Feedback: Hunters

In Development Guardians of the Dream PTR
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In this thread, please discuss ongoing changes to the Hunter class in the Guardians of the Dream PTR.

Beast Mastery

Aspect of the Wild and Call of the Wild have struggled to be compelling choices during Dragonflight. Both of these cooldowns were competing for similar design space to make you and your pets feel stronger in a way that feels different than Bestial Wrath. After evaluating these abilities, we have decided to replace Aspect of the Wild entirely and convert it into passive options on the talent tree.

The removal of Aspect of the Wild allows us to double down on Call of the Wild being a strong pet summoning cooldown for the Beast Mastery spec. We’re also lowering the number of talent points in the Thrill of the Hunt and Dire Command talent nodes from 3 to 2, which should give you some extra flexibility in your talent choices.

  • Aspect of the Wild has been removed.
  • New Talent: Savagery (Passive) – Kill Command damage is increased by 10%. Barbed Shot lasts 2 seconds longer. Replaces Aspect of the Wild.
  • Master Handler has been redesigned – Each time Barbed Shot deals damage, the cooldown of Kill Command is reduced by 0.5 seconds.
  • Call of the Wild has been slightly redesigned – Cooldown reduced to 2 minutes (was 3 minutes) and the base ability now also has the added functionality: Whenever Call of the Wild summons a pet, the cooldown of Kill Command and Barbed Shot are reduced by 50%.
  • Choice nodes for Call of the Wild updated:
    • While Call of the Wild is active, all of your pets are affected by Beast Cleave. Each time Call of the Wild summons a pet, all of your pets Stomp.
    • While Call of the Wild is active, each time you Kill Command, your Kill Command target takes 3% more damage from all of your summons. This effect stacks.
  • Thrill of the Hunt is now a 2-rank talent (was 3). Each point grants 2% critical strike chance, stacking up to 2/4 times (was 3%, stacking 1/2/3 times).
  • Dire Command is now a 2-rank talent (was 3). Each point grants 15/30% chance to trigger (was 10/20/30%).
  • Snake Bite has been removed.

Marksmanship

Windrunner’s Guidance being unreliable has added too much variance to a hunter’s performance on each dungeon or raid attempt. This should keep the Wind Arrow theme strong and useful, while being predictable and reliable for how it interacts with your other abilities and the Trueshot cooldown.

  • Windrunner’s Guidance has been redesigned – Each Wind Arrow fired reduces the cooldown of Rapid Fire by 0.5 seconds, and every 8 wind arrows increases the duration of your next Trueshot by 1 second, up to a maximum of 10 seconds.

Survival

  • Wildfire Bombs now correctly states that damage is reduced when damaging more than 8 targets.
    • Developers’ note: This is not a functionality change for Wildfire Bomb, but rather a tooltip clarity update. This has been in effect since Shadowlands.
  • Wildfire Bombs now deal 40% increased damage to your primary target.
    • Developers’ note: The Aberrus Survival set bonus increases the value of Wildfire Bomb while in single target encounters in a way that has worked out well. We want to keep this interaction going forward for Survival, so we are removing it from the set bonus and just making all variants of Wildfire Bomb, including any periodic damage effects, deal 40% increased damage to your primary target when using Wildfire Bomb.
  • Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (4) Set Bonus – No longer causes Kill Command to increase damage taken from Wildfire Bombs.
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This feedback is in two parts, the first focusing on general Hunter concerns and the second is more about SV’s talent tree.

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Has there been any further discussion on Hunter’s desirability in competitive PvE environments? We are one of 3 classes in the game without any sort of unique buff, and even then DK brings both Grip and AMZ, while Enh Shaman brings Windfury Totem, as well as “better” versions of our traps and AoE stuns.

Yes, we do have turtle, but Paladin and Mages bring a similar effect on top of unique raid buffs.

I think unless each Hunter spec is tuned to do unreasonable damage, there won’t really be a reason to bring a Hunter moving forward in most PvE situations.

