A Hunter Raid Cooldown Idea

Many hunters including myself have been asking for some kind of raid cooldown. I've been pondering this for a while, trying to think of what our CD should look like. I want it to be different and obviously useful. The other night an idea finally hit me. While it's (hopefully) too late in the Warlords development cycle to get a new ability implemented, I really like this idea and want to share it.

Lots of classes get really useful raid cooldowns and enhancements these days. You've got your Heroism/Bloodlust/Time Warp, Rallying Cry, Lock cookies and portals and summons. Seriously, why so much Lock love? We need hunters to get something along these lines. I want other raid members to feel grateful we're aound, like the way I feel about a Warlock when a cookie saves my ass.

Some of you are probably thinking, "We get lots of those CDs! Our exotic pets can bring hero, a battle res.." Let me stop you right there. For starters, you have to be BM to bring those. Next, bringing them can mean giving up a different buff your raid needs. Most importantly, those are other class' abilities that we borrow. What I want is a new hunter raid cooldown. Something no other class brings, and is helpful for the whole group. As I was trying to figure-out what it should be I knew it needed to be pet based. We are the pet class. It's our thing. I was having a hard time thinking of something cool until a flex run I did recently.

It was a situation every raider has experienced. Earlyish in the encounter something tanky or healy want awry (I won't pretend I really understand what those guys do. I should, but I don't.) and both our tanks were dead. It takes a few precious seconds to get a tank targeted and ressed, not to mention buffed-up. As this process was happening and the boss was running around clobbering characters that aren't tanks I thought, "Man I wish my pet could tank. Just for 15 or 20 seconds while we regroup." Eureka.

Hunters and huntress' I present to you what should become the new hunter raid cooldown: The Oh Shit Let My Pet Tank For A Bit button (name TBD). It's useful. It's different. It's pet based. I'm not going to pretend that I'm not pretty proud of this idea.

What I'm envisioning is a single button that gives a short time (for some reason 20 seconds seems good to me) where our pet takes no damage and sits on the top of it's target's threat table. During this time maybe the pet's threat could be magnified so a skilled hunter could MD other mobs to it, for adds or council fights. And when the ability is over the pet dies and can't be immediately ressed. Maybe it can't be ressed for a minute or two, or possibly until combat ends. I'm not calling this an 'Oh Shit" button for nothing. This isn't Heroism. You don't normally plan to use this. You just thank Elune that you have it when you need it.

Speaking of Heroism, the same rules apply. You get this ability exactly once per fight, regardless of how many hunters are in your raid. No stacking hunters and rotating pet tanks to replace a real player tank or to cheese some fight mechanic. But even with these restrictions, this ability could come up huge in at least a few raiding situations. We have the aforementioned dead tanks scenario. The ability might also help before or during a high damage phase to give healers a chance to top-off real tanks. I think the coolest application of this ability would be the last stand. I'm talking about that all too familiar situation where 1 or 2 DPS are trying to finish off a 98% dead boss. This ability could be the difference between a kill and the super frustrating 0.5% wipe. It just might buy us an extra 10 seconds of DPS to get the boss down. Imagine the heroes we would be every time a hunter and their pet take down the boss with everyone else watching from their corpses! Their children and grandchildren will sing songs that tell the Tale of The Sporebat that Killed Hellscream.

What do you think of this idea? Got your own hunter Raid CD idea? Let me know. We won't get anything until there is a conversation taking place in the hunter community.