I think my main issue with the generic hunter tree is that you are heavly pushed to pick the right side of the tree as MM. And the right side of the tree is mostly a massive button bloat. So if you wanna AOE as MM you mught end up with explosive shot, barrage, volley and trick shot, these abilities barley interact and feels more like stackong cake upon cake.
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I like the Hunter class tree design a lot. There are some individual talents with issues (Imp Exhil, Fogged Crystal, Binding Shackles, Scare Beast, Nesingwary’s) but I have zero problem with the base concept. I like that I can tailor my utility to the encounter, or take all the actives at the expense of some sustain/DR/movement.
Maybe it feels worse for SV because you kinda have to take the pet talents in the bottom left?
Keep in mind that something like Barrage is EXCELLENT for stacking up Bullseye quickly during the execute phase of an encounter, Volley automatically grants Trick Shots for the duration, and Explosive Shot is a strong ability in its own right that is replacing a Multi-Shot GCD. It does add a number of buttons, but I feel they all have their place.
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Oh ye they all provied something im just afraid thar it will end up feeling more like mash all your buttons instead of developing the aoe rotation into something intressting
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I would agree with this, yes.
To a certain degree, I guess it depends on how you look at it, what your goals are. But in the sense that it doesn’t really bring back anything particularly interesting from the past, or anything new for that matter, I agree.
Having said that, I haven’t looked at other class trees in detail, so I can’t really fully compare it to those.
Hmm, not really.
Why is Fogged Crystal bad? It’s obviously not a mandatory pick for most end-game content in general, but these trees aren’t exclusively designed for end-game. The point is that it’s meant for solo play + niche situations in e.g. Why is this a bad thing?
While I’ve mentioned plenty of things in the OP that I’d like for to be changed/“fixed”, in regards to the BM tree, I am excited about Call of the Wild, along with the talent Kill Cleave that allows Kill Command to benefit from Beast Cleave. Those are definitely good additions to the spec.
Many other things, such as how they’ve removed the CDR on BW and put it in a separate talent, + how they’ve removed one baseline charge of Barbed Shot and put that in as a separate talent as well, such things I’m definitely not happy about.
If they made the following changes to the class tree, I would be pretty happy about where it’d end up:
- Aspect of the Fox has been added in the place where we can currently find Counter Shot, to allow for the class to bring some additional utility, other than Primal Rage(which isn’t exactly a massive perk in group-based content). A lot of other classes/specs are getting additional raid/group utility, and atm, I think hunters are the only ones left out in this department.
- Tar Trap has been taken out of the tree, the intent is that it should be given to us as a baseline ability, when we level up. Same as it works currently with Freezing Trap.
- Improved Exhilaration has been moved out to take the position of the placeholder node they mentioned in the post, the one they wanted to be about utility(where Scare Beast was previously placed).
- Misdirection + Fogged Crystal have both been moved one row to the left, to where Tar Trap and Improved Exhilaration was previously placed.
- Counter Shot has been moved down one row, to where Misdirection was previously placed. To make room for Aspect of the Fox.
- Wailing Arrow has been added below the new position of Counter Shot. Again, I would prefer it to be about the utility(silence effect), not damage.
- The new position of Scare Beast, is as a tangent node that extends out from the choice node for Scatter Shot/Binding Shot. I think that would be much more useful for any scenario where you would find value in picking Scare Beast.
I know @Adreaver is content with keeping Wailing Arrow as part of the BM/MM trees, but tbh, I find that this would be a really odd way to go about things. IMO, there’s no reason to have Wailing Arrow as part of either of the spec trees.
Correct me if I’m wrong here but, is there any situation where you’d pick Wailing Arrow for the damage(over what other choices there are in either of the trees), or do you pick it primarily because of the utility of the silence effect, and the damage it deals is mostly just a bonus? Add to that the fact that, as the devs have outright said, the intention is that SV should be able to use all available abilities in the class tree, even when using a melee weapon, the exception might be Barrage. That’s one more reason for why it makes no logical sense to put it in talent trees tied to individual specializations.
