The talent itself has been “fixed”, but how it affects so many other talents makes it a non-choice. Brutal Companion is a strong talent that gives reduced effectiveness if you spec into Animal Companion, so Animal Companion won’t be used unless another spec that avoids Brutal Companion can compete.
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Interesting thought so I wanted to go pull a log and see. I’m not saying this guy played perfectly, he played pretty well but that hardly matters here; Stomp rank 2 still isn’t working and War Orders doesn’t give Kill Command charges. Obviously these are all very rough numbers/estimates.
The log: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/y1dXzJMAVpKmC97g#type=damage-done&fight=3&source=7
Just looking at that specific boss fight he did 37,498.3 DPS. After removing his AC he did 30,222.8 DPS.
37,498.3 - 30,222.8 = 7,275.5 from the AC
His primary pet did 16,010.2 DPS with AC selected. To calculate what his AC cost him in DPS we divide his primary pet’s DPS by .65 (undoing the 35% AC nerf) and subtract that number by the original value. That leaves us with the DPS loss of the primary pet caused by AC.
16,010.2 ÷ .65 = 24,631.1 - 16,010.2 = 8,620.9 DPS loss caused by AC
It appears that on a single target and without War Orders functioning, AC cost him (8,620.9 - 7,275.5) 1,345.4 DPS.
That gap will close (and outright shift in favor of taking both talents) when Stomp rank 2 and War Orders becomes functional, Kill Command casts will go up a lot. He had 13 casts of Barbed Shot though not every cast would equate to a new Kill Command cast. It only takes 3-5 extra Kill Commands, and no extra Stomp damage, to completely close the gap in DPS and you could likely get good value on 8 of those 13 Barbed Shot casts.
Assuming all of our talents function the way they say they do and they don’t alter Brutal Companion I don’t really foresee any situation in which you don’t take both AC and Brutal Companion. When they do eventually fix all the major talent bugs I’ll circle back around to this topic though. It is a very interesting interaction/topic IMO.
The announcement from last week, where they’re talking about entering a new phase and moving away from larger changes in design etc, in favor of focusing more on bugs and tuning, I find this a bit worrying.
Obviously, they can still proceed to make changes as they see fit, with the current trees. It’s just that, like I’ve said before in this topic, there are still several things that I feel should be/needs to be worked out with both the class tree as well as the BM tree.
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Some talents in the class tree, such as Binding Shackles, really should be looked over, and reevaluated. Especially the positioning and dependencies.
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The fact that the class is still lacking some raid-wide utility, situational or otherwise, lends itself towards how we’re heavily dependent on higher tuning/numbers, for it to be worth bringing hunters to more difficult content. This goes straight against what they themselves have said about their philosophies involving class design, for Dragonflight. And no, Sentinel, atm, isn’t a worthwhile pick for a raid setting, at least not something that promotes the idea of bringing at least 1 hunter.
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The entire bottom left capstone path of the class tree, involving pet related nodes, should ideally require 1 less point in total, or 2 even.
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In the BM tree, you still have the issue with how it’s quite “expensive”, you have few individual nodes to pick between, and instead have multiple unnecessary ranks added to certain other talents, making them less than what they should be, on the basis of each individual rank.
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While they have fixed the unintended effects tied to Animal Companion, and the deficit aura implementation, there are still some negative sides, with seemingly uninteded effects, to the point where taking the talent straight up counters the benefits you get from certain other talents.
- Like I’ve also said before, I think the ideal solution would be to make Animal Companion a baseline addition for anyone who chooses to play Beast Mastery. Not a mandatory one, but also not one that is dependent on picking a talent. I’m not entirely sure what they’re called, but they could just add it into the spellbook as an expandable button, where you choose between the AC and just using one pet. And with this, they may also change the deficit aura to now apply at 50% reduction, rather than 35%, making it a net zero gain, or loss(also allowing the second pet to use its Basic Attack; Bite/Claw/Smack).
- This would, imo, make it easier for players to determine the value of this ability/effect, and I think that it would also make it easier to balance on the back-end. On that note, the second pet should be designed to benefit from the passive effects provided by the main pet(spec perks, such as Leech, or more health).
- Like I’ve also said before, I think the ideal solution would be to make Animal Companion a baseline addition for anyone who chooses to play Beast Mastery. Not a mandatory one, but also not one that is dependent on picking a talent. I’m not entirely sure what they’re called, but they could just add it into the spellbook as an expandable button, where you choose between the AC and just using one pet. And with this, they may also change the deficit aura to now apply at 50% reduction, rather than 35%, making it a net zero gain, or loss(also allowing the second pet to use its Basic Attack; Bite/Claw/Smack).
