Feedback: Hunters

In Development The War Within Beta Test
63

So, initial response to hunter rework: (sv aoe)

  1. Why, just, whyyyy did u ruin wildfire infusion by removing the different types of bombs? That was the best part of bomb play for sv. Now you just hit it once in awhile to reapply the 3 dot stack. Complete ruin of sv’s aoe theme play.
  2. The class tree’s dps nodes were mostly gutted except for moving around ES. Now the class tree suffers like other class trees: Get to the end with excessive points because there is nothing good to spend them on.
  3. Zero changes were made to the sentinel hero talent tree, especially regarding thematic changes. While i expect no changes because of the short beta, I am still extremely disappointed with its implementation.
  4. You forced pet dmg modifiers from the class tree to the spec tree. This was completely unnecessary and just muddies the water.

What you did okay.

  1. You made ES more available and you made Steel Trap something that can be forgotten with a choice node. While Steel Trap should have been the first thing you deleted, at least it doesnt take up a priority spot.
  2. Unnatural causes is interesting, but extremely underwhelming for being a end node.
  3. You moved Flanking Strike and Advantage to the left side of the tree, and you made quick shot forgettable, which is great. However, there is not enough nodes on the left side of the tree so we are forced into the right side.

I am happy to see changes, however, many of them are just offset. Forcing aoe play into more ST cleave just feels bad. Having to maintain mongoose bites during aoe for merciless blows is just a headache. The spec seems to be funneled into a extremely niche role that won’t help its representation numbers moving forward.

64

Carve is gone, and Serpent Sting applied via raptor/mongoose (via talent). Interesting.

65

Survival mastery gives a flat 6% DR now and hunters can get 2 charges of SOTF. That’s a lot more survivability.

1 Like
66

Heh, the fact that Symphonic Arsenal in the Sentinel tree still showing Carve is a sign they didn’t even touch this hero tree yet.

1 Like
67

Hello Hunters! We’re very excited to unveil the class and spec tree updates for Hunter today!

We had a few goals going into this update, and we wanted to communicate those so the Hunter community will have some more direction when giving feedback in the coming weeks.

Across the Hunter core tree and all spec trees, we had these goals:

  • Improve secondary stat scaling across all Hunter specializations
  • Condense existing damage effects
  • Conservatively expand on the range of Hunter utility
  • Solidify rotational gameplay and fantasy of each spec

Core Tree

The Hunter core tree had a substantial amount of throughput relative to other core trees, which all had to be generic given how differently each spec can utilize the Hunter class tools and spells. This led to a lot of passive damage instances and didn’t do a ton to expand on each spec’s gameplay.

We’ve culled a lot of passive damage procs in the core tree, added some more situational utility, expanded on Hunter defensives, and made sure that each Hunter spec can meaningfully utilize the spells available to them in their core tree.

Beast Mastery

Beast Mastery’s gameplay has remained solid through Dragonflight, and we weren’t interested in rocking the boat too violently with this update.

Beast Mastery and the Hunter class in general have had a host of passive damage over time effects across many abilities. To help add some more cohesion to all these disparate damage over time effects, we added some bonuses like Basilisk Collar to help push the damage over time gameplay in a very Beast Mastery direction.

Beast Mastery is not a damage over time spec, and we are aiming to keep it that way. Your pets will always be the primary source of your damage and the DoTs you apply will more often than not be completely passive or passive procs-- but we felt the sheer number of DoT effects Beast Mastery has merited some deeper support.

Lastly, we were interested in pushing on the boundaries of Beast Mastery’s fantasy by adding talents like Huntmaster’s Call. We feel that it is important for Beast Mastery to be primarily about your tamed and summonable pets, but we’re also interested in more deeply expressing the “Wildcaller” part of Beast Mastery’s fantasy. We hope that calling upon beasts of legend and summoning swarms of crows should help to make you feel like the flavor of Hunter that can call upon the wilds to aid you in battle.

Marksmanship

At the beginning of the update process, we were feeling mostly pleased with the individual effects found across the Marksmanship tree. However, we had more of an issue with how these effects all worked in concert.

