ST: the nerf to Basilisk Collar is felt. To min/max damage, you will have to pay a lot more attention to using cobra shot and taking advantage of CS stacks (Serpebtine Rhythm) during damage windows.
AoE: there are some improvements but things will have to tuned better or just plain fixed. So starting off with the good, Black Arrow dot spreads well with Hunter’s Prey. Like really well. In larger pulls, Shadow Surge feeds on that dot spread and its basically free damage available every 6 sec. This synergy feels really good.
Now to the bad. The other Dark Ranger talents are remarkably underwhelming. Bleak Powder was stealth nerfed so it only occurs on the initial BA application and not on the cleave. So now instead of being a moderate amount of damage especially in the CotW window it is rather paltry. In the same vein, the Dark Hounds proc does not appear to be triggered by the BA dot. Whether this is a bug or not is anyone’s guess but it makes their damage contribution in AoE fairly meh.
And now the ugly. The cleave range for BA/Hunters Prey is wicked large and doesn’t currently respect combat status. If this doesn’t get fixed, the “Hunter pulled AGAIN” meme will become default true.
TLDR: BM ST changes add some complexity to the rotation and will need to tuned better to offset the BC nerf. BM AoE is markedly better but not great. In the DR tree, there is some nice synergy with some talents (BA/HP/SS) but not with others (BP/DH).
Had someone today in general saying if Im doing tank damage on aoe I am troll that they pull 1.1 million dps as a bm hunter. I just don’t see how that is possible unless they are blowing every cool down and it peaks that high maybe but it’s definitely not sustained
I don’t M+ because toxic and no guild, but I can get to about 1.1mil at current ilvl w/CDs, and definitely cannot sustain it over a long period - maybe a minute and a half to 2 mins tops.
Maybe if they are significantly higher ilvl? Don’t know about that though.
I can show you logs of bm hunters holding that and more. Those bm hunters are playing with coordinated groups though.
The bottom line is BM does better than tank level damage. It just does. That is a verifiable fact. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t need a LOT of help to catch up with other classes. The good news is they are working on it actively and the main culprit, Basilisk Collar, is being tuned.
Ophelianee is one of the top rated BM hunters in the world. The overall in a recent Grim Batol 10 run had the Ret Paladin at 2.47B, a Frost Mage at 1.77B and the BM hunter at 1.57B. The Warrior tank was at 1.18B. So clearly a BM hunter can do better than tank level damage overall but it is still not a favorable comparison is it? The number two rated BM hunter in the world beaten soundly by the 1968th ranked frost mage isn’t an aberration either. Log after log has the same outcome with BM hunters just not functioning well in M+. Unfortunately, as you go up in level, they become more of a liability until the spec is unplayable (hence why no BM hunter has done above an 11 this season).
Oh as a side note, if you look at the log from pull to pull in the instance, about a 1/3 of the time Ophelianee was either equal to the tank or below the tank in damage done. In burst windows with CoTW and in the ST portions, the hunter was well ahead of the tank which is why the overall came out as it did, but if you are like me and run Details up pull to pull you can easily see where the misperception of BM hunters doing tank level damage comes into play.
Part of the issue is that compared to how BM is played on average, doing AoE in dungeons has significantly higher mechanical complexity which also hurts it.
Overall 0.5 patch changes are looking good and while it’s not ideal, i doubt we’re going to get anything prior to it.
(Still don’t think BM is good, but you can time 11s even as top dps in group)
You kind of left off some pertinent information in these two cases to make your point which I think is (and please correct me if I am wrong) that BM is competitive if played correctly? Case in point, in the top graph, the hunter Moowae who you state was consistently above the tank (although let’s be honest there are points there that are a little sus) was also the PI target 11 times and benefitted from the fact one of the other DPS died 3 times. In your bottom example, you have Ratdestroyer the 268th ranked BM hunter in the world where he absolutely went off the rails in damage done. While you did point out he had an Aug assist, you failed to point out the other DPS died 4 times in the run which really skews damage output especially when you have an Aug in the group. So bottom line, you can always find exceptions if you look hard enough but…
Number of MM hunters to successfully complete a 10 or 11 key-- 12,056; number of BM hunter’s to complete the same level – 731. ( Or if you really want to push the meta data to the ugly somewhat unreliable extreme: # of MM hunters to successfully complete a 12 key–44; #of BM hunters same level-- 2)
TLDR Under certain conditions (PI target, Aug buff, other DPS are dead) BM hunter’s can look pretty good but it is an illusion. Despite being one of the most heavily played specs in the game it has one of the lowest representations at competitive key levels. Or in the immortal words of Azotharion, “BM in M+ is bad.”
Actually that is my point. Sorry I wasn’t clear. People that would normally do competitive keys as BM can’t do them because of how they are currently tuned so they have switched to other specs/classes/roles.
While this might be true, there’s nothing wrong with wanting BM to be more competitive. Ideally multiple DPS specs for the same class should be close enough to leave the option there, even for the “competitive” folks.
Your point is that BM Hunter don’t need to be properly balanced because 0,01% of the player base play all three specs… Who are you to talk about “good points” bro? LMAO…
It’s not really ?
Looking at 2nd log we can see that you can time keys even when bm (which we all agree is not good) is the top dps.
This also means that BM is fully capable of doing 12s.
People who normally do competitive keys normally do it as the competitive spec.
If you’re going for reasonably high top scores, you’re playing best spec, be it 40 or 14% ahead simply because it’s better and you’re actually pushing content.
This is the case for every single class (esp when the spec swap is this easy w/o the need for fully diff trinkets/weapons)
As an example : there are 202 frost dks and 23 unholy at 12+
Are unholy DKs that absolutely bad ? No, it’s simply that frost is better.
There are 44 balance druids and 1 feral.
There will always be extreme swings when one spec performs better in a class, and very much more so when it’s that easy to swap specs.
