It seems the developers have a sort of mental block on Hunter Class thematic design, which like you beautifully put, puts a strain on overall class cohesion. All Hunter specializations had Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, but also Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, etc. All Hunters could wield melee and ranged weapons at the same time.
There’s no logical reason that the ranged sidearm can’t perform the basics of shared class functionality barring a ranged auto-attack (yay less than ~5% total damage!) like Steady Shot, Multi-Shot, and Arcane Shot, but can somehow use Kill Shot and Explosive Shot? Strange…very strange design choices.
It’s like the reverse version of original hunter as in it prioritizes melee combat over range. Original hunters had melee capabilities, but they lack in damage and main purpose for them was to get out of melee.
Survival Hunters now uses melee combat as their main focus and have range attacks for when they have to move out of melee range.
However, every rework of Survival after Legion has cut back on melee and add more range abilities. If Blizzard continues to remake Survival in the future we could see it being a range spec again.
Oh, I did miss that word the first time around! Thank you for clarifying. I don’t quite agree with your perspective, but I appreciate you taking the time to clarify for me.
(As I said in my thread, people would disagree with me regarding my claim about the original Hunter. I just really appreciate that you’d go into detail! )
Tbh, I basically don’t agree with most of your post. This idea that devs have to design a class around the 20 year old initial class design is foolhardy. It leaves no space to do cool new things. Driving classes into new and interesting places makes the game better.
Pretty much blizzard is good at copying good game design and making it better. Id love it if they stole thing from GW2 and monster hunter and finale fantasy. In our universe hunters are masters of the bow and hunting spear but are also a jack of all trades when comes to exploiting there hunts weakness willing to learn just enough magic or engineering to get the job done so it leaves a wide umbrella on things the hunter could do realistically .
Can you make it so my hunter pet doesn’t die 3 times a game to aoe unpreventable dmg, god forbid they target the pet, its dying instantly and each spec heavily relies on it, its seriously not balanced at all with how often and fast they are dying, if there were statistics it would show how often these pets are dying each arena compared to any other expansion
Currently the conversation has gone away from Hunter identity some and more on hunter survivability and raid utility some the player base feels hunter doesn’t feel as playable as there alts and get annoyed they die at stuff other classes can handle easily. Myself including and now my hunter just benched for now and i have been playing Arms warrior more since the start of Dragonflight after getting a lvl boost.
Yes, I am aware of that and I addressed it in my introduction. I said that there’s already so many good threads and posts out there about the state that Hunters are in currently, and Blizzard should go look at them.
I decided to bring up the design now, because the devs are already starting to plan for and work on the next expansion — it’s already on the drawing board! So I want to, hopefully, get this thought into their heads… instead of this point getting brought up too late when they’ve already mostly decided on the Hunter design for the next expansion — which is in alpha. It’s been notoriously difficult getting devs to make some, let alone many, reversions to the Hunter design in alpha… this is because they’ve set their minds.
Hence, why I’m trying now when they’re starting to discuss this stuff internally.
Granted, I am guessing about the timeline. But it is public knowledge that Blizzard starts working on the next expansion — and start thinking up ideas for the expansion after that one — very early into the current expansion’s lifetime.
I did mention in the second half that I believe by setting up and sticking to a core, united identity for all 3 specs — and I used the classic Hunter as an example given the class talent tree in DF (pets, utility, and ranged abilities. True classic Hunter right there) — then it would enable Blizzard to build upwards and preserve all of the “forward progress” they’ve made.
I don’t hate the post-Legion MM, nor BM, and not even MSV. (Legion MM is a different story, but I disgress.) But rather, my point is that all 3 specs feels like separate classes — such that it’s not uncommon to see posters refer to Hunter specs as “SV class” or “BM class,” and so on!
Right now, there really isn’t a “core” Hunter identity. And I disagree with you… I don’t think it’s regressive to set up the classic Hunter as the base, because there’s nothing stopping Blizzard from adding flourishes through the specs.
Heck, look at the other classes. Blizzard returned to the classic identities for all of the pre-Legion classes, and then gave them a nice mixture of old and new toys in the spec trees. So Blizzard can do this.
I understand your concern about throwing out all the new stuff! That’s not what I’m suggesting, at all.
(Thank you for your feedback. It shows me that I need to clarify my position more clearly in my post.)
Sorry to intrude, but to toss in a couple pennies’ more thought on this particular matter:
Likewise, I think an insistence on shared core makes sense… but is also limiting if extended from available toolage to a set of design constraints.
