You aren’t who the game is designed around. Sorry. Your feedback actually doesn’t mean anything and you’re doing harm by spamming the thread with your emotional outburst.
You aren’t the arbiter of what is and isn’t useful feedback.
17 Likes
I mean at this point continuing to engage with you just furthers the spam so whatever. Can yall just let the opinion be considered heard so that we can talk about other things? Obviously we aren’t anywhere close to final yet and there’s a lot more cool stuff to unpack that deserves way more attention.
Hi, person with fifteen years in game dev here.
The proposed changes to MM are logical, rational, sound, and while I find the eagle to be a fairly boring option, the overall design pivot for the spec makes perfect sense.
It is also utterly wrong and you should not do it. In your design meetings, you are telling yourselves that people who are attached to their pets will simply switch to Beastmaster when the MM changes go live, and that they aren’t losing their pets at all. This is a myopic raid-only perspective that is unworthy of the people tasked with developing for WORLD OF WARCRAFT.
Your view of the player reaction is incomplete: they’re attached to Marksmanship and their pet. They do not want to play Beastmaster and they do not want to lose their pet. The emotional attachments that these Hunter players have to the game are about both of these things together intrinsically, and you cannot take it away from them without giving something equally significant in exchange, and expect them to be happy with it.
And no, the eagle is not a good exchange. What’s that make sense for, other than a Tauren? How does that fit a goblin or a Forsaken or a Draenei? For starters, you ought to consider that the eagle is a different pet for every race. But moreover, you should not do this to Marksmanship.
What you ought to do is give Hunter a fourth spec for your sniper-only, eagle assisted design, and you should call it SNIPER, and you should leave Marksmanship with its pets. If anything you should make its pet support slightly more robust while maintaining the fantasy of being a shot-heavy, aim-heavy spec.
TWW for the most part has been an excellent expansion. It is legitimately the most fun I’ve had in WOW since Legion, and for me it exceeds Legion in many ways. The talent trees and Hero Talents for the most part have been designed with a sort of immaculate creativity that equals and in some case exceeds the best designs of the Blizzard of yesteryear. The continual choices to serve the RP community, to deepen immersion, to reward alt grinding, and to deepen class fantasy, have been some of the most inspired and inspiring decisions in game design I have ever witnessed. TWW is worthy of much applause, and you all at Blizzard deserve to be proud.
Do not walk back your good designs with this unfriendly, mechanical and unemotional rationale. Tapping into player emotion is what makes your game good.
18 Likes
Nope. We will continue making it clear that this is a character-ruining issue for us and that it is of highest priority it not be implemented to live.
Which was pretty much always going to be the case for something like this. Either you’re an output-focused raider who doesn’t really care about the trappings of the class as long as it doesn’t detract from playability/convenience, and you feel mild approval of this; or you REALLY, REALLY, REALLY care and you hate it with virulent fiery intensity. There’s not going to be a lot of middle ground. For the people who have an issue with this-- which I think is going to be a LOT of MM hunters-- they’re going to have such a gigantic issue that it nullifies any and all improvements that come in alongside the change.
(You talk about whatever you want to talk about. That’s how asynchronous communication works. So far you haven’t seemed to have anything to actually say, aside from trying to get other people to shut up.)
15 Likes
First they came for my survival tree, and I did not speak out because I was not a survival hunter… oh no wait i WAS a survival hunter.
Now there are 2 hunter specs I’d rather not play and theyre going to trash the one I do play.
10 Likes
Ok so on another topic, I’m curious about how the interactions with auto shot swing timers are supposed to work.
Precise shots increases swing timer by 2s. The tier set proc reduces swing timer by 2s. In the rhythm reduces swing timer by 1 second. Haste exists. Bloodlust exists.
Doing things in discrete intervals of seconds instead of using a variable sounds like a really, really bad idea and nothing else in the game works like that. Can you actually get to a divide by 0 problem with enough haste and the right talents? Does anyone know anything else about how this is supposed to work? Surely not, right?
