The Hunting Party Podcast and WoW Insider have each brought up the idea of getting rid of pure dps classes and making everyone a hybrid. While taming a pet that enables a healing tree is conceivable, our having tenacity pets already suggests that we hunters would most likely end up with a tanking tree were we to be hybridized. It would not be a simple transition, though, as I discuss below the cut.
Before we get into this I suppose I should provide some credentials. You already know that I know hunters, but you may not know that I have an alt tank that I’ve used for progression raiding and some hard modes. I follow tanking news, know prot warrior tanking thoroughly and have a decent awareness of what the other tanking specs can and can’t do.
In brief, here are the things that hunter pet tanking is good at already:
- soaking AoE damage – This is largely thanks to Avoidance.
- snagging adds – If the hunter is free to MD adds to the pet then it is arguably easier for a hunter to grab them compared to a real tank.
- aiding healers – Hunter pets take more damage than real tanks, but they also get more healing via Mend Pet, Spirit Bond, 2t5 (if worn) and Blood of the Rhino. The extra healing taken does not at all make up for the increased damage taken though.
- DPS – Hunter tanking has the potential to yield more dps than a player tank. And, yes, tank dps does matter so it is worth mentioning.
Here are the things that hunter pet tanking is currently bad at compared to player tanks:
- not taking damage – Hunter pets take a lot more damage compared to player tanks.
- mitigation – This explains in part why pets take so much damage. They simply don’t match up to the mitigation that player tanks get from talents, mastery, parry and dodge. This is arguably a problem in itself because a lack of consistent mitigation makes pet healing spiky.
- holding AoE threat - While MD’d Multishots work, they don’t compare to a player tank.
- positioning, strafing and not turning one’s back on the enemy – Move To is no substitute for having direct control over a tank.
- cooldowns – While Shell Shield and Cower are great, a player tank’s cooldown toolkit is much deeper and more versatile.
- taunting – Pet taunts currently don’t work on bosses and have a long cooldown.
- ranged silence – Most tanks (except maybe bears) have a ranged silence these days and, well, it’s pretty handy.
- interrupts – Tank interrupts can’t miss these days and are on a standard 10-second cooldown. As such, they count among the tools that a tank can be expected to offer a raid.
- raid utiltty – Tanks typically are able to apply a variety of useful auras to reduce or soak incoming damage for themselves and other players. Tenacity pets can typically only offer one such boss debuff at a time and it comes at the expense of not having Shell Shield.
- flexibility – Player tanks can respec and regear to be more proficient at various offtanking jobs, damage soaking, dps and so on. Pets do have some options, just not as many.
- single target threat – While pet threat can be adequate, I don’t see it stacking up favorably compared to the threat that player tanks can currently generate. Opening threat is an area where player tanks should very easily beat pets come 4.3. However, I haven’t done any pet tanking lately so I’d yield to Arth on the matter.
- pathing – Pets do not always take the best routes while moving, and they often turn their backs on mobs whil doing so.
The general pattern that appears from these lists is that hunter pets do not compare well on many important dimensions of tanking. As such, if hunters were ever to be hybridized, our tank spec would need to gain a lot of mechanics, abilities and capacities. Some of these things would be easy fixes. It would not be hard to give hunter pets standardized interrupts, taunts and other tanking tools. It also wouldn’t be hard to boost their threat and mitigation. Basically, adding abilities and changing coefficients would be the easy part. There would also be the issue of translating hunter stats into tanking stats, but Blizzard is already proficient at such conversions.
The hard part would be fixing the problems that derive from a basic premise of the hunter class: namely, that the pet is an npc separate from and controlled in a limited fashion by the player. Kiting and repositioning are simply comical with a pet because it cannot back up or strafe. Controlling the pet from the hunter’s perspective is also a drawback in itself, as is having to mind two sets of fight mechanics at the same time: those that affect tanks and those that affect ranged players. These positioning and perspective issues alone make a pet tank hugely inferior to a player tank, especially for offtanking jobs. I sincerely doubt that Blizzard would allow current pet control mechanics to persist in any hunter tanking tree. We would be more likely to see some radical revision of the pet-hunter relationship. Below are my guesses at revisions that would fit that bill.
- Pet Vehicle: In this solution, the pet is say a rhino (or other amenable pet skin) that the hunter rides via WoW’s vehicle interface. The hunter would no longer have access to his or her normal abilities and would instead have access to a complete set of pet-themed tanking abilities. I think it’d make sense to have the hunter at least maintain autoshots from atop the beast for appearance’s sake.
