i feel like enh didn’t really gain much that it h asn’t had previously, no? ret definitely did gain options.
those 3 dps specs (and unholy, kind of) are sure in an interesting place, but this is entirely irrelevant to dark ranger feedback 
2 Likes
You’re absolutely right, back to discussing DR! Just saw the interview w/ Jelly and though I’d give my feedback while SV was actively being worked on. As far as DR I really like the double disengage idea posted by another player!
1 Like
I thought this tree would 100% have a cuance to change your next aimshot into a wailing arrow or something
3 Likes
Honest question: Do we need Wailing Arrow to be available to BM and MM spec trees, if it’s so rarely taken anyways and Dark Ranger would already supply that bonus to exactly the same specs?
What prevents Wailing Arrow from being a free perk of Dark Ranger (perhaps replacing the discrete but solely maintenance-centric Black Arrow whose mechanic can be emulated almost perfectly through auto-shot and effects which increase attack speed) rather than just a rarely taken low-output BM/MM talent, while Sentinel and Pack Leader provide free utility of similar value in turn (“free” outside of having to pick among Hero Trees)?
5 Likes
Unfortunately, I feel like the only way to really make it thematic without changing the way classes play is to bake some of it into core mechanics with new visuals but I don’t think any of that is likely to happen. Until I see the animations, I think we are going to be BM/MM with a sprinkling of Dark Ranger and it’s going to be a disappointment. That’s why I want to push for the changes I suggested. It changes little in the core rotation but adds a bunch of flair and some mobility/utility. I am holding out hope for some video of the gameplay.
2 Likes
That’s fair. I understand your reasoning, certainly.
I’d just still like 71-80 to make at least as much gameplay difference as 64-70, and right most do not quite seem to do that.
I’d be fine with two buttons per Hero Class, even… so long as there was very good reason / need for them each to be new buttons instead of just gameplay-affecting buffs to existing buttons.
- Per which criteria Wailing Arrow (a utility-bearing AoE-burst CD), for instance, makes more sense to me than Black Arrow (a use-on-CD maintenance buff).
Note here that the original effect does not vary from simply being procced from auto-shots as per modern Lock and Load, and even its reset mechanic’s effect could as easily be imitated by… say… having a chance to leave behinds shadows of oneself as decoys that briefly duplicate your attacks for next to no damage but still generate a high portion of the duplicated attacks’ proc chances, including those of your auto-shots.
4 Likes
I’m hoping the visuals really come through. Someone mentioned giving arcane shot a shadow effect (making it shadow damage could make the shadow dmg buff more useful?). A purplish flare could be cool. I just want to look/feel like a dark ranger.
7 Likes
I’ve played Hunter since Vanilla and my favorite army to build in Warcraft 3 was actually Dark Ranger with Necromancers as Undead. I’ve been longing for a Dark Ranger spec or class in WoW since before 2004!
My knee-jerk reaction to these talents was mixed. There are some interesting talents here, but the core of the tree looks like a reflavored DoT that resets CDs, speeds up damage, introduces little opportunities to the rotation, etc, which we’ve seen a million times before.
The good parts:
- Making Dark Arrow central to the tree.
- Summoning minions.
- Including a Life Steal/Leech effect.
- Dark Chains touches on the Dark Ranger Fantasy nicely.
The iffy parts:
- Dark Arrow now looks like just another DoT that you want maximum uptime on just because it triggers little opportunities for extra damage by letting you use other abilities more often, or by adding tiny little bonuses to those abilities.
- The minion summoning is incredibly sparse. Seeing a little hound pop up every now and then doesn’t really meet the fantasy of the Dark Ranger for me. I also worry about aesthetics. Putting a lot of time and effort into finding the right pet for you is a major part of playing a Hunter.
- The Life Steal ability is fairly limited by only applying to shadow damage, and the other talent option, Smoke Screen, doesn’t hit the Dark Ranger fantasy like the name suggests it would. To me, it makes me think of Sylvanas fighting Bolvar or dropping down off that tower in the BfA trailer.
