Fixing Hunter Survivability in 1 Post

Classes Hunter
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Any one of these changes would help Hunter squishiness immensely.

  • Exhilaration now has 2 charges, a 1.5 minute cooldown on each charge, and restores 25% health immediately and 25% health over 6 seconds. Combine Natural Mending and Rejuvenating Wind into a single 2 point talent.
  • Disengage has 2 charges. Disengage reduces your damage taken by 10% for the duration of posthaste.
  • Aspect of the turtle reduces all damage taken by 75%, and deflects all attacks during this duration. Every time you use Exhilaration, reduce the cooldown by 30 seconds.
  • Survival of the Fittest reduces all damage taken by 33% for 6 seconds.
  • Nature’s Endurance: Reduces damage taken by an additional 17%, and Survival of the Fittest now grants 1 charge of Exhilaration. Using Exhilaration reduces the cooldown of Survival of the Fittest by 25%.
  • Lone Survivor: Survival of the Fittest lasts 9 seconds, and you additional gain 33% of your health as a barrier for 6 seconds. If the barrier is destroyed, the cooldown of Survival of the Fittest is reduced by 50% and you heal for 20% of your max health over 6 seconds.

Having more movement in PvP would stop MM from roleplaying a corpse.

  • Lock and Load now activates after casting Chimera/Arcane shot 3 times, in addition to random RNG. This is still slower and more focus intense than sitting still and hard casting, but it gives more flexibility and damage when on the move.
  • Trueshot allows Aimed Shot to be cast while moving.
    Both of these would increase MM survival in every aspect, because standing still is one of the things that’ll kill a MM hunter the most.

Survival is a joke spec. Tbh I don’t even know how to fix it other than to not play it.

BM is a nice sustain, but all specs need to last more than 5 seconds in any fight.

16 Likes
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I would also vote that pets get a little bit more defensive, surviving aoe, or get equal health to the hunter themselves. Pets die so fast in this high burst meta, and most other pet classes have at least 1 free instant revive mechanic, while hunters do not.

Make pets great again please.

Also bring back craven strategem legendary power into main hunter tree.

7 Likes
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I like the suggestions overall, but would like to add pets need more because they can die so easy to passive cleave, and turtle should be usable while stunned. Also some of the proposed changes would be way too strong. The MM change ideas would be amazing, I don’t think it would make MM OP or anything but would be a massive quality of life improvement. BM with beast cleave duration could be buffed by another 3-4 seconds too. Survival… I have no idea honestly. It is never really played or brought to anything except for when it is very very strong like the end of shadowlands. Other than that its no where to be seen.

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Some of the changes I recommended can be done individually. The MM changes are crucial overall, not just for PvP, but for quality of life in general. Having access to Aimed Shot is essential, and when you’re forced to move for a mechanic, your DPS is shot. You have no idea how many times a swirly appears under my feet just as I’m starting an Aimed Shot.

Some of the other changes I’d make is to remove a slew of 2 point talents (or singular bad talents) for minimal gains. Like… 2 points for 4% crit damage (Sharpshooter). What. Or how about Bombardment. To even use that, you have to shoot off FIVE 20 focus shots, emptying your focus bar, just to get… Trick Shots. Terrible.

I’d also love to just NUKE all of the RNG in the tree. Deathblow? Remove the proc chances. Now only procs off of Rapid Fire, to serve as a finisher blow to Rapid Fire (a free double tap). Additionally makes your Trueshot Aura much more fluent. Aimed Shot > Aimed Shot > Rapid Fire > Deathblow.

Keep in mind anything I suggest is SINGULAR changes. Meaning just one or two of these can really patch up the class and help a lot.

  • Reworked Legacy of the Windrunners: 50%/100% chance to coalesce 3 Wind Arrows for x damage. Each Wind Arrow reduces the cooldown of Wailing arrow by 1 second.

You will ALWAYS coalesce 3 arrows now. This is more suited to movement heavy/pvp side of things, as you’ll soon see.

  • Windrunner’s Guidance: Increases your movement speed by 20%/40% for 3 seconds after casting Aimed Shot and allows your next Aimed Shot to be cast while moving. Your Wind Arrows restores 1/2 focus.

