Community Council discussion on Hunter design

Classes Hunter
791

WRONG!

It is well known across the wow community that hunters have the worst class and spec trees, by far, hands down. We are not even out of Alpha and pretty much everyone knows it. I have heard from multiple people in different guilds that their hunters are thinking of rerolling just bc of how bad the trees are.

Anyone who compares the hunter/rogue generic trees, and any rogue spec tree/surv tree will overwhelmingly proclaim that the rogue trees are far superior to the hunter trees. Pretty sure you can thank the bad dev and alpha testers for that little bit of feedback i suppose.

792

Bring Back Titanstrike Titans Thunder spell but with a new visual cause it doesnt fit BM now but it was a nice spell.

And Thunderslash passive

793

your brain is cooked and running worse than a 15 years old Land Rover.

2 Likes
794

I’m surprised they didn’t somehow incorporate Thunderslash as a node choice with the new AotW.

795

I think they just said. Titanstrike was fitting Hati beeing Thorrim pet as lore so lets discard all that was linked to that even if it has good passive/ability.

Titan Thunder would be really good with the Kill Command/summon build

796

Nope. Straight shooting facts. Just bc your a white knighter claiming they are amazing doesnt mean they are.

797

I feel like this is being overcomplicated.

The core issue is that Hunter has only 16 capstone points affecting throughput, across 11 nodes. They have only 11 points to spend.

For MM, 5 of those points are worthless, meaning there is zero choice in capstone expenditure beyond whether to take Injectors or Hydra, Explosive or Barrage. That is poor design.

For BM/SV, only two other active capstones can even be taken. And they have to pay 5 points just to get back a Level 15 talent crucial to their specs’ playflow. That is arguably even poorer design.

A typical BM build will have to spend 7 of its 11 capstone points on especially dull talents (+10% KC damage, +6% pet damage, +15% crit damage as Bleed). A typical MM build need only take 4.

That is terrible.

There are reasons, of course, to treat active capstones as packages/bundles. One does not spend a point to buy Alpha. They spend 5 points to buy Alpha, +10% KC damage, and +6% pet damage.

An MM does not spend 1 point to buy Steel Trap or even 3 points to buy NTA + Steel Trap. They spend 7 points to buy 4% crit, Explosive/Barrage, Death Chakrams/Stampede, NTA, and Steel Trap.

There is a problem with all that, though, when the amount of actual gameplay-improvement one has access to is so much lower for one bundle or “package deal” than another. And that is absolutely the case for the talents pathing to Alpha no matter where you put them in the entry, mid, or capstone tier.

Is that really something BM would necessarily want, though, in terms of gameplay? Remember, raw resultant damage can be granted through anywhere, by any means. Gameplay should be the foremost point of event-adding talents.

Cobra Senses is decently fun. Killer Cobra is decently fun. But are self-resets really something we want to make obligatory for BM by putting it in the class tree (in the same sense as SFP being made obligatory for Priest or formerly Rend being made obligatory for all specs of Warrior) instead of leaving it up to player choice?

I’d far rather have choice in that. Just as I’d rather be able to choose between Legion (MB as Focus-free procs) and BfA style (KC resets) Focus conservation. If you put it on the class tree, though, that becomes far more awkward to pull off, as it then constrains pathing and choice among utility talents or forces one’s would-be choice of paths / bundles in the capstone tier.

I don’t see why that would be the case. Hell, I’d be fine with there being not a single dull throughput talent (the likes of Beastmaster, Improved KC, Keen Eyesight, or Master Marksman—absent of interaction for all but SV) in the whole tree and having 6 more points of interesting utility.

This.

Ultimately, it comes down to the number of discrete choices from which the specs of a given class could maximize their attractiveness for the greatest number of players. That’s going to have far less to do with whether a talent is “utility” or “throughput” as simply whether the given node holds gameplay interest and whether its upstream and downstream is sufficiently point-efficient to be a real choice. But, as players will typically feel obliged to favor throughput over utility, and at differing weights per content, that “effective point-efficiency” is all the harder to balance when you force choices between utility and throughput instead of just different forms of, separately, utility or different forms of throughput.

3 Likes
798

Agreed. And agreed as well with your point about the packages. Especially now that they’re adding some passive throughput (hopefully into the bottom third, as discussed), I would like to see some of the total package cost reduced.

Before, if the package cost was reduced, we’d end up just taking all the active buttons. Before they cut the branch from Explosive Shot to Death Chakram, you could take KI/AP, LPI/HB, Barrage/ES, and DC/Stampede. As you point out, for MM, you’d substitute KI/AP for yet another active button in Steel Trap. So reducing the package cost would have led to a design where you’d have too many active abilities no matter what – and amazingly, not very interactive active abilities at that! Stampede, ES, Barrage and really even Death Chakram, are basically press on cd, and really Death Chakram is the only one that has an impact on your other abilities. We need more nodes like LPI and KI/AP because they don’t introduce active abilities, but do introduce the ability to choose a slightly tweaked playstyle – and I’m glad that seems to be a little bit of what we’re getting with Serrated Shots and Artic Bola.

