Revert Withering Fire back to auto firing Deathblow procs! WF just feels bad now cause you’re insanely GCD bloated during CoTW and Trueshot. Dark ranger is very behind Pack Leader currently and needs more than just a buff to black arrow. Keep the change with it proccing off Call of the Wild and gaining Deathblow every 4 seconds, just bring back the auto firing!
3 Likes
It’s been ages since I did that content, but I remember finding a way to fool the tigers. If it was not moving away, I think it was moving towards it because it canceled the pounce if you were at melee range at the end of cast? Anyway, I remember killing the things with my gnome arcane mage (who nowadays is a nightborne), and she surely had no pet tanking for her.
I’d need a level-appropriate character to teste, but I’m feeling lazy.
Happy Thursday!
Did you know that Pack Leader is weaker in every single way compared to Sentinel and has 2.5 nodes that don’t contribute anything even slightly defensively or offensively?
- No Mercy is just an extra, non empowered basic attack which does very little damage for SV
- Shell Cover is a very weak 10% defensive node that you can’t control that lasts 6 seconds after you take the damage
- Envenomed Fangs and Flanking Strike-Ursine Fury are also numerically very weak
These talents need another look at if Pack Leader is meant to be an appealing tree to pick. Otherwise, SV will be Sentinel for every situation possible
3 Likes
I disagree with doing this. Live withering fire is extremely problematic. The base damage of black arrow, aimed shot, and rapidfire outside of trueshot have to be tuned around the fact that spamming aimed and rapidfire in trueshot throws black arrows off global. Your trueshot rotation doesn’t work like that any more, and you will likely want to be using windrunner quiver with dark ranger builds, which would not at all jive well since them consuming your precise stacks and feeding into the streamline economy would happen without your control and not necessarily when you want them to. Something like pre rework withering fire would work fine. Ofc I really like putting wailing arrow with the readiness effect built in there.
Additional problem identified:
- Whenever the BM Season 2 two-piece proc, your GCD will “lag” briefly and become unusable/desynced from the GCD-recharge visual.
4 Likes
Chimaera shot is removed or somewhere else? I guess it’s part of aspect of the hydra but I was rather fond of that spell, and was rooting for it to become baseline.
Can double tap stack to 2 or do I need to do volley into aimed into trueshot?
Hello! Given a few more discoveries have been made, here’s a new full list of bugs and issues:
- Dark Ranger Issues:
- Shadow Hounds was not updated to reflect the new tooltip. It still does a physical Beast Cleave.
- Damage from your Shadow Hounds do not heal you via Embrace the Shadows.
- Whenever Withering Fire is Active, the buff on your character still says that it fires automatic Black Arrows.
- I would pay a bit of attention on the single-target damage of Dark Ranger, the removal of Basilisk Collar affected it more than Pack Leader by a good margin. Even if it’s supposed to be a more AoE-focused spec, it’s quite far behind.
- Consider adding Bloodshed to Withering Fire as a support for 1-minute builds.
- Pack Leader Issues:
- If you have a rolling Howl of the Pack Leader buff to summon a pet on your next Kill Command available, and cast Bestial Wrath to give you a second one (via Lead from the Front), casting Kill Command in that scenario will cause a third buff to immediately be available (for the third pet you didn’t summon before), despite no effect being supposed to give you one in that scenario.
- (NEW) The Bear cannot spawn Hati/Fenryr.
- The Bear gives +1 count like other Dire Beasts to Huntmasters Call stacks.
- Spawning a Bear at 2 stacks pushes it to 3 without spawning Hati/Fenryr.
- While at 3 stacks, spawning a Dire Beast overflows the stacks, spawning a Hati/Fenryr and taking the count back to 1 instead of the normal 0.
- (NEW) Pack Mentality Kill Command damage increase does not affect Animal Companion.
- (NEW) In the original 11.1 Notes, it was noted that Alpha Predator would scale multiplicatively rather than additively. This does not seem to be the case as the 50% increase from Pack Mentality does not gain this benefit, making it effectively only increase damage by 43.5% rather than 50%.
- (NEW) Wyvern’s Cry is supposed to increase both pet and player damage, it currently only increases pet damage.
