I’m going to share my thoughts on MM. And in advance, please excuse my bad English (it’s not my native language :D)
Overall it was an improvement, if I had to put it on a scale where 0 is where we were in the last six years and 10 is the perfect rework, we’re now at 6.
Lone Wolf, Precise Shots, Trick Shots are still problematic.
The spec tree has improved a lot, but it’s still full of placeholder nodes like “5% crit” or “10% cooldown reduction”.
Chimaera Shot is a classic skill for Marksmanship hunters, but I still don’t see myself using it in any scenario. It deserves a little more love.
Wailing Arrow is cool, but the RNG Silence is a bit weird.
Small suggestions:
Lone Wolf - Keep the 5% dmg buff but turn it into a node choice where you can choose something like “Lone Wolf of Ferocity”, “Lone Wolf of Cunning” and receive the pet’s active skill.
Trick Shots - Replace Kill Zone with the Tier Set effect from Dragonflight seasons 3 and 4. Kill Zone is currently only chosen for the 8% increased damage, the effect of ignoring LoS is practically useless. So I imagine this change would be a good solution to the Trick Shots problem.
Precise Shots - Although the ETF change was good, Precise Shots is still a problem especially during Trueshot in single target scenarios. I still feel that pressing any button besides AiS during our highest burst window is bad for our rotation. My suggestion would be a new change to the ETF where it becomes a choice node where you choose whether during the Trueshot window, your AiS will automatically cast an Arcane Shot or Multi-shot, just like Serpentstalker’s Trickery does with Serpent Sting. This suggestion may be a bit unrealistic and needs to be worked on better, but it would be nice to have some change in this regard.
Crack Shot - Make it baseline, please
Improved Arrow Shot - Make it baseline, please
Tactical Reload - Make it baseline, please
Night Hunter - Make it baseline, please
Chimaera Shot - I see this skill fitting better in place of the current Wailing Arrow. It could be the same usage criteria, after 20 Wind Arrows your next AiS becomes Chimaera Shot, but always being an instant cast. Of course the skill needs a good damage buff and a little bit more flavor, maybe having increased damage on targets affected by Serpent Sting? I’m not sure yet.
Wailing Arrow - It could go directly to the Dark Ranger tree instead of Black Arrow. It could keep the same interruption effect and area damage, but it would be instant like Black Arrow is now and would gain the effect of generating AiS charges. I think this way it would slightly improve the perception that Dark Ranger is weak and would give a powerful AoE and ST damage and an on demand interrupt.
I’m sure it’s been said but can we figure out a way to add MM’s season 3/4 tier armor to our abilities or talents. It makes AoE feel so smooth and rewarding if done correctly. Casting multishot over and over feels clunky and even worse during Trueshot. As for BM, maybe bring back that rapid fire multishot azerite armor ability. It doesn’t change the rotation but it at least made casting multishot feel cool.
The only real issues left are BM’s leech and misdirection and of course the classic lust issue for MM and that’s about it. Great job so far Blizzy!!
Aren’t there already talents that modify EITHER RS or MB, depending on which you have? I mean, the newest talent tree you can almost spec around MB if you REALLY don’t want it.
Viper’s Venom, Merciless Blows, Sweeping Spear, Wildfire Infusion, they all work for either RS OR MB. I don’t know how the numbers look if you talent AROUND MB and of course then Bloody Claws too, but it’s entirely possible I suppose to just not take MB. You lose Mongoose Fury in the process (and Bloody Claws) but you still have the larger initial hit of RS.
Honestly, one involves managing a buff stack, the other doesn’t.
Pls pls pls change the horn on Huntmaster’s Call talent, at first using it was kinda cool, but playing for awhile with it makes me want to just rip my headset off.
Smoke Screen bugged. From how I read it [Exhilaration] is just supposed to give you 3 sec of (Survival of the Fittest) not waste a whole charge of your wall (SoF) when used. If this goes live you will have to use both wall stacks of SoF before touching exhilarate which we have cool down reduction on…so the last thing you press is the ability that has CDR makes no sense to me. you dont even get the whole 6 sec of dmg reduction when it triggers from pressing exhilaration only 3 sec, but it still consumes a stack if you have them.
I wanted to get a PVP’er voice in here too for survival.
While the changes are overall great, there are a large number of uncontrollable AOE abilities that will break CC, and not enough single target focused talents to take advantage of.
Grenade juggler is a RNG CC breaker
Contagious Reagents breaks CC when spreading
Exposed Flank will break CC
We’ve always been able to work around bombs because of the predictable cone, but explosive shot is a wildcard.
We need more single target damage focused talents, because currently Bloody Claws, Quick Shot, and Sic’ em are next to useless.
Diamond Ice is going to be mandatory if you want to have any kind of control in arenas. I do worry that many hero talents in general are really potentially degrading CC-focused gameplay in favor of pure Mythic+ AOE-fest.
So I’m not a hunter main, but my wife is and she wanted to hop on and try bm. Am I crazy or is this spec bloated as heck? I feel like it has more keybinds that my rdruid and that’s saying a lot. The tree opened up a lot access to abilities, but my lord. Now steady shot is a rotational ability for bm from what I can tell? I think she has 34 keybinds and that’s without pet commands? She didn’t even go out of her way to pick up EVERY active ability in the tree either.