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  1. This feedback revolves around Survival’s talent tree being both very narrow and very expensive, which can lead to gamers feeling not so excited when playing with the talent tree in comparison to other DPS specs

(This chart was made prior to any Rogue/Havoc changes, I will update this ASAP)

As you can see, Survival has both the fewest number of talent nodes available to the spec compared to all other melee DPS as well as the MOST amount of talent nodes that cost more than 2 or more points to fully invest in.

The quick and dirty math shows that a whopping 39% of our tree is nodes that take more than 1 point to fully invest in, which drastically reduces the amount of talents available to the spec.

Compare that to Retribution Paladins (a recently reworked mDPS) They only have two talent nodes in the entire tree that cost more than 1 point and a tremendous amount of choice nodes.

Not only is our talent tree set up in this very (frankly, odd) restrictive way, Survival also has a tremendous amount of talent nodes that are simple passive abilities.

This is eight of our nodes that are simply purely passive bonuses to our damage. I understand that not every talent needs four layers of daisy chained synergy or to be an active node (quite the opposite! I love a good simple talent) but 8 entirely passive nodes with no procs or interactions of an already restrictive class tree is not exciting to play with, theorycraft, or even think about, especially when compared to other melee DPS specs.

It’s not so fun investing points in that you can’t even see function and does not feel fun as a player. Look at Quick Shot—despite it being a passive damage increase, you can actually see the impact it has on your character when you invest in it.

On top of that, several of these entirely passive “do more damage” nodes also buff the same abilities and end up being redundant. Another point of contention here is that many of these nodes simply gate other passive nodes—not many exist to act as a gate to more exciting talents (active or exciting passives).

24 Likes
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To say this is underwhelming is…an understatement. You guys genuinely just don’t get the problem and it’s really frustrating. Part of this is, again, nobody on the team plays Hunter including the Hunter dev. The other part is you have this idea in your head that Hunter brings something to raid because Turtle is a reflect ability that “sometimes” (i use that loosely) acts like an immunity. And that is just not true. Turtle is a wannabe iceblock/divine shield/cloak of shadows etc. except it’s worse than all of them because DoT damage still applies and happens during the Turtle.

I am now going to copy and paste the feedback that I posted on 10.1/10.1.5/and 10.1.7 PTR forums:
We’re now approaching 5 years since BFA launched and the “rework” happened for all 3 hunter specs. Since then, blatant and serious issues with the class have been mentioned time and time again by everyone in this community and yet nothing has been done. Hunters are replaceable by every single other class in WoW. We are the ONLY class that can be replaced and the raid loses NOTHING for it. We are the ONLY class that brings absolutely nothing to the raid that others can’t do. These issues have been brought up for 5. long. years.

It has been acknowledged in the past, and just openly admitted, that the main dev for the Hunter class does not even play Hunter. In what universe is that ever okay? Imagine being the lead designer for a class and refusing to actually play that class. Even they know it’s a mess of a class that offers nothing of value.

It is amazing to me that in an expansion promoted as “Player feedback driven” hunters still can’t get patch notes with significant changes. The ONLY thing you did was nerf the Rasz bow that gave us some form of life and “compensated” for it with buffs that were a joke and equated to be a nerf. The lack of understanding Hunter feedback has been the most irritating. BM complains about their kit being abysmal and your response is to buff Kill Shot damage FOR A SPEC THAT DOES NOT CARE ABOUT KILL SHOT.

MM complains for years that their focus regen for the cast time of Steady Shot is horrible and the response was to double down and force steady focus to become a thing despite the fact that people overwhelmingly hated using that talent the first time around and aggressively pushed against it.

SV has complained for years that they are melee in an already anti-melee environment and they have nothing to compensate for it. Why would anyone take an SV hunter when Warrior is right there and they have a buff to go along with it as well as superior CC? Your answer is they wouldn’t and that is correct.

