with SOTF in the class tree and the new last stand for tenacity pets that puts us miles ahead of where we were. If we get back a sensible passive dr instead of that dodge nonsense we’ll be a pretty solid position.
For raid utility we’re still in a rough spot, anything as niche as LOS has to be intentionally designed around otherwise it’s essentially pointless, not to mention how badly leech works as a defensive stat for BM hunters(it’d be ludicrous to have a raidwide defensive that doesnt benefit a spec that uses it is hilarious
Agreed. I think we’re in a much better spot defensively. It would be nice to get that Avoidance node back or some extra Leech, and it would be super nice to get Exhilaration off the GCD, but those are pretty minor requests.
As for raid utility, Nimox even acknowledged that Sentinel Owl is a very niche ability. It’s cool, but certainly not going to solve our lack of widely applicable utility.
I think an ability where we can give our pet passive to the raid for a short period would be fantastic—basically a Rally for Tenacity pets, raid-wide Leech for Ferocity pets, and Stampeding Roar for Cunning pets.
While this might be really strong, we’re honestly not stepping on too many toes—Warriors still have Battle Shout and Druids are getting Mark of the Wild back. The Leech would be a little unique, which is cool, not problematic.
For Marksmanship, I can see either giving them all three abilities with a shared cd, or the option to take Aspect of the Fox instead. On that note, it’d be great to have Aspect of the Fox or a raidwide Aspect of the Eagle for Survival-specifically.
It’s funny seeing people bemoaning that the talent trees are mostly talenting into stuff you get baseline now in Shadowlands. That’s pretty much what talent trees were before MoP and a big reason why they were replaced with talent tiers in the first place.
These trees look like a much better approach than the original talent trees but I’ll always be sceptical of them. I’m already seeing a lot of design challenges coming up that are largely avoided by the pre-Dragonflight design.
I cannot believe we don’t have an Aspect choice node in the tree. What a gigantic missed opportunity and one I hadn’t even thought of before reading this post. Now I must have this.
Too bad this idea won’t even be seen by our dev, what a shame.
A lot of interesting changes to go through, for sure!
Happy Friday, Hunters.
Several changes will be in your next build and we wanted to share what to expect. There are also several bug fixes, and some things that were previously marked NYI are now working.
Class Tree:
Survival Hunters: corrected a missing connection between Kill Command and Improved Mend Pet on the class tree.
Alpha Predator’s value has been lowered from 30%, to 15%.
Improved Traps now also lowers the cooldown of Hi-Explosive Trap.
Stampede now snares targets hit by 30%, and you and your pets gain 10% increased critical strike chance against targets hit by your Stampede.
Hunter’s Agility is once again Avoidance.
Camouflage no longer links directly to Improved Traps. The choice node below Survival of the Fittest now links to Born to be Wild.
New 2-point passive talent, Serrated Shots: Serpent Sting and your bleed damage is increased by 10/20% damage. This value increases to 20/40% against targets below 30% HP.
New 2-point passive talent: Arctic Bola - Aimed Shot/Cobra Shot/Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite have a chance to fling a bola out at your target that bounces 2/4 times and deals increased damage per point. Targets struck by the bola are snared by 20% for 3 sec.
Beast Mastery:
The top of the Beast Mastery tree has been shuffled around a bit, and now starts with Cobra Shot rather than Barbed Shot.
Barbed Shot damage has been increased by ~75% (this is unrelated to talents and just a change to the ability)
Loaded Quiver has been removed. Barbed Shot is now 2 charges always.
Barbed Wrath is now 1 point, down from 2. It no longer affects Aspect of the Wild.
Wild Call has been reduced to 1 rank.
Call of the Wild’s cooldown has been increased to 3 minutes.
The Bloody Frenzy that adjusted Barbed Shot Frenzy stack generation has been removed.
New 1-point talent: Brutal Companion. When Barbed Shot causes a 3rd stack of Frenzy, your pet automatically uses their special attack (Bite/Claw/Smack) with increased damage.
Aspect of the Wild has been redesigned.
Aspect of the Wild now fires a Cobra Shot at your target and another nearby target. While Aspect of the Wild is active, Cobra Shot’s Focus cost is reduced by 10, and each Cobra Shot fires a Second Cobra Shot at a nearby target.