- Freaky Friday: The hunter and the pet switch perspectives in a returned and boosted Eyes of the Beast. The hunter’s mind inhabits a tenacity pet and empowers it to make what is in every way a solid tank. The pet, meanwhile, inhabits the hunter and hangs around like a Warlock’s imp autoshotting and hopefully not crapping the hunter’s pants.
- Melee Huntering: Aspect of the Beast returns with revisions and the hunter melees alongside his or her pet with a permanent Misdirection channeling boosted threat to the pet. The pet is fixed at the hunter’s side, leading to precision control over positioning and solving the perspective issue. Interesting things could be done with how incoming damage is dealt with and shared between pet and hunter.
These are not the only possible solutions, they are merely the three that I came up with. I tend to favor the pet-as-vehicle approach since to my mind it would be highest on the scale of awesome, especially if the vehicle could be a devilsaur. It also has the most going for it in terms of in-game precedent (such as with this quest and this quest). Overall I think each of these solutions would solve the significant problems noted above with the current state of pet tanking and make a hunter tank that is quite fun to play.
Euripides
jurgwena
lemli
eidotrope
pherra
femaledwarf
my reply on the Hunter feedback post listed the “Freaky Friday” idea on my wish list. :)
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3123039290?page=47#931
Of the three, i think the this one retains the hunter feel the most even if it’s just symbolic
I’d like the Beastmaster to turn into the pet with some sort of worgen-like transformation. I’d love to play a crab :)
Nice Friday afternoon thoughts even if it’s not Friday.
But the question has to be why?
If you want to be a tank roll a tanking class. I did and have a warrior who is huge fun to play. I can’t see how it could be more fun to play a pet once the initial impact of seeing your devilsaur tank has worn off.
He can also be a flag carrier in rated BGs. Hard to see it ever being the case a pet could do this.
No if you want to think out of the box why not have hunters as healers? Hunters could heal in a unique way, quite different from classes now through the mechanisms of
> Converting some damage into healing, directly or via procs
> Giving pets special healing abilities
So we could:
- Adapt the T5 idea so that we can convert some/all of our DPS into healing power such as Sprit bonds> a sort of hot that applies to players and heals them in some proportion to our DPS
- Vampire sting: special shot that damages boss over time and heals raid for proportion of this damage
- Pet talents/special abilities that mean our pets can rush to players and either heal or mitigate damage
–> Turtles have power word barrier ability
–> Bears can give barkskin to someone
–> Monkeys can throw “life giving banana” that will heal 30% hp
–> All pets have sacrifice that means they die and their HP gets transferred to a player
(our ability to dismiss/summon pets means we could mix and match lots of these according to the encounter and make full use of our 5 pet slots)
- Procs of various natures that give us special heals according to our attacks
Apart from giving hunters a whole new role in raiding this would also help us in soloing.
The more I think about this the better an idea it would be. Many times raids are not sure whether to take an extra healer or a DPS. Hunters could help fill this by having a spec that could be half healer/half DPS. Would also be great for rated BGs where hunters could play different role according to BG.
(The idea has already been sort of tried in Cat. Disc priests have a smite spec they can use, not sure how much this happens in practice).
I believe each of my solutions could plausibly have the pet effectively carrying the flag. Each of them adds direct control over the pet, enabling things like flag carrying.
Healing by doing dps is, as you note, kind of disc’s thing (or priests in general if you count shadow’s passive healing). Because of that, I think that pet healing would have to find some other way to be meaningfully distinct from the other healing specs.
I also believe Blizzard would want hunter healing to be sufficient in itself for healing rather than being part dps and part heals. Hybrid roles don’t really have a role in 5mans, even if they’d be okay in raids.
Overall, though, healing just seems to magical to me for it to be a hunter role. We don’t have mana and we shoot guns.
I think its where you come from.
Yes healing can be “magical”. But in my mind it can also be physical as well. That’s the “logic” if you like of the T5 bonus (and bandages for that matter)
So the “healing” that hunters do would be based on the idea that they deal damage to the boss and use this to power their healing. Plus their pets have special healing abilities that can help all party members not just the player (like Master’s Call and ROS do now in fact).
So for example having a sting that heals the party proportional to the damage done to the boss. Or a glyph for rapid fire that beacons a player and applies X% of the damage done as healing while rapid fire is up.
They could have “traps” that they can lay in the raid that heal in a way based on nature.
Their DPS also gives procs that allows them to carry out huntery healing. Say something like aimed shot but when it procs we can target a friendly target and give them a health boost/damage reduction or something.
And our pets have a number of abilities that would be very much in line with how we see them now. Like spirit bond, turtle barrier, bear barkskin for example or a “lick your wounds” that can be applied to a friendly target. We could make full use of all 5 stable slots to allow a variety of abilities to be available and pet swapping would become a standard hunter skill, not just one for PVP.
