Yesterday I posted a long article about distintive design vs. normalization in pet family design, prompting by a recent post on The Mysic Hunter called Inevitable Normalization.

I advocate a middle way between these two extremes in which we distribute existing pet skills among the families in order to alleviate some of our problems. This is really meant as a stop-gap while the slow, slow wheels of design turn — a compromise that improves our lot while we wait for the final answer.

But I stopped before getting into the nitty-gritty details — because honestly that post had already gone on too long. So today, let’s look at the specifics.

All families get a closing skill.

One of the biggest differences between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ pet families is whether they have access to a skill like Dive or Dash — a skill that lets them close with their target faster. A closing skill is very important in PvP, situationally important in PvE, and extremely convenient at all times. So let’s make sure that all pet families have access to a good closing skill.

For most families this would be Dash or Dive, but we might get adventurous and extend Charge to a few of the least popular families, like bears and crocolisks. It won’t do any harm, especially after the Charge+Growl interaction is changed in an upcoming patch.

Dive:

• Spore Bats: Dive

Dash:

• Bears
• Crabs
• Crocolisks
• Gorillas
• Scorpids
• Serpents
• Spiders
• Turtles

(Incidentally, I don’t want any gruff about how turtles can’t dash. You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever had to chase one around before a visit to the vet!)

All families get Bite.

Bite isn’t an amazing skill, but it is a nice solid reliable damage-dealer and all pet families should have access to it. That means adding Bite to the following:

• Crabs
• Owls
• Scorpids
• Spore Bats

All families get a basic focus dump.

A focus dump is just a pet skill with no cooldown timer. Since there’s no cooldown, a skill like this can be used to ‘dump’ excess focus, turning focus directly into damage. Focus dump skills have become increasingly useful for both Beast Mastery and Marksmanship hunters because there are talents in both trees to generate extra focus for pets.

There are two basic physical damage focus dumps in the game right now: Claw and Gore. So it makes sense to extend one or the other of these skills to the pet families that don’t have one yet. Which family gets which skill is open for debate, but I would suggest the following:

Claw:

• Bats
• Dragonhawks
• Hyenas
• Tallstriders
• Wind Serpents
• Wolves

Gore:

• Crocolisks
• Gorillas
• Nether Rays
• Serpents
• Spiders
• Spore Bats
• Turtles

Spread the family love when possible.

We tend to think of Screech as a unique family-specific skill, even though it’s shared by bats, carrion birds, and owls. With Screech as an example, there is little barrier to extending at least a few of the skills that are currently unique to another family or two. For example:

• Charge: Bears and Crocolisks
• Screech: Nether Rays and Spore Bats
• Prowl: Spiders and Raptors
• Shell Shield: Crabs
• Furious Howl: Hyenas
• Poison Spit: Spiders
• Thunderstomp: Tallstriders

I know that these suggestions are probably the most controversial in this post, and you can make the argument that extending the family-specific skills this way could potentially interfere with future design. Nevertheless, this method provides an extremely quick and easy way to give something to pet families that have nothing. But you could also leave out this portion and only implement the first three headings if you wanted to be more conservative.

And that’s it!

As I mentioned before, these changes aren’t intended to fix pet families completely. They are presented as merely a short-term solution that doesn’t require too much work, doesn’t negate further changes in either the the direction of more distinctive design or of normalization, and yet still manages to improve our situation somewhat right now.