#11 - March 24, 2010, 8:18 p.m.
The Spirit Beasts were added as a way to capture that old feeling of having to hunt (which really means be very patient and very lucky) to get rare spawn pets so that you'd feel awesome and be able to show them off. Making those creatures actually more powerful than other pets goes completely counter to that design. If the frustratingly rare spawn is needed for highest possible dps, there would be a lot of exasperated hunters out there, and I think they'd be totally justified.
Spirit Beasts are the hunter equivalent of the Time Lost Protodrake. They are there for bragging rights, not max dps.
We're not sure yet what we're going to do for hunter pets in the future. I fear that even if the dps gain was marginal that hunters would still go for the highest dps pets, so really there only exists an illusion of choice. We could literally make all of the pet families do the exact dps and have rather watered down special abilities (because otherwise one of them might grant a 1 or 2% dps benefit and that would end up being the pet again).
In other words, I can see a design where pet choice is purely cosmetic and pet stats are identical or I can see a design where pet choice matters, in which case you don't really have that many to choose from on content that matters.