The absolute ignorance to just throw away all feedback on this class for years and refuse to touch it while pretending that everything is fine is crazy to me. How anyone on your team can post patch notes that say “Player feedback and data driven” while not including any changes for Hunter dozens of times this xpac should be the end of this expansion being dubbed “Player driven” because there is nothing player driven about the lack of changes to this class. WoW players very rarely agree on a lot but the one thing, if people are being honest and not just memeing, that everyone can universally agree on, is that hunters are worthless and have nothing of value in this environment of PvE/PvP and their current state. It should not surprise you that the last time Hunter’s mattered and were brought is when you removed buffs and substantial externals in Legion and the only thing people cared about was pure damage and mobility. Now we live in a world of Buffs and externals and heavy utility yet Hunter is just floundering with none.

I know you don’t care, so it’s pointless to ask but still, when do you plan on listening to feedback or at least responding as to why you feel differently?

To quote Liquid Maximum “Why would I ever bring a 1st Hunter when bringing a 2nd of any class or spec is significantly better?”

Now i sit back here and I read this through again and I ask myself, do these 10.2 changes address any of these concerns in any meaningful way?

The answer is no.

Do these changes address the problem that a 1ST HUNTER is less value than a 2ND OF ANY CLASS?

The answer is no.

Do these changes address a singular problem that has been raised by hunters for YEARS regarding survivability.

The answer is no.

Disappointed isn’t the right word anymore because I expect this. And personally, for myself and others, the damage of the specs doesn’t matter. The damage does. not. matter. The lack of utility matters. The lack of raid buffs we give matters. The lack of debuffs on a boss/add that buffs our raid matters. The lack of literally anything that is unique to us that benefits the raid matters. And until someone on that team acknowledges that this feedback is not wrong at all because it is shared and felt in ALL aspects of WoW, nothing is going to get better. Mythic+ aggrees, PvP agrees, and Mythic raid agrees. Hunter DAMAGE OUTPUT does NOT matter when they can not SURVIVE on the level that every other class can. It does NOT matter when we do not bring a buff to the raid in any way.

Suggestions:
-Improve survivability of the class, make our defensives feel like real defensives and let us be more mobile again in all 3 specs.
-Give us SOMETHING to benefit our group. Expose Weakness debuff applied when we crit that improves the crit chance of our party/raid members. Hunters Mark increases the attack power of melee/ranged attacks against a target by x amount. Give us traps and bombs that we can use on the fly during the fight to put debuffs on a boss or add that do unique things. Literally do something to make us valuable to a group.

41 Likes
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This is quite nice though

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Set bonuses are trash again and where is massive buffs to survivability/defensives/utility?

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I feel like the BM changes are, ok. The reality is though as many people have echoed Hunter brings nothing that really is unique to a situation. This is the case in raids and especially so in M+.

Our “immunity”, defensive, interrupt, dispel/soothe and cc/stops are all worse versions of what other classes have. On top of that Hunter brings nothing of value for a party buff. Primal Rage might be used occasionally but you are just better getting an evoker or shaman as they offer a better kit with Blood Lust. MM can’t even use Blood Lust without severely gimping itself.

MM itself is long overdue for a ground up rework. The fact that this hasn’t even been brought up here is incredibly disappointing.

SV was a gamble and turned the vast majority of hunters don’t want to play a melee. Which should be no surprise to anyone.

So the vast majority of Hunters are stuck choosing between 2 specs. BM is a good baseline in terms of satisfying theme and play style but lacks any form of good burst. MM has lost the fantasy of hitting massive aimed shots from big range because of PVP. Both specs are mediocre when it comes to AoE.

I feel like Hunter is a pure DPS class with very little utility but it’s damage profile is not very desirable. It’s fine in low end content and because of that it probably has a very healthy player base. I just don’t believe that most Hunters are feeling any sort of wow moment anymore.

21 Likes
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Hunter should be able to bring ANY of the existing buff just slightly less efficient.

Dont have a mage tonight ? Our hunter will bring 4% int
Dont have a Dh tomorrow ? Our hunter will increase magic dmg taken by 4%

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hunter survivability is fine but i agree the utility of hunter’s is the reason they aren’t included in groups. the set bonus for BM sounds interesting. it gives a bonus that applies to both single target and aoe, has great synergy with other talents, and compounds with bestial wrath damage. need to wait for sims but this sounds powerful to me.

the bm rework potentially gives us the burst cd we have been missing with the call of the wild rework. 2 min cd’s are great especially if it lines up with our trinkets this patch and the choice node rework under it are actually impactful now potentially making it a reasonable option now. its a little anti synergistic with our tier bonus with having to spec out of the dire beast capstone branch in order to take it which feels weird when our tier is 100% dire beast focused.

