this meme must be stopped. between endurance training, rejuv winds, exhil with no cd, turtle, sotf, and bear; hunters have solid survivability. we aren’t even the squishiest dps on our armor type anymore. yes some hunter specs struggle with rot, but to say we don’t have solid survivability is just exaggerating
No hunters still are one of the most fragile classes in the game. Has it gotten better? yes. But they are still made out of glass.
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this is just not a true statement I’m sorry. between a giant hp pool and 3 proactive defensives and 1 reactive defensive we are not a fragile class
I feel that at this point when Bepples goes to a restaurant, and the waiter asks for his order…the reply is something about how ranged survival should come back.
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Have you read the feedback on the priest hero talent “oracle”? It’s not well-received at all.
feral, balance, enhance, and ele are more fragile to my knowledge. If true, that means hunter is one of the more fragile classes
I read a fair amount of it, because I also play priest. The thing is, the basis behind it is sound. It addresses issues with the specs, but it doesn’t do a very good job of it. It’s definitely something that can be tuned though. Essentially, strong basis but lackluster implementation.
Dark Ranger, on the other hand, addresses none of the current problems and just creates new ones.
Feral and Balance have significantly more defensive abilities than Hunters, but they have to give up DPS talents to take them. Plus, they can just shift into Bear form at any time.
WCL shows the most deaths in Mythic are Balance, Feral, BM, and MM. Druids have a harder time than Hunters in Mythic, because they need those DPS talents. Heroic logs have a ton more parses to draw data from and they show BM and MM Hunters as having the highest death percentile by a significant margin.
BM and MM also have the weakest self healing by far. Even before Spirit Mend and Mend Pet were nerfed, we were dead last, but the gap was smaller. For reference, just look at WCL again. Compare top Hunter healing parses with any other class and the gap is significant.
The problem with our defensive toolkit is what Blizzard considers a defensive. Feign Death and Disengage are counted among our defensive abilities, but they do virtually nothing to help with the rot damage that is prevalent in Dragonflight. So, yeah, our defensive toolkit is larger than many insist, but it’s not appropriate to the content. Even in PvP, the only way to be competitive without a pocket healer is to run away.
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Indeed, feral/balance can always switch into bear form, but that is countered by the fact they can’t do anything but DOT dps while in the form.
My main point remains though, notwithstanding my admittedly anecdotal statement about feral/balance/enhance/ele, that all 3 hunter specs are some of the most fragile specs in the game.
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I wasn’t disagreeing. Your comment just read like bait for the folks that want to insist Hunters are invincible, so wanted to clarify. I think we’re of the same mind.
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Indeed, the gap between the haves and have-nots in the survivability department is much too vast currently.
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Dark ranger should have been for surivial not bm since black arrow is a surivial ability originally.
Also for bm dark ranger seems weird and not interesting at all.
Lastly get rid of the dark hounds ability. No one who has a theme for there character be ruined with hounds. Only fits undead and elfs.
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This tree feels more like “Hunter with Black Arrow tacked on” than actually fulfilling the fantasy of a Dark Ranger. Which I guess is the point of hero specs, but I think Dark Rangers have a lot more potential than just a “press on CD” Black Arrow with a boring proc.
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Because over the years people probably got used to borrowed powers fixing the specs.
And how well did that work out for the start of each new expansion?
/shrug
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Exactly
/10char
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I would really like to see this in action. The visuals and all that.
Sadly it seems as though we got as far as ‘lets add back black arrow’ and not much further. I had hoped that this spec would let us drift closer to the old ranged survival we lost. Some idea’s that I had.
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Add in interaction with Serpent sting to bring back the DoT aspect of old survival. Converting it to Shadow Damage to match the theme.
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As this would also need to come with reason for each spec to use Serpent sting other than passively for MM, add a passive node that increases damage to targets with Shadow DoT effects on them. Making it add stacks per dot to make Black Arrow a funnel tool.
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Reintroduce Serpent Spread functionality to MM and BM through this tree. This could be converted from the existing Shadow Surge talent, except using Serpent Sting as the catalyst for causing the AOE explosion on your main target, which the explosion then spreads.
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Remove Wailing arrow from the spec tree’s and make it the capstone here, with the proc from Black arrow to reset the cooldown. The AoE silence could be preserved by leaving the cast time on the spell, with the Black arrow proc removing the cast time and silence if “balance” requires allowing hard casts to keep the silence, though i doubt the silence would be missed for all the use Wailing Arrow gets.