New choice node below Aspect of the Wild:
Each temporary beast summoned reduces the cooldown of Aspect of the Wild by 5 sec.
Cobra Shot damage increased by 30% while Aspect of the Wild is active.
Several talents shifted around past the first gate due to the above changes, but the tree’s structure is very similar.
Marksmanship:
Dead Eye now also reduces the cooldown of Kill Shot.
Windrunner’s Guidance has been lowered to 25% critical strike damage bonus.
New choice node below Wailing Arrow:
Wailing Arrow resets the cooldown of Rapid Fire and grants a charge of Aimed Shot.
Wailing Arrow now fires 5 wind arrows at your primary target, and up to 10 split between any secondary targets.
Crack Shot lowered to a 1-point talent.
Calling the Shots and Eagletalon’s True Focus have swapped spots.
Survival
Coordinated Assault, Spearhead, and related talents should be working.
Explosive Expert tooltip updated, it has no interaction with Kill Shot and is just some cooldown reduction to Wildfire Bombs.
Birds of Prey has been redesigned. Kill Shot now strikes up to 3 extra targets while Coordinated Assault is active.
New choice node against Birds of Prey: Bombardier. The cooldown of Wildfire Bombs is reset when Coordinated Assault is activated, and when it fades.
Guerilla Tactics increases the initial damage of Wildfire Bombs by 50%, down from 100%.
Fury of the Eagle once again grants 50% critical strike chance against targets below 20% HP.
Ruthless Marauder increases the HP threshold for increases critical strikes by 5% per rank rather than increasing critical strike chance.
Thanks for the continued feedback and testing.
And yes, have a nice weekend everyone!
So the level 15 Survival Hunter talent in live is now better than the pinnacle talent in Dragonflight?
I would love to hear the logic behind that one.
Lol so its just another braindead talent. Got it.
Okay so…Middle line is now 2-3 target cleave.
So the perceived logic behind this is that they realized we now get bombs more often and so lets instead reduce the burst potential of bombs by lowering the initial damage boost to 50% for this talent
Is this going to make us want to pick FotE?
Seems like the logic right now (could be they are just behind in substantial changes) is they want to juice up the barebones talents they have now until we stop complaining that there is no actual choices or any defined playstyle anywhere around SV.
Some interesting and some concerning changes.
I like the inclusion of New ideas as that was missing before.
Sad to see Alpha Predator got nerfed Killer Instinct was never taken.
Interesting… If there is budget to acquire it. Tree was tight before no point node reductions made to Hunter tree. I rather prefer it to Killer Instinct.
Stampede snares targets OK Still dependent on hitting target so can still miss. Much preferred wave not line. Stamped and Bola snare will mess with Tanks Kiting and will aggravate our lack of spread AOE ability. We want stuff in tight.
Ok I guess
Trap stuff is good.
Still feels bad to have to Take Binding shackles even if you decide to take scatter shot as a route choice to Alpha Predator Hopefully a new route opens with Serrated Bolas Node.
BM tree.
We gained 3 points thru node point reductions in upper 2/3 of tree. Bloody Frenzy removal is No real impact as could never see it taken and it was end of path.
Turning Aspect of the Wild into a sort of long cooldown Chimera shot feels Kind of Strange… Not too many 2 target burst window fights Behaves similar to Havoc target doubling Chaos Bolt on Warlock. Chaos Bolt hits like a truck Cobra Nibbles in its current form.
Barbed shot Damage increase Good negates wanting to take Sharp Barbs.
Barbed shot 2 charge Good
Brutal companion Nice reward to Frenzy 3 stack.
OK i guess as New choice node carries the new AotW cooldown reduction.
New Choice node below AotW ?? Currently spot below is occupied by Barbed Wrath Node.
Wonder if its going to swap places with Call of the Wild and CotW will become the mentioned double choice Node
Each summoned beast Reduces cooldown on AotW Kind of lack luster without the extra beasts from Dire Pack build
Once again this is gated by Budget restrictions Nice it has the option to Boost Cobra shot damage by 30% complimentary with albeit limited applications with extra Cobra Shots from AotW
Anyhow Guess we have to wait and see what the above comment entails
The new version is… confusing. It is like they are trying to give us some better aoe and then thinking “OH we should also try to make there big CD windows feel better” but then they meshed them together and failed to do ether. Beast Cleaves duration is going to be brought back down from the enhanced cleave we are used to with our 4 set. That means more focus being spent on average to maintain Beast Cleave for AOE.