1 Like
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Echo everything that’s been said about hunter utility. Please acknowledge us. The last few years have been frustrating.

MM set bonus: Why two seconds of volley…could we at least get 2.5? (long enough to cast an aimed shot).

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This HAS to be a joke.

How does this address survivability, lack of group utility and dragging up the rear of DPS for a class that does literally nothing else? Where is addressing the fact we are shoehorned into one specific pet? Where is addressing the totally broken way of interacting with pets for Lone Wolf MM Hunters? Where is the acknowledgement of at least the fact we’d like to be able to choose tenacity/cunning/ferocity for whatever pet? Id love to even dare bring up the idea of bringing back pet specs but at this stage I’ll just settle for ANYTHING that acknowledges what Hunters have actually been saying.

There has been so much massive in depth feedback and it appears nobody has looked at a single thing thats ever been posted on any of the forums.

For BM, all this has done is made you press the same buttons just faster than ever. Yeah it buffs AoE and then our set bonus is useless.

For MM this removes some RNG, sure, but at least it was RNG that would help during the steady shot boredom ability drought - and now its got a cap on it while randomly buffing a completely seperate talent on a different branch that has nothing to do with it? Also what is that volley proc on our set bonus? What are we supposed to do with that? We cant even get off an aimed shot in that time.

Survival is really doubling down on bomb spam yet again despite repeatedly telling you stop doing that.

Quite frankly why even bother with feedback? Clearly nobody listens or even understands whats wrong or anything about the class at all to even know what to do with the feedback we give you.

Seriously does ANYONE there play a Hunter?

20 Likes
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Survival Suggestions

Replace Carve with the following:

Culling - Kill Command strikes all enemies affected by your damage over time effects within 8 yrds of your pet.

Adjust Frenzy Strikes to the following:

Frenzy Strikes - Butchery reduces the remaining cooldown on Wildfire Bomb and Flanking Strike by 1 second for each target hit, up to 5.

Kill Command reduces the remaining cooldown on Wildfire Bomb and Flanking Strike by 0.5 seconds for each target hit, up to 5.

Adjust Viper’s Venom to the following:

Venomous Fangs - Your first Kill Command on an enemy has a 50% / 100% chance to apply Serpent Sting. Subsequent Kill Commands have a 15% / 30% chance to do so.

Make Mongoose Bite a choice node with the following:

Kill or Be Killed - If you have more than 50 Focus, your next Raptor Strike costs 20 more Focus and deals 100% more damage.

Adjust Spear Focus to the following:

Spear Focus - Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite have a chance equal to their Focus cost to grant a stack of Tip of the Spear.

Adjust Bloody Claws to the following:

Bloody Claws - The chance for Kill Command’s cooldown to reset is increased by 2% / 4% for every 20 Focus you are missing.

Adjust Sweeping Spear to the following:

Sweeping Spear - Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, Butchery, and Fury of the Eagle each deal 5% / 10% more damage.

Replace Quick Shots with the following:

Eagle Eye - When Kill Command’s cooldown is reset you have a 30% chance to gain the effects of Aspect of the Eagle for 6 seconds and cause your next Raptor Strike or Mongoose Bite to refund its Focus cost. Casting Raptor Strike or Mongoose Bite will cancel the effect.

Replace Explosives Expert with the following:

Skirmisher - Your abilities that cause you and your pet to attack as one grant you the Skirmisher effect, increasing your Versatility by 5% / 10% for 8 seconds and cause your next Disengage during this time to heal you for 5% / 10% of your maximum health and not trigger its cooldown. Casting Disengage will cancel this effect.

Activated by Flanking Strike, Coordinated Assault, and Spearhead.

Have Fury of the Eagle grant +30% chance to Dodge while channeling. Add a Focus cost to the ability to allow it to benefit from Mastery.

