at the time? Devilsaurs- so as I've said before, it's less about being forced to use exotics and more about being forced to use a wolf or a saur.

[Sarayana]

What most people don't seem to remember is this is a game. It should be played for enjoyment.

Hallelujah.

[Palladiamorsdeus]

This absolutely IS a game, that's something I've been saying for a long, long time now. Use what you want, when you want, and why you want. The downside is you might need to find a slightly more relaxed guild if you are out to be a serious raider, but personally I think that's worth it.

I prefer individual and more unique pet's, but right now I can't deny that some pet's are just very lackluster. One of the main problems that I can see is the prohibitive cooldown on some pet family abilities, to where you eitehr have to be ready to hit it at a moments notice, or you just let it go and not be that useful.

I realize this may qualify me as insane, but it amuses me to no end to take a sporebat into heroics.

[FuzzyDolly]

Is it wrong now that I tamed Skoll I don't plan on telling my guild he doesn't have Furious Howl? I mean I'll tell them if they ask, but I'm not going to offer up the information. LOL I mean, he IS a wolf, right?

[cowmuflage]

A crab with furious howl would be Lolburgers. I would have one just cos a crab howling looks so funny in my head.

[Makoes]

I am for equalization of pet base stats, and being able to choose which talent to spec my pet. As for pet special abilities...it would seem to me that so long as the pets ability was not damage boosting, would solve the damage dealing problem...such as make abilies where the pet can restores a % of the hunters mana or health after battle, or some other passive out of battle ability. Either that or give pets the same racial ability as thier handeler...shadowmeld ftw!!!

[Gimlion]

Personally, I HATED the equalization of pet stats... (After WoTLK) I think that a tank pet, SHOULD have more armor and health, and a damaging pet gets more DAMAGE... On a more positive note on my part, AWESOME sig of Red XIII Makoes...

[Mania]

I think that a tank pet, SHOULD have more armor and health, and a damaging pet gets more DAMAGE...

Would you accept some sort of choice that allowed you to make any pet into a tank by giving it more armor and health, or make any pet into a damage dealer by giving it more damage? Or is tank/damage/etc inherently tied to pet family for you?

[Gimlion]

Well, I liked that each 'Spec' of pet had it's own stats, I also think that they could re implement that with allowing pet spec 'choice' and whichever spec you chose, your pet would get the set amount of 'extra' stat boosts determined by said spec... For example "Gimlion Tames King Bangladash" *Hmmm, I want you to TANK!* "Cat obtains Tenacity Talent Tree and 0%DMG 10%Armor and 5%Health"

[Sarayana]

I think that a tank pet, SHOULD have more armor and health, and a damaging pet gets more DAMAGE...

Would you accept some sort of choice that allowed you to make any pet into a tank by giving it more armor and health, or make any pet into a damage dealer by giving it more damage? Or is tank/damage/etc inherently tied to pet family for you?

Well that's what we have now, isn't it? I mean, I don't spec for more stam and armor on my dps pet...

[FuzzyDolly]

No I think the point is to have ANY pet in the ferocity family be able to take Furious Howl. That way ANY ferocity family pet would be "able" to raid and therefore change up the scenery in raids and instances. I'm tired of looking at wolf butts all the time.

[Kastarakovski]

First and foremost I echo the sentiments that it is a game and should be played for enjoyment. Thank you!

The second it gets to the point where "it's all wolf/devilsaur or no raid for you" and the game becomes stupid.
I have better things to do than have a guild telling me what pets I should use and what I should terminally abandon just because it's not the right amount of DPS for their epic e-peen system. And I'm going to stand by my guns and say it's always awesome to see everyone else's wolves dead on the ground after the boss had done a stomp move and see my beloved Warpstalker, Nightshade, or my Loque'nahak, Tiberias, still attached to the boss's heel chomping, hissing and snarling away like the kitty druids.

I'd love to be able to choose a talent tree for my pets, but at this moment, whatever seems to spill out of GC's mouth I have a habit of ignoring. Sometimes he thinks before he opens his mouth and other times he doesn't. Like now. All this serves is for him to make people angry and quite frankly I view his "pokemon legendary theory" to be probably the worst thing he could call it.

If spirit beasts are simply for show and not for raiding, they'd be untameables by now.
But then, following that idealism, Nightshade, my Gezzarak, shouldn't be raiding beside me either. But she is. She's my raiding pet. And she's my choice.

That's what playing a hunter should be about in the first place - your choice - not some hunter-disliking employee's opinion of a choice nor what a guild believes to be the best OMGDPSNAOW IMHO.

[Mania]

Well that's what we have now, isn't it? I mean, I don't spec for more stam and armor on my dps pet...

Sure, but you can't spec your gorilla as your DPS pet because he doesn't have access to Spider's Bite and his family skill doesn't add any DPS for him or you.

....

I think we're actually pretty close to a compromise that most hunters would find equitable. We're just divided a bit by language. (And by 'we' I meant everyone in this thread, not just me and Sarayana.)

I say 'normalize' and some hunters hear 'shallow-ize'. I saw 'cosmetic only' and some hunters hear 'pointless'. And those may be -- can be -- fair points.

But in practice what we're talking about is allowing you to customize your pet, whatever it may be, to your particular needs. Putting the customization in your hands will add depth, I believe -- or at least not remove any -- because you will still carefully choose how to spec your pet with talents.

The scary part is that to do that without investing more effort than they have, Blizzard will probably have to tone down some of the current inherent differences between pets, which really just means shifting the family skills around a bit.

[Ryai]

I say 'normalize' and some hunters hear 'shallow-ize'. I saw 'cosmetic only' and some hunters hear 'pointless'. And those may be -- can be -- fair points.

