MM is in a great spot right now damage wise in PvP, Arenas specifically. What is currently hard to deal with is melee classes, especially double melee comps, since our damage kit does not do well when forced to hard cast Aimed shots when we should instead be kiting melee to reduce damage taken.
Been 2100-2200cr all season as MM exclusively and my biggest complaint is scatter shot & roar of sacrifice being PvP talents instead of baseline abilities. Our PvP talents are already lackluster but not being able to choose anything except 1 slot is dumb. Whether or not Scatter DR’s with trap I still find it extremely useful as a peel to offtargets.
MM is pigeonholed into running with a partner who can stun for trap, unless you actually practice using conc shot on a focused healer and self trapping on the run. It’s definitely doable and I land plenty of traps 100% on my own, but it takes a lot of practice and can put you in bad situations if you have to push far across a map for a trap.
MM is bottom of the heap in arenas. We should take whatever help we can get. If that means a way to regain range when kiting, that’s fine. If that means more DPS so we can run dual and triple DPS, that’s fine too. Let’s not be so picky.
I mean defensive and utility upgrades is what we need. But if they want to give us more damage to compensate for being a glass cannon, I suppose that works too
We absolutely need an additional kiting tool(s). We also need the ones we have to work more reliably.
Both Explosive Trap and Bursting Shot (especially) have times they don’t work when there is no reason that I can find for them not to be working. They are either bugged or flawed and need to be looked at.
Tar Trap has a very small AoE and doesn’t even go off until someone is a couple meters past the middle, making it barely a nuisance in most cases. In addition to a larger radius and a more efficient trigger mechanism, we used to have Aspect of the Cheetah and other tools that helped us kite around our Trap. So not only is the current Tar Trap anemic, but we don’t have all our mobility tools making Tar Trap, a once great kiting tool, almost useless.
Ergo, we need more kiting tools. There simply is no other solution.
Everyone likes doing crazy DPS. And I am not saying our overall damage is where it should be. I don’t know. I feel like I do enough, but minor number tweaks might be warranted. That’s more a PvE determination though. It’s not what we need in PvP.
If we had enough damage to make us good in PvP with our current toolkit, that would basically mean we would have to be oneshotting everyone all the time. No one really wants that, even if some think they do. It’s not skillful play. I don’t want tools that encourage bad play. I refuse to compromise on that.
I do think that the way our damage is distributed could be better however. I wish it was a little less front loaded. Hunter’s Mark + Careful Aim + Double Tap + Aimed Shot + Precise Shots as an opener is by far our best move and very powerful, but it doesn’t actually get us a kill in any situation where someone is paying attention. I wish it was (like it was for a decade) a little more back loaded. I miss Kill Shot like a fish in the Sahara misses the water.
So yes, I think a little bit of a burst redistribution would REALLY help out the spec and encourage skillful play, but a straight up meaningfully large buff to our current damage distribution would only encourage bad gameplay.
For me personally its not about having a high rating, but about how much skill and mastery of my class it takes to get there.
Barbed shot attached to stomp become single target for pvp, or have traps not break on aoe damage.
Id like to see spirit beasts get mortal strike. Then blizz could add some exotic and spirit beast families in. Plus it would allow bm some additional defenses without sacrificing ms. Either that or make spirit heal and survival instincts baseline.
That may be to over powered or steep. But as it sits bm feels pretty solid defensively while running spirit pet. But way more dangerous with ms and freedom. Bm would be in a fun strong maybe to strong place not sure. But would love to see this tested.
I cannot comment on mm or survival have nearly zero experience on them. So someone else like dilly can take the lead on those.
Maybe. It would certainly be welcome, but I don’t think it would be sufficient. We need kiting tools. I don’t have enough tools to kite at all in many situations, much less kite and do damage.
We especially need it since everyone basically have 100 ways to break out of CCs. But if we want to… We have to click on the talent (that should be a baseline passive). Feelsbadman
We do if kiting is our game. I would love the old aspect of the cheetah back, with CC escape so could again be experts at the high speed kiting we had to do back in Vanilla to beat Artorius the Doombringer. However, I would hate to have to convert to mage style root and teleport “kiting”; there are already mages for that.
My understanding, though, is that Blizz wants our class fantasy to be “sniper”, not “kiter”. If the only way they’re going to give us PVP parity is “sniper”, we should take that.
