i feel like a 13 yard melee range every 15 seconds definitely fits in your definition of “new and better”.
you have a really bad habit of saying things are fun and inspired and new when it’s just extra speed on hover or a second charge of VR lol
Im okay with kill command focus, the main problem with the tree is the extra pet only last 6 seconds. The % uptime sounds awful. IF it is only 6 seconds, let it summon 2-3 pets, not just 1. and make sure that kill command/beast cleave work on all the pets unlike CotW.
if it is just 1 pet. double to triple the duration.
2 Likes
By the time the extra pet connects and starts doing damage the 6 seconds will be half through 
So are these new tree talents going to completely replace the current talent trees?
no they are just additions. you pick a hero tree at level 71 and you get the first node immediately and you get a point to spend every level from 71 to 80. you get the whole tree by the time you are level 80. you can freely swap between your hero talent options whenever you would normally be able to swap talent options.
I don’t mind it all that much. My only issue is with the name.
Why is it called Pack Leader when none of the talents involve leading a pack?
There’s no additional pet summons (Pack) and there’s no additional party/raid support talents (Leader), so why is it a Pack Leader when it doesn’t have a pack nor is it a leader?
you already have pets (pack) and you improve their performance (leader)
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Only if you’re looking at it from a BM’s point of view. Yet for Surv hunters? One pet a pack does not make. But I understand, hardly anyone ever remembers that Survivial is a thing that exists…
You + pet is still a pack
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SV is absolutely winning with this talent tree tho. you’re a great leader of your pet
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So call it something along the lines of “Beast Commander” or something? A survival hunter isn’t leading any kind of pack with access to only 1 pet and no party buffs.
I’m not arguing that the numbers aren’t ok, I’m arguing about the naming of the tree.
Oh boy, you hear a someone yell “Lookout for that pack!” And it’s just some dude and his dog? Yeah nah mate, that ain’t no Pack Leader.
Could you imagine talking to someone who’s out walking their singular pet and they’re all like “Yeah mate, I’m like Pack Leader, look at my pack”, what a joke.
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/r/the_pack moment
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I’m going to give two feedback posts on Hunter / Pack Leader. I want to discuss the overall meta-design in this one.
My perspective is pure-PVE mythic raider as a hunter main. I’m 8/9M amirdrassil in a 6 hour a week guild. I play the hunter spec that most reliably gets me into prog boss kills in any given tier (so currently my perspective is BM oriented).
Hunter suffers from being an exceptionally popular class.
And unlike the other highly popular classes (e.g. paladin & druid), where the sub-fantasies can be divided by spec, each of the hunter specs can appeal to many wildly different styles of player.
Mages all want to be Gandalf, Warlocks all want to be grimdark emo Gandalf, but Hunter players will never even agree what weapon we want to be fighting with.
You can have been drawn to hunter because you like controlling a pet, because you like archers, because you like a ranged version of a melee-esque playstyle, because you like collecting pets, because you like a self-contained open world character, (once upon a time) because you liked trapping, and others I won’t have thought of.
Therefore any hunter hero tree has to deal with an extremely diverse set of player expectations.
This isn’t just dealing with “beastmaster & survival” or “marksman & beastmaster”… this is simulatenously fulfilling the fantasy of people who (e.g.) think Beastmaster is for using uwu neon themed pet stampedes to fight open world rares, while simultaneously supporting others who think BM’s about split target pressure potential in 3v3 arena. Of course, both are wrong & BM is actually about maneuverable pure ST ranged damage for raid /s.
So for any hunter hero tree to be a success, it needs to embody multiple perspectives simultaneously.
The choice nodes should be absolutely critical on a hunter tree. While each choice node will always deal with a theme (e.g. how is your sustained aoe damage improved?), for a good hunter tree the answers offered must be as thematically different as possible (e.g. more pets vs moar dots).
At the point the moar-pets zookeeper believers, split target barbed shot proc fishers, and big-red-pet burst window power infusion receivers are all enthusiastic about different overlapping versions of the same tree - that’s when Devs will have made a good hunter tree.
Having framed the obstacles of the hunter design situation, I want to give a more personal opinion from a raider perspective.
In my opinion the base hunter trees are bland but functional. There is a single target spec and there is an aoe spec. Situationally you can shuffle a few active utility talents in the class tree & if you’re really keen a couple of marginal sim-for-highest-dps talents in the BM tree. By the sounds of it SV has more interesting variations in the spec tree - but with the queue of people wanting to play melee classes & the lack of a compelling reason to bring SV over ranged hunter, I’m probably never going to find out.