3 Likes
Agreed. Many of the issues are still pretty fundamental, and even the isolated issues are still rather numerous for “Now it’s just tuning.”
A quick Class Tree mock-up via TTM. WIP, but the main ideas are all there.
CONTEXT
Ferocity / Cunning / and Tenacity families have been removed in place of a return to Beast Training, from which one’s pet’s passive, short active, and long active can all be manually selected. Hunters can also select such talents for themselves, which will be used while no pet is active (i.e., while in Lone Wolf).
Primal Rage has been separated from the pet and made baseline in the form of Horn of the Hunt.
Countershot has been made baseline. We are no longer the sole pure dps class to have to pay a significant cost for their interrupt.
HIGHLIGHTS
This tree allows you take almost exactly half of its 51 points or dabble in almost 60% of its nodes.
Serpent Sting and Alpha Predator have now been made far more accessible.
Orphan Nodes have been used for Misdirection and Tranquilizing Shot, now both centered in the tree, as to avoid any concerns about pathing to those core talents. Ideally, though, I’d just make them baseline.
Pet, Beast Training and Aspect stuff has now been moved more intuitively to the left (Beast Mastery side).
Traps and former Survival stuff or similarly supportive/sabotaging functions have been moved to the right (Survival side).
Intimidation has been returned to Wyvern Sting and moved to the Survival side of the talent tree. All talents of spec-specific value now instead allow for use to all.
A Murder of Crows has been moved from Beast Mastery to the capstone tier. Lynx Rush replaces the capstone node previously taken by Alpha Predator. Black Arrow replaces the node previously taken by Serpent Sting. This should both be more fitting capstone talents.
ROOM FOR FURTHER IMPROVEMENT
Kill Command would ideally be removed from the class tree completely and SV and BM would each get their own differently named versions and the Alpha Predator / Killer Instincts would replace a bloat node between rows 2 and 6 in BM and SV, each. This node would then be taken by something like the Wilderness Mending / Mending Bandages node and would have no children inaccessible from other starting points.
Wilderrun and the Scare Beast augmenters are still very WIP.
2 Likes
I do like many of the proposed talents/effects, in concept. There’s a lot of info though, with most nodes, and I feel that it might risk taking away from the base concept itself when some descriptions come off as somewhat unintuitive.
Considering how it currently works, and since you’ve positioned some of the nodes tied to the Beast Training concept fairly high up in the tree, they will also have to rethink the level requirements for when each of these pet related effects are “unlocked/learned”.
Or are you working with the idea that everything about the reworked pet system should be available from a lower level, in general?
Aside from that, some of the nodes in the capstone section seem odd. Why 2 capstones where each is about generating more Focus? And why are both of them positioned towards the left side which supposedly is for pet oriented talents, in theme/concept? Why is Arctic Bola a capstone node? Attrition seems to be way ahead of all the other capstone nodes in terms of potential power gains. I find all 4 of the capstone talents to be out of place, like they shouldn’t really be capstone nodes.
At least I would be interested to learn about your motivation for why you chose those to be the capstone talents. In my book, neither of those are either interesting, particularly powerful, or impactful(gameplay-wise).
I’d be fine with having all but Primal Rage (now Horn of the Hunt) available from the start, but otherwise the Beast Training pane itself can simply give a point, and set of mutually exclusive choices on which to spend it, at set levels more or less as is the present case.
Greatly different conditions and purposes.
Interloper (focus on CC, trap, or interrupt, with a lengthy ICD) is a vastly improved NTA. Predation is a effectively a War Machine.
I can change Interloper to, say, a 25s duration that axes 50% Focus costs on the next 60 Focus or so instead so that it can’t possible go to waste, but the main idea to the passives is optional protection against a bloated bar.
2 actives are reachable from 2 talents each. Any talents that are reachable from only one parent node have 2 overflow passive nodes in compensation.
Since Explosive Shot is the most essential/popular AoE choice and Steel Trap offers the most additional utility, those two were made the most pathable. Interloper then made the most sense below Steel Trap, just as a kill talent made sense to place before an Execute / charged by kills choice node. It is not expected that you’d necessarily take both just because they happen to be on the same side.
:: May also change Steel Trap to a choice node with a ranged bleed with brief root.
