So according to Wowhead, Blizzard looked at each spec individually, picked out the “best trait,” and put it on every piece of armor in the new raid. Here’s what we got:
Beast Mastery: Dance of Death Marksmanship: Surging Shots Survival: Wilderness Survival
Well, one out of three ain’t bad, but if this is what Blizzard thinks are the best traits for MM and SV, then I guess it’s true: devs don’t play hunters, and if they do, all they play is BM (and can you blame them? Just about everybody plays a BM hunter).
From wowhead: “We’ve taken a look at the Ny’alotha Raid Azerite Armor, and it seems that Blizzard has attempted to hand-pick the best Azerite Trait for every spec”
It’s pretty clear this statement is from the wowhead folks who looked at the traits and felt they were overall a nice selection for most specs, there’s no actual insight on this being the case.
The traits are ‘nice,’ but nowhere close to optimal. So you want to stack Dance of Death, which is good for BM hunters. That’s good, the devs did their homework there because all they ever play for hunters is BM. Apparently, all they ever do is use sims and spreadsheets to figure out how good a class is going to be, so I looked over the sims for the traits.
Conventional wisdom (and sims) say that you never want more than one of Surging Shots since more traits won’t make the chance to resetting the CD on RF any better, and more Wilderness Survival won’t reduce the CD on the Wildfire Bomb any more. At best, you want one of thse, and for MM, Surging Shots isn’t worth giving up even a single stack of In the Rhythm, Unerring Vision, or Focused Fire. At that point, it’s a gameplay preference, not a performance issue.
As someone who has not played a hunter in the past 5 years and have no idea about how MM even works, it took me about 5 to 10 mins to go to wowhead, incyveins and Warcraft logs and figure out:
A MM hunter generally wants: 1 Focused Fire, 3x In The Rhythm, and 2x Unerring Vision. They can use 1 Surging Shots instead of In The Rhythm or Unerring Vision (I believe Surging Shots shine specially in AOE). There are a few more nuances like you can take 2 Focused Fire if you are lacking the others but it doesn’t stack too well, same for Surging Shots in AOE.
All this with me still don’t really understanding how MM works btw… I’m not sure if what I wrote is 100% accurate but I think it should be pretty close… My point? If they wanted to hand-pick the “Best” or more desired trait they could have easily done so.
Edit: All that said, I believe there’s good value in your feedback about how some of the hunter traits are underwhelming while other classes are seemly getting very nice ones, they should probably take a look at that.
It’s just not a great idea to start with accusations and speculative guesses that tend to divert the focus away from the valuable feedback which in this case is that the hunter traits indeed look underwhelming.
Nobody on the dev team has mained a hunter for years. They merely punch stuff into a spreadsheet and check the numbers without making sure that it’s actually fun to play, then plop out something that plays like a mage or rogue with a pet. Hence, the omission of ranged SV, taking Kill Shot off the ability list, the klunkiness of Vulnerability and the lack of traps for MM in Legion, the weirdness of Rapid Fire in BFA, the lackluster Mastery, the mind-boggling decision to prevent hunters from DPSing during Aspect of the Turtle, the awful talent choices that all but ensure that there’s only one build worth using, and thread after thread after thread after thread of how awful MM’s design and talent choices have been for the past four years simply because Blizzard won’t listen to people who actually play the class…do I need to go on?
Nothing they have ever done has ever dissuaded the forums from that opinion.
When they say they picked the best ones, it sounds more like they picked their personal favorites. It’s like they didn’t consult any guides or anyone who actually plays each spec.
I would have said it was a tough choice, but between Blur of Talons or Wildfire Cluster. Wilderness Survival would not even be considered.
When they say the best… doesnt mean its the one you stack nor does it say in which situation. Those 3 azerite are the best indeed, but at specific setups and content.
Just a show of hands, who’s even going to bother with 8.3 progression? I don’t mean to be flippant, but there it is.
@Holymonky That’s not a bad way to go. Keep 1 Surging Shots for the proc because any more than 1 won’t actually increase the proc rate(just the damage). Unerring Vision and In the Rhythm are the ones you’d want to stack to max. This is understanding how the traits work, and generally, you want your haste to go up as high as it can.
Surging Shots is really good at making Rapid Fire a better filler in the rotation. Rapid Fire’s cooldown is 20 sec, which is horrendous, and Steady Shots really don’t have much intrinsic value. At least for MM they’re astute in understanding that Rfire is good to use In between Ashot charges.
I would have preferred either Blur of Talons or Latent Poison as they are the only two traits for survival that you would ever triple stack. I think wilderness survival should just have the WFB cd reduction baked into survival baseline so they can just up the damage of wilderness survival to make it a competitive triple stack trait.
At one stack it gives the cd reduction, every other stack of wilderness survival is just bonus damage to mongoose bite/raptor strike, which do get me wrong isn’t the worse thing in the world but it certainly isn’t a trait that survival benefits from triple stacking, numbers wise as much as the others.