*Edit. Further thought, Using Wailing Arrow is adding a second spell to the tree. Not really consistent with the other tree’s we’ve seen so far. So an alternate here is that Wailing Arrow could replace Kill Shot, with its AoE burst. This would have the added bonus of allowing Deathblow/ Hunters Prey top be replaced in the spec trees.
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Rangers Finesse should be something cooler than just some dmg increase on our main abilities. Maybe some interaction with Wailing Arrow instead?
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Yup, hunters are basically mages with pets but no cast times.
I’ll be speaking and giving feedback from a BM point of view as that is what I know and mostly play.
General feedback: I echo the earlier comments that this tree seems MM focused and BM was just forced in because there needed to be two specs attached to it. A lot of the talent node interactions conflict with what BM is currently trying to do. This tree seems super single target focused and wondering if that is intended. I’m assuming barbed shot was chosen as the reset ability attached to black arrow, because Pack Leader is going to deal with kill command and interactions with that ability. They didn’t want to have two BM hero talent trees revolving around kill command I suspect.
Black arrow: Barbed shot as the reset ability for BM is bad and it should be kill command. However, as I mentioned earlier, I suspect kill command to be the main ability affected in the Pack Leader tree and they went with barbed shot here to avoid both trees dealing with kill command. If this isn’t the case, this needs to switch to reset kill command. We already sit at max charges sometimes for barbed shot as we focus on just maintaining x3 frenzy and not over capping our kill command charges. Even more so during COTW. This will just add more charges to over cap and make it feel terrible to play because we will feel we are wasting resets.
Ranger’s Finesse: Fine passive talent node
Dark Hounds: Fine passive talent node. Does this abilities damage scale with other pet damage %increase talent choices?
Death Shade: Not bad on paper, but kill shot will need huge tuning changes for BM. If kill shot doesn’t get looked at, this becomes just a meh talent choice and mostly just dead on arrival.
Dark Empowerment/Grave Reaper: Grave reaper seems the default choice for BM here. Can find decent uses in solo play and mythic +. Dead talent node on ST fights though. Dark empowerment doesn’t do much for BM. We aren’t focused starved and the reset ability is barbed shot which doesn’t cost focus and generates focus itself. Would lead to focus over capping and being useless in most scenarios.
Embrace the Shadows/Smoke Screen: Embrace the shadows needs a higher % heal or a rework. It’ll probably never compete with smoke screen anyways though. Smoke screen is awesome and a great defensive option. Awesome talent.
Dark Chains: Neat PVP ability. Probably not game breaking since there are a lot of ways to move quickly and leave the slow moving zone. Can’t think of interactions for PvE besides maybe the shades from spiteful. Wish this was an AoE stun or something. But mostly just a click this talent node and forget in terms of PvE.
Intense Darkness: More damage is always good and on paper more chances for resets is normally good as well. However, the reset ability is barbed shot. We already over cap a lot of the charges during the COTW window just by nature of how that talent works. This will just increase that over cap even more. More bad than good talent choice.
Shadow Surge: The only AoE talent choice on this tree. Which in itself maybe a problem. On paper this seems like a cool interaction with black arrow and multi shot. Going to live and die by tuning on the moderate damage. However, there are two big things with this right now. First one is the 6 second internal cooldown. Beast cleave is 6 seconds which means we are pressing multishot around 5.5 to 5.9 seconds to refresh. Missing this 6 second window. This will force us to either intentionally drop beast cleave for a second and then press multishot to get this effect. Or we will just miss out on the effect sometimes and play as normal and when it goes off, it will just go off. This internal cooldown needs to move to around 5 seconds to avoid this. The other problem is during our COTW window. We don’t want to press multishot since we already have permanent beast cleave up during COTW (with the AoE option). So, this will either force us to ignore this effect during COTW or it forces us to hit multishot every 6 seconds during COTW even though we have beast cleave going.
Darkness Calls/Shadow Assassin: Darkness calls is a fine passive damage % node. Not much to say about it. Damage is damage. Shadow assassin is fine, but actually will end up being punishing if you have good RNG. You press black arrow, then you press your free kill shot. If the you get a reset on barbed shot early, you already are at 2 charges and this reset is wasted. just an interaction to think about.
Withering Fire: Not a bad capstone talent, but overall kinda boring for a capstone. You get a small damage window that you can’t paly around which may be nice on the meters but not engaging to play. I also really think there needs to be an AoE component to this capstone talent since it’s currently just ST focused. Even if the resulting splash damage is target capped or a damage reduction pass a certain number of mobs. Having it purely single target I think is a huge miss.
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