As mentioned above, the primary purpose of these passives is to provide comparable gains to the actives and thereby offer an alternative to the button count or lower specific emphasis that would come from taking all of them. Arctic Bola is useful if one wants pure AoE. It’s pretty plainly, and passively, just “more AoE damage (with some spec tree bias).” Attrition is just Serrated Blades opened up to include all damage over time effects because of the further inclusion of Black Arrow. It could be changed to just Shadow, Poison, and Bleeding as to avoid affecting SV bombs, but again, this is a WIP.
The “main ideas” established here are those in the Highlights above, primarily a matter of fact freer pathing and nodes being readonably useful to all specs (even Lone Wolf in the case of Beast Training talents, as Lone Wolf now allows for the Hunter to train their Lone Wolf state, too).
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Probably not exactly what you meant but… 
(…also…replace anything tied to SotF with the new ability for Tenacity pets.)
Original post: Community Council discussion on Hunter design - #104 by Ghorak-laughing-skull
Anyway, since I’ve already brought this up in the linked topic, I won’t go into detail here, as it’s also not necessarily on-topic with this particular thread.
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Not exactly, but similarly a discrete pane with tabs on the bottom for Lone Wolf, Pet 1, Pet 2, Pet 3, Pet 4, Pet 5 (by their names).
Basically a far simpler version more similar to Azerite Rings, with just a ring each for passive, short active, utility active, and exotic), but additional points allowing you to take a 2nd point in one of the unlocked rings or one you wouldn’t normally have available to you/your pet (such as the exotic ring).
In terms of animation, icon, and flavor text, some options are species-specific, but the effects are all shared.
For PvP purposes, a buff would simply show on the pet to inform enemies of their short active and utility active, since such can no longer be determined by sight alone.
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#https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/dragonflight-beta-development-notes/1278546/14
HUNTER
General
- Freezing Trap – The trap visual has been updated.
Class Tree
- Sentinel’s Protection has been slightly redesigned – Magic damage reduction has been removed, now only grants 5% leech to your party members.
- Master Marksman – Now works with Spearhead and Coordinated Assault critical strikes.
Beast Mastery
- Fixed issue where Beast Cleave Rank 2 was only using the 35% damage value from Rank 1.
- Fixed issue where Stomp Rank 1 and 2 were dealing the same damage values and the Rank 2 tooltip didn’t update.
- Stomps’ tooltip damage value is now more accurate and Animal Companion directly changes its tooltip damage now.
- Aspect of the Wild’s initial and extra Cobra Shots now properly work with the Cobra Sting, Cobra Senses, and Killer Cobra talents.
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Get rid of AC aura on pets and AC is fine…choose or dont choose but if no aura affecting Dire or Wild pets…who wouldn’t take it if that change actually happens
The AC aura is already fixed. The problem with AC and Dire Beast talents are:
- Animal Companion still indirectly affects other talents. Brutal Companion is a surprisingly strong talent, which is reduced in effectiveness due to Animal Companion’s reduced damage on primary pet.
- Dire Beasts do jack all for damage. The strength in Dire Beast on Live is in the haste component, which doesn’t stack with all the added Dire Beasts in Dragonflight. This means those Dire Beasts do very little damage and desperately need to be tuned.
3 Likes
Cognition/Highlin,
With the 10/13 fixes they chopped Brutal Companion damage in half. What are your thoughts on AC and BC? If I followed your arguments, believe that AC will make BC a non choice, is that correct?
2 Likes
The discussion was more around AC being worth it when Brutal Companion exists. With current tuning AC is the single largest DPS increase in the tree both single target and AE, maybe Wild Call is better. I don’t see any situations where you don’t take AC and expect to be able to compete.
Brutal Companion is a pretty okay passive damage talent, it’s boring IMO as it’s basically just Stomp 2.0. The question of if you take it or not is going to come down to tuning and sims. It’s one of three AE talents in the bottom third through Beast Cleave with Wild Instincts on a 3m CD and Wailing Arrow which doesn’t scale with mastery being the others.
I don’t see why you would skip it for something like M+, we’re very tight on points for multi target builds to the point we may not be taking Thrill of the Hunt. Also, because it’s just passive damage it’s pretty good for raiding. The question is does anything do more DPS now than Brutal Companion and really only sims will be able to tell us that.
Overall, I think our tree is still a mess though it’s functional. It’s been functional since it’s first itteration but I still wouldn’t call it good. The fact that Kindred still exists and we have two three point nodes and eleven(!!) two point nodes spread all throughout the tree is a crime (13/35 or 37% of our nodes are multi pointers). Also, the top is nearly all mandatory (Sharp Barbs has lost some value but not a ton) and should be changed, sixteen(!) points in the top should never happen in ANY tree. Comparatively ele (just picking a random spec that the same dev worked on) has no three pointers, ten two pointers (10/40 or 25%), and only ten points above the first gate. By the numbers our tree is objectively bad, but it’s functional.
