In my write-up of the new Call Pet functionality in Cataclysm last week, I mentioned a bug you could run into when your pet died and you called another one. The few days later, however, Blizzard hotfixed that bug.
Now Ghostcrawler has posted to clarify how all of this is supposed to work.
On comparing hunters to warlocks:
To clear up a lot of misinformation…
Soul Link is a trainable ability.
Hunters still have a minimum range.
Demonic Rebirth has a significant cooldown.
Warlocks still have a cast time to summon demons, but can dismiss them instantly.
Hunters can summon pets instantly, but have a cast time to dismiss them. They cannot switch pets in combat.
Call Stabled Pet has been removed since hunters can call any of their 5 active pets.
And on dead hunter pets in particular:
Q u o t e:
If our pet dies,
Can we use Feign Death, drop combat, and instantly bring out one of our 5 different pets in that short window of being out of combat in an Arena Match?No, because you have to dismiss a pet before you can summon a new one. You also need to rez a dead pet before you can dismiss it. It’s possible that allowing all of that in combat is fine since it would take so long to actually pull off and in the meantime you could just have rezzed your pet (or healed an injured one rather than dismissing it).
On the other hand, dismissal no longer affects happiness in any way since the new model is you can swap them more regularly. Your pets just have to learn not to get all emo about it.
So there you are: a description of the intended design from the mouth (or at least fingers) of the designer himself.
Edit: Note that right this minute on the beta, Call Pet, Dismiss Pet, and Revive Pet all seems to work fine in combat. But it sounds like that might change. Or not.
“They cannot switch pets in combat”?
Since switching pets is now done with Call Pet, does that mean we can’t call pets in combat at all? That doesn’t sound good.
If they end up implementing the “not in combat” restriction, my prediction is they will disable Dismiss Pet rather than Call Pet (disabling the latter causes problems if the hunter starts a fight without their pet summoned). However, given the Feign Death loophole for getting out of combat in most situations, they may just skip the restriction altogether.
I guess this makes sense, since otherwise hunters might have 5 of the same pet and just bring them out one after another as they die. This way there’s more care for the pet.