Those trees are also entirely passive so that’s a weird comparison to make.
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Both the flavor and design completely missed the mark here. The hero talent tree is called pack leader and the there is only one choice node for one of the two specs which summons additional pets. This is a huge flavor miss and a large disappointment. But an even bigger problem is the design of the talents. They are not transformative, they are largely passive, and most of the choice nodes are not real choices. When I look at some of the other trees, they have buttons which transform into new buttons under certain conditions or do additional things (adding abilities without increasing button bloat), they have brand new gameplay loops, they expand and diversify their damage profiles, but not hunter. Our hero talent trees are completely uninspired and need to go back to the drawing board.
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this is most hero trees though. even then the ones with active abilities are almost all just cooldowns that don’t really do anything to your normal rotation
Some do and they are poorly designed as well but, there is also some others which are truly transformative and provide new gameplay loops / damage profiles.
It’s worth keeping in mind, though, that unless the new, more narrowly fixated (and often therefore less customizable) gameplay loops are actually better than what one had access to before their existence… that’s not even a good thing.
More restrictive gameplay via borrowed powers, be they tier sets or whatever else, will have a honeymoon period of novelty after which you then become stuck with just those fewer but now equally stale options for far longer or more punishingly than before.
can you list some that you believe are truly transformative? I believe I’ve kept up to date on a lot of the hero trees and none have particularly stood out as “transformative” with new gameplay loops.
especially since the stated goals since the concept was introduced was to be “minimally invasive, not add any new cognitive load, not overshadow your spec, etc”
Most Hero Talent trees do not add new buttons that players will need to add to their action bar or find a new keybind for. There will be additional opportunities for players to express their skill, but we’re trying not to add things like complex maintenance buffs that increase the cognitive load for everyone playing a class. Most of the choices a player will make about how complex they want their rotation to be will continue to be made in their class and spec talent trees.
If people expected these to make large, sweeping changes, I feel like that’s on them for not tempering expectations with stated goals 
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Fair, but there is also more room to add on thematically without being invasive of the the original gameplay loops and customization options.
- Will probably attempt some mock-ups in the near future, likely starting from a couple talent swaps for Pack Leader or a Dark Ranger rehaul.
i feel like the current pack leader does a great job at this already for survival.
the problem with BM and its hero talent trees is that the gameplay loop is already so tight you can’t really do or add anything to it, especially since the larger playerbase of BM appreciates the gameplay being accessible.
like how can you get mad at a BM tree for buffing/enhancing/resetting KC/BS when that’s your whole loop?
Because of its method of its enhancements being of little to no difference from BM’s passive nodes. No showiness. No additional (even minimal) challenge involved.
Hypothetically, anyways.
The crit buff and the possible Brutal Companion + Auto-crit-per-third interaction could be interesting, though it makes me wish BC was a bit less impactful and didn’t auto-cast (instead maybe having a large buff), since we already get the auto-cast from any BS now.
right, that’s what I’m saying, there’s not a whole lot you can do to BM’s kit to introduce that—especially on a hero tree, especially when you look at other hero trees
such as what ?
I think only one that was transformative was frostfire mage ? almost all of the others are just a few diff passives and/or procs.
even then, frostfire mage (while cool thematically) is still a bunch of passives and procs, so I’m not sure what strelokz is looking at
I am going to be honest, this really does not scream Hero talents. It just feels bland and boring and rote…
BM Hunter lets just give the abilities you already use more damage, but it does nothing to really yell I need this tree or need these talents.
The Name is called Leader of the Pack, but does not evoke leadership or the concept of leading a pack of in Hunter terms Animals…
Add a third pet, allow us to use Stampeed more… so many things you can do to make it feel more like your leading a pack, but instead its not more procs like we dont have enough of them already.
If given the chance I would take this one back to the drawing board.
This is from a BM standpoint as I dont play Survival.
But that being said BM and Survival are two totally different types of Hunters and play-style of hunter.
BM should be all about the pets, and more pets.
3 Likes
ultimately my opinion about the new hero tree doesnt have much weight as other hunters who have achieved more than i have, i admittedly play this character when im tired of my main and dh. but i believe this hero talent tree is very good considering the limitations its forced to work with. it amplifies both surv and bm in a way that speeds up both specs rotation considerably with current napkin tc work.
i do want to highlight after following this thread closely for awhile, BM as a whole is very uninteractive, thus its not the new hero trees fault nor job to fix the lack of depth the spec has. the best hero trees weve seen so far are largely passive and dont do much to shake up the overal rotation aside adding a twist here and there, packleader while it doesnt add a twist on a twistless spec, does add huge power and speed in an attempt to make more interactive by adding more depth to the specs engine by effecting kill command and your pets basic attack, especially by adding the current tier sets bonus into its folds.
ultimately BM has always been a fairly easy spec with very little to do. this is clearly on purpose due to its history of being simple. to add more depth to this spec would require alot of upheaval that people in this spec historically were adverse too. trying to make hero talents fix something that would borderline be impossible to do well on its own, would cause alot more strife and strain to the playerbase than a simple passive tree.
looking at the replies, alot of the suggestions give here really lack any realism or doesnt take tuning to account which also hurst the spec. i saw one person suggesting that dire beast summon 3 pets instead of 1 despite its low cd which would require to be either increased or dire beast base damage tuned down considerably. alot of these suggestions also seem to be OP which given the fact everyone wants their main to be op, isnt that surprising. not to mention alot of which seem to be tone deaf since beast mastery already summons a large amounts of pets with cds along with dire beasts. so i ask the community to consider what exactly they want in a realistic way for the hero tree with both surv and bm in consideration. making the hero tree pack leader into demonology lite for hunter is just not good for surv at all
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Thinking about it, if they found a way to squeeze the old Stampede in there (summon the other 4 pets from your active stable for X seconds), I’d be a lot more okay with Pack Leader. Give it a sizeable cooldown and have the other hero talents interact with it (such as triggering Wild Attacks or consuming Vicious Hunt reducing the cooldown or increasing the duration of your next Stampede) instead of the biggest thing being trying to push us to maximize Bleeds with Coordinated Assault/Spearhead and… eugh, Steel Trap.