If you look at Hi-Explosive Trap, it currently says that, when triggered, it deals ~57% of your AP as Fire damage, and it’s on a 40 sec CD. That’s not something you’d pick because of the damage. They can just reduce the amount of damage that Wailing Arrow deals, so that people wouldn’t be heavily motivated to pick it “just because it deals damage”, but first and foremost because you’d want to make use of the silence-effect.
Add to this the fact that AoE silences aren’t a very common type of utility/perk amongst all the classes, so if we would have Wailing Arrow as part of the class tree, that would make the class as a whole more desirable. Again, IMO.
Edit:
I suppose that if people really want Wailing Arrow to also deal a decent amount of damage, you could instead move it to the class tree, and place it as a capstone tangent node that extends downwards from Master Marksman, near the bottom of the tree. It would be positioned between the choice node for Chakrams/Death Chakram and Explosive Shot.
It’s bad in the context of being largely wasted points in terms of moving around the tree at level cap for PvE or PvP.
It’s fine as a leveling or soloing talent. For a general purpose talent I’d rather it give the Hunter DR.
New post in the Hunter alpha topic: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/feedback-hunters/1279513/63
The next build to alpha will have some pretty substantial changes for the hunter talent trees. Many talent nodes have had their position shuffled around, as well as connections, so this won’t be an exact list of what specific talent node moved to what new position and what it connects to. Some of this may be redundant information with previous posts:
Baseline Changes:
- Mend Pet has been bumped up from 35% of Pet’s HP over its duration, to 50% of pet’s HP.
Class Tree:
- The placeholder Agility % node has been replaced with an Avoidance node.
- Improved Exhilaration (the pet healing) is now part of the baseline Exhilaration ability. This has been replaced with Rejuvenating Winds.
- Viper’s Venom in the choice node after Serpent Sting has been replaced with Hydra’s Bite.
- Binding Shackles is planned to work with any combination of Scatter Shot, Explosive Trap, Binding Shot, and Intimidation. This should make sense with the new tree layout.
Beast Mastery
- Dire Pack has been redesigned. Every X Dire Beasts summoned now resets the cooldown of Kill Command, and reduces the cooldown and Focus Cost of Kill Command for a duration.
- New talent added that increases the duration and damage of any Dire Beast summon.
Marksmanship:
- Steady Focus values lowered to 4/8%, rather than 7/15%.
- Hunter’s Knowledge and Focused Aim now boost Rapid Fire damage and crit chance in addition to Aimed Shot.
- Salvo has been renamed to Bombardment and redesigned - Arcane Shots increases the damage of your next Multi-Shot by X%, stacking up to 4 times.
- Explosive Ricochet renamed to Salvo, and design adjusted. Multi-Shot now also shoots Explosive Shot at up to 2 targets hit. This can only occur once every 45 sec.
- Killer Ricochet renamed and redesigned, is now Razor Fragments - When Trick Shots fades or is consumed, your next Kill Shot does X% more damage, and causes up to 5 targets to bleed for Y% of the damage dealt over 6 sec. This node comes right after Deathblow , which may be in a different position in the tree now.
- Bursting Shot and Quick Load are no longer a dependency for any talent node on the tree.
Survival
- Terms of Engagement and Improved Harpoon talents have been combined and now only requires 1 talent point total.
- Several abilities reduced to 1 or 2 total points, down from 2 or 3 total points.
- Precision Removed
- Frenzy Strikes now also applies its cooldown reduction to Flanking Strike.
- Note: there’s an issue where this talent will incorrectly be able to be obtained by a prior node without the Butchery/Carve node, this connection will be removed in a future update.
- Wildfire Infusions - Volatile Bomb has been adjusted because Serpent Sting is no longer a baseline, guaranteed to have ability. This bomb will continue to deal bonus damage to a target affected by Serpent Sting, and will also apply Serpent Sting to some number of targets it hits.
- Viper’s Venom is now in the survival talent tree with a redesign. Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite have a chance to apply Serpent Sting to your target.
