Community Council discussion on Hunter design

People were hyping up the changes to Coordinated Assault. I do appreciate them making it an interesting cooldown rather than just a blatant clone of Bestial Wrath… but I don’t think it saves SV like a lot of people now think. The rotation is still dead outside of CA and it seems like what Blizzard intends is for SV single target to take both Coordinated Assault and extend the window as long as possible before it runs out and then it’s time for Spearhead. So basically SV will be alternating between the 2 cooldowns and trying to stay in them as long as possible because with neither cooldown active the rotation, and perhaps the damage output, is dead.

I mean… it’s unique… but as we see often “unique” doesn’t automatically mean “good”.

Also their rework to CA makes it revolve around Wildfire Bomb. It seems that once again despite them trying to make SV all about “beast companionship” (and pretending that isn’t just blatantly stealing BM’s identity) they’re drifting towards making Wildfire Bomb the centre of the universe for SV. This begs the question: why keep it melee when the melee part of the identity is continually sidelined? People get pissy with me for calling melee a handicap for SV but it seems even Blizzard views it that way to some extent. Their design for the spec seems to sideline and minimise the melee part of it. So why keep it melee?

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Yea. I agree. People have been blowing up CA’s changes.
Why?
Its a on-use cd with some bomb cdr based on your pet. Thats it. No +dmg, +haste, nothing. Honestly, its EXTREMELY WEAK.

I notice hoe blizz is pushing that playstyle as well, and if thats the case, ill sit the hunter or just play bm/mm. Ive played frost mage too and their playstyle is 100% the same as what they are trying to do with surv and trust me, it sucks. Everyone is like oooo ooo when they push those windows up but as soon as boss does something and that window drops, their dps drops like a rock and you end up on the bottom.

Im a bomb supporter, as well as a rsv supporter, but if we cant get rsv, we might as well have bombs. The MS playstyle died out a long time ago.

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I concur, this sums it up pretty good.

Hunters are just in an awful state with how the change into talent trees look at the moment and while there have been improvements its just so far from enough I am starting to get a bit worried. They make these very small changes each week and ignore glaring issues. Class tree and SV tree being the worst by far. SV tree is by far and large the worst in the game.

I’d also recommend you give feedback on the alpha thread. I’m honestly not sure they pay much attention to anything else atm.

Welcome back Watermist, hope you can get some good points home to Blizzard.

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To be honest, I was too. Then I saw that there are 3 more classes that havent been implemented yet and so there is still time. From there, if we take a look at the layouts of the different classes talent trees we can see some competing ideas in how they function. Take the new warrior talent trees. There are very distinct (literally spread out) different pathways that have easy to navigate routes for different roles. When you look at the hunter trees and druid trees, we see far less distinction and they look more like Talent webs than they are Talent Trees. That makes me believe 1 of 2 things.

  1. Blizzard is furiously working on the trees doing multiple things. They are reframing talent trees, adding/removing nodes so that there is less of a margin between different classes (Feral Druid has 33 nodes, Shadow Priest has 42?), and processing feedback to parse out the constructive and do-able suggestions. I am more hopeful that this is the case.

or…

  1. Blizzard is doing classic blizzard and they are going to send an unfinished product again and we will have to suffer with classes that are obviously limping into Dragoflight for the next 2 years.

Lets hope and pray for the first option.

Ok I’m not going to read all of that huge wall of text (I stopped reading the moment you mentionned ‘melee’), but you should stop pretending there was such a huge difference between the specs that it would be impossible to fit in MM. Only 2 damage buttons were mechanically different. Sure playing it felt different, but that’s exactly what the DF talent tree should be for : gameplay options.

I think the MM talent tree is our best opportunity (=most likely) at getting the Black Arrow + ES gameplay back as an option.

I am a bit worried that every single other class has been released in a better state than the hunter specs are now, even after several weeks of changes.

And all the most recent classes like warrior, paladin and shaman just look freaking amazing, to say the least. So no, I am still worried because I will not be surprised when they have all classes released in the next two or three weeks and will simply move on to finish up alpha and then move on to beta for a while before it’s time for prepatch etc.
And we all know how much iteration/changes Blizzard do during Beta… that’s right, near to nothing! It’s all about balancing, tuning and marketing then. So I am worried, because after 1 month (and god knows how many months before the reveal) of work and the class and Sv trees are still tremendously bad.

But what can we do but keep giving feedback and cross our fingers? Just as before.

Edit: I want to make it clear that I don’t think it’s from a lack of communication or dedication. Nimox have been responding for sure and they are all probably working hard. It just seems that whoever (Nimox?) is designing the talent trees for Hunter just is not interested in the class at all. Just look at what the same person managed with Shamans. It’s a lack of interest and passion for hunters that is giving us this crappy result.