The idea of a pet giving up its life to save someone else is quite nice I think and might make other players appreciate having our pets around.
As for 5 mans having another healing class might actually help I think given main problem with them is having to queue for healers. Reality of healing them is also that, after they have been out for a while, its ridiculously easy.
As a hunter/healer you would have a choice like other hybrids. You could just do as now and go DPS. But if you were well geared and confident that you could handle an undergeared tank you could go hunter/heal. Indeed from a purely selfish hunter POV that would be great as we get low queue times and grinding VPs would be a lot more interesting.
(that said of course same could apply to hunter tanks, though if spec is capable of full raid tanking then 5 mans should be easy).
Hunter/healer spec might also be useful in arena PVP too.
I play disc priest and what I like about that spec is that it has options of offence and defence. Hunter/healer could be the same but even more so which would be a fun option to our current role.
Another crazy way of doing hunter tanking would be removing minimum range and making a pew pew hunter tank spec.
But I very much agree that positioning is the big limiting factor. Even if you gave some improved positioning tools and some stuff to compensate for lack of positioning control (like avoidance) you’d quickly run into a problem where on many fights hunter pet tanks were *too* good, because the pet AI automates stuff that a player would normally have to pay attention to.
Personally if pet tanking were every to be a legitimate player spec, I would still want to control my hunter while my pet tanked — to maintain that essential thematic feel of the class.
Perhaps another (challenging) option would be to have a non-gcd ability that toggled pet movement to hunter movement. So when on your pet moved exactly as you moved. … well, that would still have problems with positioning. Hmm. Hope someone comes up with a better answer than I can : /
The template of abilites is there. Another thing needed would be a ranged aggro builder to get pack mobs to collapse on the pet. Something innate rather than MD multi becuase this is limited to facing.
I don’t think BM should be limited to a tank roll but should have the ability to enter into it. Without this roll the Tenacity pet tree largely becomes moot except for soloing (which can really still be done by any pet).
Maybe, the pet still follows (but side by side) the hunter and doesn’t reposition to back of the mob. Some mechanism for shared damage between pet and hunter where some incoming damage (due to hunter being in frnt of boss as well) is redirected to pet and the hunter’s damage builds threat on pet a la glyphed misdirect. This could be a talented Aspect ( a revision of Aspect of the Beast). Something like this would allow BMs to be like feral tree in that they can go DPS talents or tanking talents.
Gosh, now why does your idea sound so familiar? :)
I think still using ranged attacks. Maybe not a la Rexar. I have been thinking about for a while since the announcement of threat changes.
I support option3 :P (through a new unique BM aspect). But still as a ranged ( of course this would eliminate min range- at least if you were in the aspect)
Resistance is Futile needs to be moved to BM where it will do the most good.
I could not be more in to the idea of tanking from atop my rhino!
I know, right? I think it’d make sense and be way fun to give it this ability:
http://www.wowpedia.org/Kodo_Beast_(Warcraft_III)#Devour
pet as a vehicle! that’s awesome. it would stop the tons of “pets as mounts” requests that have been on the forums for 6 years too.
i’d do it a bit differently – i’d keep (most of) the normal hunter abilities. this way, the hunter would do the stuff like generating aggro, interrupts, tranq, whatever from atop the pet. the hunter could order the pet to use its cooldowns. the bosses could only attack the pet however, leaving the hunter immune to everything, like the way it works with all sorts of vehicles now.
oh, and i’d like the BM tree to look like the feral tree – with both a dps and tanking option. thinking of it, dpsing from atop your pet sounds quite saucy too! i’ve always wanted a mount like my spirit beasts! :D
I loled hard when I read your freaky friday idea :) Also, they could make our pets try to continually run the hunter behind the boss and disengage around like the hunter AI you see them use in the faction champions and that quest where you fight side by side with your (lame) future self.
I really REALLY like the “Freaky Friday” concept… I actually thought of this when I first heard of pet tanking, as a little adolescent hunter hitting 80 during TOC… I imagined exactly this scenario, taking control over the pet while the hunter stands back like a warlock pet and autoshoots. BM could become modeled similarly to the Feral tree, where there is a valid DPS and Tank spec.
Having the Hunter mount, or rather, merge with their pet makes the most sense. They could combine their health and armour pools to get something closer to the levels a normal tank has. The Hunter would then just take manual control of pet abilitys like Intimidate, Thunderstomp and Cower etc. to get the required toolkit a tank needs. Pet Misdirection would probably be sufficient to pick up the bosses and hold them initially, and also offer a way to pick up adds from range, inc packs with multi-shot. With a few tweaks it actually appears quite viable!