Or perhaps a gimmick where a number of other skills have a portion of their Physical damage converted to Bleed damage for Culling the Herd, so things like Fury of the Eagle aren’t left in the dust.
Seeing them implementing a talent(Pack Coordination) in the Pack Leader tree which does pretty much the same thing as BC does, if picked in the BM tree…
Sure, it doesn’t have the requirement of 3 Frenzy stacks in order to trigger, but still.
Also, I’m a bit worried about how this now allows for a double stacking on additional simultaneous pet Basic Attacks, at increased strength. Didn’t they specifically nerf BC by 50% because of how it was considered too strong in it’s initial implementation?
Frenzied Tear, yet another KC reset mechanic.
Furious Assault, yet another BS reset mechanic.
Beyond that, just other types of passive damage boosts.
Having said that, the wording on the capstone; Pack Assault, suggests(to me) the probability of them making Call of the Wild more central, to serve as a major CD for BM. It doesn’t really make sense for a capstone talent in such a tree to rely so heavily on a talent on a side branch in the main spec tree.
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but call of the wild already does this and in a way where its not extremely broken. doing this would be extremely redundant and cause the spec itself to get nerfed for having yet another cd that brings all of your stable pets into combat. this is really what i ment with the last part of my og post…
Call of the Wild already does exactly this. It would be redundant for BM and be shoehorned in for SV, where Coordinated Assault fits the flavor of the tree perfectly.
Culling the Herd isn’t pushing you to do anything differently. It’s a bonus to bleed damage when you Kill Shot. It’s entirely passive and just increases the damage of things you are already doing. You play exactly the same as you do now but with more damage, especially in execute.
Fury of the Eagle is not left in the dust. It does a LOT of damage (it also applies bleeds when it crits through Master Marksman, which is VERY often from Ruthless Marauder and would tick hard from Culling the Herd). The tree also has several mechanics for Kill Command resets, which just give you even MORE Fury of the Eagle casts. If anything, the tree is helping it, not hurting it.
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Yep, similar concerns here. The main difficulty seems to be in diversifying the tangible/visible impact/feel of the KC buffs, but that basically gives you three options only:
- Amplifying the per-event value of KC generally (such as via a damage amp, a la Wild Instincts), which then forces you towards synergetic talents;
- Amplifying the per-event value of KC onto the per-event value of something else (such as BC), which then forces you towards two sets of synergetic talents; or
- Coming up with something new out of thin air that is cool but does not interact with any of the preexisting talents, which is difficult.
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I play Survival almost exclusively, with a little bit of Marksmanship when the range bug gets me. I have much less experience playing BM, so, while I know that third spec somewhat, most/all of my feedback is from a Survival perspective.
There is a lot to like in this tree. Kill Command resets might not be the most exciting mechanic, but they are what make Survival function. Overall I think that this is a really good start to a Hero tree, at least when viewing it from a Survival perspective. I am excited to see talent nodes that bring back popular tier set elements that the spec has had this expansion. I am also looking forward to the Covering Fire/Scattered Prey node and more bomb-butchery cdr madness.
Sort of unrelated, but I would hope that Carve and Raptor Strike would move to being baseline when the Hunter trees get a look over for TWW. Having to spend talent points to learn an ability, and then spend them to learn the better version, feels bad. Carve also feels like an ability that no longer has a real purpose. If Surv had RS and Carve(and the bomb cdr functionality of it), but could upgrade either of those spells to Mongoose and Butchery it would feel better. Much of the Survival tree(and MM tree and Hunter class tree) are frustrating due to how costly talents are, how poor the pathing options are, and how restrictive that ends up being for builds.
Does the inclusion of Cull the Hurd mean that the functionality of Coordinated Assault might be getting some much needed changes? Could Spearhead be added in tandem with CA as a cooldown that interacts with the many Kill Command and bleed talents? Or, will Spearhead be removed and CA reworked into a cooldown worth using in all scenarios?
The Tireless Hunt/Cornered Prey node has potential, but I also find it frustrating. 8 seconds of 15% movespeed is not nothing, but it also feels like an insult given how long the cool down on Cheetah is. I would rather see this knock the baseline CD of Cheetah down to 1.5minutes, or increase the duration/speed amount of either of the 2 phases to something more impactful.
Cornered Prey is interesting, as attack range is hard to say no to, but given that this use of Disengage is likely to be moving us away from our target (unless we do the jump/turn), 5 yards seems ineffective.
One of the highlights of the Dark Ranger tree for me is the Defensive choice node, as I felt both options were substantial while not adding another overall defensive button as compensation. The Defensive node in the Pack Leader tree, Den Recovery, misses the mark. There has been some confusion as to whether using Mend Pet will grant the player the heal over time, or not. There are certain frustrations when it comes to this talent. Mend Pet, like Exhil, is on the GCD and feels horrible to use. I would love to see something that made turtle less of a meme defensive. Hunter defensives/Cheetah already have base cooldowns that feel too long for what they offer.
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