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Getting behind the good changes that have been put forward from the community, commenting liking sharing, it will get back to them eventually. Just hopefully not before it is too late. I dont think we realize how easy it is to get the devs to see our points. When they see a hundred likes on a post and a hundred comments all saying they agree I would wager they look into the feasibility of making that suggestion a reality. Sadly we arent that cooperative here in the Hunter Forums. But if we were… man… who knows…

I’ll use warrior as an example since it was just released but, look at their talents…it’s not perfect but whoever was in charge of the DF class design knows what abilities felt good/are good to use and brought them back. Hunter needs that. (Titan’s thunder felt good to use in Legion) Also…unless I missed it, most warrior abilities are 1 pointers.

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In a perfect world BM should have a melee/ranged playstyle added into their tree - it shouldnt be that hard as BM has always had a simple rotation/spellbook (kindof until they added in all the zookeeper buttons to press), MM should be og MM, and surv the og rsv to seperate; I want this so bad. This would alleviate all needs for archer niche archetypes within wow/fantasy gameplay, because as it stands we only have one class that uses ranged weapons… (really no need for another class for ranged spec, hunter should be able to accommodate all niches)

As it stands now the trees need alot of clean up, would like to see some flow within the talent trees, atm it seems like a mess with too many points in nodes that lead to weird places, getting better though

I wish blizzard would focus on this, id actually come back for an expansion where it was fun to play the class playstyles people would want from a hunter class.

Most my comments are copium for devs to halfass add in more and to add something new to the hunter class, which needs “organization and consolidation within the specs” and some new abilities for once maybe. I just dont think at this time the devs have enough time to make this happen, prove us wrong blizzard please.

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Its SUBSTANTIALLY obvious the difference between war/sham/rogue and mage/hunter/druid. The former trees have identity, structure, and direction, the latter trees have ZERO of it.

Surv is the worst of all of em, even feral.

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Ahhhh, I look forward to rsv crying threads for years to come.

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Actually,
If blizz would have implemented rsv this time around it would have been better. No more dealing with the ReXxAr wannabes taking up resources, no more of this stealing from other specs, no more of trying to manipulate useless capstones to make them work.
Instead, they would have had a very singular and base spec to work from. ES, BA, SS, CS, and KS. No more KC bullcrap. No more stuffing KS crap down our throats. No more on-use cds. From there they could thematically and mechanically direct the tree into aoe, cleave, and st builds that fit the identity and ‘meat’ of the spec.
These all can culminate into multiple new, refreshing, POWERFUL capstones at the end of the tree. No more recycled fury that has no synergy with bombs, no more CA that has been manipulated beyond comprehension and STILL isnt worth a dang without birds of prey. None of our tree being overtaken by worthless KC talents, dead talents that increase focus or have a CHANCE to apply SS, or worse, 4% crit.

So, yes, i think blizz not inacting rsv for DF is probably the WORST decisions they have made so far.

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Well that’s just too bad, I guess the crying threads are here to stay.

They would have always been around though, most rsv crybabies are some of the most broken record entitled people on these forums. Cry on!

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How are they entitled crybabies?

Blizz ripped their spec fr them years ago. Thats the opposite of entitled.

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Just when we were having good discussion… Take it to personal messages or just drop it entirely. If you arent here to be part of the solution at least stop being part of the problem.

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Agreed. We all obviously love the hunter class. Theres no sense in bashing on each other. If you agree with somebody’s ideas feel free to say so and expand on them. Add your input on what you like and add in your own thoughts.

If you dont like somebody’s feedback just ignore it and post your own ideas. Theres no reason to post why somebody else is wrong or why you dont like what they have to say.

The discussion is a lot more productive without all the bickering.

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because clearly they want a melee spec that isn’t as badly affected by downtime (compare to other melee specs like arms/fury/enh that get cucked hard by long/forced downtime)

Sounds like they want a ranged spec then.

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I’ll admit, rsv was pretty badass back then. Keeping dots up, old explosive shot, old lock and load, black arrow mechanics, the sound and gun graphic popping out, talenting into stronger traps (loved the root from snake trap, though steal trap is basically the same now), Serpent spread from multi shot was also really satisfying lol.

Never really thought about it until now. Msv is a little wonky with literal grenades exploding next to your ear, carve not being as satisfying in the rotation, sv only being able to use a staff/polearm doesn’t feel right and lastly interesting that hunters is the only Ranged physical class in the game and the only class that uses Ranged weapons and they decide they needed another melee spec yet oddly enough it has been slowly but surely reverting back to Ranged since it’s conception lol

I know it may seem like it but I’m not trying to hate on msv or want rsv back, tbh it is fun at times but I clearly remember playing it back then and how satisfying it was to how it has evolved since it’s conception and never really feeling like, “OK this is pretty badass” . I play every class btw, cept balance and I like the majority of them for one reason or another.

Let me ask you, @Bepples, Have you ever watched Denaik 3? It was such a good pvp movie lol

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“How are they entitled??? They only whine about something from 5 years ago!!!”