It was on Timeless Isle that Blizzard first tried to take the MM pets away in exchange for a slight DPS buff. It pretty much killed any chance for MM Hunters to survive unless they were in a group with a tank. Blizzard backed down pretty quickly and restored pets but as I recall kept the buff for going petless. It was so long ago I don’t recall if at that time they called it Lone Wolf or not.
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Bestial wrath grant howl of the pack leader
Pack Leader Feedback - Survival Hunter
After testing this week, Pack Leader is just a lot weaker than Sentinel again. Much like release 
One of the easiest ways this was fixed in 11.0 was to slap a tuning knob on Pack Leader and calling it a day (the old Pack Leader has 20% WFB and 20% RS/MB)
No Mercy really needs to be doing something. Even BM finds this very weak, but the sometimes-free Pet Basic Attack on Kill Shot is just not doing any damage for a Heroic talent. This really needs some sort of empowerment whether its Kill Shot or the pet itself.
Envenomed Fangs is also very numerically weak even with the new ways of spreading Serpent Sting.
Ursine Fury while fine in AoE doesn’t feel great in single target due to how low the CDR on Flanking Strike is.
Shell Cover really needs a lot of TLC. The defensive value is far too low even with the new values. I believe it would feel a lot more appealing if it was a permanent 10% under half health, something like Will of Necropolis
All of the above points contributes to why Pack Leader is a lot weaker (numerically and feeling wise) to Sentinel. It’s a shame to see a cool new Hero tree be so weak and unappealing
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I’m not sure how I feel about changing diamond ice to 4 seconds. Duration is already reduced by taking this talent.
I was playing back then (and even raiding SoO, I legit got the Kor’kron Wolf mount for beating Garrosh on Normal difficulty, which was renamed to Heroic in WoD) and never heard of this. If this happened, it must have been a bug or it was so poorly announced that it never reached me. Back then I was still dreaming with going petless, when WoD was announced and I saw Lone Wolf I got so happy!
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It didn’t last long. A day or two at the most. When it hit Blizzard tried to say it was the greatest thing since sliced bread but the instantaneous revolt of the players had them apologizing with the promise to reverse the change. It would also have been easy to overlook as this was going on at the same time as the forced and accidental PvP flagging related to the censer.
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Sound more like a bug. Back then Blizzard was against revising classes during an expansion. Usually, small adjustments were done through releasing new major inscription glyphs (like the one that allowed to cast Aimed Shot while moving, I remember so fondly that one…).
Maybe some code for Lone Wolf slipped into live, some people found it, and Blizzard said it was for a future change, then fixed it.
As for censer… I’m guilty of using that, lol. I really wanted the mushan mount. And got it! The grind was excruciating, though.
There are no eagle things. That’s why.
I really cannot overstress this, the eagle is just a hair shy of imaginary. It is a hummingbird-sized blip that flits over an enemy for one-third of a second during two proc animations. It flies down to T-pose over you for half of a second when you activate a certain buff. That is the full, complete extent of the eagle’s visible presence in the game.
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While there’s a lot I love about the changes so far, there’s one major point I’m really worried about:
Unless there’s a significant change, Marks hunters will really suck for mythic+ encounters where there are two boss fights like the Tussle Tonks in Operation Mechagon.
Marks hunters still cannot cleave without three targets being close to each other because multi-shot is for some reason just made to be more finnicky and less useable than its Beast Mastery counterpart.
Aspect of the Hydra is an acknowledgement of this that only band-aids the situation for certain raid encounters where you can specifically change builds just for those specific bosses, but that problem still exists in Mythics.
Also, it should be noted that while this is a problem most visible with double boss encounters, it’s also something that still exists in every trash pull where you have less than three mobs or where one of the three mobs just happens to hang back for a moment out of range of your multi-shot spread. Those moments really feel bad and kill the fun of this spec.
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And there was a 14-month content drought with MoP! IIRC (because Falstan has sparked my memory), this happened towards the end of MoP’s lifespan, after a LOT of players have quit, and others have started to play a lot less (like, 1-2x a week instead of everyday).
I was one of the crazy few who still played almost everyday and I hung out on the forums. In my defense, I was in college and I had loooong gaps between my classes so I needed to kill time.
But yeah, I do remember this now that Fal brought it up. In particular, Watermist died SO fast to the tigers on the Timeless Isle, LOL. I finally retreated and killed the cranes by the center camp. When I struggled with the freaking CRANES, I stopped playing that day in disgust and went to watch the fallout on the forums. LOL.
I cannot believe I’ve forgotten all about this. But it goes to show how important pets are to our defensive toolkit!
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Would be nice to get some notes sooner than later. We’ve hit a dead point again where there’s not much meaningful feedback left to give but we are also still not close to something anyone should be comfortable launching with.
Please clarify whether it’s intended to double down on pet family passives and abilities and then fix them either way.
Please follow up on the feedback with trueshot. Halve its cooldown or bake more meaningful stuff into it so that it doesn’t feel so bad as a button. Withering fire also still needs work.
You (blizzard) aren’t going to want to have to tune this version of the spec against the other specs in pve or pvp. There are long periods of really dead downtime once TS is over and you’ve expended all of your charges. Overall damage is quite low over time, despite most/all of the abilities actually hitting really hard and being quite bursty. This is partly why I suggest 45s cd trueshot, because you’ll be able to buff the numbers less to make the spec average out. Having trueshot on approximately the same cadence as bestial wrath or colossus smash keeps the rotation flowing and removes large amounts of that deadtime. You can also make feathered frenzy and tensile bowstring base effects so that 5 modifier talents aren’t necessary just to have the button function.