Please blizzard, don’t take my pets away. If you’re really set on these changes just give us an across the board nerf when we have a pet out so no one would do so for any sort of competitive gameplay. We already get rid of the pet in grouped content, but I will hate doing any solo content without my pet of 10 years, and I hate BM
9 Likes
That may be true but a person that gains information from an animal who 1) doesnt give them away instantly and 2) you have had eagle vision this entire time meaning theres magical sight inherently for hunters makes sense for marksman. Beast Mastery isn’t evem an entire zoo? It’s one, maybe 2 pets and a dire beatsllst or two unless you go pack leader (which you dont have to) but it ABSOLUTELY is MUCH closer to MM fantasy with a spotting eagle than ANY other pet, if pets HAD to stick around. And if I got my wish, we would have no pets because MM doesnt want or need them at all. A pet fantasy comes from the other one or two, ranged pet user, melee pet user. Also, survival has actual moves that make you somewhat feel like you are fighting with your pet. With MM the most interaction you have with your pet is misdirection and that vanishes the second a real tank shows up anyway.
3 Likes
Sir, we had that and its called Lone Wolf and it was complete garbage. Instead, how about we keep the eagle and you get to use whatever pet you want but you dont get the benefits of the eagle? Sound fun?
1 Like
Trash? Because of Lone Wolf? Lone Wolf is a terrible way to play the game. If you summon a pet its a flat damage loss and if you habe ti use lust, you’re hindering yourself in every active way to summon and dismiss the pet. This makes infinitely more sense in every direction except for the people that solo play because they like the pet and that’s fine, give the pet back but don’t brick the eagle. The eagle has a lot of interplayability in it with your skills and rotation that is far better than having a “insert random pet here” to bite someone
2 Likes
I don’t use Lone Wolf. As i mentioned somewhere earlier. MM is as close as you can get to the classic hunter playstyle (which im a bit familiar with after 20 years).
I play MM with my pet, always have. Lone wolf is crap and i would argue has done more harm than good.
12 Likes
OR you’ve been an MM player since Wrath and felt like class fantasy has been largely ignored for Marksmanship as a whole while BM gets an entire pet stampede and survival gets to at least attempt to habe a kindred animal bond to fight alongside with while we have… oh right… shooty bow and a useless pet in everything other than PvP. A spottong eagle that marks targets is infinitely more cool and fun than the past iterations that we have. The issue is that people are playing MM who dont actually want MM to feel like a sharpshooter. They just want their pet to be a meatwall whike you do damage which isn’t fun gameplay in anyway nor does it add to any class fantasy. It’s a remnant of old Hunter that has needed updated for a LONG time and anyone who wanted MM to live outside of Survival and BM’s shadow will like this change, anyone who doesn’t is because they’re hard locked on a pet, which mind you, MM has been taking Lone Wolf in nearly every iteration of it because we DO NOT USE THE PET.
It’s weird that you’re buffing serpent sting damage for BM, and have a pack leader hero talent that interacts with SS (and consumes it), but you’re removing the talent to easily apply it with KS/BA and leaving the bad talent where it only happens after 3 MS/ES (it’s also weird to remove serpent stalker for MM).
Removing wailing arrow and barrage for MM is weird
Removing eagle eye for BM is weird
Bringing back (a passive) double tap is weird
Taking out fortitude of the bear and pet leech is weird
Removing the option for an actual pet as MM when soloing/if you don’t care about min/maxing is weird
Naming a talent headshot but not bringing back the spell head shot is weird
Redesigning MM after redesigning it 3 months ago is weird
Why so much weird?