Adjust Mending Bandage to only cancel from DIRECT damage.

Merge the effects of Hunting Pack with Aspect of the Cheetah.

Reduce the cooldowns of Aspect of the Turtle, Aspect of the Cheetah, Survival of the Fittest, and Exhilaration by 33% and improve Born to Be Wild to 15% / 30%.

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i’m guessing they will make that volley trigger trickshots for the rapidfire that proc’d it, or it is pretty meh. its already pretty meh in single target. its synergy with the 4 piece could be interesting but i’m not sure 15% is going to be impactful. this tier set does seem pretty underwhelming and only really impactful in aoe.

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Continuing the discussion from Guardians of the Dream PTR Development Notes:

Does this mean the other bugs present in Call of the Wild will be fixed before 10.2?

Specifically…

Bugs that prevent Call of the Wild from being chosen, even with the upcoming changes.

  • The damage of Call of the Wild is still reduced by Animal Companion. Animal Companion has been bugged since it was added in Legion. It needs an overhaul, as it affects so many other talents.
  • Summoned pets only last 6 seconds, but if standing at max range the pets take 4-5 seconds to reach the target. They do not do damage while en route. Unless pets spawn on the target, or teleport to the target, this makes CotW a melee talent for a ranged spec.
  • The summoned pets sometimes spawn at the Hunter’s feet and refuse to move forward and attack the target. Doesn’t happen to everyone, so unsure if this is a latency issue, pathing issue, or something else.

Bugs that affect class fantasy.

  • The same pet is summoned over and over again. It does not summon an assortment of pets from the stables, as the tooltip claims. It summons the first pet in your loadout repeatedly.

Also, would like to see some raid utility added to the class. It’s getting old at this point. Your reps have told people in interviews they were happy with the raid buffs as they were, but then you added an entire spec (augmentation) that showed that wasn’t really the case. If you can add an entire support spec, it doesn’t seem like much of an ask to give raid groups a reason to bring Hunters.

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It addresses none of it and my genuine fear is that these initial notes, as they have been on every patch of DF so far, are not the floor of the changes we’ll get but the ceiling, and the only thing they would consider changing would be the numbers tuning for their “buffs and nerfs” that they’re allegedly giving us.

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Honesty a survival hunter rework is needed. it would be awesome to actually lean into half range half melee.

2 Likes
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I tried out the new WRG on the PTR and i love it.
This is a much needed change, props to the team for coming up on a way to stop the rng and to not kill the talent fully. however this talent has no impact on opening trueshots which is the lust + ca window of MM is when they do the most damage. not a big deal if fights are designed in a way you lust later and not on pull, we are trading opener dps for stronger mid fight and execute dps. not a bad trade off. i am personally not a fan of doing my damage during 30% of the fight and wet noodle for the rest (Careful Aim seriously needs to be looked at). now for some stuff i feel we could benefit from.

  1. remove improved steadyshot (make it baseline or outright delete steadyshot, make arcane shot a generator like legion).

  2. shift In The Rythm to the spot Steady focus is (This talent needs to go, not sure how its survived this long after no1 likes this awful maintenance buff on the least impactful ability in the entire hunter kit).

  3. If going with the arcane shot generator idea, change rapidfire into a focus spender(This gives the rotation a smooth feel letting you rapidfire to spend focus, get your ITR and streamline buffs and unleash a quick casted aimedshot and then you spend your precise shot empowered arcanes to get focus back).

  4. volley and rapidfire currently cause your autoshot swing timer to reset (this has big implications on talents like LNL that rely on autoshot or anything trinket related or procs, this should be fixed as all other casts have been made to not do this since burning crusade).

  5. The tier 2 set is great and it addresses a lot of problems such as not having 2 target cleave, having to multishot during trueshot. (currently on ptr this gives 6 seconds of trickshots allowing you to rapidfire>Aimed>Aimed>rapidfire inside of trueshot as a rotation).

