2 questions. Why mm is bottom tier, and one question about bm

Hi guys!
I played hunter back on wotlk, came back for legion (didn’t like that gameplay too much), got excited for new mm and then left it at 120 and went play my dk.

I’ve been seeing the logs and I see mm hunter are the worst dps class for m+ and not too good for raiding, while bm is really good at both. Why is this? I mean I can see the easy rotation of bm, and the full mobility being really handy but if it was just that I’d expect at least a better log score for mm, so I ask you what mm lacks that makes it the worst dps?

Second point, I’ve been playing bm and is the rotation just 3 buttons with 2 cooldowns? Barbed, kill command, spend focus on shot, crows if talented and repeat? It seems way too simple, so I think there has to be something behind, like balance druid (really easy to play but has a rather high skill ceiling with the cancel aura and optimization of stars buff).

I don’t dislike bm, but mm has a place on my hearth since it was the spec I first played and enjoyed a lot on wotlk (bring back stings, quimera and aimed instant cast!)

Lets see …long cooldowns ,long cast time on big “hitter” (sometimes stuff dies by the time stupid thing goes off or you have to move and that is 4-5 sec lost which is 3-4 globals for most melee classes),bad survivability and self heals,after strong burst our damage just drops because spec relies to much on up time and hard casting aimed shot.You have to be on top of things know fights and manage cd for pulls to perfection and reward for that is to be at best 2nd on dps.

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If you’re only using that simple rotation it’s no wonder you aren’t getting much out of the class.

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Chunty I appreciate your answer, but two things. If you read carefully you can see there are question marks after each of those sentences. What people tend to expect when they finish a sentence with “?” is an answer, they aren’t confirming anything they are asking.

Now to make it clear to you, to avoid any “you are doing it wrong” answer, I was indeed feeling I was missing something, as a matter of fact I wrote “there has to be something behind”. I thought it was clear I was asking for recommendations but well…

Let’s try to read and be more constructive like Sumar did.

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I’d like to jump in here and I am not trying to be non constructive as that just breeds the cancereous hate that ruins this game. I just wanted to say that I definitely am constantly busy furiously mashing buttons with my rotation. It is most definitely not just 2 buttons. As an example, looking at the logs from just one fight (Shad’har) in the raid last night I was doing about 62 casts per minute and had 13 different abilities that comprised all of those during the fight for a total of 332 for a 5 minute fight. And I for one know that I am not the best at maintaning my uptimes as well as the top tier hunters. I also know that if my haste was higher than about 10% those numbers would seriously increase also. But nevertheless my point was that there are lots of things that you should and need to be doing other than kill command and barbed shot. As for anyMM questions, I am a one spec kind of guy so I have no clue, besides BM is the only real way to go anyways.

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why we need more than 2 ranged specs.

cause MM is a bad spec thats badly designed.

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In no particular order, MM doesn’t do great in high mobility fights and its aoe is ineffective unless its 3 or targets. Also for all the effort it takes to make MM work you can switch to BM and get better numbers without the same kind of struggle. Highly mobile ranged DPS is hard to compete with.

That’s a great info thanks!
I was guiding myself with icy veins and their rotation was quite simple that’s why. Do you know any good bm that makes some videos I could see and compare?

I have nothing constructive to add.

If I were to take a guess, BM is doing really well because they have full mobility and MM does not. I think BM are able to have a higher corruption value as they can kite the corruption add and move out of the eye aoe. MM has the opposite problem where they need to be able to find the time between mechanics to actually hard cast so they can’t use as high of corruption.

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If MM did more damage people would be playing it. BM is killing it right now so most raiders are playing it. M+ is all BM as well because of MMs lack of utility and terrible AoE design.

That all said unless you are pushing top tier content all three hunter specs are serviceable in all environments except for PvP. MM is horrible in arena and while it does have some merits in BGs it still isn’t as good as survival. My opinions, don’t take them as some sort of agenda.

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So, everyone wants to go and hate on icy-veins. I bet they don’t even realize that the BM Hunterr guide is not only kept really up to date but it’s also written and updated by a BM hunter who is basically looked at to be the authorative figure when it comes to them (and he is usually the top BM hunter for boss damage, at least he was for Mythic Azshara last I heard).