4 Likes
Yeah and what do you say to the people who have been playing MM for years and dont interact with a pet at all but we have all the keys and useless buttons to have that dont benefit us? None of it helps literally at all. I understand not wanting to lose the pet but robbing people that have been asking for MM to change in some way that doesnt revolve around an animal that you summon that actually reduces your throughput, is made of jello, and doesnt do jack all, is like asking a frost mage to cast fireball for half of it’s rotation. You don’t do that. Marksmanship is about the steady flow of nailing hard hitting shots, and if that is what you like then this should be good for you. If it’s bad for you then you never actually liked MM for what it was an actively forced anyone else who didnt want the pet to live on that crutch until now, so now theres finally a change and you come out of the woodworks and say its not fair but people like me have been asking for Marks Hunter to actually feel like a ranged sharpshooter who pinpoints and executes enemies and has zero need for a pet and Lone Wolf did NOT cover that class at all. It was an annoying half baked response that seemed cool at first but ended up screwing us because the second someone needs our pet, we lose 10% damage across the board just so we can press lust, dismiss the pet, and then wait for LW to stack back up again.
So while you say this is a bad change because “mah world of warcraft is changing” recognize that a lot of MM players got forced to play something else for the last X amount of years because they did not enjoy where MM was or how it acted because it felt like a half baked hunter from Classic trying to cosplay a retail hunter.
1 Like
Then just give lust without the pet? Like that would literally solve the problem. Use a pet if you want a slight damage decrease, lust either way.
6 Likes
Yeah, and as I said in a different post, retail and ALL of it’s classes have had massive design changes to bring them into a class fantasy archetype EXCEPT for MM because it’s been a half classic hunter ans half retail and it feels cheapened and boring in current iterations of WoW. I have played MM for a VERY long time and I have seen it go rom the bottom to the top and back down again and all I habe asked for was the thematic presence of feeling like a sniper in an RPG where the class is described as a sharpshooter. It hasnt done that yet at all, and this is the closest I have seen it get to it without harming people in a way that leaves them stranded.
Don’t get me wrong, having all the pets is nice and i’ll miss them but I dont use them, at all. Literally. Not even in Delves. It dies WAY too fast and doesnt actually help me. Heck, the second I open I rip aggro from it anyway so what is the point? I’d be fine with them giving the ability to summon whatever pet you want but just like Lone Wolf did, lose the advantages that the spotting eagle gives you and you can keep the pet. But by and large, MM has always been slowly moving out of using pets at all and choosing to opt for stances and natures of animals, but lose the companion. This keeps a pet but now its more directly tied to your class spec and doesnt feel like a useless key that actually causes a huge DPS loss just for doing it. The last time I used a pet on mm I used Eyes of the Beast to troll my fiancee and thats it. It brings nothing else
Out of interest, define “a long time”
I’ve been playing my hunter since day 1.
The best MM has ever been is maybe wrath or MoP. The it unfortunately inherited a lot of survival leftovers in legion that I would argue weakend the spec overall.
Incidentally, just did a delve with my bear and didn’t rip agro once.
6 Likes
Again, that doesnt solve the issue of the class fantasy still being a boring subpar excuse for a spec conpared to what they did with BM and Survival and every other class in the game. Fire Mage removed almost all of it’s ice spells except the cc ones because it made sense, and hyper focused on combustion. Sub rogue got turned into shadow assassin with all new animations, what did MM get? Oh yeah, a crosshair that zooms in and goes WHACK, yay woohoo, good job. That’s called drawing the short end of the stick from a creative standpoint.
You want your pet because you feel tied to it, that’s fine, there’s two specs for that. There’s only one high burst physical ranged DPS that acts like a sharpshooter, so lets actually make it feel like that at least to some degree instead of making sure that a random animal gets to keep it’s agency when you don’t actually NEED it.
I’d be fine if they wanted to do both and let you keep the pet and lose the eagle, fine by me, but just as you told me to suck it up, you would lose all the benefits that come with the spotting eagle
What if they added a talent to 11.1 MM that was the inverse or “Lone wolf” such that you can summon your pet but reduces the damage of some of the MM abilities. 
The “reasoning/fantasy” would be that have a pet could throw off you aim. But having a faithful companion is worth it.