Precise Shots is a meaningful and expressive part of Marksmanship gameplay, but currently Aimed Shots has a hard time sharing the spotlight with all the other various effects found across the Marksmanship tree—especially during Trueshot. We are aiming to “unclog” the Marksmanship Trueshot rotation with a redesigned Eagletalon’s True Focus. With Eagletalon’s True Focus talented, firing an Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot will immediately fire another Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot that will benefit from and consume Precise Shots. This should help you to continue to get value out of Precise Shots in your Trueshot rotation, and you can focus on the more exciting parts of Trueshot, which are Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire.

The Wind Arrow suite of talents have been an exciting visual and gameplay component of Marksmanship for quite some time, but their effects and bonuses have gotten more complex over time. With this update, we wanted to dramatically simplify the effects of Legacy of the Windrunners and add some more exciting payoffs via a now-passive Wailing Arrow and an update to the Readiness capstone that should add some more skill expression and further increase the excitement of Trueshot.

Lastly, we wanted to ensure Marksmanship was owning its niche of burst AoE. Talents like Kill Zone and Rapid Fire Barrage are intended to not only be fantasy-forward and exciting talents in their own right, but encourage groups to try out a Marksmanship hunter if they want some sizeable burst every 60 seconds.

Survival

Survival has had a few different iterations over the course of WoW’s history, and with the addition of the Dragonflight talent tree, we saw a collision of many effects both old and new. With this talent tree update, we wanted to take a swing at making Survival’s kit more cohesive and taming some of the more complicated effects across the tree.

The more impactful core change to Survival is going to be Tip of the Spear’s new design. We really liked the story that this talent told and the gameplay behind it-- the Survival Hunter and their pet working in concert to deal more damage. As such, we’re expanding its effects on the talent itself and also opening it up to be augmented across the talent tree in various ways. We hope that this new core rotational concept will help to create satisfying gameplay and help to sell the Survival fantasy a bit more.

Many of Survival’s spells were either very simple (Flanking Strike) or incredibly complex (Coordinated Assault + Supporting Talents). We wanted to take some steps to smooth out the average complexity of Survival’s talents while also honing in on the core rotational gameplay and how that might be more cleanly augmented by supporting talents. More complicated talents like Deadly Duo and Wildfire Infusion have been replaced with effects that are simpler, stronger, and have more moment-to-moment implications for your gameplay.

Explosions are a core part of the Survival experience, and alongside the core rotational changes we made, we also proliferated access to Wildfire Bomb and Explosive Shot. Grenade Juggler and the new Bombardier are working in concert to make Explosive Shot a more appealing and excitement-driving rotational spell, and we hope you enjoy blowing things up in the War Within!

Lastly, we are aware that Wildfire Infusion’s previous iteration provided a great splash of color to the Survival experience that is now lost. We are interested in exploring ways we can amp up the visual excitement of Survival in the future, but we do not have anything to share at this time.

Phew, that’s a lot of changes! We are really excited to read everyone’s feedback regarding these updates and can’t wait for you to get your hands on them!

Thank you for reading!

17 Likes
68

Surv should still be ranged.
You gutted bomb play.
Surv = Bm 2.0

Just to hit the key points.

7 Likes
69

Disagree on all of those. Clearly Survival isn’t your type of spec and that’s fine.

18 Likes
70

Can we get the ability to choose ranged or melee gameplay for survival? Kind of like choosing dual wield 1 or 2 handers for fury, or dual wield or 2 hander for frost? The ranger talent would be an optimal place to do this. It already exists to buff up ranged abilities. A suggestion would be taking it, allowing the use of muzzle and kill shot with a ranged weapon. Even if not optimal, it would give the option, potentially satisfying both camps, those who wanted ranged back, and those who want to keep melee.

8 Likes
71

MM Changes all look amazing

4 Likes
72

This ain’t happening. Not sure why folks still keep asking, survival is a melee spec.

14 Likes
73

All of those specs basically suffer from having that extra option so no, it’d be better not to.

Classic is right there with OP RSV, I don’t get it :person_shrugging:

5 Likes
74

Survival is currently the least played spec in the game, like, it just straight up is, and there’s a substantial audience that wants the gameplay niche, even if it’s not exactly the same, of ranged survival back. The fact that people keep asking for it should be evidence enough of this.

It’s obvious survival won’t be going back to pure ranged at this point, but why would giving the option between the two be a bad thing?