Now that these passive throughput options are being implemented, reducing the package cost makes sense because you’re no longer forcing players to gobble up every active ability – we can choose to take passive throughput options instead.

I hope that we see either a removal of one of Improved Kill Command or Beast Master, or that their cost is reduced to 1.

2 Likes
799

Which is problematic… why?

Literally every spec does this already just by forcing a different pre-purchased R1 talent.

The link meanwhile, says of the Class Tree points changed between specs that “Keeping that distinction is important.” That’s hardly a crushing condemnation of having made those distinctions.

But… it is. To the very same extent as Enhance or Fury or Protection or Demonology or Frost or Arcane or Guardian.

Is it heresy that Frost, Fire, and Holy have a ranged AoEs while Arcane, Shadow, and Discipline instead use melee AoEs? Does that suddenly divorce them from being Mages or Priests?

And that remains: Beast Cleave for BM, Trick Shots for MM, Frenzied Strikes for SV.

  • BM was untouched.
  • MM replaced MS crits refunding some Focus cost and improving MS damage briefly with an actually integral mechanic.
  • SV replaced MS maintaining basically passive DoT damage with, CDR to their rotational CD and main CD.

Why are older, duller versions of each so ‘inherently better’ to you?

And let’s not forget that at that same time, the specs likewise changed functionality and/or access to baseline abilities. MM, for instance, did not even have access to Arcane Shot in WoD.

…To which end you want to go back to where they all played far more similarly, shared talents, shared all but up to 4 skills (Steady or Cobra or Focusing Shot, Aimed or Explosive or KC; Rapid Fire or Bestial Wrath)?

Why this insistence that Hunter should start off bloated, solely add to (never adjust) the base skills (not that this was true even pre-Legion), and add relatively little depth in going into each spec?

5 Likes
800

So you want to not only remove talents but also prevent throughput nodes in the middle section? The capstones are already DOA, why would you want to make things worse?

801

Can we stop pretending that every ability’s power is not entirely subject first and foremost to baseline tuning (which isn’t necessarily even class-wide, but is instead often spec-specific, even for shared skills)?

Or would you be happier if we nerfed all your skills only to give that power back over throughput talents that then deny you utility nodes?

We do not need X number of throughput nodes in the Class Tree for player power. We could have none and each spec could still be overpowered. It depends simply on the resultant power, whether it be given directly or was multiplied additively across seven different talent point per skill.

The whole point of switching back to a higher number of nodes (up to some 90 in total, rather than 7) and interconnecting them is to offer a sense of progression yes, but also—and more importantly—choice.

What nodes we get in the Class tree should be whatever optimizes player choice, as to make Hunter’s specs as broadly and deeply attractive to players as is possible with the current bank of effects we have now and whatever more the devs can come up with.

They’re not. You take as many of them as you can. In MM, you literally take 11 out of 12 of the non-BM/SV-specific points. The remaining single point, btw, is the Sentinel buff (utility).

2 Likes
802

Yes. For the several reasons I’ve already outlined above.

This is objectively wrong.

“Worse” is subjective. I don’t agree with the proposition that taking out boring, flat % damage buffs to Kill Command, in favor of allowing us to take more interesting throughput increases like Bolas and Serrated Shots is “worse.” I believe it’s much, much better.

2 Likes
803

Tbh as say BM, i think buffing KC which scales with a number of our talents & mastery, feels better than a random AP proc on cobra shot (that also doesn’t scale with our mastery)

At the end of the day Bolas are not reactive in any way, you just randomly passively do a bit more damage, so I wouldn’t call it exactly “interesting”.

804

I never said anything was wrong with utility, however, considering I examined every generic tree across all the classes and hunter is the only one that doesn’t provide throughput in the second section Why must the class be limited to utility only relatable to limited groups of players?

Here, I will clarify what you just said. You basically said Blizz has a number that dictates how much power a spec has, and either we can have 20 talents that equal up to that number or 5 talents.

First off, that number changes in accordance with tuning as they have to balance around the output of all the other classes, not just its own. Second, hunter capstones are extremely limited to the quality and significance of their playstyles and are often subjected to spec talent changes. This was seen most recently when they buffed BM but nerfed surv through the nerf in the generic tree to make up for the bm buff. Three, not all the throughput nodes fit all the specs. MM cant take pet talents and wont take SS talents. BM takes pet talents but wont take SS, surv wont take chak but will take pets and SS. no one wants the traps.
In other words, you ONLY get 11 points in bottom third which means you can have 11, or 16, or 30 talents in the bottom 3rd and it doesnt matter. So why limit hunters to a handful of crappy talents when you can provide them with a plethora of talents to provide choice?

