Rogue 1.12 Preview

[Kevin]

I'm okay with some trees not being up to spec for raiding, as long as they have their uses somewhere.

I'm not. Every tree should have enough raid utility and bring something different to the table, so that specing into it doesn't feel like you are holding up progress. A scaling BM talent probably does most of it - requires 20 points, increases pets AP by 10-20-30-40-50 of your own or some such.

Not true Frink - the best AV teams kill very few players, and get out of there in 15 min or so. Now keeping a team togeather is 1/2 the stratagy I think.

On the scaling hunter talent I've thought a bit about it. You need to scale damage and survivalbility to be viable. Even then the pet has to be good enough to merit healing by the healers or by the hunter but not get so strong that when you solo that beast master becomes even better than it already is. One of the ideas I've thought it to make it an active skill, not a passive boost something more like the old spirit bond which I still think was more useful than the new version. Or something that simply penalizes the hunter some if you make it passive.

If you do say a 5 point talent that grants the pet 5% of the hunters armor/HP/resists/AP/crit (maybe not all of those but if the pet isn't getting more HP/armor/resist then it won't be viable at all in some encounters) that shoots the hunters DPS up, maybe back to even with the other specs maybe too far ahead you can tweak that. However I think that just took the strongest solo build and made it even more crazy. Of course you can attach a penalty to it. By saying each point is 5% more for the pet but 2% less for the hunter (maybe just AP, probably don't want it dropping the def stats but maybe you do).

You could also simply make it an active skill as mentioned or put a couple of new active skills in there. For 60 seconds the pet gains X% of the hunters AP and another one that for X time the pet gains X% of the hunters defense. That starts to limit power via mana pool/regen and makes the play more interactive as well.

Dunno but I would like to see a scaling pet damage talent that maybe scales survivability some or maybe two talents that do that or just change the current armor talent to be a bonus off the hunters armor value leaving it where it is in the tree. Heck the more I think about it you could likely make most of the current pet talents simply tie into the hunters stats. Though you might have to move some of them to different tiers. This would likely weaken a beastmaster while leveling, which is fine since they are very powerful, but would up the viablity of pets end game and potentially make a 20 point beastmaster build more viable as well. Though this would mean that the survival tree would likely need more than just the 4 damage scaling talents, but maybe not.

You could do something like that for the warlock as well to help the pets end game.