This is an awful idea. Go play a MOBA if you want skillshots.
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this was taken away because it added nothing besides a terribly obnoxious deadzone to play around with that offered no benefits.
dual wielding
this is also completely inconsequential. you have just as much identity using a 2her
they do, ptr is for bug fixing, design on specific talents, and massive changes
live is for number fixes.
saying ptr testing does nothing is just plan wrong. theyre not gonna make trueshot a 1min cd or something in live, they could do it in ptr. they just unfortunately ran out of time. yall already no what i think they wasted time with so it doesnt need to be rehashed. but thats ultimately the truth of the situation, they ran out of time for further massive changes this cycle. whether or not they continue it in 11.1.5 is yet to be seen, but possible since they did it with shammy
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It’s like I said before. Many of us warned Blizzard that they were taking too big of a bite.
But Blizzard is gonna Blizzard.
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I never liked the dead zone for ranged abilities, but Lord of the Rings Online solved that problem with their hunter class. It doesn’t have a pet, but it does have the dual-wielding hybrid melee/ranged playstyle we used to have. They just deleted the dead zone.
Also I never said using a two-handed weapon was any less valid or anything. Just that we lost a piece of our identity by losing the option to dual-wield.
As for why dual-wielding is important for class/spec fantasy? Blizzard added 3 sword skins in Dragonflight as a reward for completing the night elf heritage armor questline. These swords use the iconic three-bladed moonglaive model that was added in BFA S2 for the Darkshore Warfront, a culturally significant weapon for all night elves that was previously only availalble as a warglaive for demon hunters.
The moonglaive is particularly noteworthy for being the signature weapon of the night elf Sentinels. MM and SV hunters have access to the Sentinel hero spec. And yet, SV hunters cannot wield this signature weapon. Not because they can’t use swords or dual-wield, but because Blizzard simply made it impossible to play SV without a 2h weapon.
I would much rather be running around with a bow on my shoulder and two moonglaives at my hip, but any ability to perform melee attacks has been almost entirely deleted from the class.
You seem extremely focused on a very narrow idea of what a hunter in wow should be
If anything I’m the opposite. I like it when players have options for how they want to play. I just think it’s stupid that SV hunters can equip 1h swords, can use moonglaive skins on those swords, and yet cannot actually play a Sentinel SV hunter with moonglaives because Blizzard decided you must use a 2h weapon, and you must conform to either being 100% ranged or 100% melee, despite this not making any sense lorewise because any good hunter worth their salt would be adept at blending melee and ranged combat.
It’s Blizzard that has a very narrow idea of what a hunter should be. We can either be Sylvanas, incredibly watered-down Tyrande (which doesn’t even make a lot of sense because she’s this weird priest/hunter hybrid with moon spells that could never be accurately represented by a single playable class anyway), or Rexxar. Pack Leader doesn’t get to send their own pets out to do cool stuff, they just get Rexxar’s pets instead.
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it wasnt a big of a bite, not in the slightest. most reworks happen in these patches. and even in smaller inbetween patches.
mm isnt more conviluted compared to hpal, aug, or ret, or dh, or outlaw. they just put resources in the wrong place and caved to something they should have left alone or shouldnt caved into
like this. what is this for. what would be the point on using dev time to make sure everything isd usable with 1handed weapons (this includes bug fixes and the unraveling of tangled code. which takes dev time)
who would this be for other than casual rper’s who cant pretend they can duel wield despite 100% of rp being “pretend”
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In today’s PTR patch, Blizzard fixed the previous issue where Mutagenic Toxin’s attacks did not reduce Coordinated Assault’s cooldown.
At the same time, they nerfed the 2-piece set bonus by changing the 200% efficiency Barbed Shot cooldown reduction from “-24s and 2 stacks of Barbed Shot” to “-12s cooldown and 1 stack of Barbed Shot.” Additionally, pet summons no longer benefit from the set bonus.
This is a massive nerf for Hunters, especially considering that the previous patch already reduced the set bonus’s damage by 70%.
This is a classic Blizzard-style nerf—first, they gut the damage numbers, and then they “fix” so-called bugs afterward.
Why is Blizzard doing this? This nerf makes absolutely no sense. Marksmanship is still garbage after the rework, and Survival is just as bad.
Blizzard knows what all three Hunter specs need in Mythic+ but just keeps nerfing them instead.
It’s really disappointing. If Blizzard doesn’t know how to design the Hunter class, they should just delete it instead of making it suffer like this. Revert the nerfs and bring back the buffs!！
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It never made full sense to me either, but the way the spec works currently, they just slowed down auto-attack speed and put even more emphasis on Aimed Shot being this big heavy hitting ability, like a sniper shot. Plus our Mastery effect literally increases our attack range beyond 40 yards, which may as well be sniping distance if we’re the only ones that can attack from that far out.