1 Like
805

Well, your very inaccurate in your findings. At most, you sound paranoid that others wont take utility when you want to.

This is objectively right when you compare their significance to other capstones in other classes.

Well, its not like blizz is pushing out talents that provide synergy AND interesting gameplay so we are forced to approve baseline damage multipliers because thats how we get our dps.

806

That’s fair. It’s like wind arrows for MM. I think the snare on the Bolas are enough to make it more interesting than a flat damage increase to an ability. But I take the point—it’s not amazingly more interesting.

807

What on earth are you on about? I asked how Blizzard could tune a class that could spend anywhere from 11-20 points on throughput in the class tree. How that gets interpreted as paranoia is beyond me.

1 Like
808

I am responding to your comments on why there shouldnt be throughput in the middle section

809

Yes.

There are two ends of balance: internal and external.

Internal balance is the domain of when certain selections meant to be choices are so overpowered or underpowered compared to the others that they do not actually form choices. In which case, the underpowered choices get buffed and the overpowered choices get nerfed until they again act as actual choices for an increasingly large span of players (e.g., PvPers, raiders, M+ers, up to the LFR players, +5ers/NRs, the +12ers/HRs, the +20ers/MRs, etc.).

External is when the devs look at the warcraftlogs for a given tier, see one spec see it underperforming (or overperforming) nearly everyone else even when the fights (do not) favor it, go “Oops,” and slap an aura buff (or nerf) on it.

It will not matter to Blizzard whether a given spent 30 of its Class Tree points on throughput or only 3.

If it is, by their judgment, overperforming or underperforming (which is always a matter compared to all other specs in the same role, regardless of their class) generally, they will simply slap an aura buff/nerf on the spec.

If it is overperforming or underperforming under certain damage profiles only, they will slap aura buffs/nerfs on all the spec’s main contributors to the profile at issue.

It’s not a matter of “limiting”. It’s a matter of cohesion, choice, and the talents themselves.

It’s not the choice to put Improved Kill Command in the capstone tier that made it a terrible talent. It’s the fact that it does nothing but increase KC damage by 5% per point despite KC being a basically spec-specific skill.

Nor does putting all throughput in the capstone tier mean that the majority of the capstone points have to be stuff as dull as Improved Kill Command.

But, seriously… What exactly are you hoping to see here? Bestial Wrath, Dire Beast, Trueshot, Razor Fragments, Wildfire Bomb, Precise Shots, etc., all in the Class Tree?

We’d be far more likely to get synergy if people stopped asking for hefty throughput in the class trees.

We’d be far more likely to get more interesting gameplay-affecting talent if people stopped asking for raw throughput damage or stat multipliers.

…No one has argued for or against this, only that capstone talents are frequently balanced only against each other as not to feel lackluster per point. As such, if you throw a bunch of utility into the capstone tier alongside highly effective throughput, no one doing Normal or higher raids is likely to take that utility unless it can significantly help cheese a particular fight (which just brings in more concerns as it promotes talent-swapping on a fight-by-fight basis).

Perhaps that won’t affect you, but it will affect a large span of players, for whom those effects are now effectively barred from use, unable to be given through tier sets, PvP talents, potions, more pathable talents, or any other means.

2 Likes
810
  1. I find the synergy verse throughput argument wrong. Synergy provides funner gameplay while also producing throughput. Pure throughput is just damage. TBH, blizz had all the freaking chances in the world to create fun synergy in the trees before they released them. They didn’t do it. Thats not on the community, thats on blizz.
  2. Well thats where they went wrong. By balancing the capstones against each other, it only prevents for solid capstones. So if 2 out of 4 of the capstones are crap, blizz is going to nerf the other two so they are all on the same level. That just brings the capstones (as a whole) lower on a class level, and dont stand against other classes capstones.
  3. I wasnt talking throwing utility in the bottom 3rd, I was saying why didnt blizz provide 4 capstones with 3 or so talents in each “group” that are new, strong and viable for all the specs? They did it with other classes. Instead, we got what I like to call “normal” spells like SS, ES, predator as capstones that dont work across the specs and are not significant at all. Thats the core of the issue with hunter capstones. They are not “capstones”, they are basic shots that have almost no meaningful dps increase. Sure, SS or predator are increases, but NOTHING like WS or some of the other spells out there.
  4. Actually, I was hoping to see NONE OF THEM in the class tree. I was hoping to see SS, ES, Barrage, and the pet talents in the middle. I was hoping that I never had to see the traps again. I was hoping for WS instead of chakrums.