There’s a solid selection of players who confuse number of buttons with the complexity/validity of spec. By this standard, fire mage should probably be the easiest spec in the game 
BM regularly gets lumped into this perspective as a classic example of an ‘easy’ or ‘starter’ spec. Add in the ability to pet collect & you have a classic hipster it’s-only-for-the-casuals argument.
To properly play BM - or any spec - at a solid baseline in a complex raid encounter is a genuine challenge that requires practice. The actual issue with BM is that once you’re capable of achieving that baseline, you’ve also just about hit the skill ceiling. Your DPS results beyond that point will come down to kill times, target choice, external buffs, and potentially unhelpful-for-the-raid play choices - not better personal ability timing or selection.
So linking that opinion back into what I said about hunter being a diverse class…
BM is a spec that could substantially benefit from some rewarding-if-and-only-if-skilled choice nodes in its trees.
I recognise that Bliz said they wanted to avoid adding cognitive workload - but we also have the Lightsmith & the original Oracle trees, so I’m going to assume that was more a guideline than a rule… 
If the hunter hero trees were to embrace a basic theme of hard-but-rewarding vs easy-but-moderate, with both options emphasising different themes of the hunter toolkit, then I think it would be a recipe for success.
For example, the Pack Leader tree has the Covering Fire / Scattered Prey aoe-oriented node. Both are potentially reasonably nodes that make the current AoE rotation easier (assuming baseline Multi-Shot damage is buffed), but the choice between them is answered by a sim & neither changes gameplay (unless Multi-Shot is made overpowerly strong).
A better hunter tree would offer two different themes and two different risk/reward options.
For example, keeping Covering Fire (pet based simple aoe) would encourage an opposite alternative like a hunter-based skill oriented ability (e.g. barbed shot has an aoe explosion when refreshed, doing more damage if the prior DoT had less time remaining - which would also enable some increased degree of AoE while in a baseline ST spec). Or if you wanted to keep a (boosted base damage) Multi-Shot ability like Scattered Prey, which passively boosts direct hunter damage, it could be balanced against a skill-based pet ability that puts a mark on a random Multi-Shot target & summons an additional Dire Beast if you Kill Command that target.
By playing off skill-theme & skill-purpose there is a tremendous amount of potential for interesting choices within the hunter kit. It has not been used effectively. The diversity has led to watering down rather than creating alternate flavours.
This is why I think Pack Leader is terrible. It’s a completely passive tree, for the class that most needs a tree full of choices. Some of the choices should be passive… but the tree should not be.
9 Likes
this is the intention of hero talent trees and asking for/expecting hunter to be the sole exception is kind of bonkers
Could we at least add Spearhead to the talent that summons a pet for 6 seconds? This talent benefits BM far more than survival because with CDR BM can use wrath more than twice as often as survival can use CA.
I agree with everything said in this post, also Plunderstorm is the worst thing to happen to this game.
3 Likes
These are both of very little value outside of very niche cases in PvP.
There’s no Posthaste movement speed attached to DH’s Disengage (Vengeful Retreat), and Momentum is a slow and subtle ramp-up these days. Unless you really need that brief 70% snare on a second set of targets… you’re only extending your pathetic 8 Fury per second buff by up to 3s, requiring awkward movement bundling.
Felblade hits for less than a builder. It’s primarily a mobility tool until RNG fails the DH often enough to then, finally, be typically their lowest priority action among single-charge skills when it wouldn’t simply overcap their resource glut.
Now, I will admit they’re a more interesting way to give something around the value of 15% more movement speed on Cheetah, but let’s not imply that they’re any more powerful than that given the power of either affected skill in the present state of the game.
If BM is the outlier… why wouldn’t those nodes simply be in BM, itself? Else you end up needing to have hugely different conditional nodes between BM and MM | BM and SV on BM’s Hero Talents or risk overloading the non-BM simply to make up for BM being denied a decent skill ceiling (especially after Savagery becomes available and if/when Savagery is optimal) until Hero Talent levels.
DoTs are inherently of multi-target value when their priority exceeds other multi-target attacks and their frequency of use exceeds their durations. That is clearly the case with Barbed Shot, as the only competing AoE action is Multishot, which needs only be used per ~5.99 seconds, and Death Chakrams (unless Stampede finally gets unneutered) per 45 (120) seconds. And both ST and AoE builds take Stomp, which already give Barbed Shot an uncapped AoE.
I have to tentatively agree that it such could be used more effectively, but do you have any examples of the alternate flavors you’d like to see?