A lot of great feedback has already been said here so I am going to iterate one because it just feels like its a FORCED choice, which as a BM Hunter feels bad, and its with Hero Talents
Pack Leaders last ability Pack Assualt basically demands you to go down and get Call of the Wild. Which I feel then really limits the amount of talents I have to play with or specs I want to try out.
Pack Assualt should really function this way off of Dire Beast or Huntmasters Call or Beastial Wrath… something higher up in the skill tree where it is not as limiting.
This is then added by an additional insult to injury if you go down Dark Ranger it is calling for you to get Call of the Wild again!
At this point Call of the Wild either needs to go up the tree or removed from being called out in both our hero talent trees… or we are forced into this which leaves out other great bottom tier talents
This is just never going to be taken I don’t think. We don’t press Kill Shot really any more than usual even with CA and then only when we crit we reset Kill Command which is already getting reset from other sources.
It also sucks we have to path through it or Tactical Advantage to get to CA.
Tactical Advantage is pretty underwhelming but a better choice than Sic Em.
Also what’s with Improved Wildfire Bomb which increases WFB damage by 8% and then Tactical Advantage also increasing Flanking and WFB by 5%.
Hunters have new visuals and sound effects when Huntmaster’s Call summons Hati or Fenryr.
The sound effect for this is atrocious after the first few times, please get rid of this or use a different sound. Sounds like I’m blowing fog horns for most of the fight.
I mean, if you have nothing better to spend the GCDs on and will still be getting your KCs off in time… why wouldn’t you Cobra a bit more and fill what unlucky (Barb-proc-less) time would otherwise be empty with Steady Shot if able? Not a likely scenario, but filled downtime is still better than… complete downtime.
And Grenade Juggler also increases WFB damage by 5%.
So, 2 pure WFB (or WFB and FS) damage nodes, and 2 more that include WFB %damage increases… because we really needed even more bomb emphasis in that way…
Again you shouldn’t be focus starved so any period where you have a free GCD it should be used on Cobra Shot. If you have enough time to be slamming yourself dry on Cobra Shot you are doing something very wrong.
Most high rated games with good healers on both teams come down to mana, 1/2 the time I’m diamond icing a DPS for peels. DMG depletes mana bars, more DMG on more targets is a net positive especially in dampening. Opportunities to get clean traps on healers out of cleave range happen often enough. If it was as bad as you are worrying about here then BM would’ve seen no success at all I’m DF S4 due to barbed shot and call of the wild spamming stomp.
Trading Coordinated Kill and Bird of Prey for Symbiotic Adrenaline and Relentless Primal Ferocity is kind of a sad change. The 50% cooldown on wildfire bombs and killshot really made that rotation feel much more active during our burst window, and more than 10% haste ever will. 10% haste is fun and getting a more reliable TOTS and +7% dmg boost to direct damage is nice, but it’s not close to the cooldown it used to be.
I feel like in Dragonflight I love Coordinated and Fury of the Eagle, but in TWW I only really like Spearhead, and that’s just because 30% crit and crit dmg is insane, not because I like it as a skill.
I also really miss my +3 yard range passive, if it didn’t have all those wildfire talents behind it I don’t think I’d even run it.
It might feel less fun, but CA during Dragonflight was one of the weakest cooldowns in game. If you compared CA builds to non-CA builds, they offered no different damage profiles and CA wasn’t even a noticeable increase in damage. It just felt slightly faster to play. It says a lot about the power of the cooldown if no-CD builds were competitive and even better in many situations, in both raid and mythic+.
Logging dummy tests now with the new CA, the burst is a LOT higher. If you look at your damage graph, you can see when you press CA; this wasn’t the case for all of DF. Relentless Primal Ferocity is pretty powerful. Tip of the Spear is going from 26% to 39% on my character AND you get two stacks of Tip for every KC. This is much more powerful than the 7% damage boost you said.
This is a much more elegant solution to CA, especially the macro issue that was required for all of DF. Not only does this cooldown actually feel powerful but it also doesn’t need a clunky macro anymore, like the DF version.
That being said, it is still sad to lose Birds of Prey, but I think overall this is a massive improvement.
That’s all well and good. I think my main point is that the single target talents are lacking if you don’t want to cleave. Mainly fixing quick shots, sic em, and bloody claws would solve this by giving useful options to progress down the tree.
Grenade juggler is too good to pass up, so we will have to accept a degree of randomness.
I’d love to see talents that reshape our primary focus dump - mongoose bite.
Surv is playing really different now. Crit and mastery are shaping up to be high value stats, whereas before it was haste, haste, haste to really maximize your mongoose bite windows. Now a lot of globals are spent prepping heavy hitters with TotS, with less time and emphasis on maximizing mongoose fury.
In my mind, the best way forward would be:
Replace Raptor Strike with Mongoose Bite
Bring base damage of MB up to where RS was
Decouple Mongoose Fury from MB and make it it’s own talent further down the tree to replace bloody claws or Sic Em.
Make Mongoose Fury max out at 4 stacks instead of 5 so we can take advantage of top end of window in our new rotation.