There is the possibility we make aoe builds that don’t take Beast cleave and rely on spells like explosive shot but with our master being the way it is I doubt Beast Cleave will be dropped from AOE unless we are consistently at a max of 3 targets. I don’t think it is an awful idea to convert focus generation to having all spells cost less focus BUT right now it is 10 focus on cobra shot. That means unless we have points in to things like Alpha predator you will just spam cobra shot during Aspect because it will do way more ST damage per focus spent (TBH that is a really bad idea for a CD) The only time I think that Aspect of the wild would be better is on a prolonged cleave fight like say Prototype Pantheon where you 2 target cleave for 70% or more of the fight.
The change to Aspect also affects how BM tends to scale early in an expansion. The large chunk of stats and resource regeneration for a burst window is very good when we are low on secondary stats and unable to generate the kind of resources we are able to once we are getting closer to heroic item level of the first season. This change has a negative impact on our sustained damage as we will more often be reasoning focus in preparation for our small burst windows using Bestial Wrath and Bloodshed.
I also want to quick mention the other new talent. TBH this talent kind of cements my belief that the people who are doing class deign for Hunter do not actually play BM.
New 1-point talent: Brutal Companion. When Barbed Shot causes a 3rd stack of Frenzy, your pet automatically uses their special attack (Bite/Claw/Smack) with increased damage.
Yikes… Realistically this talent is in conflict with the core niche BM has which is strong uninterrupted single target. This talent would need to be doing Chaos Bolt levels of damage to be worth not taking advantage of Frenzy. Realistically this talent would only be applicable in M+ or PVP when you have break periods that force Frenzy up time to drop.
If this was something that triggered when Bestial Wrath finishes or after a Kill Command it would be far more applicable but as of right now it looks like a cutting room floor idea.
They basically dismantled the predator build because no one was touching the garbage trap crap. They can shove that 15% you know where.
I dont care how much the buff traps, we dont want that playstyle.
Hunter’s agility is still complete garbo and its doa.
Wtf is a bola, for one, and two all they did was COPY/PASTE CHAKRUMS. Its the same dang action. Wow they are lazy and cheap AF.
Surv
Bombadier is a completely useless. Getting a free bomb at the beginning and end of an already weak af cd doesnt make it better. All they did was competely and utterely rip off the tier set so we cant use it elsewhere. Craps trash.
Why nerf a NECESSITY talent for a garbage CHOICE talent? God they make no sense.
So, now we are past the building stage and into the tuning stage, which sucks bc surv was doa on week 1, they havent added anything good, and now they are already nerfing them to hell.
This totally fits a hunter theme. Bolas are like a string with weights on them. They are thrown and the weights swing around, wrapping up the legs etc. of your target. The bouncing effect seems weird but I think this ability is a cool addition.
Unless it also kicks in every time your third stack of frenzy is refreshed? Otherwise yea, this needs to hit really hard to make me wanna drop 3 frenzy stacks.
Yet it nerfs the hell out of surv too AND they just nerfed the hell out of bombs.
So, this is the problem you get when blizz doesnt provide enough exciting and viable capstone options in the generic tree. Then they change something in the class tree, nerf the generic tree then another spec gets nerfed.
Plus its what happens when blizz doesnt create a whole spec for itself with its own identity, instead creating some half-hearted bs with no identity with borrowed spells then never fixing it.
KC is the MOST affected spell in the general/surv/bm trees
if you touch KC for anything you either
Nerf the hell out of Surv AND BM
you buff both surv and BM.
Then they nerfed Guerilla Tactics by 50%.
So, by a means of elimination, since predator is DOA, we automatically start the new expansion with:
No pet oriented capstone talents that are worth a damn.
No one is taking traps.
Stampede or Chakrums = We will all be forced into garbo chakrums bc blizz wont buff stampede enough for it to be viable.
So we will have to take SS BUTTTT surv already has a talent that provides SS on raptor strike which is REQUIRED for the now nerfed to trash bomb build.
