I’m not even sure how to articulate my confusion without writing an outline. I’ve crabbed on here before about what we’ve got and where we’re going. However, the new trees are even more confounding to me. For example…
- Primary focus generation for SV is… KC? An optional ability in the class tree.
- SV still relies on a pet to generate focus because why?
- Many SV talents imply a symbiosis with your pet and increase damage for you and your pet, while many talents in the BM tree increase damage to your focus generator?
- The Spec defining ability is your first choice in the spec tree, and for BM that’s… a bleed and not, you know, something to do with beasts?
These are just a few things that are utterly confounding to me. I could write a more exhaustive list, but it would be more of the same theme. It feels like BM’s spec identity on paper doesn’t match its implementation (Hunter+Pet team), and SV just doesn’t have a spec identity outside of “Melee Hunter” - Hunter hit with stick! Hunter strong!
If they just replaced KC as survivals generation cd with Flanking Strike, the whole kit would make a lot more sense thematically. Also SV is the hunter x pet team, BM is the “hound master” spec
3 Likes
They gutted a bunch of Bm identity to throw into survival, including spirit bond and then instead of focusing on poisons, explosives and close quarters tactics they went hard into animal themed abilities. Even though i dunno how it makes sense to have an explosives expert in melee, with a sad fuzzy pet in the bomb path
In the meantime flanking strike, coordinated assault, raptor strike, mongoose bite, all animal themed abilities, with coordinated assault becoming even more of a pet+hunter style
Really wish focus fire would come back and they’d just lean more heavily into the hunter + pet thing for BM
7 Likes
The guerrilla fighter theme of 2 man team using hit and run tactics and improvised weapons and terrain knowledge to whittle down the enemy until they’re weak enough to finish off. Ranged dots and traps followed by the big ambush execute and out of hit range again really fast. We’ve even got a talent called Guerrilla Tactics
That theme right there is why i think KC needs to stay baseline for BM, and SV needs flanking strike instead as the focus generator. It makes more thematic and mechanic sense, and it’s (at least to me) a lot more fun and satisfying to press that button.
BM being the zoo keeper spec, throwing Crows, Stampede, having a second pet, and all that it just seems like the right fit
2 Likes
Beastmaster doesn’t mean best friend it just means the best tamer of many beasts and haveing so many beasts you don’t have a close bond. Survival is the ruffing it with your beast companion in the wilds spec aka camping with your best friend spec. At least thats how i see it now.
3 Likes
Yeah this is so weird. It’s almost like they revamped SV completely with the motivation that the old RSV was too similar to MM… but then had to remake BM into a zoo-keeper build (which since then have completely driven me away from the spec) because the new “melee” SV became too much like old BM… like what? Viewed in hindsight it’s a huge facepalm if you ask me. And since this, 6 years ago, Blizzard have yet to fix this problem they themselves created for “reasons”.
6 Likes
I disagree about the first part, because I don’t think that is what they are going for (it is a Part of it but not the whole part, which in itself is the problem Blizzard have with SV) and I personally really don’t like it and don’t think it plays well.
But I wholeheartedly agree that KC needs to go from the SV spec. It has nothing to do there and just feels so awkward as well, as a focus builder. I’d rather have smaller CD and/or charges to flanking strike and build focus from that.
3 Likes
But BM was never that until Legion, and even then, if you taleted Dire Frenzy (which was so popular they renamed it Barbed Shot and made it baseline), you had 1 strong pet (and Hati).
Since then, there have always been talent options to be a houndmaster type with many pets, but the baseline has consistently been single pet. Even in DF, you can still have that single strong pet by skipping Animal Companion, Dire Beast, Stampede, and Call of the Wild.
BMs thing has historically always been about the bond between Hunter and pet, which is why Spirit Bond was always a BM talent up until they deleted it from BM and made it MSV’s mastery.
SV can’t occupy that same niche without stepping heavily on BMs toes.
12 Likes
This forced separation of those concepts when BM has historically and arguably still does represent both is one of the most obnoxious and cancerous design directions for this class.
20 Likes
I’ve never seen a developer get the “ranged fighter with pet” archetype as wrong as blizzard has.
In every other game it’s a lay up for developers but for blizzard they keep finding new ways of making it worse.
6 Likes
I think Blizzard’s issue is they don’t want pets to be too high of a % of your total damage; they even memed on it in some April fool’s post around Nyalotha IIRC. It’s why BM has dropped hard in SL, most of the buffs BM has gotten haven’t even effected the pet damage either. They have been making the pets less of the focus but haven’t filled that gap with fun or meaningful gameplay; I really REALLY hate current cobra shot scaling which is a prime example of their lack of understanding what BM should be. Remember, cobra shot was only buffed to stop us from pressing arcane shot instead and that is a pretty major lack of focused design intention.
Heading into DF I don’t see this direction changing much either; the stable build on the right looks good but it’s again a couple steps from making the focus being on the pets. We have more talents in that tree buffing non-pet abilities than stuff directly tied to your pets. They even nerfed beast cleave % again and stomp is basically out of reach with where it is right now.
They need to focus on the pets again, not just the main one (plus AC) either. Let’s roll frenzy into dire beast and get rid of the bleed damage barbed shot idea. Let’s add an a real pet based AE ability and throw stomp in the bin, auto firing passives are boring.