- New Talent - Ranger - Increases the damage of Steady Shot, Kill Shot, Explosive Shot, and Serpent Sting.
- New Talent - Intense Focus - increases focus generated by Kill Command
- New Talent - Ruthless Marauder - Fury of the Eagle has a 15% increased critical strike chance against targets below 20% health, and Fury of the Eagle critical strikes reduce the cooldown of Wildfire Bomb and Flanking Strike by 0.5 sec.
- The critical strike chance and cooldown reduction values go up per rank, the 20% HP threshold does not change.
This is a lot to parse, and things above are not final. Thanks for the discussions so far, we appreciate it.
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Say what now
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I guess we’ll find out on Tuesday what it actually means
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In short, this. As I suspected.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/en/wow/t/feedback-hunters/1279513/67
The MM changes sounds cool, just really whish they would give aimed shot on the move QQ.
I diselike the dire beast focus in the tree, i think its a cool option for people that like the playstyle but i prefer the feeling of me and my animal companion fighting not me and my zoo. Just hope there will be viable builds they play less with the zoo theme.
The ranger talent in survival sounds intressting, but i have no idea how it will play out. Please dont give me false hope for old survival blizz. Im not ready to get hurt again.
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Aww rip. There goes my dreams
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Presumably, I would say that they’re doing this to distinguish between BM and SV. As apparently, SV is now the “beast companion guy”.
See my previous reply, above yours. They have no intentions of making a RSV subspec within SV.
Ye i saw </3. My biggest issue with survival taking BMs place as the animal companion specc is that its thematicly all over the place. I dont feel like anything when playing it. I wanted melee hunter for such a long time but ever since we got it i have never been able to get in to it.
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Reserving Total Judgment until I see the actual tree but…
There are the buffs to Fury of the Eagle ABSOLUTELY NO ONE WAS ASKING FOR.
Holy hell. Give us an actual useable ability. Lacerate or Caltrops would be such a God send over discount fists of fury.
Serpent Sting is now a passive so now we really are basically a 3 button rotation. We will probably lose the application damage too so theres a subtle dps loss if thats true.
Also spamming KC less because we get more focus per cast is a win HOWEVER, it degrades the value of pet damage talent points and KC damage talents because there will be less KC overall now. Nice.
Someone reiterate that into the Alpha feedback for me please.
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Looking at what was said in the post, regarding class changes and BM.
The next build to alpha will have some pretty substantial changes for the hunter talent trees. Many talent nodes have had their position shuffled around, as well as connections, so this won’t be an exact list of what specific talent node moved to what new position and what it connects to.
Will be interesting to see how they re-structure the class tree.
Baseline Changes:
- Mend Pet has been bumped up from 35% of Pet’s HP over its duration, to 50% of pet’s HP.
Sure, why not.
Class Tree:
- The placeholder Agility % node has been replaced with an Avoidance node.
Okay. Again, will depend on placement with the new layout/structure. Probably won’t be enough though as Avoidance just helps with AoE damage taken.
- Improved Exhilaration (the pet healing) is now part of the baseline Exhilaration ability. This has been replaced with Rejuvenating Winds.
Good change. Still far from enough though, considering how bad hunter survivability is in e.g. content.
- Viper’s Venom in the choice node after Serpent Sting has been replaced with Hydra’s Bite.
Interesting for sure. Might make it worth going for Serpent Sting + Hydra’s Bite. Will depend on tuning ofc.
- Binding Shackles is planned to work with any combination of Scatter Shot, Explosive Trap, Binding Shot, and Intimidation. This should make sense with the new tree layout.
Better than before, but still very situational. And still fairly worthless in a group-based PvE setting. At least in terms of our own survivability.
Beast Mastery
- Dire Pack has been redesigned. Every X Dire Beasts summoned now resets the cooldown of Kill Command, and reduces the cooldown and Focus Cost of Kill Command for a duration.
- New talent added that increases the duration and damage of any Dire Beast summon.
Okay. Wonder what will be done with Dire Command. That talent at 3 ranks, while it will have some nice synergy with these, those 3 points should ideally be reduced by at least 1.