8 Likes
75

Feedback on Survival Hunter after Brief Testing

Survival Hunter currently has some very degenerate gameplay loops. The frequent resets of Kill Command (KC), the amount of focus they generate, and talents like “Alpha Predator” create a situation where players constantly have to choose between capping on KC stacks, bomb stacks, or letting Mongoose Strike stacks drop. I do not feel this is indicative of good gameplay design. This is further complicated by having four or more major cooldowns, not including trinkets.

Major Issues Identified:

  1. Button Overload:
  • The class has too many buttons to manage effectively.
  • There is a significant imbalance between focus generation and spending.
  • Multiple DPS priority systems are being integrated into the class simultaneously.
  1. Conflicting Design Ideas:
  • Having to pick both Spearhead and Coordinated Assault introduces conflicting mechanics.
  • If Spearhead is meant to focus on Mongoose Bite, constant resets of Kill Command seem counterintuitive.
  • Juggling these systems, along with bomb stacks and energy-generating abilities like Death Chakrams, is overwhelming.

Summary:

There is currently no balance between the number of KC resets and the amount of energy generated, all while trying to keep other active abilities off cooldown. This makes the gameplay feel chaotic and unmanageable.

8 Likes
76

In regards to the Marksman Spec Tree.

It feels kind of bad that Lone Wolf is in row 7.

Is there any chance Lone wolf could be moved to rows 2-4?

8 Likes
77

I disagree. If it becomes a balancing thing that’s on blizzard, but that shouldn’t be a reason to not give players the option.

As to why not play classic? Because I’ve been there done that, and prefer the overall gameplay in retail. It’d just be nice to have that well having the spec I played until legion still be here ya know.

1 Like
78

Absolutely love the marksmanship changes, feels so much better. Only issues I see are:

  1. Even with Eagletalon’s True Focus, we still have to press multi-shot every other button to get trick shots in AoE, which just feels absolutely horrible. Maybe make it so during Trueshot, the Trickshot effect enhances the next 3 Aimed Shots or Rapid Fires?

  2. The new Wind Arrow/Wailing Arrow synergy is really fun, but getting a Wailing Arrow shot at the beginning of Trueshot feels kinda useless, because you don’t need the resets and charges of Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire that it gives. A possible solution would be making it so you get the free Wailing Arrow proc after Trueshot ENDS?

As for the class tree, I genuinely have no notes, it’s absolutely perfect. I love the changes between class tree and spec tree like the Serpent Stings being passive in your spec tree and Bursting Shot being moved to the class tree, Binding Shot getting CDR is really fun (but to be fair I’m just a sucker for CDR).

(Also, side point, from a leveling point of view, these trees are SO, SO much better, getting trick shots in the first gate, getting Exhil passive, will make leveling so much better.)

13 Likes
79

I would love to see Surv be a tank spec. Maybe something like your pets take a percent of your damage taken. Have cooldowns likw your pet jumps in front of you and takes the damage you would have instead. Another gameplay loop could be you have to try to help keep your pet alive. idk it would be cool to have a tank spec

7 Likes
80

The MM changes look great, but can we please maybe look at Primal Wrath becoming a baseline Hunter skill, and not tied to a pet family? It’s really annoying for all Hunter specs. BM and SV are forced to use ferocity pets, and MM is forced to cancel Lone Wolf.

Also, Lone Wolf being in row 7 is kinda weird. I’m not using a pet ever as MM, so I don’t know why it isn’t just baseline.

19 Likes
81

To add RSV back, the entire spec would have to be adjusted just for an “option” that Blizzard very clearly does not view as the intended way to play the spec, just like with SMF and 2h Frost.

And unlike those specs, RSV has no real overlap with a majority of the spec tree. You can’t press Raptor Strike with a ranged weapon so how are you supposed to use most, if not all, the important talents? Slapping “or Arcane Shot” is such a halfass solution to a non-existent problem.

So yes, there are great reasons to not return RSV. It’s gone, let it go.

8 Likes
82

Quick note for MM Wailing Arrow;

Good changes I believe, however Wailing should do just as much damage on single target as Aimed Shot if it is going to replace it. Something like ‘do more damage if it hits a single target’ to compensate for the loss of an aimed shot, without making it scale too high in AoE.

13 Likes