Most of the complaints I’ve seen focused mostly on Wind Serpent. It would have made more sense to me to just increase the cooldown of Lightning Breath and put a maximum range on Eyes of the Beast, rather than go through the trouble of implementing a page of nerfs for things people rarely talked about.
If instant KO is a problem, perhaps consider changing a few abilities to percentage-based damage, or capping the maximum damage (basically the same thing, I suppose).
If pet is still “too good”, maybe diversify their defenses, like tanky pets (lots of armor for mitigation), nimble pets (low armor and high dodge), and resistant pets (low health and armor, but more magic resistant). This gives them sort of a paper/rock/scissor effect for how they deal with enemy players, and make them more situational so you would have to swap them in and out depending on what you want to do, rather than just having your one preferred pet do everything. It might kind of already be this way, but there’s not a whole lot of reason to switch pets around except for a few examples (like Turtle if you really want to tank a dungeon or something). The differences should be more severe.
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Anyway it requires devs to understand the class. But they don’t.
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A 150-180 damage spell is never going to 1 hit ko an equally geared player.
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Very simple, they have to massively increase the Lone Wolf rune damage increase. If hunters were doing the exact same DPS as they are now but without a pet, they might even be considered underpowered given they would be in 3rd to 4th place in raids AND that hunters are the only class with no other roles besides DPS.
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Lone wolf doesn’t work in any scenario other than raids without massive utility and mobility buffs as well as damage and the 20% lion stats.
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Simple PvP fix: Permanently reduce pet damage done to other players by 50%. If the pet is more than 45 yards away from its master, reduce its damage done by 95%.
Now the hunter has to actually do something to kill other players, and the pet still serves purpose by keeping ppl in combat and causing pushback.
Also apply this to Warlock demons if “fairness” becomes an issue.
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At this point I wish they would just remove LB so people have nothing to complain about. But I doubt they would stop crying on here over AI pets.
Yea while your at it, just nerf everyones total damage by 50%…this is an absolute trash take. Nerfing pet damage by 50% flat out is laughable. So you instead only want the pet to hit you for 30 damage? (my previous post stated just remove LB). Nah just remove LB, you’ll be fine against cats and raptors since they are pure melee.
Not to mention adding in “PvP modifiers” to appease cry babies on the forums is how Retail got so garbage.
Instead of this maybe rework Eyes of the beast to break at 45 yards? Ever think its Eyes of the beast you’re worried about and not the pet? Or make the pet disappear completely when it reaches a threshold of like 60 yards away.
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It wasn’t until SOD that I saw Eyes of the Beast as anything more than just a meme flavor ability. I suppose that also came with the increased pet damage because otherwise sacrificing your hunter abilities for not so great pet damage was just silly. And, of course, you rarely if ever see someone using it without a Wind Serpent, which points to one very specific problem that Blizzard has all but ignored for the sake of global nerfs that don’t really make much sense in the context of the problems.
But I’m also sure someone will come in here with a “ackshully, it was always super useful”.
Only way to fix it is to make the pet damage because of something the player did and not just load the AI with all the power. Looking at retail BM, there is an actual rotation that includes things like barbed shot that empower the pet as opposed to this classic version where you just take the runes and talents and press go kill button.
They should also look at doing more utility based pet abilities than just raw damage output. Looking at underutilized pets, they should look at things like wolves and buff them to be a comparable dps increase for a group of melee for example rather than just single target damage like a cat has.
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If you went this route, you would have to simplify the entire Hunter kit. In the past this may have worked, but now you have all the standard Hunter abilities, up to 3 extra rune abilities, and now whatever pet abilities that all need to be placed somewhere on your hot bar. I imagine this type of button inflation is why Blizzard started cutting down on all the different actions to just a few in the later expansions, and this was before the extra 7 or so abilities that we get now in addition to everything else. This would, by far, make Hunter the most complicated and user intensive class.
Solution to that would be to have the runes replace abilities. Arcane shot becomes barbed shot etc…
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This is clever. I like it.
But the replacements need to actually deal damage. Not like explosive shot replacing arcane shot and dealing the same amount of damage.
Pet scaling shouldn’t have just been baseline. It should have been an added constant passive of taking Bestial Wrath or should have been what the Beast Mastery rune did. Getting pet scaling for free is silly. Too strong even with nerfs, turned entire class into BM, and is a big part of why they aren’t going to be capable of fixing lonewolf and why the other specs will remain discount.
Next phase BM talents put pets right back to where they were before this nerf and then some.
Unless they give lonewolf, the only thing mutually exclusive with pets, some actual unique stuff - its just going to be BM every phase.
Every new thing they add will just be more stuff stacked on top of the already-strong pet.
I think it’s probably reasonable to get into the mindset of keeping changes for SoD as isolated to runes as possible, and not making sweeping changes that would affect other flavors of Classic Era, i.e. Classic Era, Classic Era: Hardcore, as well.
Having said that, my personal opinion is probably relatively contrary to others, and would have been for the devs to say, “If you think hunters are OP in phase 1, then roll a hunter. Otherwise, deal with it. And if you have trouble finding yourself a raid spot in later phases, wishing you would have gotten exalted with WSG in phase 1 on a warrior and not a hunter, deal with that, too.”
As it is, they are creating a culture of players who know that the louder they complain, the more they will be catered to, and eventually the people who actually enjoy the game will just stop playing, because there’s too much noise.
That’s what I think personally, and perhaps I should just keep my opinions to myself or just walk away if I’m sick of all the complainers being the cultural normal.
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There was arguably nothing wrong with BM and it only affected Wind Serpent, considering that is the ONLY thing that ever came into the equation when people whined about it.
Proposed P1 hunter changes:
BM Rune - “Does not affect pets that use lightning breath”
I do think that less tolerating of complaining would be a more desirable norm to work towards, personally.
Upping the lvl cap not only helps fix hunters but helps fix every class a little more.
Buff master marksman to 10 and change sniper training to 3 seconds and hunters would be back where they are supposed to be and historically were at this level. Unreal to let the deep wounds bug to continue and rogues scaling that way already.
Buff Lone Wolf to 30% extra damage. Make Lion a base ability rather than a rune, because nothing else could ever hope to compete with it anyway, regardless of slot.
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