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I am being completely serious when I say I will give up on this cycle of MM Hunter if Trueshot changes (buffs) aren’t announced on this week’s PTR build.
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Going petless requires quite a bit of relearning. Right now it’s a lot easier since the defense kit of the class is at its strongest (nowadays you have simultaneous access to many options that shared the same talent rows before). Also, pet tankness were slowly nerfed accross the board due to changes on healers and tanks, so back then the mobs caused more damage and the pets soaked way more punishment.
But regardless of era, if anyone decides to go petless, there’s a learning curve to deal with tough mobs. You can’t just pew pew, there’s a lot of planning the pulls, cc’ing mobs because you don’t want to be overwhelmed, use of defensives, and kiting.
Not saying you have to like it, of course. To each its own. But to me, once I went petless, I loved how the spec felt strategic and engaging. I died quite a lot (still do, on certain mobs, and some are extremely hard or even impossible to solo), but slowly got used to it and never wanted to return to pet play.
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Exactly the same as me. I’ve been petless since before dragonflight and I love the playstyle. It’s so fun. We have plenty of tools to deal with everything.
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Don’t get me wrong. I know we have a lot of CC for kiting. I’ve been kiting since Vanilla, heh. You can look at my achievements for some challenges and their dates, if you’d like.
But you know those tigers? They pounce. They pounce on a short cooldown. Back then, in MoP, we had the original Binding Shot (which was a talent), traps (Frost, Snake, Fire, Explosive, and Freezing), FD, Deterrence, Disengage, Wing Clip, Concussive Shot, and Glaive Toss (which was also a talent).
It didn’t stop me from getting pounced on ceaselessly by the tigers; their cooldowns came up before my CC did. You said you raided SoO. I wasn’t a raider back then — conflicted with my class schedule. I was running around in Timeless Isle gear. I was “under-geared” compared to you.
I wasn’t the only one having issues. Every “under-geared” Hunter struggled IF they didn’t have adequate space to kite (Timeless Isle is cramped and full of mobs that hit hard back then!). Some of our CC were strong, but not the others.
The moment our CC were used up, and the moment the mobs got up in our faces… we were done for. We were squishy.
(Let’s not get into Legion. We LOST all of our traps and didn’t get any back until we got two measly traps in 7.1.5.)
Personally, I’m fine now if my pet dies in delves tier 8-10; I’m geared enough that I can kite and burst down the mobs before I rez my pet and tackle the next group. But now we have different CC tools than we did back in MoP (and, again, let me point out that I’m now over-geared. I’ve never been this “over-geared” in my WoW career. I’ve never been this well geared at this point in an expansion’s life).
I know you like the petless playstyle. I know you like kiting, and that’s perfectly okay. But, Timeless Isle back in MoP on an ilevel 485-something Hunter was an entirely different matter. So, please don’t say, “Oh, you and every one of the other Hunters who struggled just need to practice kiting.” I don’t think you saw the fallout on the forums. It was massive — even non-Hunters knew that the MM hunters couldn’t survive Timeless Isle without being in heroic raid gear or with a tank. There’s a reason Blizzard backed down in a matter of days and restored our pets within an extremely short time period.
THAT is why I keep talking about players leveling Hunters. THAT is why I keep talking about Hunters who are under-geared… in questing gear. There’s a massive difference!
(And Khaz Algar? The mobs are spread out. They aren’t elites with short cooldowns, crowded in a small space, like the Timeless Isle tigers. And let’s not forget the stone giants that wander amongst the tigers.)
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Could have it function similarly to Tipping the Scales.
1 stack = 50% faster power-up
2 stacks = Instantly full power
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Empowered aim shot with that as a talent would actually be super fun.
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You can avoid that. It’s been ages since I did that content, but I believe it was just a matter of moving at the right moment so they wasted the pounce? Back then we were not stopping to cast Aimed Shot anyway (except on the pull), since we had to wait Steady Focus to proc to cast instant Aimed Shots.
I do Arathi Fall area full of elite nerubian mobs as Lone Wolf. Only thing I can’t kill there are the rares. Also, I do Siren Isle petless even in the storm mode. Those are similar experiences to Timeless Isle.
Hello,
Some more Trueshot feedback after some more testing:
Trueshot feels bad in PVP, especially when you have just 1 stack of streamline. If feels awfully painful to cast while people are avoiding you and running behind pillars anyway when they see your big CD. Casting at 2 stacks feels good, but so does the old Trueshot on live that has no requirements.
Also, increased crit chance/crit damage being the new big Trueshot mechanic is too RNG in PVP and if you don’t crit, or the enemy team has hunter/warlock (who have tools to negate crits)
Please:
- Reduce the talent tree nodes you have to take to make Trusehot do something
- Reduce the Trueshot CD baseline
- And/or give it some other effects that make it more exciting
Thank you
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Just give us fast cast True Shot back.
No one plays a class and says: DANG! I SURE LOVE SLOW CASTING!
Don’t even know how something like that makes it pass the brainstorm phase of development. Someone actually O.K.'ed True Shots redesign, let that sink in. Yikes.
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