Anyways, I’m not here trying to be jock rydin here, I just think that most people think that the information that is on there is not good or wrong and it may be for other classes but for us it is what I and most would consider the de-facto guide to read for BM Hunters.

Go check out our discord and see what happens when you type in !guide, I’ll try to put in the link here if yoiu or anyone doesn’t know it but if you can’t get it to work send me a pm and I will shoot you or anhyojne another one (or if you want to do the googling yourselkf just look up trueshot lodge in discord.

I have learned everything that has been useful and helped me improve my game all through the discord channel and occasionally looking things up on icyy veins or wowhead. I have been playing since Mists as a solo achievment/mouint/toy/pet farmer who up until 8.2 had done maybe 2 dungeons total. Because of perusing the discord channel whenever I have some time and simply picking up on things that are discussed and asked there I have gone from that to doing really well for myself I think (I’m not going to list stats or anything as this is not meant to be a brag post). But I highly recomend to any hunter out there that they join the discord and just simply spenmd some time on there just reading and learning from those guys that are regulars there. They are mostly the top hunters that we have most of the time so you definetly are not going to go wrong with anything that they say or reccomend you to do.

And don’t be afraid to ask a question if you have any, but please don’t be that guy who asks for the umpteenth time today if anyone is using AC as a talent. Try top utilize the search bar that is there first because I guarantee that most times your question has not only been asked before but a lo9t of times before, I see it happen constantly. The cool thing is that pretty much everyone on there is nice and you dont see people being shamed for doing things like asking a question for the 1000th time, something that is rare from a lot of my experiences in wow itself. Anyways, sorry for the long post but if you have any other questions, feel free to let me know or shoot me a pm. Here’s the link for the discord: `https://discord.gg/FzqetY’

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I think two things would go a long way to fixing MM’s DPS: mobile Aimed Shot (just return Sniper Training so MM gets a bonus when standing still) and Kill Shot.

I’d still like to see Piercing Shots added to the list, but one thing at a time, right?

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bm hunter is the way to go for all aspects of the game right now its pretty solid and yes has a really simple rotation.

Also remove the charges from Aimed shot, it has a long as hell cast time and cost almost 50 focus, there is no reason to have it on charges.

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Aimed Shot on cooldown is actually a good way to ensure MM Hunters aren’t totally immobile turrets all the time.

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Agreed.
Without the charges, >80% and <20% HP targets would be continuous Aimed spam, while considering focus. At least the charge system being affected by haste makes for a playstyle that is taking advantage of multiple abilities.

This is the big thing that would at least improve the spec, in WoD’s mastery that allows full movement, but reward extra damage if the player is stationary.

As for the original question, it could be tuning, or the specs design not allowing movement from raid mechanics, or it could just be that players of the class have gravitated to a spec with less issues.

If you’re not high progression in PvE raiding/M+, just play what you enjoy, as you’ll more than likely excel at a spec you’re invested in.

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You can generate focus on the move and the current playstyle encourages you to use arcane shot 1-2 times in between aimed shots so having aimed on a charged cd just creates unnecessary down time leading us to to rely on filler spells that do piss damage. Aimed shot not being on cd wasn’t problematic for literally any of previous expansions because it had a long cast time. Its not an instant cast spell why the hell does it need a cd?

As Shanksorg said, Icy Veins is accurate and up-to-date.

Yes, BM has a relatively simple core gameplay loop. But it doesn’t really tell you anything to just look at a rotation page and call it a day. There are other things to keep track of when actually in a boss fight.

Long post incoming: looking at all the things you have to keep track of as BM.

You have three primary rotational abilities: Kill Command, Barbed Shot, and Cobra Shot. Sounds simple. Keep Kill Command and Barbed Shot on cooldown while using Cobra Shot as a filler dump. Simple, right?

Not quite.

Cobra Shot takes 1 second off KC’s cooldown, which is something you have to consider alongside the GCD (1.5 seconds, reduced by haste) and the focus cost of the two abilities. So far so good.

