Having read the capstone and other talents, the capstone seems like 50% of it doesnt even work. How can vicious hunt stack twice when kill command consumes it? Doesn’t that mean it’s impossible to use?
Kill command applies vicious hunt, and then you use kill command which consumes it and reapplies it. Well in that case you’re never getting to two stacks.
This seems to be an obfuscation of the fact we have little dps compared to classes that heal and tank. We ARE squishy, I have never heard anything to the opposite on that fact and we have absolutely no value b/c of the lower dps.
Perusing the leaderboards is indicative of a class that is popular only with the people who play it. For 10 years BM, despite the spec’s low dps, has been the only spec present in that list and yet it has undoubtedly been a 3rd class spec (ask a Hunter)
These are the things Hunters want to see addressed, not more complication of their
class which somewhat disguises these issues but a head-on fix of what we basically
NEED to move on with as a class. This is not tuning, it is a re-invention of who we are as damage dealers. Please and Thank You
Numerically this looks very strong. Unfortunately, it just lacks any kind of pizzazz. You just do more damage doing what you were already doing. Not even any fun animations.
Its like plain oatmeal. Plain oatmeal is a fine breakfast, but a little lacking when the person next to you has steak and eggs.
I feel like Pack Leader is functional but feels perfunctory. It serves its purpose but lacks flair both mechanically and visually.
I have a few ideas about where that visual panache could come from, and what old abilities or existing archetypes that we can pull from to get a higher level of wow factor to really knock it out of the pack.
Visuals
Loa + Bosses - there’s much to be said for summoning more pets with major cds, but this throws us into the pitfall of basic dire beast functionality. If the extra beast summoned from BW or CA was the spirit of a beast Loa or beast boss(with maybe a buff on spawn) we could have that unique wow factor that pushes it beyond “add another pet” I’d lean loa because they’re generally untameable but visually still read as beasts, having one heed your call for 6 seconds would be a nice visual treat.
Lynx Rush - this spell remains one of the most striking visuals when it comes to pet centric spells - a new and improved version of this would be a unique way to signal “there’s a pack leader here”
Titans thunder - the addition of Mimiron, Thorim and Hati to hunter lore hasn’t been explored much, but here’s a prime spot for an old ability/functionality with some visual flare - a lightning aura around your main pet, or arcing between you and your pets or from pet to pet is again another striking visual that would bring that missing visual panache and replace a simple “more kill commands” or “more barbed shots”
Kill Shot - aside from the need for a visual flair for this ability, having it trigger an ability from your pet simultaneously, maybe with a massive red bolt visual, could really sell the increased coordination that being a pack leader entailed.
Improved Bestial Wrath/Coordinated Assault Visuals - The shadowflame visual is excellent, something in that style could be deployed on pets and would be a lovely distinction from a normal cooldown.
From a general class standpoint there are some more egregious functional oversights in the hunter tree that could be fixed.
Explosive trap - Hunters should be able to talent explosive trap into a knock up/knock down, even if this doubled the CD it would shore up the serious lack of group utility when it comes to control during lock fights in M+
Leech - some amount of pet damage should heal the hunter, even if it’s not as effective as pure leech, the fact that the stat gained from our major group utility barely effects 2/3 specs is frankly silly.
Sentinel Owl - make it bigger, make it give avoidance as well as leech, yes it would overlap with other utility, still this would at least make it function better. Perhaps instead of leech just straight “heal for the damage you do for the next x seconds up to 100% of your HP”
Traps - there’s much to be said of the mastery of trapping a wanted target in a sea of mobs and nameplates, but the disconnect between hitbox size and trap trigger radius can get.really aggravating.
A PvE toggle that lets you throw 5 traps in a wide area that have an altered duration would be a solid way to expand that mastery through functionality change.
Main Concerns:
Not enough flair, in visuals and arguably even audio.
Some talents have reeeaaaalllyyy trickled out their actual gameplay effects via unnecessary daisy-chains, almost as if attempting to waste 1-2 talents.
The present tuning (though such is subject to change) would have deleterious effects on Survival’s interactions with resource economy.
The first should be pretty obvious, but the last two may take a bit more explanation.
To that end, let’s start with Survival and look at the ways that Vicious Hunt, Pack Coordination, Frenzied Tear, and Furious Assault interact:
- Vicious Hunt deals an extra 200% AP of uninteractive hunter damage on every second Kill Command. (Scales with nothing but AP.)
- Every second Kill Command causes your next Raptor Strike to give a pet basic attack, individually worth up to 67% AP to a single target. (Scales with Mastery, Ferocity, Beast Mastery.)