- Lead from the Front is supposed to increase the damage of your How of the Pack pets by 25%. This does not currently include the melee hits from The Bear pet.
- The Boar secondary target effect hits the main target.
- Slicked Shoes will always reduce the cooldown of Disengage even if it does not remove a movement impairing effect.
- Envenomed Fang, Shell Cover and No Mercy are all a bit better, but probably not super-great still.
- No Mercy, when Combined with Hunter’s Prey, will cause your pet to swap to and attack whatever target is FIRST hit by Kill Shot, rather than what you are targeting. With this week, it no longer causes a full pet swap for your main pet (the Bear will still fully swap). This is still annoying.
- The Season 2 Tier Set issues:
- (NEW) Proccing the season 2 2-piece will cause your GCD to “lag” briefly and become un-usable. https : //gyazo . com/31a47c4bd234a80babf2969c620fa10b
- The 200% increased Barbed Shot can be overwritten by a normal Barbed Shot, which isn’t a bug but feels bad.
- Misc Issues
- The Bloodshed spell tooltip makes no mention of the 20% increased Kill Command damage when specced into Venomous Bite.
- (NEW) Venomous Bite does not affect Animal Companion.
- Pets will both have their own seperate buff for the Tauren racial “Brawn” and the Dwarf racial “Might of the Mountain”, and inherit the Crit Damage / Healing from the player, making them benefit twice from the effect.
Thank you for reading!
19 Likes
Why has Dark Ranger had a dead node since the expansion launched? As far as I can tell Blizzard has never commented on the fact that The Bell Tolls just makes Black Arrow… do what it already does baseline. Either it’s a mistake, or there’s misinformation in the tooltip, or… I don’t know? But it seems bonkers that we’re coming up on a year into the expansion and nobody has ever officially said anything about this.
4 Likes
A newly discovered bug which is contributing to Pack Leader lagging behind Sentinel by quite a lot for Survival.
Wyvern’s Cry should be increasing both you and your pet’s damage. This is currently only increasing pet damage. Since Survival is primarly damage from the hunter and not pets, this is pretty impactful.
I don’t think this alone will close the gap, but it would make it much smaller. Pack Leader still has multiple talent nodes which do nothing for Survival, such as:
- Shell Cover, the defensive node, is still incredibly lackluster compared to what Sentinel and Dark Ranger offers
- No Mercy leaves a lot to desire, considering Basic Attacks do VERY little damage (and these still cost the pet focus)
- Ursine Fury is a damage LOSS on single target; it desyncs Flanking Strike from cooldowns and does not provide enough CDR to actually cast it often enough to negate this
Fixing the bug with Wyvern’s Cry and adjusting these two nodes would go a long way towards making Pack Leader a fun and viable pick for Survival.
1 Like
What are the chances someone could do their job today and make some changes to Trueshot before the weekend?
4 Likes
Happy Friday!
Did you (yes, you) know that Pack Leader is going to be significantly behind Sentinel in all forms of PvE content both offensively and defensively?
- No Mercy is just an extra, non empowered basic attack which does very little damage for SV
- Shell Cover is a very weak 10% defensive node that you can’t control that lasts 6 seconds after you take the damage
- Envenomed Fangs and Flanking Strike-Ursine Fury are also numerically very weak
- Wyvern does not buff the SV hunter at all
1 Like
Here is the summary of this week’s MM hunter PTR development:
- a half-hearted balancing patch on Tuesday
- no “real” patch with development updates/bugfixes on Thursday
- Aspect of the hydra still bugged, making it impossible to truly test single target
- Unbreakable bond pet passives/actives still clashing with the eagle ones
11.1 to be released when exactly? Better speed up the dev process, guys
7 Likes
So uh…we’re really just phoning it in huh?
Knowing how easily egos get bruised (see outlaw rogue and survival hunter reworks) what are the chances that them adding back in the pet and then doing nothing else is being done completely out of spite? Just letting the spec sit destitute because a group of people weren’t happy with the rework they created.
