To 2k?
That is so depressing.
Yeah I played MM/Fury KFC to 2.2 this season but one bad session put us back to 2k. It’s such a hard comp in this meta that one mistake or aggressive double melee comps just wreck MM. It’s a lot of fun but definately frustrating to be a Hunter right now. Even the consistent comps like Cupid & Jungle are struggling right now.
Marks’ base damage kit feels pretty fun to used now that it’s tuned higher, but the overall non-damage kit is just so bad. I’d like to see binding on a 20-30s cooldown and swap places with trailblazer on the talent tree so that you can actually use it. I think it also makes sense to make scatter baseline and on disorient dr.
Then honor talents like rangers finesse replaced with stuff like readiness that fit better with the needs of the class now that stuff like catlike and cheetah dodge are gone. As it is now, you just don’t have enough tools to support what you are supposed to do as mm. If you are going to have to plant and cast, with no passive tankiness (which you shouldn’t have), then you need ways to “stop” and control the other team enough to actually create a window to do so.
Firemage is a pretty comparable example. The specs are roughly equivalent in terms of squishiness, but fire has temp, cauterize, roots, shimmer, and things like spammable poly to live/stop/control and set up its damage.
Because mm and bm are bad. Hunters aren’t actually good right now in this meta but if you wanted to play one play survival mm looks frustrating and janky.
Might I ask why you compare fire mage and Hunter? Theyve never been compared and they’ve both existed in the game for as long as the other.
Hunters have always had their own tools that aren’t blink and sheep to get space, and I think catlike reflexes was one of the worst iterations. Having to be crit by melee to get 30% Dodge?
Thing is mages didn’t get pruned much in the name of class fantasy and even gained when you look at shimmer.
MM has jus been pruned every expac since wotlk and needs stuff like pet utility/cc, silencing shot, entrapment, instant aimed Ms, chimera, binding shot or disengage root, scatter back.
Basically the only thing rn they have that needs to be a PvP talent is explosive trap knock back.
Just in terms of how they function in their comps. Marks will (ideally) share a lot of partners with mage, like thug vs rmp, kfc sv wmd, jungle vs fmx, etc.
Both are squishy ranged classes that rely on control to set windows up for burst, and mobility/outs to survive instead of passive tankiness. There are obviously big differences and they shouldn’t feel “the same”, but in terms of tools to accomplish a win condition, they need a lot of tools to accomplish some of the same solutions.
Like you mentioned, marks is pretty pruned where others aren’t. Binding stun/Wyvern is gone, bursting disorient is gone, scatter still shares dr with trap, and things like catlike and cheetah dodge for survivability are gone. To boot, you can’t even use the new binding root because it is on the postehaste row.
Imo, replacing rangers finesse with readiness (cd reset on turtle, exhil, cheetah) fills the gap left by cheetah dodge and catlike, and gets rid of a pvp talent designed around last iteration of mm. Scatter baseline solves the imbalance of the other hunter specs having intimidation, and changing dr to disorient provides the setup needed. Swapping trailblazer and binding allows you to actually use binding.
That way it’s the same general set of tools unique to hunter but fitted more in a way where you can use them together and tuned more to fit the needs of the spec.
mages and hunters have literally always been compared with each other
they both have always worked largely the same up until warlords of draenor with differing strengths/weaknesses and utilities
historically they have all played the exact same comps. they even cced extremely similarly with deep/breath -> sheep and scatter -> trap
they both had a spammable purge in mop, were both pretty equal in terms of mobility, and they were even the exact same with defensive cooldowns (block cold snap block, deterrence readiness deterrence)
even down to their rotational abilities with frostbolt being comparable with aimed shot (later steady shot when frostbolt stopped doing damage) and ice lance with chimaera (you can still make the same argument for fire)
Rep is not a direct correlation to spec strength. If that were the case then we could confidently say that Warriors are stronger than DKs which is not even remotely true.
