I may have not communicated myself properly, but if people don’t want the rotation to change (meaningfully or otherwise), or add bloat, or add talents like Ranger’s Finesse, I’m saying I’m a bit confused on what people actually want the talent tree to do
Especially for BM—barbed shot procs are near worthless with the way the ability works now, kill shot procs would be useless with current BM priority, kill command damage amps/associated synergy is almost assuredly saved for pack leader, so that would leave cobra shot passives for DR, which is about as exciting as a bag of hair
Will certainly be interesting to see how they take this
if people don’t want the rotation to change (meaningfully or otherwise), or add bloat, or add talents like Ranger’s Finesse
Different people want different things, you can’t please everyone. Any hero specs that aim to do so are inevitably going to end up being either painfully boring or a mess.
Remember that this forum, reddit, and twitter do not represent the playerbase. If WoW has a million players, the ~150 people that have commented in this thread make up 0.01% of the population.
But… if a hero spec wants to add an additional button, it should actually commit to doing so and make it a meaningful, fun button that you would want to press. Not… whatever this is.
2 Likes
Unfortunately, tying the tree to something both specs share is hard, because the Hunter tree is a disaster of design and the two specs are wildly different. The fact that other Hero talents modify existing abilities, but Dark Ranger adds a new button, makes me think the developers didn’t know how to modify something both classes share either.
- It needs to be a damage ability that is taken early in the tree to avoid forcing a spec to take a certain path.
- It needs to be something that ties into the Dark Ranger theme.
- It needs to be something that both specs would get approximately the same power from.
Off the top of my head, I’m thinking more in line with our big cooldowns - Call of the Wild and Trueshot.
Black Arrow(or rename): When Trueshot or Call of the Wild is active, all damage done by you and your pets is also considered Shadow damage.
- Ranger’s Finesse: (Unchanged) Aimed Shot, Rapid Fire, Barbed Shot, and Kill Command deal 15% increased damage.
- Dark Hounds: Every XXX Focus spent summons an undead hound to charge your target and deal Shadow Damage.
- Death Shade: Targets below 20% take an additional 5-10% Shadow from all damage you and your pets deal. (IE, 100k Kill Command does an addition 5-10k damage as Shadow)
- Dark Empowerment: Steady Shot and Cobra Shot have a chance to apply a DoT to your target that deals shadow damage every 2 sec for 8 sec.
- Grave Reaper: When a target dies, it has a chance to explode dealing shadow damage to enemies within X yards.
- Embrace the Shadows/Smoke Screen: Increase Embrace from 15% to 30%. Leave Smoke Screen as it is, even though I know that won’t happen.
- Dark Chains(Choice Node 1): Disengage chains the two nearest targets together. Both targets will move 40% slower until they move more than 8 yards apart. If a second target is not available, a single target will be chained to the ground and move 40% slower until they move 8 yards away.
- Haunting Wave(Dark Chains Choice Node 2): Disengage repels enemies away from you as you leap.
- Intense Darkness: When Trueshot or Call of the Wild is active; (Marksman) you no longer need to stand still to channel abilities; (Beast Mastery) your pets’ attack range is doubled. (For MM, this addresses the issue of the burst window being interrupted by mechanics. For BM, this addresses the poor pet AI, that causes pets to miss attacks against moving targets. Pet will still chase at standard melee range, but their attacks have a longer range.)
- Shadow Surge: Mostly unchanged, however make it permanent and adjust the damage accordingly. Also, remove the internal cooldown. Multi-Shot is low damage. Nobody is going to spam it.
- Darkness Calls: (Unchanged) Shadow Assassin: Remove the “affected by Black Arrow” portion and just make it permanent.
- Withering Fire: When Trueshot or Call of the Wild is activated, a barrage of dark arrows strikes your target for shadow damage and increases the damage you and your pets deal by 10% for the duration. (Trueshot is 15 sec. CotW is 20 sec. The duration discrepancy is offset by Sniper Training, which means dark arrows will do significantly more damage for MM)
These ideas are just off the top of my head over the last fifteen minutes. I’m sure I overlooked some complications, but it looks better to me than what they announced. Having much of it attached to a 2 min cooldown might bother some, but enough of it is just ‘always on’ to make up for it I think.
6 Likes
The only AoE talent is Shadow Surge in this tree.
Dark Chains is worthless in PvE.
We need some changes in the Hunter/Spec trees, please!
3 Likes
Or just make it like the grip that DKs have. And oh yeah, give it to Survival, where it should be, along with the rest of the Dark Ranger stuff. Should be Surv/MM, but I’m guessing one of the devs is a total BM player and just HAD to have DR theme for their character.
1 Like
BM and MM have had wailing arrow all expansion + sylvanas bow last expansion. this wasn’t a surprise to anyone
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Agree. If we are stuck with this theme, why ADD a new shot? Why not modify a current shot, and then make more of our current damage shadow damage, instead of creating this whole new subset of damage as shadow damage? Why force this weird additional change to everything?