It’s what we need if that’s the only way Blizzard will give us PVP parity. As for PVE, MM could do 5-10% more damage across the board and still be mid pack in raids. Maybe we’d even get invited to M+ sometimes.
It’s never “bad play” to play your class correctly. If what you’re insisting on is that MM has to have exacting, near perfect play even to match the facerollers on the other specs, then what you’re really saying is that you want us to be bottom of the pack at PVP, which isn’t acceptable from a balance standpoint. It would be nice to have room for good play, but then perfect play should regularly get us to the 3000 rating range, not the 2000 rating range. That requires a buff, not just redistribution.
That said, we are nowhere near to one shotting anyone. The fully stacked opening shot that you describe gets people down only 20-30% at best - and that’s assuming we find them before they find us, which is already 50/50 at best. Making us even less front loaded than we already are again makes us worse, not better.
Heck, you can sneak up on people in the world, add trueshot in front of your opener, hit them with five or six aimed shots, and it’s still 50/50 that you kill them before trueshot expires even if they’re AFK. Meanwhile, a properly talented mage will have killed them twice over in that time. Finishing isn’t really the problem with Maledict, but needing them to be AFK for 15 seconds to get them below 25% health is. We need more initial burst, not less.
I’m not saying that initial burst all has to be in the opening shot. Giving trueshot more acceleration without reducing the duration, so we can get off one more aimed shot, might be adequate in battlegrounds and world PVP. Or let us cast trueshot without breaking stealth, so when we’re lucky enough to get the drop on an arena team, we can open with burst. That way we’ll have a fighting chance of actually putting someone in danger of dying, with the win going to the side with faster reflexes and more accurate use of CC.
There are three strengths that the MM toolkit is designed to emphasize. Kiting, battlefield control and ranged burst. Those are the only strengths in the kit. That is not a new thing. It has been very clear that MM is that spec since WotLK, and in truth, it has been that way since Vanilla.
Let me justify that by looking at the current toolkit.
Baseline Kiting
Steady Shot
Concussive Shot
Steady Shot extends Concussive Shot
Disengage
Arcane Shot
Freezing Trap
Rapid Fire
Tar Trap
Aspect of the Cheetah
Bursting Shot
Mastery: increased range
Pet abilities (Master’s Call, increased movement speed, etc.)
Every single other ability (except Aimed Shot) is instant, not casted
Core Talents
Every single talent is instant or can be cast on the move → complete mobility
Explosive Shot
Trailblazer
Posthaste
Born to be Wild (Cheetah reduction)
Binding Shot
Lethal Shots
Lock and Load
Piercing Shot
PvP Talents
Explosive Trap
Hunting Pack
Scatter Shot
Ranged Burst Baseline
Aimed Shot
Precise Shots
Rapid Fire
Trueshot
Mastery: increased range
Mastery: increased damage
Core Talents
Careful Aim
Camouflage
Streamline
Hunter’s Mark (maybe)
Double Tap
Calling the Shots
PvP Talents
Sniper Shot
Trueshot Mastery
Battlefield Control Baseline
Concussive Shot
Steady Shot extends Concussive Shot
Frost Trap
Tar Trap
Counter Shot
Bursting Shot
Flare
Pet abilities (Dispel, Mortal Wounds, pet snare)
Core Talents
Binding Shot
AMoC (great against stealth)
Hunter’s Mark (“”)
PvP Talents
Scorpid Sting
Spider Sting
Viper Sting
Scatter Shot
Explosive Trap
That is almost our entire toolkit. The only things left are defensive abilities.
To suggest we aren’t designed to be a kiting class is ludicrous. That is the design purpose of almost our entire kit. The fact that we suck at kiting is a failure of tools in the kit, not a design intent.
Mage also has the same three strengths, and they always have. Mage (especially Fire) and MM (and formerly SV) have always played similar. It is no coincidence that Fire Mage and MM have been my most commonly played specs for all of WoW. HOWEVER, they have also always felt completely different even though they have similar strengths and weaknesses.
There is nothing wrong with a game that has effectively 36 classes for two of those classes to have similar strengths and weaknesses. People fear homogenization too much without realizing what actually contributes to the feel of homogenization. It is the feeling of homogenization that needs to be avoided, not similar strengths and weaknesses. There are only so many categories of strengths in any game like this. There HAS to be similarities or the game would be awful.
