Elwood
New Member
Ghostcrawler posted the following:
1) Exotic pets should be a choice. We do not want every BM (or every hunter for that matter) feeling like they have to get an exotic pet to be competitive. We spent a lot of effort to get say gorillas, crabs and spiders up to snuff so we didn't want hunters to actually enter LK with fewer pet choices. Even a 51 BM hunter should feel like a crab (especially a crab) should be a useful pet.
2) Exotic pets should be a choice, part ii. They should not be demonstrably below say cats and scorpids. That seems to be the case on live at the moment, so we adjusted it. Because of the somewhat convoluted way that pets scale, it's not always easy to predict what the average pet will look like on live -- it varies enormously depending on gear and buffs (more on this below).
3) Our target is that the exotic pets are slightly better than normal pets. The key word is "slightly." If you forego an exotic pet for whatever reason, you should not feel like you are gimping your team or group. Note that part of the value of the exotics is their unusual abilities, some of which can fill in missing debuff holes if you are lacking certain classes in your group.
4) We offered the Spirit Beast as a challenge for hunters to try and tame. It would be a big mistake if we made this pet the best one in the game. For starters, it would no longer be rare.
5) We disagree that the 4 extra pet talent points are useless. You can call them useless if you only care about your pet's dps and can max that out without those talent points. Not all pet talents were intended to buff dps. (More on this below too.) At the end of the day, the BM 51 is just one talent point. It shouldn't grant you a 10% dps increase. We like for the 51 point talents to be attractive but not mandatory.
6) If you think that no hunter cares about the look of their pet, you are just wrong.Very optimized players might be willing to tame an untextured cube if it had the highest dps. However, a great many hunters (I would argue probably even the majority) rolled their class because they wanted to tame pets. Being able to tame exotic pets is very exciting for them.
7) The way pets scale is convoluted. Certain stats scale while others don't. Pets double dip from buffs because the pets benefits from the buff directly and indirectly through the hunter. In short, this is something we want to clean up. We just need to figure out how to do it the right way to avoid these problems in the future. This applies to warlocks, DKs, and to a lesser extent every class with a temp pet like druids and shamans.
8) On the topic of hunter pet talent trees, obviously this was a new feature for us. We have a much better idea now of what works and doesn't. For example, I don't know that pets need many more clickable abilities as hunters have so much to manage already. It also threw a rather harsh light on the system that allows you designate abilities to be autocast or not -- that system can just be buggy and frustrating. We have some plans to look at the trees in a future patch (not expansion). We might even add another tier to make sure that 51 BM hunters can improve their pets dps (slightly) with those bonus talent points.