Honestly, why not just rename Barbed Shot to Black Arrow, and make it add a portion of shadow damage while the BS buff is up or something? There’s lots of better ways this could have been done.
2 Likes
Bringing black arrow back which was an iconic survival ability just to not give it to survival feels wrong. Can we please bring back ranged survival? It’s fine if we keep a melee spec but can we make it a choice node or something? Also undead stuff doesn’t really make sense to me as bm
4 Likes
was black arrow the “iconic” ability or was it the way it interacted with lock and load? 
based on how in the dev interview about this and the specific mention of survival’s “melee identity” I don’t think they’re going to make SV ranged especially with a choice node
SV is melee. It doesn’t need any more “shots”
2 Likes
Black arrow was one of the way that lock n load was triggered
I’m aware it’s melee but they are asking for feedback, my feedback is that it shouldn’t be
3 Likes
I am aware, but it was also triggered by traps lol. I’m saying black arrow wasn’t the “iconic” part, the lock and load proc was 
1 Like
I dont like barbed shot and aimed shot reset/charges. We already have plenty and we dont need more of those. Barbed shot doesnt stack on the same target and we cant use preceise shots enough.
Wailing arrow could be removed from MM talents and moved to dark ranger talents with more interaction.
I hope black arrow isnt dispellable.
We have rotation/playstyle issues that must be solved. We either have no interactions among our own toolkit, or we have too much on the same ability which causes us to have no time to use them, or they end up dealing too much damage so they get nerfed.
9 Likes
In my defense I did say it was an iconic part of rsv not the iconic part, but that brings up another miss in my opinion. It should proc lock n load and with explosive shot instead of barbed shot again. I guess I just don’t see how between the new trees and now the hero path why there isn’t a way for both rsv and msv players to get what they want. For example both could have full access to their melee and ranged stuff but one side of the tree buffs the range and damage of the shots while the other side buffs their melee damage
1 Like
because that’s just now how the game works. this is a dark ranger feedback thread, not a “bring back RSV” feedback thread
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Even if Dark Ranger made a better attempt to bring back RSV, such as making Black Arrow proc two free Kill Shots with no cooldown, it wouldn’t be very good because it’d essentially be forcing a different spec’s rotation into MM and BM.
Despite RSV having had Black Arrow, it and Dark Rangers are two completely different things. RSV was about DoTs and varied magic shots (Cobra Shot, Black Arrow, Explosive Shot and Arcane Shot), a Dark Ranger uses Shadow shots (Black Arrow, Wailing Arrow, Withering Fire), the occasional melee attack (Shadow Dagger, Dark Rangers in cutscenes) and necromancy (Dark Minions).
4 Likes
This is the core problem with MM. It already doesn’t have room for all of what it can/wants to do baseline. Giving it more stuff doesnt make it feel better to play, it just feels like more of the same. Other specs have Obliteration vs Breath of Sindragosa, Momentum vs Demonic, Glacial Spike vs. regular ice lance etc. MM doesn’t even feel different in AoE really aside from having even more focus problems and awkward multi-shotting every 2nd GCD.
MM is unable to get cool new things, because they dont have room, they dont have mechanical interconnections between abilities to synergize or create new playstyles. We effectively have 2 buttons 'Generate focus" and “Spend focus” and thats it. The spec doesn’t have a chain of interactions of A leads to B leads to C leads to D that flows smoothly. We have buttons that do effectively the same thing, just reskinned to do more damage to create variety. You could remove Rapid Fire and make steady shots just do more damage and the spec would play identically. Aimed shot and Arcane shot are 2 buttons that do the same thing, convert focus into damage. the additional “resources” to generate of Precise shots arent worth using and get munched and wasted regularly and ignored. our maintenance buffs dont interplay with anything they just give haste, and fit awkwardly into the rotation, especially during CD’s. Half of our tree isnt new mechanics, its just different ways to make our effective 2 buttons do more damage.
Separate point unrelated to the quote: Having a PvP only talent in the hero tree is dumb. The reality is that the majority of players are PvE and PvP talents already exist. It feels like Hunter’s are just getting 1 fewer hero talent than the rest of the classes/specs as a result. Doubly so with “hero talents” such as Rangers Finesse. If its so hard to come up with ideas for hunter, I think that serves as pretty clear evidence that the spec needs a larger scale rework to its core gameplay to open up room for more mechanical variety and playstyle alterations. Legion MM was LOVED. It was too skill expressive, creating too large of separation between patient sniper amongst the playerbase. I want legion MM patient sniper back, It doesnt need to make me do 2x the damage of regular hunters, I will LOVE that gameplay if it only rewards me with a 2% damage increase. I LIKE skill expression in rotation, i liked the slower gameplay pace and focus limitation instead of GCD limitation. We already have BM as a faster paced spec.
7 Likes
I know, I’m suggesting we use the new opportunity to allow rsv to happen. MM is bloated and dark ranger doesn’t really seem to fit with bm so I am offering suggestions to open up our possibilities