1 Like
Some spitballs that’d give substantial utility (assuming DR and SN also got significant utility) while also being thematic:
Background Changes:
- Camouflage is now Aspect of the Lynx. It has a 120s cooldown but can be used in combat, fading into stealth over 3 seconds (similar to Invisibility) and charges at triple speed while out of combat.
- A new PvP talent greatly reduces your chance to be hit while in Feign Death and allows one to use Aspect of the Lynx from Feign Death without triggering its cooldown.
- Aspect of the Wild again replaces Savagery and now additionally causes Cobra Shot to deal Nature damage and your Nature damage to scale with Mastery by 50% normally and 100% during Aspect of the Wild.
[To Be Renamed] Why Aspect When Can Beast?
Replaces your Aspect abilities with new summoning actions which also provide part of the benefit of those actions to nearby allies. When you attack, it will likewise attack for (40% of AP) physical damage, reduced against secondary targets.
I.e.
- Summon Cheetah – Summon a Cheetah to run alongside you and convey to you and nearby allies a portion of its spirit, increasing your movement speed by 90% for 3 seconds and 30% for 9 seconds thereafter and the movement speed of allies near you or it by half this amount.
- Summon Tortoise – Summon a Elder Tortoise to accompany you and convey to you and nearby allies a portion of its spirit, deflecting attacks aimed against you and reducing your damage taken by 30% and giving nearby allies a chance to deflect attacks against them to a maximum of 30% of your health thereby spared.
- Said tortoise teleports as needed to ostensibly keep up with you, but you actually get the benefit regardless of whether it’s in range. Might or might not allow you to attack while Turtle is up. Anti-bubbling you [Shattering Throw] kills tortoise.
- When you use Eagle, you get an Eagle. It also increases the range of allies within 12 yards by 12 yards.
- When you use Lynx, you get a Lynx. It also shrouds allies within 8 yards if not currently targeted by any engaged enemies.
- When you use Aspect of the Wild, you also get a Cobra, causing… [to be decided].
- Etc., etc.
Or
Run With the Pack
Your Aspect [Summoning abilities] cool faster based on relevant actions.
- Aspect of the Cheetah - Cooling speed is increased by half your movement speed.
- Aspect of the Turtle - Damage reduced by other abilities other decreases the cooldown of Aspect of the Turtle by up to 10 seconds at a time based on the damage reduced.
- Aspect of the Eagle - Cooled by up to 5 seconds at a time, based on damage dealt, when dealing a non-melee attack.
- Aspect of the Wild - Cools 10% faster while enemies are taking periodic damage and by up to 2 seconds at a time from periodic damage dealt.
- Aspect of the Lynx - Cools 50% faster if you haven’t taken direct damage in the last 6 seconds.
- Murder of Crows - Cools 200% faster for 5 seconds after killing an enemy.
To me, those would be rather Pack Master-esque. Perhaps a bit OP, unless other Hero Talents were brought up to match them, but I feel like that level of tangible power, where it’s utility-focused and it would not negatively affect rotation or substantially reduce the cognitive load of team-play, should be what Hero Talents aspire to.
1 Like
Here are my 2 cents as a consistent top 1% key pusher and near CE BM/Surv main playing since end of BFA:
Vicious Hunt
- This is incredibly boring. Just add the visual clutter of an additional pet companion so you have your “pack” - that alone solves half the complaining. it’s going to hit like a wet noodle but gives hunters something, so they’re not complaining their tree is lacking or unimpressive while appealing to the variety of hunters that love pet collecting and showing off. It gives them a somewhat ‘unique’ visual that distinguishes them from their Dark Ranger/Sentinal counterparts. This additional pet’s damage can’t be too high or it’s busted for BM’s beast cleave. I don’t personally love this option as it’ll feel lackluster when finally played when your pets just dive at an enemy and you forget they even exist while doing your rotation.
- I suggest also making it so that depending which pet(s) you have out, you gain a 1-2% buff to a stat depending on the pet family (Exotic = mastery) or even more in depth with each pet type providing a stat buffs (Scalehides = vers) but I doubt that the 2nd option will happen even though it would be my preference so we can mix and match pets for the situation. Whether or not that’s a personal or stat buff to the group, I’d leave up to the devs but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a personal buff despite it allowing Hunter to bring more to the table for raid, m+, and PVP beyond lacking utility and buffs currently.
- Alternatively, stealing this idea from Altani (above), having pets spawn when you hit ‘Aspect of the X’ seems really neat if an effort was put in to rework hunter’s trees finally to solve their lacking utility.
