As a long time hunter player, who plays for the pets, there are many updates that would be great for pets.
* Mechanical pets, its a bit out there, but blizzard offered this as an option a few months back, and got mixed results from the community. It was still in the works, but just a few mecha hunter pets would be pretty fun, if nothing more than for kicks. Go mecha gorilla!
* Pet armor, this should be simple stuff, gives pets a chance on proc for X, increases damage by 3%, etc. Preferably, if possible, also makes the armor appear on the pet. Some options are collars, war harnesses, and etc. These could also give cross bonuses, example both hunter and pet recieve 3% increase damage to humanoids.
* Possibility of saddles, making some pets mountable. Defintley Some because bats can't be mounted.. for obvious reasons. Quest or difficulty of getting one roughly equal to the cost of a normal mount, with slight reduction. Saddle could appear on pet when equipped.
* Pet foods that are fed directly to the pet, and give bonuses, with even possibilities of pet breathes fire for X minutes. Obvious ones are stam buffs like sporeling snacks. Some less obvious ones are 15 min of low dps ice dmg for a higher level snack.
* Non normalization of pets, it's ok if pets have similiar stats for each family... not if they are exactly the same, especially if thats true of all pets (not just by family). Turtles should not attack, and run, as fast as cats! Or raptors! Some pets SHOULD have fast attack speeds, and fast run speeds! Especially if your giving up some other pets nifty skill/stats to have them. Original argument against it was wolves with very fast run speeds, and bats with very fast attack, yet neither of those have been particularly game changing if even important to anyone except us hunters. Most players can't, or don't, outrun a pet anyways.
* Taming sizes, this is an ok fix for some pets, however some pets hunters want big. You want your giant raging pet storming right towards the enemy and for them to go oh #&#^! (censored :P). This was originally done to fix bat wing size, something that hasn't had a big effect, still causes the same issue, and didn't really apply to other pets. If kodos were tameable a tamed size could be added for those as well to make them useable, as well as other pets. Keep the 1-3% size increase by level (maybe even make it different among other pets so they can grow to different sizes).
* Pets keep wild skills and still have family skills available, this is not an over powered request. Consider that this means wild skills would not scale. Whatever the pet has on it when you tame it is what it gets in wild skills, and you would have to watch for other pets for better ones. Family skills would still be trainable, and you could choose to unlearn those wild skills in favor of other ones, while still learning those to your beast skill book. This adds a lot of flavor to all pets, its not over powered since pets usually don't have that many wild skills, and the ones they do have are mob level skills (which are actually lower, a few levels lower than the actual creature, or it would be over powered). Examples, barbed crabs in azuremyst have 1st level thorns in the wild (noticeable in taming quest, where you use taming totem instead of skill to get one), lash tail raptors in barrens have lash, Gorillas have a pummel like ability. This would also fix some problems with pet skills right now, aka lack of attack abilities.
* Include more pet family skills, more general skills, almost all pets should learn dash (with exceptions of things like crocolisks, turtles, who can't really run that fast). This includes raptors, who should have dash. Many pet families don't have a skill at all, many also agree that there should be 2 pet skills per family. Pets in need of love especially are spiders, crocolisks, and spore bats.
* Include some rare pets, hunters need a reason to go searching through the wilderness to go find an elusive and cool pet that no one else has. The original argument against this was not balancing, but that everyone would get the same pets, everytime there were special elite types everyone wanted those (several instances of this during different patches, where one or two pets became better for X reason). Real reason behind this is lack of good pets to start with, everytime one gets an advantage everyone swarms it. King B is a perfect example, when blizz did the test run on cobra reflexes (btw not a bug, it was included after the patch, king B never had it before, its start of more test skills and a way of testing it without compromising all pets to do it, and on a popular pet many people would have) now everyone wants him for his fast attack speed. There are easy fixes to this, first one is make rare pets actually hard to find/tame, make them wander, have them in difficult places, make hunters actually say "I got this pet and it was hard, but its awesome!" Second, and with earlier points, add more variety. Hunters wouldn't all want the same pet if there were more to choose from, especially ones with better attack, or good pet skills (like wind serpents, that should not have been nerfed). Third, is to change the increase each rare pet gets, for example one rare boar might have increased damage/stam, another might have increased armor/speed.