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Regarding issues with hunter survivability
Taking another look at the changes they announced just the other day. Specifically, what they said about replacing Improved Exhilaration with Rejuvenating Wind(Endurance Conduit from SL).
- Improved Exhilaration (the pet healing) is now part of the baseline Exhilaration ability. This has been replaced with Rejuvenating Wind.
Looking at the tooltip of that conduit, it reads like this:
Rejuvenating Wind
Exhilaration heals you for an additional 10.0% of your maximum health over 8 sec.
Accounting for my own hunter, based on the average 5min simulation, with optimal play, I’d spend around 18 Focus/sec. With that in mind, based on that I’ve also taken the talent Natural Mending(2/2) which reduces the remaining cooldown of Exhilaration by 1 sec for every 12 Focus I spend, I would reduce the remaining CD of Exhil by an additional 1.5 sec, on top of the regular cooldown count. In short, this equates to how the cooldown of Exhil is reduced by a total of 2.5sec for every second that passes.
With a base CD of 2min for Exhilaration, this would mean that it will be back off CD after about 48 seconds, again with optimal usage/Focus spending. In reality, it will probably be closer to every 55-60sec.
Where am I going with this?
Well. What if they add this talent – Rejuvenating Wind, but they also add a small damage reduction effect to it, let’s say 15-20% DR, for the duration of the Rejuvenating Wind(8 sec)?
The tooltip of the talent could read:
Rejuvenating Wind
Exhilaration heals you for an additional 5/10% of your maximum health over 8 sec.While you’re under the effect of Rejuvenating Wind, you also take 10/20% less damage.
This would basically provide us with a discount Barkskin, every minute or so, assuming that we’ve also talented into Natural Mending 2/2. If we haven’t, it would instead be every 2min, which was the base duration of Exhilaration.
I can’t post this feedback on the alpha forums as I don’t have access, but if this sounds decent enough, feel free to forward this post, or it’s contents.
Heck, I would even suggest that they make it into a choice node.
Choice node, pick one of the following talents
[Rejuvenating Wind] - Exhilaration heals you for an additional 20% of your maximum health over 8 sec.
While you’re under the effect of Rejuvenating Wind you also take 20% less damage.
[Deterrence] - Instant - 10 sec duration - 2.5 min cooldown
Reduces all damage taken by 40% for 10 sec.
I don’t know how it really will pan out and I know its alpha but feeling a little
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We need to keep in mind some of these changes, such as the binding shackle change affects more than just a M+ or raid. Many pvp and that is a decent change towards that.
I could also see it working in M+ on packs if tuned correctly.
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I mean neat theorycrafting for sure but I just have one issue with it. I don’t like that we’d have to use our Healing ability (retroactive healing that should be used after taking damage) as a preemptive damage reduction spell.
It would feel bad however you use it. Either you use it for DR and “waste” the healing or you use it to heal some damage you’ve taken but potentially waste the DR. I’d rather they just bring back some old hunter love with Deterrence and make it a DR ability. Don’t think it’s too much to ask for one heal, one DR ability and then the turtle as a immunity ability. Then we’d be in a much better spot.
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Yep, I know. That’s why I made a point of mentioning it in the context of a group-based PvE setting. Not saying that it would have no use at all there, just more situational than not.
Well, who says that the heal should only be used retroactively? I frequently use Exhil during mythic progression to make sure I’m topped off before windows of large amounts of incoming damage.
As it looks so far, we will gain more than twice the benefit from Natural Mending, compared to what it’s like on live right now(where for BM it requires 30 Focus spent for 1 sec CDR, and for MM/SV it’s every 20 Focus spent). Again, in the new talent tree, it’s a 2 rank talent that says “every 25/12 Focus spent = 1 sec CDR”. Even as a base improvement, that’s a fairly significant one.
Obviously it wouldn’t completely negate any potential scenario where you’d have to make a choice, but even so, again, compared to what it’s like now in SL, it would be a heck of an improvement.