Barbed Shot has 2 charges and it gives your pet an attack speed buff which stacks 3 times, meaning you are best served using a BS and stalling until Frenzy is about to fall off then using BS again, which will allow you to get to 3 stacks and stay there longer. Furthermore, your auto-shot crits have a chance to give you a charge of BS for free so you want to make sure that free charge doesn’t get wasted while still maintaining 3 stacks for longer.

So that already makes the spec a lot deeper, but there’s more.

You don’t just have rotational abilities. You also have Multi-Shot, your AoE ability. It does pitiful damage, but causes your pet to start cleaving for 4 seconds, doing heavy clumped AoE. This benefits from the Frenzy buff so having 3 stacks is important. Also, you don’t want to be spamming Multi-Shot; you only want to be using it enough to keep Beast Cleave up while filling in with your normal rotational abilities.

More importantly, you have cooldowns. The spec comes with Bestial Wrath and Aspect of the Wild. Bestial Wrath increases all your damage by 25% for 15 seconds with a 90 second CD while Aspect of the Wild gives you 5 focus per second for 20 seconds plus 10% crit and -0.2 seconds from your global CD (that last one isn’t on the tooltip but it’s there), with a 120 second CD. Furthermore, Bestial Wrath’s CD is reduced by 12 seconds every time you use Barbed Shot so that’s something you have to take into consideration (with Barbed Shot’s reset, this means Bestial Wrath has a very varaible CD).

Of course you want to pair these whenever you can while also making sure you get as many Bestial Wraths as possible during the course of a fight… while also making sure you take into account factors on the fight that might require you to pool your cooldowns. And make sure to have decently high focus when going into a Bestial Wrath. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a huge part of BM’s challenge is cooldown management.

Then, on top of all that, you have talents. Luckily we mostly have passive choices, barring situational utility like Binding Shot (an extremely powerful AoE root; use it in M+ on Necrotic weeks and your tank will love you). Previously we would take A Murder of Crows which was a powerful 15 second DoT on a 1-minute CD that reset its CD whenever the target died. Managing that properly was pretty rewarding, but now we generally take the passive Thrill of the Hunt which will give you more Barbed Shot resets due to the increased crit chance.

We also used to take Chimera Shot, a 15-second cooldown 2-target cleave that gave focus, but again we now prefer the passive choice One With The Pack to increase Barbed Shot proc rate. Finally, we now take Killer Cobra which causes every Cobra Shot during Bestial Wrath to reset Kill Command, which makes Bestial Wrath a bit more hectic and powerful.

Then, on top of everything, you have the borrowed power i.e. items.

You have azerite traits that change the spec in meaningful ways. Dance of Death, by far our best trait, makes Barbed Shot have a chance equal to our crit chance to give us a big agility buff for a few seconds. Given crit also increases the Barbed Shot reset chance (remember, it’s a proc from auto-shot crits), this magnifies the value of crit. Once you have 3 DoDs and high crit (>30%) this actually takes priority over maintaining Frenzy, although Frenzy is still important. This is why Barbed Shot reset rate was so important to our talent choices. Add to this Primal Instincts which gives your Aspect of the Wild a big mastery buff, with the first PI you get also making AotW give you a Barbed Shot charge (check out the BM opener priority with this trait). Finally you also need to consider Rapid Reload which causes each multi-shot to take 1 second off the CD of your aspects (Cheetah, Wild, Turtle) for each enemy hit, which is spectacularly powerful in M+ and alone makes us one of the more valuable M+ ranged classes.

And, of course, we have azerite essences and trinkets. But they are common to other classes and now you get the point. Don’t forget the utility side of things, either.

TL;DR: It’s not enough to just look at the rotational abilities and say “seems simple enough”. You can do that to most specs in the game. These days specs have a lot of intricacies in how the abilities interact, whether it be with other rotational abilities, cooldowns, or azerite traits and essences. I would still say BM is one of the simpler specs, but it’s not as “afk free DPS” as many people say. You can definitely see a difference between good and average BM Hunters.

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