To be honest, normalization isn't such a bad thing. I mean Blizzard already did that when they destroyed Ferocity having 10% dps and Tenacity having more armor/hp% and cunning being 5% across the board.

So to be honest if I wanted, or if anyone else wants to get miffed over 'shallowizing' pets, they should take it to Blizzard as they've shown they really don't care about truly fixing a problem and believe equalization fixes all problems.

And maybe it did- but I still see Wolves seeing more raid time than any cunning pet. And I mean my god I was making a glyph for Aria on our ally realm, my DK comes out of the Dal bank.

NORTHREND WORGS EVERYWHERE. I actually gah'd irl and whispered her the sight.

No cats. No raptors. No moths. No devilsaurs. One spirit beast.

Crapload of wolves. Everywhere.

The scary part is that to do that without investing more effort than they have, Blizzard will probably have to tone down some of the current inherent differences between pets, which really just means shifting the family skills around a bit.

Actually that's not scary. If you look at what happened to Gorillas, their pvp Pummel ability is now near useless as a Tenacity pet, is it not? Yet, switch them to cunning or ferocity. BAM, you got something scarily useful! I mean if you, well if the people who aren't listening to you and just hearing what they want and freaking out first and rationalizing later, just take a look at pets. Being able to choose a pet tree for said pet would make some more useful. Some as useful as wolves, especially, if FH, like TS, was given to the Ferocity tree.

Prowl could also be put into the CUNNING tree- since cunning was supposed to be PVP anyways and what would you want for a pvp pet? Why stealth ofc!

I mean if no one actually uses imp cower, it should just be replaced with Prowl for cunning and FH for ferocity and that would fix -alot- of problems.

Ofc wolves would need a new ability, but if cats got Rake why not give Wolves a version of Ferocious Bite?

[Sarayana]

Well that's what we have now, isn't it? I mean, I don't spec for more stam and armor on my dps pet...

Sure, but you can't spec your gorilla as your DPS pet because he doesn't have access to Spider's Bite and his family skill doesn't add any DPS for him or you.

Fair enough, I read it as you suggesting that one day we'd be able to do what I described, which makes no sense... lol.

I think we're actually pretty close to a compromise that most hunters would find equitable. We're just divided a bit by language. (And by 'we' I meant everyone in this thread, not just me and Sarayana.)

I say 'normalize' and some hunters hear 'shallow-ize'. I saw 'cosmetic only' and some hunters hear 'pointless'. And those may be -- can be -- fair points.

But in practice what we're talking about is allowing you to customize your pet, whatever it may be, to your particular needs. Putting the customization in your hands will add depth, I believe -- or at least not remove any -- because you will still carefully choose how to spec your pet with talents.

The scary part is that to do that without investing more effort than they have, Blizzard will probably have to tone down some of the current inherent differences between pets, which really just means shifting the family skills around a bit.

In all honesty... I listened to all the alarmist chatter when they announced the new pet system, and I find it has worked out pretty well. Not perfect, but well enough. And now, people are worried about the new stuff GC is talking about and all that, and I think it'll turn out ok too. What they want is to avoid the exact situation we want to avoid - where there's one perfect pet that everyone has to have. However they go about that, we'll adjust and still run with our favourites. If less people lug around a wolf, then we're all the better off, in my humble opinion. (And no, I don't hate wolves. ) In that sense, I'm pretty sure I... uhm... agree with you, Mania? Lol.

[Sarayana]

You know, I was just reading over your post Ryai, and it occurred to me... part of what throws things off balance seems to be the cunning family. It's the neglected family that they try to balance things around. If not for cunning, I'm sure we'd still have the dps boost to ferocity and the armor/hp boost to tenacity pets. I wonder if we'd be better off with two families only or if a redesign of the cunning family would perhaps fix it? Hmm.

[Ryai]

You know, I was just reading over your post Ryai, and it occurred to me... part of what throws things off balance seems to be the cunning family. It's the neglected family that they try to balance things around. If not for cunning, I'm sure we'd still have the dps boost to ferocity and the armor/hp boost to tenacity pets. I wonder if we'd be better off with two families only or if a redesign of the cunning family would perhaps fix it? Hmm.

A redesign wouldn't be so bad. Throw prowl in, throw out carrion feeder put in the ferocity talent instead, and thus also HotP and Lick wounds as those do seem to be more for pvp too. I mean sure yes I know there are hunters who do use them but I can't sacrifice my glass cannon's dps so it makes no difference if that is also shared in the cunning tree. Get rid of RoS my god it's the most useless talent ever. I'm sorry but making you more immune to crits really won't save you in the long run- that and it's useless for the tanking tree too. Maybe, maybe if they designed it to be once again, like the Protadin talent to divert some damage from the target to the pet, it'd be useful. It would even make them more useful for raiding/instances if your pet could be a sacrifice to keep the healer alive.

I mean, my pets already zerg ahead like mad to protect squishies. And I've had them thank me for it even when tanks try to blow me off by saying my pet can't protect clothies/wouldn't prevent a wipe. I mean hell I've even gone out of my way to pull aggro off a healer and onto myself cause in the end my dps doesn't matter- healer being alive and keeping tank/rest of the group alive matters.

If cunning and also tenacity, could offer some more help to this, it would make cunning atleast, more of a utility tree.

And mean the mana recovery talent would have to be changed or taken out anyways. The trees are going to have to be reworked anyways, it would make sense to well impliment some things and take out other soon to be redundant talents.

Unless RoR is turned into Roar of Energization?[whatever?]

[Aeriika]

I always thought they could handle a lot of our pet problems by just letting us spec our pets like we do our toons. Instead of having 3 destinct families, make the three family trees into talent trees (kinda like ours) and let people chose their pet based on what we like and maybe a special family ability but allowing us to tailor our pets to our needs or wants.