Pack Coordination
- This is simple but works. It has great synergy with SV’s kit utilizing pet attacks and it’s just free passive damage for BMs.
Howl of the Pack
- Free crit, nothing to complain about here. Both specs like crit.
Wild Attacks
- Works with the above Howl of the Pack which is again, free crit. It’s fine but would be better if it was just combined with Howl of the Pack into a single talent. That allows this node to be a fresh spot for something new.
Den Recovery
- This is very lackluster compared to the other classes and specs’ DR. Especially if pet mend doesn’t also heal the hunter to help deal with rot damage that only really BM struggles with. We are usually already topped up before outgoing damage making this hero node dead on arrival. I suggest using Hunter’s Mark and making the target deal 3-5% less damage to the hunter and pets as they help ‘hunt’ the inferior mob, just like the original SL conduit worked.
Tireless Hunt (or)
- This is another lackluster node. If it functioned like druid’s Stampeding Roar to give hunters some utility, that would be ideal, or again, take anyone else’s ideas for this node.
Cornered Prey
- This name doesn’t even make sense and would be better suited for the Hunter’s Mark node suggested in place of the Den Recovery node. The 5y is kind of nice for surv and doesn’t do a whole lot for BM. Some have suggested giving surv Aspect of the Eagle. Maybe a flat additional 3 yards for the hunter and nearly allies works better for this (though I doubt it’ll happen given the lack of utility provided in trees for specs I’m familiar with).
Frenzied Tear
- It functions well with survival’s kit triggering free arcane shots when talented into Quick Shot and BM loves free KC resets.
Covering Fire / Scattered Prey
- This node seems great for both survival and BM. Less multi-shot uptime babysitting and had a good feedback loop for survival.
Cull the Herd
- Kill shot could use a decent buff for both specs, otherwise, great node that benefits the handful of bleeds survival has. BM’s killshot is embarrassingly weak and survival needs killshot to hit harder for Birds of Pray to make more sense to take currently.
Furious Assault (or)
- Good node - BM loves free barb shot resets and Surv loves T29 (VoTI) teir set bonus.
Beast of Opportunity
- This node does a whole lot more for BM than Surv. If this was tied to fury of the eagle, it would be closer to balanced given BW is about a 45s CD after all the CDR. Surv currently will never take this node. If it needs to stay on a longer CD, Spearhead makes a lot more sense than coordinated assault as we spam KC during Spearhead a lot.
Pack Assault
- This node works amazingly with Coordinated Assault providing empowered spells but admittedly, it is quite boring for BM. I would move Vicious Hunt (top node) to combine with this node if the 1st node gets reworked to anything that better fits the hero tree fantasy.
General notes and class feedback:
- More defensives (like the popular SL Hunter’s Mark and Feign Death conduits) and better utility would be nice like explosive trap knocking up or having the option to since sanguine still exists. It’s also silly how many talent points a hunter needs to give up to make Survival of the Fittest nearly as good as Pally’s Sac. In its current state, Hunter struggles to compare to other specs in high-end m+. Dark Ranger will be the default for BM hunters pushing due to Smoke Screen while Pack Hunter offers no DR. Admittedly, the rest of Dark Range seems very lackluster.
- Speaking of Hunter’s Mark, it should increase damage for the first and last 20% by 5% to compete with what other classes bring to the table such as DH and Monk’s debuffs. 1% increased damage overall is very weak, arguably the weakest raid buff and by the time I’m casting Hunter’s Mark on a target, it’s usually down to 90% already.
- Defensives in general should be off the GCD, especially exhil.
- Surv’s CA should be a 1:30 CD and spearhead 45s - survival’s CDs are incredibly weak to the point that they are comparable and at times worse than not taking them at all (No CD build). Bird of Pray should shoot 4 kill shots regardless of targets so it’s more bursty and makes it more justifiable to take and use over a no CD build. Those kill shots and bomb empowerment just need to flat out be stronger. At least with Pack Leader we’ll be getting more so this might be fine but even then bomb empowerments still are extremely underpowered. Last I checked, an empowered bomb needs to hit like 50 targets to do similar damage to an empowered kill shot.
- Roar of Sacrifice can be a usable external in PVE in the class tree, it’s never taken otherwise as the 6% avoidance will always be taken for self-survivability in pve content.
- Tranq Shot removes needs to remove multiple stacks of buffs to be comparable to evokers.
- (Surv) Can we remove the awkward Mongoose bite/Rapter strike and Carve/Butchery nodes and stick to popular Mongoose Bite and Butchery? It makes no sense having an alternative button that do the same thing.
6 Likes