It’s important to note that seven of those two pointers ele has are below the last gate and the other three are right before the last gate. They are used to keep them from selecting every capstone which is an acceptable place to use multi point nodes when they’ve got five capstones, three of which are choice nodes.
That’s not to say that BM is going to be bad to play in DF, that’s more of a DPS tuning issue which Blizz is historically VERY bad at. I’m not hyped for it but I’ll still be playing it if I’m even playing the game at all.
3 Likes
The changes to Brutal Companion make it less desirable, but it still seems to be a decent talent. It gave Animal Companion a run for its money in terms of single powerful talents, but now it seems more akin to the rest of the talents in the tree. Obviously it’s still affected by Animal Companion, but even still it’s a good talent.
I was honestly hoping they would change the way Animal Companion works. Not just the bugged part, but the actual mechanics of the talent. As it stands, it’s about a 25% increase to pet damage: 2 pets doing 65% of normal damage equals 130%, but the second pet doesn’t do pet abilities, so it’s about a 25% increase to pet damage overall.
Rather than 2 pets doing 65% damage, just make the first pet unchanged and the second pet does 30% of the first pet’s damage and doesn’t cast pet abilities.
I gotta say, this right here is what I don’t understand. Why does there have to be an aura? Just leave the first pet alone and second one does a percentage and it’s finished…not interaction with other skills and talents.
I assume there must be a coding reason, because it’s seems to be much harder than it has to be. Why make something that interacts with everything else?
Why do I ask questions for which there is no answer? Sigh
Thank you for response, funny you you mention Ele as that is the other spec I have been thinking of going in DF over BM. The other interesting thing about Ele, they are in same place as Hunters when it comes to raid utility!
As to the BM tree costs, I have been concerned about those from moment they first came out. Apparently those concerns have fell on deaf ears.
An hour or so later… went and tried a M+ build, going to have to not take Thrill and probably Sharp Barbs. Just to have points to spend at bottom, so by not grabbing those 5 points, we can spend 9 at bottom, lol
Also I have serious doubts anyone ever take Aspect of the Wild and it’s subsequent choice node w/o some big buffs
Thank you for your thoughts
Been maining BM since WoD. I am currently playing the beta and I have to agree with many here the talent tree and gameplay is so underwhelming I am probably going to play my warlock this expansion. The Dev’s put no effort or imagination into BM and it’s basically a worse copy/paste version of live.
Half the abilities are under-tuned and/or do not make sense in their tree positioning, the other half are 2 or 3 pointers which are required to even make the spec playable. Tip of the cap Blizz, you never fail to not fail…
HUNTER
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Class Tree
- Arctic Bola’s damage and chance to activate have both been doubled.
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Beast Mastery
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Beast Cleave will no longer be improperly activated by Kill Command or Stomp damage.
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Dire Frenzy talent damage bonus increased to 30/60% for ranks 1 and 2.
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Dire Beast damage increased by 50%.
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Call of the Wild has received several bug fixes:
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Wild Instincts should no longer incorrectly grant charges of Barbed Shot while Call of the Wild is no longer active.
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Bloody Frenzy and Wild Instincts should no longer give their effects without knowing the appropriate talent.
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When multiple pets are summoned from Call of the Wild, it should no longer be possible to get multiple stacks of Predator’s Thirst, Endurance Training, or Pathfinding.
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Wild Instincts now properly checks for Focus to be spent before causing a Barbed Shot reset.
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Call of the Wild should properly be reset upon encounter end.
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Brutal Companion has received several bug fixes:
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Brutal Companion longer causes your pets to consume Focus when doing their extra pet special attack when your pet is above 50 Focus.
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Brutal Companion damage bonus lowered to 50% (was 100%).
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Brutal Companion now properly works with pets that use Claw.
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Brutal Companion’s damage bonus no longer incorrectly applies to all special attacks from your active pet.
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Brutal Companion no longer causes the special attack to deal bonus damage if your pet is above 50 Focus.
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Developers’ notes: Pet focus management is not intended to be part of the Brutal Companion talent; it should provide some extra special attacks from your pet. If this interacts with the above-50-Focus threshold damage bonus, you might feel compelled to manually handle the casting of your pet’s ability to always get maximum damage benefit while at 3 stacks of Barbed Shot.
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Most of those have been on beta for a while, just never got listed in the notes.