  6. Tier 4 set is basically non existent in ST, i am not sure how many targets it has to hit to be impactful in aoe, i would prob tack on a rapidfire or volley damage buff % to this and remove the rng making any target hit by volley also be hit by wind arrow (Wind arrows currently do about 1k damage, testing this tier set on ptr it gave me about 200 dps in ST lol).

  7. In the general hunter tree, get rid of steel trap and swap lethal poison, as it makes no sense to spend points to pick up Serp sting to reach lethal poison/hydra byte and its just a wasted talent point, moving LP allows us to take 2 points serrated shots, which is a big improvement over current path and no1 really like steel trap and often spec out of it even if it sims the best.

  8. remove Lone wolf or allow last pet dismissed to grant the hunter its effects (Ie 10% leech, 8% movespeed, 8% stam, gain lust, master call, Something else (Since fort of bear is baseline) this allows some hunter utility and extra survibility to rot damage which we are very weak to in pvm as our tools for dealing with raid spikes are fairly good.

  9. in the general tree rework sentiel owl to be out permanent and grant 5% raid leech, once per 2 minutes you may activate the owl to survey the area granting 10% raid wide crit chance and allowing mobs spotted by the owl to be target able even when out of LOS. (This provides a great passive raid buff and adds a damage boost to the raid and provides utility in the form of being able to dps out of los). This would obviously have to not be stackable to avoid abuse.

  10. move bursting shot out the dps tree, this is not taken due to the massive implication of dps loss for its pathetic knock back, move it to the general tree somewhere.

Here is a few idea’s on how to fix hunter and give it utility, fix some core issues such as focus generation and a reason to be brought to raid.

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The first thing seems to have been fixed - Least all 3 of my 3 pets not in stables were on details dmg log. 2 of them at such low damage amounts they got clearly summoned momentarily by call of the wild.

I didnt pay attention to where the pets spawned but I dont remember seeing them spawn on me so also potentially fixed.

Raid buff would be something, which would make first hunter better than copy of another class and make lot of hunters sleep easier over their raid spots. While I understand the concept of not all need raid buff, with how few classes there are w/o one, it just feels bad. And the fact this doesnt seem to matter to Blizz is frustrating as a hunter player.

The BM talent changes are a step into right direction, what I would still argue is giving BM 1 extra point in spec tree, be it baselining multi shot or making beast cleave 1 point node, I dont care which but it would really alleviate how tight BM tree is. Currently BM pays 4! points for functional AoE (multi shot+2 Beast cleave + Killer cleave ), thats just such a high tax to pay for it.Tree could use some more love but if we arent getting a real rework small touches on top of whats on ptr and I would be personally relatively satisfied till end of expansion.

Another thing I would like is increasing duration of thrill of the hunt by 2s into 10s(1s per rank), same as frenzy is with savagery, which is required for call of the wild. Its a great node but essentially the frenzy 2s increase is completely worthless if you run Thrill of the Hunt as thats only 8s and you need to keep it up. Obviously numbers are easy to change but Thrill of the hunt is still “mandatory” pick in tree - Just hitting damage dummy with few different talent layouts and even with rng and human error existing Thrill of the Hunt layouts did noticeably more damage to say its just still talent you have to pick.

The feedback I dont understand is complaining bout BM tier set. It has lot of synergies with talents and is also powerful, not much more I can ask for it. It doesnt affect rotations beyond talent choices, which dont affect rotation much, but I feel like the rest of the boxes get checked. Also leans into BM fantasy of having a literal zoo of beasts fighting for you, which is actually surprisingly fun for me.

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The fact that we didn’t care about Kill Shot probably means they were right to buff it.

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Some thoughts about the current set of changes (BM, raiding-focused feedback):

Two Build Problem
Right now, either you play the full AOE build, which has some of the worst ST in the game, or you play the ST build and have no AOE. We’re getting a few new points, but I think you’ll just feed these extra talent points into more ST if you’re playing ST and AOE if you’re playing AOE. If you try to play a “mixed” build, what’s mostly likely to happen is that you’ll just lose on both ST and AOE to classes that get solid baseline AOE for free (e.g. Evoker). This feels like a natural result of hunter design; if hunter’s “mixed” builds were competitive, its pure ST/pure AOE builds would likely be too strong.