Let’s give BM a reason to actually care about mastery; it wasn’t a stat I cared about in BfA and I hardly care about it in SL. Let’s make BM the master of all the beasts and allow pets to properly scale with secondaries, why doesn’t bite etc. scale with haste?
None of that will happen though because barbed shot is basically quarter to half the talent tree with cobra shot taking up another sizeable chunk of it.
1 Like
Why would it? Pet Focus generation scales with Haste, so you get more Bites. Why would you expect Haste to make it hot harder?
IMHO, Barbed shot should be SV’s focus generator and not frenzy your pet. It doesn’t make any sense that it’s BM’s deal. KC should be exclusive to BM either as a focus generator or the meat and potatoes “shot” like MM’s Aimed Shot. BM should use abilites that command animals to do your bidding, like a pheramone shot that attracts a bear to maul your target or a peanut butter shot that attracts a swarm of squirrels to slow and do quasi-tick damage (think snake trap.) Stuff like that.
Blizzard has the opportunity to clean up the absolute mess that is the Hunter class as a whole, but I feel like they’re going to squander it. Also, to add to my original confusion, why is MM’s second shot priority a machine gun when, thematically, they’re supposed to be the most sniper-like of the three?
I think it’s interesting that this mentality doesn’t seem to limit their design with other pet classes. Unholy can do amazing damage with their pet cds, and Demo and tyrant is all about legions of demons - both of these specs have powerful pets combined with heavy defensives and group utility, yet imagination when it comes to BM is essentially non existent.
It’s an imagination and social hangup for hunters that’s their major limitation right now more so than any actual gripe with actual in game function getting out of hand.
1 Like
Currently you don’t get more bites with more haste, your pet regens focus fast enough with no haste to keep bite on CD; however, you do get harder hitting bites more often with more haste. This scaling ends around 25% haste though as once you are around 25% haste your pet regens focus fast enough to never drop below 65 focus while keeping bite on CD. This also means at 25% haste AOTW focus regen is meaningless for the pet adding to why it’s a bad CD, though that is very very minor.
What I want is for Bite’s CD to scale with haste like Kill Command, Barbed Shot, and a ton of other abilities across the classes. I want more bites with more haste on top of the existing damage scaling and focus regen and I want AOTW to not become basically useless for the pet within the first two raid tiers.
Barbed shot shouldn’t be the focus generator…Cobra shot should be or drop it and use steady shot as the generator…make Dire Beast and stampede do more damage and drop animal companion …even if dire/stampede cost some focus…
1 Like
and they tried to say that all 3 hunter specs were too similar which is why they wanted to take sv in the melee direction when in fact all 3 ranged hunter specs were night and day from each other.
now they are literially trying to copy paste bm hunter into melee sv hunter. i am speechless with these decisions and direction that they are trying to take sv spec.
ranged survival was unique and polished it should of been left alone. i am talking about the 5.4 iteration.
if this was a loaded gun scenario where 1 of the specs no matter what HAD to go melee it should of been bm. the only 2 melee hunters in lore are both bm. and as a melee hunter you need a pet on top of you taking the brunt of the damage while you connect fuses and set traps for maximum carnage.
but instead some brilliant person working at blizzard said “hey, lets make survival melee because all 3 hunter specs are too similar” what an einstein, because now melee survival is going to be bm just melee from the looks of everything. so much for spec identity.
yes this bothers me.
9 Likes
https://forums.wow-petopia.com/viewtopic.php?p=630033#p630033
According to petopia, the problem isn’t that SV copied BM. It’s that they didn’t rework BM away from all the stuff SV copied. 
3 Likes
exactly. i will never wrap my head around a melee hunter. maybe if i wasnt a ranged survival die hard main back from mop to wod and had it taken away from me. but nevertheless. if they really wanted to stay true to the lore. the measly 2 npcs that are actually bm melee then they would of made bm the melee spec.
i have no interest in a melee hunter but a melee bm hunter is all i can see working. i dont think i would be as upset about this all the years later. just watching them do rework after rework. buff after buff. and still a dud.
i dont think they will ever make any changes. (one could hope) but i mean as a “beast master” the possibilities were endless. but they chose survival as the melee spec and there are basically no roads leading away from the fork they are stuck at with this decision.
1 Like
I feel Blizzard sort of put themselves in an odd position moving out of Legion and in to Shadowlands. The team verbalized this idea that they wanted to put less emphasis on spec identity and more on class identity. That is sort of a problem for classes like Warlock, Hunter, and Mage. All three of these classes are triple DPS spec. If you try to prop up class identity over spec identity which was there (original intention for SL) you start to loose what makes one of these three identify against the other two. I believe the team realized this which is why these changes really only impacted utility rather then core gameplay.
Now with the changes to the talent tree a spotlight has been placed on just how much spec identity some classes lost when they lost there artifacts. Instead of expanding talent rows Blizzard chopped up most specs and used Azerite traits as a bandage to fix the classes that got the short end of the stick.
I think Shadowlands showed just how bad some Hunter talents are. The lack of diverse synergies lead a number of those basic talents like Barrage and Murder of Crows to be just awful in almost every situation. I think Survival was the exception with more talents that synergized they actually had a couple distinctive play styles and rotational changes. There main problem was there balancing and the fact that they are melee and thus looking to take a melee spot in groups.
What I am getting at with all this is I believe the team is finally acknowledging the fact that Hunter has been in a bad spot for a while. I think the direction they are going also shows they don’t really know what to do or how to accomplish the kind of variety they want for the class and each individual spec.
3 Likes