- Each Bite (given per 3s and per every 2 KCs + 1 RS) has a 20% chance to reset the CD on your builder, Kill Command and make the next KC hit an additional time for 30% damage. (No clear indicator whether it also gives double Focus and I haven’t seen any testers demonstrate one way or the other yet.)
- When you use this empowered Kill Command, you have a 50% chance to make your next Raptor Strike free and deal double damage.
So let’s put all that together and work backwards from the end of that chain:
- You have a 20% chance of a 50% chance per Bite, or basically a 10% chance per Bite, to get a free, double damage Raptor Strike.
- Without any further interaction, this would net you a free, double-damage Raptor about once per 30 seconds, on rough average, or ~374.5% AP, scaling with Mastery, Sweeping Spear, and Spear Focus, per minute. (For point of contrast: KC itself gains ~100% non-scaling AP per use.)
If we were to wholly prioritize these procs at cost to net damage and procced KC resets often enough for unlimited KC casts…
- We’d get an extra Bite per 3 GCDs (KC, KC+, RS). Pre-Haste, that would be an extra Bite every 4.5 seconds, increasing the rate from 3 to 5 per 9 seconds, a 67% increase, bringing the average rate of empowered Raptor Strike procs from per ~30 seconds to ~18 seconds. That is the absolute maximum we can manage pre-Haste, but at least that two-thirds bonus margin increases with said Haste.
It’s probably worth a word here as to how our priorities would shift under the presently given tuning:
I’m going to split this part into pre- and post-capstone, if only out of some over-optimistic expectation that we might eventually get a more interesting, more thematic capstone (without which our impact on the below is doubled, but we’d then be using up 6 talents daisy-chaining out this purpose).
Without the capstone:
- Under the tuning given, of course, as even without Beast Mastery, Improved Kill Command, SV’s Improved Kill Command, Alpha Predator, or Furious Assault, a baseline SV Kill Command does effectively ~105% player-equivalent AP. It also contributes 25% Raptor Strike damage until more than 3 uses since the last Raptor Strike. And now, with Vicious Hunt, that is increased by 200% AP every other use, or an average of 100% each. This puts KC at an absolute minimum of 250% AP’s value per average use.
- Meanwhile, Raptor Strike does only 182.7% AP. It would therefore be optimal to cast over Kill Command only once per two Kill Commands.
- That is, overcapping Kill Command charges would be the far greater loss than overcapping Focus, so long as you are getting at least one Raptor in after each empowered Kill Command (which in turn covers the per 3 Kill Commands of Tip of the Spear even if it causes double the triggers per Frenzied Tear). KC is now your nuke, while Raptor Strike would be your “occasionally optimal” fallback attack regardless of present Focus. Our cast portions and interest in Focus would quickly mirror BMs, except that we attempt to ensure we will have enough Focus left over after each upcoming VH-KC to use Raptor Strike before the next KC without having to drop Explosive Shot, Kill Shot, etc.
Now, I don’t think the tuning will not persist in that state or towards those implications, but I find it worrying that not only do these skills largely invert our usual interactions with resource economy but what little potentially noticeable or capitalizing payoff we get is so dwarfed by the basic and potentially problematic effects of Vicious Hunt itself.
- The end of a daisy-chain like that isn’t likely to bear fruit more than a few times per minute and its individual reward is, itself, unless we would otherwise have complete downtime from unavoidable Focus starvation (which is damn near impossible at present and per our talents continuing verbatim into TWW), less than that given to each Kill Command. Why is the ‘few per minute’ nuke worth less than the builder available at least every 6 seconds?
Now, with the capstone:
- Take our current Haste-scalable impact on that final outcome, Furious Assault, and double it. With the capstone, you get 2 Bite-causing Raptors per every other KC, up from one. Thus, now, you want to Raptor Strikes per 2 Kill Commands. Okay, so we’re now more or less back to how we were before… just with the whole point removed of our resource bar being 3.33 Raptors Strikes long.
The flexibility is that much reduced, greatly disincentivizing any gambles for brief/finishing burst over rigid rotation. That’s still deleterious. Heck, that much, especially, seems worse in its gameplay, so far as I can imagine, than Survival would be without those additions.
Aside: The capstone guaranteeing these effects on CA (rather than getting it only from every other KC) would be fine… except that VH makes KC hits so hard that you’re going to want to use it often enough that any Raptor Strike you could possibly fit even into a base CA is not going to benefit from the twice-stacking Pack Coordination anyways.