Rather than the exact number of viable builds, I’m more worried with how BM is tuned as a result of the design choice to put a (relatively) steep cost to attain competitive AOE; we only have a sample size of two, but so far we’ve had BM with solid ST and worst-in-class AOE (Vault) and solid AOE but worst-in-class ST (Aberrus).

Call of the Wild
It’s really hard to take Call of the Wild seriously when the pets still slowly walk from the player to their target. If you’re standing at max range, your pets will get one, maybe two attacks in before despawning (and if Bloody Frenzy is taken, they’ll stomp on the way to the target). I think this issue really holds this talent back.

Dead Talents
BM has several talents that are completely dead; I have never taken these under any circumstances: Cobra Senses, Kindred Spirits (despite how easy it is to cap Focus from time to time due to all the free abilities BM has), Cobra String (we do not need free KCs), Hunter’s Prey (Kill Shot is barely worth using). The only time reason I’d take any of these is if they were buffed, and due to how generic they are they’d probably just replace some other talents and enter one of the two default builds.

Other issues:

  • ~50-80% of BM’s damage comes from pets, depending on target count, which severely devalues Leech. Since MM can’t use a pet without griefing their damage, only SV can actually use a Ferocity pet effectively (in raiding; Ferocity is great for solo content!).
  • Related, there has been very little pet diversity since at least BFA, if not earlier. There is very little reason to run a non-Tenacity pet in raid as BM, and among Tenacity pets I pretty much always run a Spirit Beast and a Mortal Wounds debuffer. The Leech issue contributes to this; I would have really liked to have 15% real Leech in P2 Diurna. In addition, having the ability to quickly swap pets similar to Wild Kingdom (on a long CD, if need be) would be huge for QoL in the event that multiple pets were actually useful.
  • The class tree has several dead talents/talents that are only taken to reach nodes we actually want, such as Improved Tranq Shot and Binding Shackles.
  • I don’t feel like the current set of changes make hunter any more attractive to raid groups unless they just do more damage than their competition. There is no spell in their kit would ever make me think “I’m glad we brought a hunter!”; even small things like Time Spiral go a long way to justify a raid spot (Sentinel Owl is way too weak to fill this role). Also, the reason to be brought doesn’t need to be a raid buff (a raid buff is the simplest fix, though); in SL, hunter brought powerful burst AOE with Wild Spirits, and that was good enough. For better or worse, the hunter damage profile is flatter this expansion, so it’s harder to justify a spot without raw numbers.
7 Likes
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Just tested it on live.

  • Summons slot 1 & 2 pets in my loadout the first time, then it’s the same pet from slot 1 over and over until it ends.
  • All pets summoned at my side and walked to the target. If dash was off cooldown, one of them would run.
  • Out of three casts of Call of the Wild, I had two pets that summoned and stood still until they despawned.
  • About half the pets summoned walked slowly to the target, wasting uptime.

It doesn’t even need to be a raid buff. Warlocks have cemented their spot with unique utility abilities - summons, gateways, lock rocks, battle rez, etc.

  • They could easily convert Sentinel Owl to be something more useful. They clearly intended for that to be the case, then released an abysmal ability that no serious player uses.
  • Make Hunter’s Mark a single target buff or debuff. Increase crits against that target, or perhaps reduce the damage the target does with AoE abilities by a few percent.

Lots of possibilities to give Hunter’s utility, but they refuse to follow any of them. Instead, they tell us everything is fine as it is, then add Augmentation to the mix. It almost seems like a middle finger to the entire class.

Any tier set that dictates builds is poorly designed. Especially when the talents it buffs are at the bottom of the tree. With the 10.2 changes to the right side of the BM tree, there is a strong possibility the new ‘best build’ will be the right and middle paths. These changes may push us away from a Dire Beast build(left path), but the tier set pulls us right back.

If they want to classify the pets summoned by Call of the Wild as Dire Beasts, then problem solved. Otherwise, they are just fixing talents that might be ignored, and the tier set is why they’re ignored.