- The slow effect on Dark Chains and its dispel conditions make it seem almost trivial. I suspect that half the specs in the game can neutralize it with one ability and it might buy you a second at most against NPCs.
- No sign of Silence or Charm being represented anywhere, even in a minor way.
What I base my Dark Ranger fantasy on:
The key element to the Dark Ranger fantasy to me (possibly due to my Necromancer Undead WC3 experience) was always momentum! The defining feature of the hero, to me, was that inexorability — that unstoppableness — that often influences Death Knight abilities. The key difference was that the Death Knight led from the front and tanked for its minions while the Dark Ranger led from the back and used guile and agility to ensure that it only ever engaged an enemy on terms favorable to the Dark Ranger.
- Black Arrow gives you the ability to add some extra force to your attacks for an advantage in damage, but the mana cost prevents you from keeping it up for the entire fight.
- As enemies fall to Black Arrow, they get back up on your side, shifting the balance of power in your favor, rather than both armies just exchanging damage and each player trying to be the one that comes out less hurt. Dark Ranger/Necro armies were fairly unique in that they could come out of a battle stronger than they went in.
- Life Leech is a personal version of the previous effect. Every attack you make takes from your target to make you stronger.
- Silence delays enemies and gives you a few seconds to build your lead over your target, or disrupts them in the middle of a big play.
- Charm takes an enemy and makes it an ally, directly turning your opponent’s strength against them.
- More Undead than Dark Ranger focused: With Necromancer support, every enemy that falls is a potential ally, and every ally that falls can potentially be raised again to mitigate the loss. Turning enemy units into allies after they die and giving allied units a second chance to keep fighting both contribute to this feeling of a wave building and building, eventually overwhelming your enemies.
Every part of the Dark Ranger kit was focused on setting hurdles for your opponents, trying to trip them up or impede them at crucial moments, while managing your resources to empower yourself until suddenly they were on their knees and you were at the height of your potential, ready to deal the killing blow.
The image of Bolvar, the mighty Lich King, on his knees as Sylvanas walks out of the fading blizzard and renders him powerless to stop her from just taking the Helm of Domination off his head comes to mind here. She entered the fight on her terms, set a careful trap, anticipated her enemy, turned his strength against him, and when she reached her goal it was a surprise to him but not to her.
Changes I would enjoy seeing:
- Dark Arrow as a personal buff rather than a DoT. For example, add shadow damage to your attacks and abilities in exchange for increased Focus cost. Activating it might add 20% shadow damage to your autoattacks and damaging abilities, but at the cost of 20% more focus cost or 20% longer CDs. It’s no longer “fire and forget every time it’s off CD”. Now it’s something you can feel pressured to use in tight situations but may ruin you if you don’t properly manage it. You can plan to use it with other CDs to maximize their effect.
- More minion representation. A single talent feels paltry. For example, I’d love to see Grave Reaper/Dark Empowerment summon undead (because that’s what killing targets with Black Arrow originally did), or for Shadow Surge to summon an undead shade that flies to the main target hit by multishot and explodes in shadow damage, possibly haunting them with shadow damage over time.
- At the very least, glyphs that change the Undead Hound into an Undead Windserpent, Raven, Bear, Deer, or even Human would go a long way towards letting us fit the spec to our fantasies without disrupting gameplay much.
- A tangible way to limit enemies and avoid being limited. Like a Curse of Tongues or damage vulnerability effect on Black Arrow or attacks from summoned undead, and an effect like Death’s Advance or Cloak of Shadows, perhaps on Disengage or Aspect of the Cheetah. For example, it may be OP but it’d be cool to gain an effect like Cloak of Shadows for a few seconds while Disengaging, and having the option to activate Disengage again during that brief window to teleport/shadowstep/banshee magic back to where you Disengaged from. I would enjoy trying to use that kind of ability effectively in a raid. “Do I save Disengage so I can use the Cloak of Shadows effect to soak damage from the boss’s next raid-wide attack or do I use it to reposition more quickly so I have higher DPS uptime while avoiding localized hazards?”
