Welcome to Yet Another Hunter Feedback Post
For introductions- I’m Kawney, I played SoD the day it came out and swapped to Melee Hunter at the tail end of P1. I enjoyed P2 theorycrafting for melee, and played through Gnomer at a high-ish level, but stopped playing during P3 for various reasons.
This is a very general list of changes, in no particular order, that I have compiled from both my own ideas, as well as different sources throughout the community. I believe a majority of these changes could be made to increase the viability, as well as provide various options to players to provide changeup to their rotation. That being said- I am not a game developer. The tuning of these suggestions could be completely out of whack, I am mostly here to attempt to bring fun & some slight complexity into a spec that’s focused around spamming one button.
Treatise of Truestrike
-A skillbook, teaching the hunter how to cast Truestrike Aura, increasing normal attack power equivalent to Trueshot. Overwritten by Trueshot Aura.
This is an attempted solution to Trueshot Aura. It would allow flexibility in what kind of hunters you can bring to a raid group,while not overshadowing the ranged AP benefits for MM hunters to invest in Trueshot.
Lone Wolf
-Additional functionality: While no pet is active, your melee weapons & abilities will benefit from talents that affect ranged weapons & shots respectively.
This is a potentially difficult to implement solution for hunters that wish to play Lone Wolf melee hunter. A large problem with LW melee is wasted talent points- BM talents are completely lost due to lack of pet, and ranged talents are partially wasted due to commitment in melee. This would allow players to pursue this fantasy, while also providing some support to the melee weave playstyle.
Carve
-Reworked Rune: Strike a target for 100% weapon damage, and surrounding enemies for 50% weapon damage.
This change would allow for carve to be viable in single target scenarios, while retaining it’s AoE identity.
-Additional functionality: If the targeted enemy is afflicted by Wyvern Strike, it’s DoT will be refreshed and spread to enemies struck.
A tie in to Wyvern Strike. This keeps viability of Carve outside of x/x/31, while also giving it some synergy with Wyvern Strike to promote 2h melee viability.
Cobra Slayer
-Mongoose will now be activateable off of miss & Wyvern Strike hit.
I feel the current iteration of Mongoose has potential to be a powerful & good button to hit, however it’s activation rate leaves much to be desired. This change will help DW hunters significantly, as well as allow 2hand hunters access to this rune.
Raptor’s Fury
-Additional functionality: Mongoose Bite refreshes Raptor’s Fury, but removes one stack. Now stacks up to 10 times (?)
While many people will request for Raptor Strike to be reduced to 3 seconds and keep this rune the same, I believe this opens up a much more interesting playstyle based around trying to greed heavy-hitting Mongoose Bites using Raptor’s Fury as a resource. The spitball-tuning is extremely rough, but I hope the idea is visible.
Trap Launcher
-Combat traps are now either baseline, or also tied to the Melee Specialist rune. Trap launcher retains the rest of it’s functionality.
This is essential to allow any melee build that wants to commit to a deep survival build (x/x/31 especially) to work without feeling like they’ve ‘wasted talent points’. It might require some more tuning with the current iteration of TNT, but I feel a majority of hunters will appreciate this change.
To end it off, these are just my thoughts. I open this up to the rest of melee hunter players to brainstorm for yourselves. Nitpick my ideas, come up with your own, bring up other changes that need to be made outside of the ones I have mentioned here. There is also plenty of feedback throughout these forums from players with equally, if not better, ideas than the ones I have. Give them a shout out here.
Another great feedback thread: