Ye agree, they dont need to introduce a new class with 3 ranged weapons dps specc, but i think they should give some focus for ranged weapons. Historically Hunters and the rest of the casters did function somewaht diffrent from each other playstyle wise so i just think its important to do a distinction between them and that just adding in more casters might not solve the issue.
I really think GW2 is a good example of diversity in themes from ranged weapons. You have guns, longbows, shortbows and rifles and all the classes uses them in entierly diffrent ways. You have your basic ranger with a longbow using rapid fires and volleys but then you can equip a shortbow and you are now more mobile and its all about flanking your enemy for extra bonuses. You can contrast that to Guardian dragon huntes using longbows to fire magical fire arrows to lock down and burn their targets while being more stationary. And you have theif deadeyes using rifles where thery can switch stances between casting on the move and kneeling down to become stationary but increases their dmg and range, they have all these options and much more it really feels like blizzard is falling behind in this department.
Ye sorry it was aimed more broadly to the community, it feels like melee idea for hunters just keep coming up and it feels like the ranged aspect keeps getting pushed to the side.
I also really wanted a melee hunter specc before legion, tho i didnt want it to replace any of the speccs that existed. But i cant help but feel some level of bitterness towards the general direction for hunters. Losing one ranged specc sucked but then also what happend to MM really turned the class i loved upside down.
Them making aimed shot stationary again just inched them closer to playing like casters instead of keeping their unique playstyle of being more mobile. And it feels worse now seeing mages get ice flows back, elemantal shamans gaining some nice mobility and evokers looking like they will also have some nice mobility while MM just keeps existing in this inbetween land of not playing like the old mobile hunters while also not commiting to the sniper marksman idea so its just feels like a caster with a bow.
its ok to range if you want that just should have the option to be melee too for BM same with SV with having range
marksman should have the pet still pretty much the core thing about hunterâŚ
not the main focus but pet can have more slows/ccs to help the marksman to set up big hits
One-sixth uptime of a single cast does not a caster make, and it feels good to have at least that degree of separation between ranged specs.
Consider: When Aimed Shot was an instant cast, Steady Shot couldnât be cast while moving, and it made up a significantly greater portion of uptime.
MM trades, very controllable and bankably, a small portion of mobility (at least, outside of Trueshot) for considerably more thus available burst. Those kinds of trade-offs are healthy for differentiating and adding feel and flavor to specs.
I agree variety is the spice of life and the 3 hunter speccs played way to similar in WoD so some rework had to happen, but i disagree with reducing the mobility on aimed shot. You have 9 dps speccs that are casters and need to some degree stand still to do dmg and then you have 3 ranged weapon speccs that have free movment, i absolutly think its the wrong descision to then make one of these specc less mobile since imo it reduces the variety, even more so when another of the 3 speccs gets removed. Now if Blizzard was having balancing issues and made all 3 speccs less mobile i could understand that but they kept BM with free movment so that wasnt the issue. And while its only aimed shot that is hinderd i still think its just feels bad since we have so much of our dmg tied down to that spell, last time i checked i think there was like 9 talent points just to improv aimed shot. And we are getting stuff like wailling arrow which will also be stationary.
I dont remeber the full history of hunters on top of my head but generaly they were always the most mobile while dpsing of the ranged speccs and as everyone was getting more mobile hunters started reaching their logical conclussioin. I think it was in cata they could start always casting steady shot on the move and then in MoP they also started casting aimed shot on the move with the Aimed shot glyph. So in MoP they reached the logical conclussion to have full free movment on the move. And in WoD MM got sniper training as a mastery that made gave them a 6s dmg buff if they stod still for 3s and in the last tier of HfC they got instant aimed shot as their set bonus but they still had castable on the move steady shots.
The problem i have with it is that it feels like a waste to move the specc closer to what the norm for what ranged speccs are. And it feels even worse when you see other speccs gaining back alot of their mobility aswell while you dont get it. There are ,amy ways to make a ranged weapon speccs and they should have diffrent playstyle and mobility like your example of GW2 deadeye but i really dont think they shouldâve done it with a specc that already played diffrent from the rest, and if they really wanted to do it they should instead go all in on the fantasy instead of just limiting one ability.
Sorry if this is a little ranty but i really think Blizzard made a mistake with moving MM closer to the norm and it really bothers me that they havent even added a talent for it. MM is one of the classes with the fewest nodes so there is more than enough room for a talent to give back mobility to the specc and there is even more room for more insperations from the diffrent itterations of MoP/WoD surivial and MM hunter and Legion MM hunter.
Only while under Aspect of the Fox, for which they had to give up the Ranged %AP bonus of Aspect of the (Dragon)Hawk. And by then Aimed Shot was a cast unless you had 5 stacks of Master Marksman (each stack reducing the normal 2.5s cast time by 0.5s), iirc.
Heck, originally Auto-shot itself had a cast time, forcing stop-and-go movement.
The only times Hunter has been truly limitlessly mobile has been
On BM/SV
when Steady Shot (A) could be cast on the move at no damage penalty
and (B) wasnât outcompeted by an immobile alternative (such as Focusing Shot).
Itâs primarily just been less and, more importantly, differently constrained than castersânot perfectly free. In a nutshell, while casters may bank their procs for upcoming periods of required mobility, Hunters (Marksmen) bank or rush their core casts around periods of ability to stay put.
MM is still night and day more mobile than your average caster unless youâre counting the damage loss of unimproved Scorch spam, etc., as nonetheless ânormalâ function.
Mastery: Sniper Training was a great idea poorly implemented. Had duration built and faded granularly, and generation speed scaled with Haste while fade speed remained flat, it would have been the best form of MM mastery weâve had.
In Cata we had Aspect of the Fox like Tanais outlined. We had that into MoP too until patch 5.1 which was just two months into the expansion (in fact that patch is 10 years old as of this November). Then they made Steady Shot and Cobra Shot (at the time BM and SVâs magic damage replacement of Steady Shot) mobile casts and removed Aspect of the Fox. They of course brought that back briefly in WoD as a raidwide mobility cooldown.
In WoD that Aimed Shot movement glyph was made baseline so Aimed Shot was a mobile cast even before the tier set in HFC.
I think itâs fine to have a more caster-like Hunter like MM⌠provided ranged SV still existed, which it doesnât. The whole point of SV and MM being separate ranged specs was that one was the more patient, slow-paced, bursty spec while the other was the more run-and-gun attritional damage spec. That and the thamtic difference of being a skilled sharpshooter v.s. a resourceful munitions expert. It was a solid paradigm even if it ended up with Marksmanship usually being less popular. And yes, contrary to popular belief, Marksmanship was usually the unpopular one, not Survival.
We know this is a paradigm that works because Warlocks do the same thing. While Demonology focuses on the prominent demon-centric aspects, Affliction and Destruction both use demons but focus largely on the Warlock itself and distinguish themselves on how they elaborate that; with Affliction focusing on attritional DoT damage and Destruction focusing on more hardcasted burst. So the argument that this isnât enough of a spec distinction when it comes to Hunter is just gaslighting.
In any case the reason MM gets so much pressure to be more mobile and resourceful is because we lost that with ranged SV. In our class preview in Legion they promised to bring in ranged Survival elements into MM for people who enjoyed that playstyle. As we know, they utterly failed to do that and they probably never had any real intention to do it or even an understanding of how to do it properly. We got a few watered-down and heavily-modified elements that interacted with nothing else while they continue to design MM as the slow-paced patient sniper as if ranged Survival still exists.
Iâd rather not redefine MM because it amounts to treading on eggshells around melee SV. Thatâs the real problem that needs to be addressed otherwise they will keep sinking untold amounts of time and effort tweaking and reworking SV every single expansion. Or worse, as we see in the current season, deliberately overtuning SV to ridiculous levels to bribe people to play it. Itâs an extremely negative influence on the class and the game as a whole.
This is accurate. For reference this started in patch 5.1 when Steady Shot and Cobra Shot could finally be cast while moving. BM has been fully mobile since then, SV was a fully mobile ranged spec from then until 7.0. You could also argue MM was fully mobile from 5.1 until WoD because you could glyph Aimed Shot to be castable while moving. That was made baseline in WoD but then we got Sniper Training.
There was Focusing Shot in WoD but the damage difference between that and Lone Wolf wasnât too large for SV.
I would argue this is true for before the tier set but not after. With the tier set and legendary, which is the only way to make MM a viable damage dealer right now, the spec is pretty immobile and spends most of its time casting. Now most of the time itâs a sizable damage penalty to move.
This is the main reason I really hate the current MM playstyle. This iteration was built around not having to cast Aimed Shot all the time. That was one of the main reasons they got rid of the Legion iteration. Having just 2 Aimed Shot charges allowed us to plan them around periods of movement and not lose damage. But this tier set and legendary just threw that out the window and weâre just Aimed Shot turrets now.
I donât see why it was poorly implemented. It was pretty easy to achieve close to 100% uptime even without those changes.
I think the reason they got rid of Sniper Training is because the DPS loss of ignoring it wasnât immediately obvious to the average player. When you move and canât cast Aimed Shot the loss in output is immediately obvious no matter what. However I knew people who considered Sniper Training not a big deal and mostly ignored it and ran around like a BM Hunter. Their damage would take a pretty sizable hit but itâs not so immediately noticeable just how much damage is being lost without looking at logs and comparing attempts.
Ye you are right about that, didnt play cata alot so miss remebered.
This is what i refered to when i said they have always been diffrent from other casters, since the other casters still had to be following the always be casting mantra original hunters had alot more leway to move between their dmg. Tho this only lasted until steady shot in TBC.
I think you could also add MoP MM to that list since i think their only limting factor was the powershot talent which i dont remeber when it was meta or not i only remeber suing it on single target in HfC but even then it was a stationary cast every 45s or something like that. I think focusing shot only existed in WoD i dont know if it ever was meta, i remeber that i wasnt using it in Highmaul, then switch to survival in BrF and then switch back to MM in HfC and i still wasnt using it, tho i might missremeber something here. But in general it is the MoP/WoD era where hunters generly reached their end point and had more or less full mobility.
Ye the issue i have with it is that they moved it closer to how the majorty of ranged speccs functions with out really achiving anything imo, it doesnt feel more like a marksmen than it did before but it does feel alot less fun.
Im always abit half and half on sniper training, i prefer it over what we have now but i also remeber having some irks with it.
I agree there are many fantasys for ranged weapons users and some will be more mobile than others. The bigger issues lies with almost removing reducing 3 speccs that functioned very diffrently from the rest of the speccs and only leaving us with 1 remaining, i really think it reduces playstyle diversity. But you are right if we still had survival this would not be an issue. marksmen make sense to be more immobile to aim for big hits but the issue i have is that it right now feels like its in a limbo, it doesnt feel like a marksmen but it also doesnt feel like the on the move can do hunter we ha din the past either. If anything i think legion came closer to the feeling with the feast famine playstyle you got with sidewinder. (tho hitting everything in the same dungeon as you made you feel more like a granate launcher than a sniper)
The diffrence in my opinion is that they all have to some degree hardcasting in their rotations while hunters genrally had avoided that for the last expansion. And since we had 9 speccs with hard casts and moving into legion we would have 2 without it feels wierd to give hardcast to one of the 2 speccs, but if they wanted to go down that path i think they shouldâve commited beter to it, i really dont think current MM really feels like any fantasy atmwhile losing alot of fun.
fully agree, and BM being very focused on their pets made it so that if you want any type of ranged weapon fantasy MM will be the specc that gets the focus on it.
I kinda half agree, i dont think there is much point to try and change MM drasticly atm but their tree absolutly have some room to change up aimed shot or steady shot to make it more intressting and give some chance to play it more like a old hunter, i prefer those kinda talents over all these % increases we currently have. But if we ever get more ranged weapon speccs i think it would be worth reworking MM again since i think it currently lacks identity since they dont seem to want to commit to really anything with it.
I wouldnât mind only if my NE could wear her NE warglaive but she canât so its a no from me. I still have to fake my W3 sentinel look. Or maybe I would be range but throwing Warglaive instead of arrow