Big asks that I suspect aren’t possible:
- The ability to tame undead as pets with this spec. The Scourge are frequently called “mindless” now that the Helm of Domination is broken, and we beat back the Legion, so there’s no Lich King or Eredar to compete with for control over them. Even if it were just the ability to tame “lesser undead” to keep us from having colossal abominations or frost wyrms, it would be nice. It would also be cool if the undead kept their standard attacks. e.g.: warriors attack with swords, archers attack with bows from a distance, and mages cast spells from a distance, so the choice isn’t purely cosmetic, but given how other pets work now, I suspect it’d be more likely to see warrior undead as tank pets, archer undead as ferocity pets, and mage undead as cunning pets, with the latter two having maybe one ability that works at range on a moderate CD.
- A simulacrum of the Charm effect from WC3. e.g.: You cast it on an enemy and an undead shade manifests next to the target and takes on their form to attack them for 30-60 seconds.
- A Life Drain effect more like WC3. You tether yourself to your target to drain their life. It imposes a positional limitation on you by preventing you from moving to max range, and it adds a twist to how melee attackers handle encounters with you in PvP, because now they’re incentivized to either back off to break the effect before re-engaging or they can just try to go all-in on you and out-damage your siphon. It could either be a 2-3 minute CD or (preferably, imo) it could drain focus every second, forcing you to balance offensive and defensive use of the resource. In raids, I’m imagining choosing between standing closer to the boss and risking more damage while doing less damage due to the focus drain vs staying at a distance and risking death by some other effect if I don’t heal myself with Life Drain.
- A brief AoE silence on Counter Shot?
- The big one: A system similar to Unholy DK, Demolocks, Rogues, Monks, etc, that involves stacking buffs and/or debuffs and executing a big combo finisher ability to recreate that feeling of building an advantage up to the point of being momentarily unstoppable, and then crashing down on your enemies. i.e.: In every exchange, you slow and/or weaken your target(s), and in doing so gain a buff on yourself. And when you reach a certain number of buff stacks you can unleash an ability like Apocalypse that causes an entire pack of Undead Hounds (or whatever your minion is) to rush your target and overwhelm them, or summons a massive flurry of shadow arrows, or cloaks you in shadow and reduces damage significantly while preventing your movement speed from being reduced below 100%.
That’s a lot of text. Far more than I realized I had in me.
As I was writing it, I was aware of the balance concerns, and that these talents are expected to interlink neatly with existing specs, but I felt it wiser to just throw everything out there just in case any of it resonates.
More than anything, I’d like to emphasize that (in my mind) a Dark Ranger is proactive. The current proposed talents seem (to me) to be extremely reactive. You throw your DoT out and wait for procs. I personally would strongly prefer a playstyle that focuses on proactively setting up opportunities and properly timing your actions.
For example, I love Marksmanship as a spec in part because of how good it feels to think 10 seconds ahead in a fight and be in the perfect position to spam Aimed Shots while everyone else is scrambling to avoid dying, or standing in front of a frost trap in PvP and catching a rogue trying to gank you before they can do anything.
That’s peak Dark Ranger fantasy to me. You pick your place. You anticipate what’s coming. You make your preparations. And then you execute both your plan and your enemies.
11 Likes
Yeah, I’d rather the top talent just give you Wailing Arrow, and replace Serpent Sting with Black Arrow, and then maybe move Sting into a better place in the tree, so it’s not a pain for BM to get.
2 Likes
Yeah, that would require revamping the Class Tree, but… that probably needs to happen anyways so… /shrug.
