In Heroic CN, I’m always near the bottom in DPS, but last weekend, my guild and I did Firelands timewalking, and after equipping gear from 8.3 (cloak, neck, azerite gear and Ny’alotha trinkets) I was suddenly top damage on every fight.
That makes me wonder… was BM only strong last expac because of borrowed power? I was running 3x Dance of Death and my BiS essences and I feel like a lot of the damage was coming from there. BM legendaries right now are extremely underwhelming, and as a Venthyr, Flayed Shot is also pretty weak. Covenant abilities definitely need to be looked at, but is the main issue really the weak legendaries or is BM too weak baseline?
Pretty much yes. Primal Instincts/Dance Of Death/Rapid Reload were incredibly strong traits that carried BM through BFA.
The issue could easily be fixed through legendaries or conduits - eg Balance druid’s DPS is heavily reliant on their legendary. But at this point BM will have to wait for the next major patch to have any hope of being competitive.
If you want to play BM right now and perform even remotely decently you really can’t deviate from what’s best for BM. It’s max potential damage is hella low, but it’s floor for damage can be relatively high.
Don’t gimp yourself anymore than you already have by playing BM. Meaning be Night Fey, Play Soulforge Embers.
You’re right in the sense of BM gaining it’s power from the borrowed powers described but you are also comparing relatively optimal BFA BM hunter builds to a suboptimal Venthyr BM in SL, which does compound the issue.
You’re not wrong, but they really need to look at legendaries and covenant abilities so I think I’ll just suffer until they do something. I like venthyr too much to switch and I refuse to use that clunky legendary, lol.
BM might be at the bottom of the dps charts, but if you’re doing damage below tanks then you’re doing something wrong. It’s not that weak. My BM dps is only about 10% or 15% lower than my MM dps.
Kill Command being weak is definitely a big deal. The rotation makes no sense when the main spender does almost the same damage as the filler. BM Legendaries being trash is the other main reason BM is so weak. In theory Qa’pla should be a great legendary (it was awesome during Legion), but with Kill Command being so weak it’s actually worthless.
Your looking at it all wrong in ur mind you see bm as lowest damage on the meter. In my mind I just flip the meter upside down and I’m now in first place. 200iq
Like everyone said. Borrowed power AZ Traits and a 5% nerf going into SL.
But, looking over your logs, that MM hunter is always parsing 80ish. You’ll need to start parsing around 95% to get him (which sucks). You’re leaving a lot of dps on the table with green and blue parses. So ABC, always be casting. yadda yadda yadda
That’s not to say BM doesn’t need a buff because it most certainly does.
Go through logs and review the dps differences when looking at percentages. You’ll be amazed by how much more dps people can do with just improving a bit.
To put BM Hunters into perspective, this is how low we’ve gotten as one of the most popular specs. Only 1.5% of BM Hunters represent RDPS for +15 keys whereas MM Hunters shows a staggering 21.9% player representation for last weeks affixes. People who are saying BM Hunters are “fine” are 10000% delusional. Sure, at the end of BFA, we were kings and were until our demised nerf where MM Hunters reign supreme. In just PvE content, i.e. World Quests and other non-competitive content, we manage, but for competitive aspect for M+ or Raids, we’re still unrepresented, bottom of the barrel spec. I would love to feel at least worth of a specialization if and when Blizzard decideds to give us our much needed class tuning. Our Legendries suck, yes, Soulforge Embers is garbage. Fang’s is the better of the two. I’ve used both and both are 235 ilvl pieces. Fang’s is superior by far.
Blizzard knows what they need to do to enable BM Hunters to be viable, the question is when…after the MDI? They can’t hurt or mess up the “meta” comp rotation class by tuning (buffing) BM Hunters. You see MM Hunters represent in the MDI, but that’s on certain dungeons. Regardless, the MDI meta still stays the same majority of the time. Race to World First, 99.99% MM’s.
I agree. Our lack of proper cooldowns is also worth noting. When we were working on Heroic Sludgefist, the raid leader said to save cooldowns for the first pillar, but Bestial Wrath and Aspect of the Wild are so weak that it’s actually a dps loss to save them till the pillar. I pop both in my opener and still do less damage than the dps not popping any cooldowns. That’s not normal.
This. Definitely.
Yeah, it can’t really affect it when we’re not on there in the first place, lol.
To add to this again, I never realised just how close they are in damage. I’m looking at the tooltips right now. Cobra Shot does 1708 and Kill Command does 1788. Completely ridiculous.
Kill Command doesn’t scale with weapon damage, so it’s been getting comparatively weaker as you get more gear. The balance of damage worked during BfA, but now it’s no longer balanced properly.
Cobra Shot got massively buffed during Beta testing because Arcane Shot was stronger. Blizzard decided they didn’t want us to actually cast Arcane Shot at all (worst unpruning ever), so they buffed Cobra Shot to the point it’s always worse to cast Arcane Shot.
Maybe. Kill Command still has an advantage from talents, as both Killer Instincts and Animal Companion increase Kill Command damage.
However, if your mastery is low enough (and mastery is a bad stat for BM so that’s reasonable), I can see Cobra Shot eventually outdamaging Kill Command.
Arcane Shot deals arcane damage, which bypasses armor. Cobra Shot deals physical damage so armor reduces its damage roughly by a third or so. So if their base damage was similar, Arcane Shot would win by a lot. During Beta, Arcane Shot on my tooltips said around 600 while Cobra Shot was around 700, but Arcane Shot was actually dealing almost twice the damage as Cobra Shot. After buffing Cobra Shot, they also increased the focus cost of Arcane Shot, just to be safe.
That seems like a massive design flaw. If it ever gets to that point, Kill Command would be out of the rotation completely. I remember Kill Command used to hit much harder than everything else in the kit, so hitting it on cooldown was extremely important. I still have that habit, but it seems almost pointless now? Even Bestial Wrath and Aspect of the Wild can barely be called cooldowns anymore. We have all these buttons that are basically all the same thing.
Bestial Wrath is ok because the uptime is pretty high. Aspect of the Wild is the weak one, since it’s a 2 minute cooldown but it doesn’t feel like a 2 minute cooldown.
To me it seems pretty obvious that Blizzard didn’t put any effort on Hunters during the Shadowlands Beta. MM just got lucky to have decent dps for now, but it plays the same as it did in BfA. BM only got 3 new talents. Scent of Blood is fine, Spitting Cobra is trash and Bloodshed is pretty meh. Buffing Cobra Shot was incidental due to the screw-up with Arcane Shot. And that’s literally it. The rest is BfA BM but without Azerite or Essences (plus level squish). They didn’t even try.
With the exception of long, drawn out single target fights, I have little issue on my bm. I would never, ever run anything but night fae on a hunter, though.
Wild spirits is extremely strong. Everyone says the tar trap Lego is meme, but on non wild spirit trash pulls, it’s usually around 20pct dmg.