Take Mage, for instance. Fire doesn’t have to use Frost as its sole means of CC, nor is Frost dependent on Fire for raw damage, nor either on Arcane for any sort of invested/ramped burst; heck, neither Frost nor Fire even use Arcane at all outside of the incredibly rare needs to move while already somehow in melee range and in a high-mob-count situation. Instead, those tools are available, yes, but not held as a limitation onto the other specs. I believe that’s a better approach than insisting on a shared core.
To me, MM should, of course, have access to pets, but there’s nothing wrong with it having alternate means to achieve the relevant benefits of having pets; if it could manage instead via arrows and traps knocking people back, Leech DoT shots, Distracting Shot, decoys, or whatever ways may better leverage its kit, so be it, so long as the pet option isn’t rendered unviable (so, no current Lone Wolf AoE shenanigans). All that should be essential to and required of MM is that it’s about marksmanship — about ranged weapon usage, which means also that MM must be capable of dealing its full damage potential from range.
The only spec that ought to be required to use pets, though, is Beast Mastery. For all others, it need only be an available option. And, there needn’t be any requirement that Beast Mastery have no advantages/tools that are locked behind occasionally going into melee range. Because it’s about Beast Mastery, not marksmanship. That element of marksmanship should be an available tool to BM, not a constraint on what else it is allowed.
Ahh, I think I see where we differ in how we interpret the idea of a shared core.
I’m not suggesting that one spec must use tools commonly identified with other specs (like a Fire mage using Frost spells). I’m coming more from the place of, “all 3 specs should have the same base toolkit” — capability to do full damage with a ranged weapon (aka no hidden auras nerfing ranged damage. Looking at ya, MSV) and have the kind of abilities that we find on the class tree.
I’m saying that a shared core should exist for the sake of thematic unity across all three specs, and that the shared core should be fully viable — in other words, SV shouldn’t be penalized for using ranged weapons and likewise BM and MM shouldn’t be penalized for wanting to use a single pet.
Your post seem to imply that you think I’m saying that MM should be forced to use pets, or that BM should be forced to use shots more often.
Again, I point to the class tree; we all can see that Blizzard designed the class tree with the themes of the classic Hunter — and yet, those three themes are not expressed, nor even fully viable, in any of the three specs.
That’s what I’m saying, too! I want the MM tree to be fully MM (hence why I keep saying to take RSV out of MM). I just don’t think that running a pet should render the MM hunters unviable. The same applies to all three specs — if the player wants to play the classic Hunter (ranged with a single pet), it should be viable.
I said “Blizzard could build upon this foundation.” That’s where Blizzard could put in all the uniqueness of each spec!
I’ll be honest, I’m not quite sure why you seem to think that I’m calling for forcing all three specs to use each other’s toolkits, nor to limit the spec designs. I’m just saying we need a shared core — in my opinion, Hunter is the only class that does not have a clear base identity. The other classes have a strong core identity.
If you could point out where my statements were unclear, leading you to think that I’m calling for each spec to be “forced” to use each other’s toolkits, I would appreciate that so I can edit my post! Because that is not my intention.
It’s not an either-or thing regarding class and spec identifies. It’s a spec builds off the class thing.
This is just euphemistic for the type of “tearing away basic features of the class” that we see with Survival. No, it’s not “new and interesting places” to take the ranged weapon away from a Hunter spec any more than it’s “new and interesting” to take Stealth away from a Rogue spec. It’s just manipulative language for pruning. Don’t piss on the roof and tell me it’s raining.
P.S. You’re here telling us that SV shouldn’t adhere to Classic-era design “constraints” while Allieddeath is here telling us that SV is an accurate and faithful represention of classic Hunters. You two should work that out amongst yourselves.
It is fun. It gives people choice to play a pet class as melee. Because you don’t like it doesn’t mean is bad.
Your comparison is not valid, because ranged weapon is not trade mark of hunter. If they took away pets, or some core hunter abilities, yea, maybe. But they just designed it to be a spear hunter.
It’s a choice that evidently isn’t compelling or interesting to many people, yet it replaced something that was compelling or interesting to many people.
When it comes to WoW the ranged weapon is absolutely the iconic attribute of the Hunter. They even had to tack it on to modern SV just to make it make sense.
You know full well that treating this like a “live and let live” matter where they gifted us something new and interesting at no cost doesn’t work. But dishonesty never stopped you. We’ll never forget how your first foray to this subforum went.
