When Morrowind launched, many people who played hunter/pet builds in other games came over or back to ESO. Even without a pet bar, and even though the new bear completely lacked any taunt whatsoever, there was ONE thing really cool about them that these people, and myself, really enjoyed.
At Morrowind launch, there was a very cool mechanic where, if you used the game's builtin Command Pet hotkey to direct your pet (Sorc pets worked too!) to attack an enemy that wasn't yet in combat with anything, that enemy would instantly start running at your pet to attack them. You could then target the next thing and command your pet to attack that, and while they start running to that enemy, the first would still be chasing your pet. You could chain entire areas to your bear this way to start combat.
This allowed an excellent gameplay style that more than made up for the loss of other games' pet bars. You could start combat by having your pet pull all the enemies in the area, and start your AOE stacking once they were already all piled up, never having taken damage yourself. Both the Warden Bear and Sorc Clannfear were plenty tanky enough to handle it. It was a fun and glorious time, but then...
For some reason (I sincerely hope it was just an oversight) this stopped working with the HotR patch, maybe before. Now when you use Command Pet, the enemy will do absolutely nothing while your pet (painfully slowly with no Dash ability) runs over to them. Then, when your pet finally gets to them, it does a 1-3 second windup on some power ability, which will completely MISS if you do anything to draw the enemy's attention during this time, which is easy since it no longer aggos on your pet.
Gone completely is the excellent playstyle of having your pet round up enemies! The game's own Command Pet ability is rendered essentially worthless, as is largely the entire pet aspect of the new "Pet Class" the Warden, or any reason for Eternal Guardian to respawn when it never dies. Literally, sneezing on the bear's target will draw aggro.
@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_KaiSchober @ZOS_JessicaFolsom
Can you guys PLEASE confirm if this was a bug?!?
I find it difficult to believe the devs would choose to completely remove an entire playstyle with no justification or rationale or balancing reason why it would be necessary or preferred. It seems this MUST be a mistake!
Here's hoping.