5 Likes
Big fan of the overall vibes, but I have to admit that a system like Combo Points, Chi Points, Bursting Sores, or Soul Shards doesn’t really seem to me to fit what you described earlier as much as, say… just CDs with gameplay impact on their following actions (especially if multiple can combine or overlap in deliberate ways to make yet more specific interactions among the abilities that follow them).
Which… seems rather ambiguous/nebulous, now that I’m reading it back. Sadly it may have to remain so until I can generate a mock-up. The short of it is, though, to allow for synergies that do not encourage mere bundling (“pop all these together / in immediate sequence”). That, more so than a CP-like resource system, seems like it would produce the kind of Dark Ranger-esque decision-making you describe here…
1 Like
replacing serpent sting with black arrow, regardless of position in class tree, would still add a new button to BM, and they have a whopping 0 spec interaction with serpent sting in their spec tree
And how many buttons does adding a Black Arrow that does not replace Serpent Sting add?
…Still one.
3 Likes
…right, which is my point exactly? people are saying black arrow shouldn’t be its own button because that adds “button bloat”. replacing serpent sting with black arrow is the same amount of “button bloat” for BM.
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… what do you consider “bloat”?
to a lot of people, any sort of extra button they need to think about is button bloat. in this case, serpent sting/black arrow is button bloat.
i do not agree that button bloat is a systemic problem in wow atm, especially for most dps specs
3 Likes
I think there are different definitions of bloat, but I consider it adding buttons to press that negatively affect the spec. Some think it applies if you have to find a place to put it.
Hunter core rotation is pretty simple, but on par with most classes. However, Hunters have a lot of additional buttons that are situational. Multiple traps, Disengage, Binding Shot, Feign Death, Mend Pet, etc, etc. Trying to find a spot on your bars, and a key to bind it to you, often results in removing something that is used left often. It doesn’t feel good removing things, even if they’re rarely used.
The problem with Black Arrow being an active ability is the number of non-rotation damage abilities they still need to use. I popped on my Hunter to look at what I cast on a typical fight.
In no particular order:
- Barbed Shot > Cobra Shot > Kill Command > Bestial Wrath > Death Chakram > Bloodshed > Call of the Wild > Dire Beast(Sometimes)
With GCD between each cast, it takes a bit. Adding in Black Arrow only makes it worse. Those GCDs between casts also affect the synergy of these abilities as things like Bestial Wrath is already half over by the time you get to the end of the opener.
Also,
- Dark Ranger pushes the use of Kill Shot. Assuming they make it viable for BM, that’s another thing that contributes to bloat.
- More Barbed Shot procs from the tree itself means more cooldown reduction on Bestial Wrath, so that will be up more often. It’s already about 30 sec. Probably under 20 seconds with Black Arrow.
1 Like
Yet less for MM, which is the more rotationally “button-bloated” (ExS, DC, TrS, Salvo, Vol, AiS, RF, ArS, MS, StS, SrS, KS [12 offensive actions] vs. KC, CS, MS, DC, BW, BS, CotE, and maybe KS [7-8 offensive actions]) of the two specs.
- I don’t actually feel either is particularly button-bloated outside of ExS and Salvo feeling like they should be combined and DS feeling lackluster (and Stampede painfully undertuned), though I do think MM presses on a limit after which most new actions would need to have very good reasons to take up more buttons.
Again, my spitball was to convert/augment AiS and BS and make Wailing Arrow a more central feature (for MM, with a new action, such as summoning the maw of a constructed bone drake or a whole pack of darkhounds as a capitalizing nuke for BM).
4 Likes
I mean, they’re doing it for the warrior tree with Shockwave, so it’s not off the table.
2 Likes
Why list every possible offensive action of MM, but skip a few for BM?
In the end, it doesn’t matter which spec has more buttons to press. What matters is if those abilities have synergy outside of just pressing a different button. On the surface, Black Arrow has synergy. When you dig deeper, it simply compounds on existing problems.