3 Likes
Pack Leader still needs a lot of help if it’s going to be relevant:
- Shell Cover is still awful; Shell Cover should grant 1% Damage Reduction per pet out plus 2-3% base Damage Reduction. What is the point of this talent activating after we already took a decent-sized hit? I’d settle on a 10% DR at 100% HP for ~6s on a ~60s CD that’s reduced by 1s per 100 focus spent or something like that but even then, it’s a worse version of Sentinel’s Don’t Look Back and it’s not an on-demand CD like Dark’s Ranger’s defensive.
- No Mercy - A single pet auto every Kill Shot is embarrassingly weak for a hero talent, this should be changed to something more impactful like a bleed interaction with Kill Shot or like the old Cull the Herd.
- Better Together - This isn’t a hero talent, it’s a placeholder node that offers no actual value and should be baked into Howl of the Pack Leader or scrapped entirely.
- Horsehair Tether should be in the class tree under Binding Shot - Hero Trees should absolutely NOT have utility and this rework seems like the start of a bad trend and sets precedent for other reworked hero trees to have utility.
- I suggested that Binding Shot did this “grouping to the center of the arrow” mechanic in the Beta feedback post several times so I’m glad to see it being implemented as Hunter gains useful group utility finally but not as a hero talent, please.
2 Likes
BM (Pack Leader) is so strong in PTR dungeons right now. This is great to see after a lackluster first season. However it definitely needs improvements.
- Defensives feel too weak, especially using a ferocity pet, compared to incoming, unavoidable damage.
- BM tree has so many interesting options that can’t be picked up without dropping something key. There are so many talents around dire beasts that could be consolidated to make the alternatives viable or accessible.
- Pretty much every BM hunter runs the same build with 1 or 2 slight variations. You still have to run double pets. You take key dire beast talents. Poisoned Barbs is popular and will likely be a build staple. It’s too hard to incorporate other new talents into the standard build, although, it’s possible they will see more use in a raid/st spec which I haven’t looked into yet.
1 Like
I enjoy having my pet like it is in live, it fights with me, not just standing there like some eye candy. Removing my pets ability to fight with me is like removing the pet completely. I prefer to have a useful pet beside me all the time, not when it shows up randomly and is basically useless otherwise. If I wanted to play BM on my main hunter then I would be playing it but I like MM for all the utility it gives me. While the BM pets do so much more damage than the MM hunter pets, you don’t have many spell abilities to make it, for me, more a part of the fight. MM gives my pet the ability to do a lot of damage along with me, its more of a team effort that I really enjoy, I just wish to keep it that way, they can change other parts of the MM w/o removing that is what I am saying.
4 Likes
Probably more a function of triage at this point. Adding the pets back in brought a bunch of bugs that probably take a significant amount of tedious work to fix. While trueshot, withering fire, etc. still obviously need a few more iterations of work and tuning, they aren’t flat out bugged like the pet and pet talents are.
I also think there’s a nonzero chance that they pull the plug and push marks refresh to a future patch because of it. It might not make sense to do all of the work in the first place if you can give yourself another 3 months at the design board to make the pet situation work in a way that makes more sense.
They should not have introduced the eagle and all of the built in replacements for pet utility on the spec in the first place if they intended for this to be an option. Or conversely they could have just deleted lone wolf and reworked everything else letting it just be assumed that all hunters use pets. If you’re gonna rework that whole system, do it at a time when you can do it for the whole class. Trying to do it all in a patch and then allowing the scope of the project to creep up like this just means that we are going to be playing a beta version of marks in live for a while.
7 Likes
This is nonsensical. MM pets do not ever do “a lot of damage”, they don’t really show up on the meters unless you go digging. MM does not have some utility advantage over BM, unless you count the time you play without your pet as utility. BM on the other hand does actually do damage with the pet, the pets do not cast Kill Command themselves.
3 Likes
They should have stuck with their initial design for at least this patch and then if they were going to walk it back walk it back in the next patch. That would have given them the time they needed to develop the new tree. Instead they caved to the rp crowd and so MM will be screwed for any competitive content.
7 Likes
This. I spoke about how this was not easy “do this, and do that, and magic happens.” There were a lot of programming involved with the Eagle, and putting the pet back in the space just made things way harder.
I hope Blizzard gets it done, but I fear the bus has left for this patch.
5 Likes