Eh not sure about that, MM might be in some similar comps, but the role to mage was always different because MM damage was always front loaded ,all its CC instant and nigh unavoidable ,and it’s pressure only stopped once it ran out gas (pet utilities, readiness etc)
Like readiness use was far different than Snap, Snap is solely defensive unless you get cheeky and offensively block, but had none of the power of double silencing shots, scatters etc.
Like Mage had no equiv to PHD from wotlk, (hunter’s had dispel back then too, dunno why you mention it like its unique to MoP)
Thug Cleave was an entirely different beast than RMP, Premed and Readiness were far more oppressive and front loaded than RMP
I’m almost sure ice lance and Frost bolt did not chunk anywhere as near as Aimed and Chimera, both the latter had cooldowns and back when this game made sense, cd abilities hit harder than spammable ones.
Not to say shatter combos weren’t scary, but careful aim + Piercing Shots, armor pen and like the 65% passive crit chance I had in wotlk really domed clothies
Hunter damage only became frontloaded in Cata. In WotLK your chimera shot required serpent sting/mark to be up to do full damage.
He said spammable. In WOTLK tranq shot was an 8 second CD single shot dispel so a bit hard to compare hunter dispel to spellsteal in WOTLK.
Depends on the expansion. In Cata it actually played exactly like RMP which is around the time where hunters started being compared to mages as every mage comp was then swappable with a hunter.
For sure on mages, although you’re exaggerating a bit on stats. Even full heroic geared hunters were sporting about 35-37% Crit with full Lethal Shots in the MM tree (5% to all ranged attacks). In a pvp set you had more like 27-30% and Improved Barrage gave you an extra 12% on Aimed Shot. That’s without factoring in that resilience reduced crit chance. On top of that Spriests/Locks (2/3 clothies at the time) were considered direct hard counters to MM hunters due to the nature of dots, and multiple defensive dispels. So really MM didn’t have a fantastic track record in arena against clothies back then.
In Cata/MoP Marksman very much was often directly compared to Mage, not because he’s saying the toolkit was identical, but in those expansions the specs had the exact same playstyle of turtling/pillaring between gos.
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Ok but HM debuff lasted 1m and SS is what 15s? It’s not exactly like you can interrupt, LoS, Feign Death an Inc Aimed + Chimera Combo like you can a shatter.
Aimed > Chimera > Arcane would blow out HP bars and we’re also talking about trapping so cleansing totem and dispel is irrelevent.
Again this is a weird argument to make, front loaded just means very little setup large burst thats almost unavoidable.
Shatter Combos are telegraphed and can be reflected/cc/interrupted etc
again idk why we’re arguing this.
Alas maybe its rose tinted glasses
Frontloaded damage is damage that doesn’t have to be setup. Almost half of the chimera shot damage happened 1-2 seconds after initial chimera shot hit due to Improved Stings. Keep in mind this was an expansion where rolling cleanse and cleansing totems ticking every 2 seconds existed. So much so you had to roll with a serpent to try to game the 50/50 cleanse chance.
Only damage of MM that was front loaded was Aimed/Arcane Shot.
I literally still play it. I’d provide a screenshot but I received a ban last time. Not trying to start a fight, I’m literally telling you in full heroic ICC gear it doesn’t come anywhere close to 65% even with the talents I just told you. Even in full PvE gear, you’ll get melted with it on. You had to wear resil set which had you rest at passive 27-30% depending on if you wore resil gems against certain cleaves, and/or were running 2x 1 handers for disarm chain as they had much less stats than the 2 hander.
Also know Khanitus, and his prot warrior Draek (Talked more with Draek though) and you’ll know they always played it as Survival on ladder as I had a lot of games against them and Loinclothz back in the day. Only saw him as MM on tourney realm and for a small handful of games.
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Somehow i posted my response as an edit over another post, weird.