But, again, more fundamentally than all that… Why so much daisy-chaining at all? Why not simply give Bite both a 20% chance to reset Kill Command and make its next use double-strike for (or simply hit for an additional) 30% damage and the 10% chance to make the next Raptor Strike free and hit for double damage? Or better yet, why not just set it to 20% for both and deemphasize Vicious Hunt? Why must such modest effects take up separate talents? Why must empowered KC spender always come before the empowered Raptor Strike? Why spend a capstone just to give Thing A that is lackluster (our outright bad) in its gameplay even at greater potency) the other half of its power.
Even more generally, why give us only a mildest ability to accelerate our Bite rate, something that is essentially just single-target-limited DoT otherwise unaffected by Haste, and then build what is ostensibly our only noticeable/big payoffs around that, of all things? They don’t feel big.
The emphasis on Vicious Hunt just makes Pack Leader’s contributions feel way, way too front-loaded, to the point of both depriving the payoff of any substance even if its tuning were later squished enough not to invert/wreck Survival’s interactions with its resource economy. It feels needlessly wasteful with its talent points by splitting everything out into “synergies” for ultimately little to no change in gameplay that is not degrading/destructive to, again, our interactions with resource economy and much of what set us apart from BM.
What I’d therefore like to see from Pack Leader is just a much greater visual sense of beast usage (in ways not overlapping simply with Dire Beast) and pack-leading. Vicious Hunt does feel like playing with your pet, befitting SV especially, but let’s face it — the pet is leading you, not the other way around, which is slightly awkward on SV because there Kill Command is meant as a resource regenerator more so than an opener.
Still working on a full mock-up, but just for a starting point… We have Cobra Shot, Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite; Aspect of the Cheetah, Eagle, Turtle, etc. While the latter might be problematic to involve offensively, as per Trickster, there’s surely more we can leverage from those beast-themed skills.
well said!
Hunters are the red-headed step children of WoW
I was playing when Explosive Shot was intro’ed and
the damage was fine, a little less than MM yet they
nerfed it into the wet mud b/c of Paladins/Mages
and Rogues raised such a stink over PvP that
devs nerfed TWICE in 3 days. Hunters went back
to MM leaving the defunct BM and SV specs b/c
it’s really just too difficult to balance?
Yet every other class seems to be just fine,
I know b/c I play other classes
WTF is the problem here? Is it TOO hard?
Depending on how sentinel works, Survival hunters may be forced into pack leader for PvP dps. It all depends on how the damage breakdown works. But just how its worded now it looks like Packmaster gives Survival a ranged option in spamming the hell out of kill command?
Well have to see. None of the choices feel very compelling in their wording or animation at the moment.
For what it’s worth, VH makes your next two RS/MB give a basic attack and every KC makes your next two KC trigger VH.
I think many people’s concerns with PL would immediately relax if Howl of the Pack instead summoned a Dire Beast that did something instead of Crit % damage.
Why do people keep trying to force this?
Also, as of right now Sentinel looks alot better for surv pvp (not great though).
Yeah it doesn’t interest me in the slightest. Seems really boring.
Spam kill command reset kill command, make kill command hit harder then Mongoose bite from a rough look at the numbers? It seems like the PvP gameplay then is just spam kill command till it stops resetting.
Wildfire bomb (red) would let you spam for quite a while. And with the right talent set up you could end up spamming for half a minute at times. Basically doing full (pvp) damage.
Honestly it’s not at all interesting to me.
Yeah sentinel looks like you just play the game the exact same you always have. I haven’t seen a video of it, but I heard the lunar storm might follow the target? If it doesn’t I you’d probably loose so much from the capstone in pvp.
In that case sadly just spamming kill command with big damage could end up being more beneficial sadly. Not looking forward to any of this at the moment.
Some people actually liked ranged survival and want it back. This is not a trick question.
Sure, that’s not even close what is being suggested.
Nope bring range surv back as 4th spec no kill command.
Those people should not be listened to. Blizzard has been designing hunters for the lowest denominator for far too long.
It does not follow the target sadly. I watched MrGM on twitch and he would rapid fire some mobs in a delve and they would run at him and exit the circle, leaving the bird just AFKing for 8 sec.
In PVP you would be incentivized to make sure enemies stay in the circle, either by CC or by staying inside yourself, forcing melees to choose whether to run away and wait it out for 8 sec, or stay with you and get pooped on by the birdie
LOL look at mage, warlock, priest heck even pally hero talent and come back and tell hunter talent tree is great.
The only class with a worse talent tree so far is rogue
From the people I’ve talked to and the testing I’ve done in Alpha I don’t know if Spellslinger or Frostfire is something to aspire to…
Frostfire seems ok but Sunfury my god that’s a really good hero spec.
right but that’s just one of their three. 
definitely an outlier among mage hero trees, and hero trees in general (at least from a visual spectacle pov)