* Change pet damage types, most pets should do physical damage, however it would be unique to have hard to find rare pets with unique damage types. Like Lupos, the wolf, when it had shadow damage. Now the argument was that it was to overpowered because it ignored armor as shadow damage, however what a lot of people didn't mention is that this also meant it reduced power in attacking any target with shadow resist, could resist the attack completely. It just adds variety, and comes with a pro/con, either it does more damage to those without resists, or does weaker damage than normal on those who do. This should also be true of pet family skills, some pets should have attacks that do other damage than nature/physical.
* All beast and beast like pets should be tameable (such as some types of demon hounds, and dragon whelps/faierie dragons). Pets like moths, giraffes, and etc should be tameable from the start. Dragon whelps, demonic hounds, or etc could be an added bonus by quest and with the talent "animal handler" so it does more than increase run speed for a talent far into the tree. Under water creatures could require a collar of "air breathing" to go over their gills to work on land. Made by engineers.
Long list of untameable beasts that should be tameable:
Moths -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Moth.png
Kodo -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Arrachea.jpg
Thunder lizard -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Thunderlizard.png
Zhevra -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Zhevra.png
Unicorn (in game not currently accessible) -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:BE_Unicorn_mount.jpg
Worm -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Worm.png
Wyvern -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:WindRider.png
Gryphon -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Gryphon.png
Hippogryph -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Hippo.jpg
Beetles -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:FireBeetle.png
Hydra -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Hydra.png
Basilisk -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:BasiliskOutland.png
Chimera -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Chimera.png
Corehound -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Corehound2.png
Devilsaur -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Devilsaur.png
Diemetradon -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Diemetradon.png
Frenzy fish -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Frenzy_%28fish%29
Giraffe -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Giraffe.png
Horse -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Horse.png
Mana wyrm -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:ManaWyrmBlue.png
Pterrodax -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Pterrordax.png
Shark -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Shark.png
Threshadon -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Threshadon.png
Plus others I'm forgetting.
Some demons that should be tameable (also others not noted here)
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Helboar.JPG
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Darkhound.png
Dragons that could be tameable
Faeirie dragon -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Faedragon.png
Nether dragon -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Nether_dragon.JPG
Drakeadon -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Drakeadon.png
Whelps -
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Whelps.png
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Whelps.jpg
http://www.wowwiki.com/Image:Whelps2.jpg
Big animals can have a tamed size, or alternatively allow them, except players wont want a hunter to use a big pet in raids and such, so they will be more for cool factor and BG's, arenas. Animals with big wing size only have to have a glide motion and stay closer to the ground during movement. Ocean and aquatic creatures can be useable on land with engineer item "land breathing aqua collar."
Potentially many of these updates may be only available to BM hunters, and require X points in BM tree to use. This could also be applied to other trees, and other classes. Also, pets should give bonuses to hunter abilities via skills, or other items, further emphasizing hunter's connection to their pets. Such as scorpid poison may boost the DPS damage of serpent sting, or scorpid sting. Other pets could increase aspects, like snakes to Aov, and gorillas to Aom.
All these changes can be implemented, as long as the increase given by skills is limited (and in % so they scale) is reasonable, as well is true with rare pet stats. Many of the updates can require X pts in BM tree to use. This can also be applied to other trees, and classes. Class and Talent Tree specific items, MM can get higher dmg ranged weapons, BM can be allowed to train better pets. Other classes can also benefit from the concept, having better items only available to the ones using that tree, cut down on item distribution (because BM hunter, and MM hunter wont need th