I think one of the things Blizzard is struggling with is that they see BM as the “extreme pet spec” and SV as the “melee only” spec, but all that’s left for MM to occupy is “ranged only” and they don’t know if this means a machine gunner or a sniper. Which is why we end up with stuff like Barrage and Rapid Fire and Explosive Shot. It also kinda feels like half the abilities in MM’s spellbook are themed around “magic elf archer” and the other half are themed around “rifleman.” Trick Shots is literally Deadshot from DC Comics, setting up one bullet that ricochets several times and goes through multiple targets. It makes way less sense as a bow ability. Then we get Volley, which is like Blizzard or Rain of Fire, but with arrows. A rifle-wielding hunter would probably call in a mortar strike or something rather than a hail of arrows.
I’m not even sure what the solution is, because all these different fantasies for hunters are equally valid and deeply rooted in the RTS games and overall aesthetic of Warcraft.
Respectfully, I disagree. You’ve seen me post multiple times that I believe the rework they’re attempting deals with the literal foundation of the class.
From my understanding, WoW has spaghetti coding. This includes the original classes. Hunters were the last one designed and released in beta, so it had less work done on it by release in November 2004.
This is why I keep saying, “Yo, Blizzard’s current devs don’t understand that they’re messing with the foundation of the class.”
But, both of your and my perspectives are just speculation. 
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i want to remind the court that ret, hpal, mage, and eve nthe new spec aug was reworked from the ground up and released in sshorter patch cycles
yes its all subjective, but its kinda silly to think hunter is bigger than these specs that were reworked into something completely different in .5 patches.
saying its to big and broken to rework in a major patch is just giga cope
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I guess it’s just me, but I think there’s a difference between a class coding written in 2004 and built upon many times since, as compared to a class coding written in, what, 2021? Or whenever they started working on the Evoker class. 
But it’s ok, we’ll just disagree.
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No sign of PTR updates so far. It feels Blizzard will leave us in the dark and only release adjustments via hotfix next tuesday.
Were you testing on a pvp dummy/target by chance? Set bonuses are normally -50% effectiveness in pvp.
They really gave in to people demanding the pet be brought back and then made 0 other changes to MM and are just going to let it rot.
The moment their vision of a spec rework gets forced to be changed because of people screaming about it they just give up completely and let the spec be a mess until people quit playing it or finally are willing to go along with a proper rework. This happens every time.
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What exactly was this “vision” though, really? A spec rework of such magnitude (removing the pet from one spec of a pet class) is something that should have been saved for a new expansion, so it could be iterated on with internal testing for ages and then several months of player feedback.
It feels like someone on the team looked at the 3 hunter specs we have and decided 2 of them (BM and MM) were not distinct enough from each other. SV is fine because it’s literally doing its own thing, being the single melee spec for the class. BM is the “ranged with pets” spec. So MM needed a gimmick and I guess they settled on “the ranged not-with-pets one” because Lone Wolf was so widely used in group content that it later became baseline and from there, it was determined that every MM hunter must want to do away with having a pet entirely.
But then they ran into the issue that the hunter class itself is themed around having an animal at your side that you went out into the world and tamed and named yourself. We have two pet classes in WoW, hunters and warlocks, but hunters are definitively the pet class, because they can collect and personalize their pets, whereas warlock demons are closer to disposable minions than faithful companions. Hunter pets used to need actual rudimentary care and feeding and leveling up. Everything about the class was originally designed to use game mechanics to form an emotional bond between the player and their pet.
So that’s probably how Blizzard arrived at the Spotting Eagle solution, because they concluded that MM hunters still had to have some vestige of a pet to reflect their class. I’m just not sure there was any great outcry from the playerbase actually asking for this.
Ultimately though, my question remains: what was the vision here and what actually changed about it? The Spotting Eagle is still there. Pet utility was still moved to the Spotting Eagle. All people asked Blizzard to change was adding a choice node to give us our pets back. It would still have the same problems it has now if the choice node wasn’t there because the spec rework is still built around the Spotting Eagle and associated talents and secondary effects.
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spotting eagle feels like nothing more than an attempt to make us excited to press arcane shot. thats why i said earlier this spec needs an actual rework that gets out of BFA era MM. trueshot is worse now, trick shots still stuck in BFA for some reason, precise shots is still not exciting, especially after the focus nerf. it shouldnt be this hard to make a good archer spec when there’s only 1 left in the game.
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Also puzzling that nothing has been improved with withering fire/dark ranger. Like how do you rework this whole hero tree and then rework the spec trees 6 weeks later and completely fail to integrate the hero tree that you just developed? Everything about old dark ranger would also still be better. Feels like they just don’t know what to do with it.
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The worst part about Withering Fire is it’s unlikely to change. No design changes should be expected at this point. 
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