Again personal opinion that made numerous debates on forums with you about “class popularity” statement. Wich evidently you don’t want to admit knowing fully that you’re wrong . And here is I say again " A class popularity is determined by what buffs/utility it brings and how it performs"
Because it was originally design to be a marksman/sniper. To make it interesting they added tame pets option.
Okay… I don’t think I’m following you. So you claim that ranged is no longer a trademark of the Hunter, yet the icon refers to the original ranged Hunter… which is no longer relevant? Why not change the icon in that case, then? Because that just doesn’t make sense to me.
That still sounds like a slightly different priority to me (which is, again, perfectly fine), depending on the emphases.
To me, classes aren’t really a thing at the brass-tacks or rotational level, nor should they be so long as specs exist. We ultimately play specs, not classes, after all. Having shared elements between those specs can add (a different sort of) flavor, ease of learning, and efficiency in dev time / design, but is of no actual gameplay benefit over separately tailored tools.
I therefore consider the class more of the thematic intersection that houses various specs, rather than specs the way to build off just one of 3 shared elements of a class (since that leaves each spec less room to diversify itself or flesh itself out).
But that all can vary with interpretation of nebulous words, so a more concrete explanation might instead involve some… test points, so to speak?
Let’s consider Kill Command, for instance. I do not like that it is useless to MM (not even useful as a form of utility), so long as the class tree has so few nodes and such little pathing freedom.
If, however, it had at least some niche, even if just utility-ish, use for MM, and we had a better class tree, I wouldn’t mind that it’s a throughout talent for some and mere utility for others.
I would prefer that A Murder of Crows be on the class tree, and perhaps even Razor Fragments (with SV gaining some version of Deathblow), because AMoC had never felt specifically so BM to me and all specs feature Kill Shot, including ways to increase KS damage and/or frequency, so it then feels wasteful to allow that only on MM even if it doesn’t belong in the SV- or BM-specific trees.
And yet I don’t much care for Alpha Predator being on the class tree, in part because it overly delays access to it on BM and SV and would be of no use to MM (which would only, at most, use it for utility). Nor would I like to see, say, Bestial Wrath be on the class tree.
Some have suggested making traps or some aspects thereof unique to Survival, just because they used to be in the Survival section of our spell book. I’d have to vehemently disagree, as SV has instead taken on more of a Primal Hunter / Insurgent identity, rather than just trapping, escapes, and deterrence.
I feel any trap synergies ought to instead be broader (not only via traps, as not to require traps in particular), while everyone retains access to their utility… or, at the least any SV-only traps should be primarily damage-only and off in a corner of SV.
I dislike Kill Command having a different effect and purpose on SV despite having the same name, especially so long as MM has no use for KC. I’d rather their generator have a different name, Cobra Shot replace Arcane (as nature themes are more fitting anyways) and Raptor Strike automatically replace Cobra when one is in melee range with a melee weapon equipped (else Cobra is used, via hand-crossbow), and BM and SV each start their trees with their own versions of KC.
I hate that SV loses access to ranged skills. There’s no point to it; we can fire TNT-laden arrows from our dinky little crossbows, so why can’t we Steady Shot or Arcane Shot?
However, I don’t mind that SV offers relatively few bonuses to ranged attacks and that, say, any buffs to Arcane Shot (or Cobra Shot, if it comes to Replace ArS) would really just be utility (reducing the relative costs of downtime).
To me the shared core of Hunter is:
Access to pets, traps, and ranged attacks.
Versatility through choice of pet family (or “Affinity” if such were added to Lone Wolf).
Decently high utility in mob manipulation (be it by pets, traps, arrows, or other means).
Highest in-role degrees of relative uptime (lowest likelihood / degree of damage that would be lost to forced movement/positioning).
If I’m bringing a melee-Hunter, I expect it to have higher uptime than other melee (because they still have ranged attacks to fall back on — e.g., via pistol-bows). If I bring a caster-Hunter, I expect it to have higher uptime than other casters (because Aimed Shot’s on a CD instead of a spammable). If I bring BM, I (for now) expect it to be an uptime god. But, I have no issues with there being those different sub-roles it may fall into.
Anything else, I feel Hunter should be allowed to do whatever feels best for creating fun and diverse builds across its multiple specs.
Hunter is still primarily ranged. Even SV has ranged aspect. It’s just different flavor. They just focused on melee with SV design, because hunter started with melee weapon and had dedicated melee three.
Why they don’t change? Idk they changed warrior icon from shield to sword. 2 hunter specs still use ranged weapon that may be as well one reason
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