Anyway maybe I’m jus old and senile thinking about crit % back then, but the main difference between the 2 classes was usually (to me anyway) Hunter had all these CD based instant and Oppressive damage/CC
especially when it came to Bad Manner being a stun on disorient DR that didn’t share CDs with other monkey pets
but Frost mage had subtler nuances in spammable CC, Shatter Combos, and soft CC with strong slows, frostbites, ice armor etc. Not as zergy as MM
I do remember Khan and ATC in general being played with Survival and even HLD just because the sustained was so strong alongside Long and Load being so reliable.
That and before it got nerfed TnT stun was more absurd than storm herald or Mace Spec
True, the rotation was nothing alike. However there’s a reason why in wows history Hunter/Mage, lock/spriest, rogue/WW, rogue/war have been in positions where people directly compare them with merit. Generally has nothing to do with damage style, but play style.
In certain expansions MM/Mage played almost exactly the same and fulfilled similar roles with very similar comps jungle/fmp, war/mage and KFC, thug/rmp etc. Cata is a perfect example even more so in damage style.
In wotlk absolutely. Not so much in cata and to a smaller extent in MoP. Shatters in WoTLK took good positioning and setup to prevent kills on water ele CD, and offensive/defensive purges.
During cata for example they made ele a perma pet (meant a massive increase in FoF procs) and super buffed ice lance to where it hit almost as hard as Chimera shot and they no longer had to frostbolt into a lance to delete you. This would be the same expansion that Mage was famous for that video where a guy was running around 3-4 shotting people with ice lance while playing with a steering wheel.
In that expansion mage/MM was completely interchangeable in almost all of their comps depending on what they faced, and was easy to do so because they positioned/played almost exactly the same while running the same strats.
So back to the original topic, Ryutiz wasn’t as far off base as you think when he made the comment about being like a mage. I don’t agree with the rotation being the same, but the playstyle certainly was and the community at large often noticed that when one was strong and the other was underpowered Hunters/mages commonly were replacements for each other depending on power level or the meta.
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Thanks for lesson (no shade)
Like I had no idea there was a mage playing WoW with a steering wheel.
Wotlk will always be my fav expac and usually my point of reference since after that the game jus lost its spark and I don’t remember much after it and becoming pretty casual.
Anyway I’ll hush up, GG
Bad manner was a disorient on stun DR, it’s the other way around and it broke on damage lol.
Hilariously broken but that was also only in S5, ATC wasn’t really played until at lest S7
Also realistically when you’re talking about hunter CC then - it was way more avoidable especially in WoTLK.
If you landed every trap as a hunter in WoTLK off CD your opponents were either awful or you were playing disgustingly good but usually it was a combination of both outplaying your opponents and them outplaying themselves. Realistically there were so many ways to avoid traps so if it was happening literally off CD someone had to be throwing - now you could safely cover and land every trap you went for if you were very very good and being really patient but then you’re not really landing it off CD either and still sacrificing a good amount for that.
Similar situation in Cata, just landing Monkey>Traps was a little bit more reliable because stun>trapping with full accuracy was much higher chance of landing than a scatter trap. (Basically if you had flawless aim you’d land the stun>traps always - although this would mean your opponents would try to shut you down in other ways and still had the tools to prevent that).
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Wow I forgot how much I loved this Glyph especially vs sprint in conjunction with old aspect of the cheetah.
…why was aspect of the cheetah ever changed?
Really why I can’t really enjoy ranged hunter anymore. The class isn’t at all what it used to be and might be one of the more pruned classes.
This was for wotlk yea
Well warlocks weren’t really that popular in s5 honestly, HLD became more prevalent past s6. But S5 was just DK Hunter with TNT stun and it was pretty busted
Ya conc trap worked in Cata when you had the conc shot glyph that made it so that people were exactly 50% slowed (basically countering any sprints to make sure you stayed at that movespeed). It depended on the healer you were fighting but you definitely could do it too. It required creativity to get off and you had to not be telegraphed either.
I’m interested in what you think about stuff like readiness (5m cooldown, resets turtle, exhil, cheetah) coming back in place of rangers finesse, and binding swapping places with trailblazer. Aside from scatter to disorient and base (which I know your stance on), I think those are two big things that might help a lot with the general kit.