You simply can’t have that much burst. Frankly, anymore burst than we have would be too much burst. Snipers in an FPS are generally weak, except the fact they can one shot you. You can’t have that kind of “sniper” in a game like this. You MUST have other strengths to fall back on, since there can absolutely not be “instagibs” in a healthy WoW.
MM"s other strengths, as I have shown above, are Battlefield Control and Kiting. Currently the only design strength that is working is our sniper aspect. We must fix our other aspects, not double down on the only working part. It is already super strong. We must be a more complex class. A true glass cannon has absolutely no place in an MMO. It can never work. That’s just not the way the entire rest of the game is designed.
If Tar Trap wasn’t pathetic and we could take Binding Shot (which some do in M+) and our AoE hit two targets, and there was no more Reaping, and our sustained damage was on par (its not that far off) then MM would probably be fine in M+.
It wouldn’t hurt if Camo was baseline and its CD started on button press instead of after it fell off either. Having stealth is really beneficial in M+, but ours has a contrived flaw that feels unnatural and only serves to hurt us for absolutely no real reason whatsoever.
All of those things are fixing broken stuff in our toolkit (not damage related) and fixing encounter design (Reaping).
Any damage adjustments are really a secondary concern.
I’m not sure what you mean here. Do you mean gets people down TO 20-30% or gets people down to 80-70% health, because the former is what really happens on someone with equal gear and no bubble; perhaps not every time, but often enough.
Hunter’s Mark + Careful Aim + Aimed Shot + Double Tap + Precise Shots can definitely bring someone down to 20-30% if both Aimed Shots crit which happens often enough for me. If you follow that up with your second Aimed Shot directly into Rapid Fire → Precise Shots it is very often enough to finish someone off. If you have popped Trueshot, fuggedaboutit.
Our burst during Trueshot is only rivaled by a cooldown poppin’ Destro. It’s the highest in the game. Of course that’s best on an opener, whereas Destro does not have that restriction. That’s one reason I want the burst spread out to not just be on opener. It is just not anywhere near effective enough to have our burst be mostly on an opener, without any closer (Kill Shot) or tools to open a kill window (like a stun).
Not true. In Vanilla, our damage strength was sustained single target damage; we had no noticeable burst.
Our kiting strength has always been open world kiting. We didn’t have burst and were bad at killing people, but we were good at kiting over long distances so we were good at surviving in battlegrounds and world PVP.
The problem is, actual, hunter style, kiting doesn’t work in arenas. Arenas are simply too small for real kiting. That’s why we started getting burst damage. It was a replacement for kiting in arenas. And since our burst has always been dependent on standing still for Aimed Shot, there’s no synergy; we can either kite or use burst, but not both.
And since then melee mobility has increased so much that we can’t really kite in battlegrounds or open world PVP any more; hunter kiting is purely a PVE skill now. That’s okay, but only if our burst is sufficient to balance us.
No, they haven’t; they’ve never played similarly even mechanically. Mage “kiting” is dependent on the kind of abilities you put under “battlefield control” - roots and snares in particular - which for hunters has always been the provenance of ranged Survival, not MM. That’s a completely different way of playing; they don’t just feel different, they are different. Mage range control can work in arenas because it has always depended on slowing or stopping the enemy, so it doesn’t require a lot of space. MM kiting is primarily dependent on maintaining, rather than recovering, range, by going faster than the enemy; that requires a lot more space than arenas contain. As long as PVP is balanced around arenas, hunter style kiting isn’t going to be useful.
Burst over a 15 second trueshot is hardly an “instagib”.
It could work just fine. It’s just that it doesn’t match your idiosyncratic preferences on how you’d like MM to work.
I get it. You’d rather MM stay trash than fix it in a way that isn’t the exact way that you want.
Meanwhile, it causes people like me to unsubscribe for 10 years at a time.
Normally, that opener brings people down TO 70-80% of their health. Maybe we get a double crit and get them down to 30-40%, 10% of the time. Having a 50/50 chance of winning 10% of the time might be “often enough” for you, but we have to have a 50/50 chance of winning 100% of the time in order to be balanced.
It sounds like you don’t actually want balance. You’re happy with being totally gimped in PVP. That may be fine for you, but it’s not acceptable for the game as a whole, though, not as long as arena style PVP is such an important driver of progression in the game. That approach just sucks new players into MM because it’s good for leveling, then causes them to give up on the game when the end game turns out to be nonexistent for them.
It’s getting confusing what time period you are talking about. I stated explicitly “since WotLK”. My comment about vanilla was more off-hand. Regardless, I remember Aimed Shot being substantial burst in Vanilla/TBC and we had plenty of battlefield control tools (traps, melee root, snares) to get off Aimed Shot.
From WotLK onward we were completely a burst spec, and we still had all the battlefield control spells to kite. It wasn’t all about running around. We still had entrapment, melee root, frost trap, snares that weren’t instantly countered, etc., etc. We also had Disengage on a 16 CD, or in MoP/WoD talented to have a 10s CD, and a glyph that enhanced our disengage distance, or increased our Frost Trap size, etc.
I’m really not sure what class you were playing, but I had zero problems kiting in a place the size of an arena. As for the battlefield control being SV’s thing… What MM didn’t put most of their off points into SV? I had all the same tools. In MoP/WoD our toolkit was virtually identical across the board in that regard. I’m honestly confused why you are saying the things you are saying. I remember a very different game, and had very different experiences.
Fire specifically has always been a mobile kiter, but all specs of both hunter and mage have always had similar levels of mobility and battlefield control. You THINK they were different because of how well it was executed, but if you were to make a table with strengths and weaknesses, they were very similar across the board. They still are. That is exactly what I was talking about wrt “people not understanding what makes things feel homogenized”.
I have killed many people in 5s or less. Of course that’s not all the time or even close to half the time, but that’s our potential. Increasing our burst would only increase the number of times that happens. If it was actually reliable it would call for immediate nerfs.
I disagree that it can work at all based on the entire history of the game and what has happened when a class has too much burst and too little control or tankiness. It’s never worked before, what makes you think it could work now? More to the point, why would you want it when our entire toolkit is designed for another purpose and is simply not working properly?
On the contrary. I think your proposal is just a different type of trash. (Using your words, not intentionally being rude).
Yes it sucks to suck, no doubt. It doesn’t need to be “my way.” I want it to be the way its designed to be, just working.
If you are hearing that I promise you, either you are not hearing what I am saying, or I am not saying it correctly. It’s likely a little bit of both.
What does scaling have to do with anything? Fresh 120 with no exp vs high ilvl hunter and the fresh 120 wins? I’ve been spanked by terribad players just because of gear level, so what does this have to do with scaling?
Iv been playing all of BFA as marks. Done everything from randoms bgs to +13 mythics to aotc herioc BoD. I just recently switched to BM in the last week after never playing the spec ever. The diffrence is night and day in playabilty. I never have to stop moving to do my rotation in pvp or in pve. I have better substained dps and better aoe output.
I wont be going back to marksman until they give us our cc toolkit back. The burst MM can do is cool and all but it doesn’t mean anything when you have to sit still for extended amounts of time to do it. I recently dueled a guildie fury warrior of mine. Same ilvl same exp in pvp for the most part. He absoultey destroyed me as MM. As BM is was a complete 180. He couldnt even touch me for any longer than 3 seconds. BM feels heaps better than MM. It sucks cause I loved the fantasy of a lone ranger/sniper. Just my 2cents.
Hunter is the least played class in RBGS/2s/3s. Legion Hunter was a top 5 RBG class, top 10 2s class, now Hunters are the least played in everything. Unholy DK is one of the best melee classes in the game. Please shut up lmao.
Oh, and Hunter is one the worst dps classes in PVE
That being said, I think we have the right to complain on wow forums. Without the input of an Unholy DK lol.
Yeah when everyone has the same or similar results except you, there is obviously something wrong on your end lol.
Speaking as a One-Trick MM Hunter, it is absolutely awful in PvP. Besides gimmicky Camouflage Openers to burst someone as fast as possible, there is simply not enough utility or healing to stay alive. Considering 3v3 is all Dampening Wars, its even worse for a MM Hunter in that scenario. At the very start of BFA, MM in particular has been straight garbage for PvP.
I hardly ever use the Forums outside of casual posting so I normally wouldnt post here, but you trying to say Hunters being good in PvP and are numerous in higher ratings made me scratch my head and post on this thread. Whatever you are smoking mate, I’d like some too so I can experience whatever world you are in.
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")