Pairs EXTREMELY well with revised Lock and Load; additionally, the effect only lasts for the duration of the buff, so if you don’t have another Aimed Shot ready to go in 3 seconds, you’re not going to keep the chain going.

The new Free-Movement Aimed Shot requires careful planning, just like you would if you’re sitting still, and also requires a lot of investment. So some other changes I’d make are:

  • Streamline is a 1 point talent.
  • Steady Focus is a 1 point talent. Firing two Steady Shots in a row grants 10% haste for 12 seconds (I just like a flat number more). Upon gaining Steady Focus, your next Aimed Shot costs 10 less focus (more enticing to take and makes Aimed Shot work like a soft Steady Shot).
  • Replace Sharpshooter with Killing Fields. Empowered Multishots from Precise Shots reduce the cooldown of Volley and Salvo by 3 seconds, and inflict an additional 15% more damage.
  • Precise Shots now gives 1/2 empowered Arcane/Chimera/Multishots per talent point, no more RNG.
  • Updated Bombardment: When casting Aimed Shot with two stacks of Precise Shots, your excess Precise Shots will coalesce as 1 extra Wind Arrows each stack, striking your surrounding targets for x.
  • Updated Quick Load: Bursting Shot now gives the trick shots effect, and procs Lock and Load. Every time Arcane/Chimera/Multi shot hits a dazed or slowed target, reduce the cooldown of Bursting Shot by 1 second maximum.

Pet changes:

  • Pets now have 90-100-110% Hunter Health, depending on the type of beast (Cunning - 90%, Ferocity - 100%, Tenacity - 110%). Whenever the Hunter is healed, the Pet is healed by 33% of that amount.
  • Pets have 10% Baseline Leech.
  • Revive Pet requires hard CC to interrupt, and after reviving your Pet, it takes 25% reduced damage from all sources for 5 seconds.
  • Survival of the Fittest activates on your active pet as well.
  • Whenever you gain Aspect of the Turtle, your Pet gains Mirror Shell. Mirror Shell reduces all damage taken by 50% until you are no longer under the effect of Aspect of the Turtle.
  • (Beastmastery) Whenever your Pet dies, gain Enraged Howl for 12 seconds. Enraged Howl reduces the cost of Locust Shot by 50% and increases its damage done by 25%. Additionally each Locust Shot grants a stack of Rebirth. At 5 stacks of Rebirth, your Revive Pet becomes instant cast, costs no Focus, and restores your Pet to life with an additional 25% HP barrier for 10 seconds. These effects can not occur more than once every five minutes. (This one should be a PvP talent)

Changes that could give Hunter a slot on a raid:
Pet passive effects apply to the ENTIRE raid to a lesser degree.
Lone Wolf could apply a 3% damage buff to the entire raid, as long as you have at least ONE Marksmanship Hunter aboard.
Survival Hunter can now juggle, it pairs well with their clown shoes and big red nose.

9 Likes
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Two more things I’d like to add:

  • Surging Shots: Now reduces the cooldown of Rapid Fire by 4.5 seconds each time you cast Aimed Shot. Rapid Fire does 30% more damage.

  • This gives consistent, fair results. You no longer reduce the cooldown by 0-18 seconds, but you will ALWAYS reduce it by 9 seconds every double set of Aimed Shot you cast. This is best suited for STANDING STILL and HARD FIRING Aimed Shot, for maximum damage.

  • Lethal Shots: Reduces the cooldown of Rapid Fire by 2 seconds each time you cast Multishot or Arcane/Chimera shot. Each arrow of Rapid Fire restores 2 additional focus. (7 → 21)

  • This will give MORE Rapid Fires at the cost of less Aimed Shots. This pairs well with a mobile build, who wants to trigger reworked Lock and Load more often through 3x Arcane/Chimera/Multi Shot > Lock and Load Aimed Shot > Rapid Fire > 3x Arcane/Chimera/Multi Shot… etc. Best suited for PvP, especially when you stack in Reworked Windrunners.

In all seriousness, I have no idea how I’d fix Survival, besides just having all of their attacks function with a melee weapon, and take less damage.

6 Likes
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Thanks for the laugh.

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Just make sure that reduction applies after Trueshot’s own, or it will go wholly to waste. Even with that, it may still go wholly to waste under Trueshot.

Moreover, I honestly enjoy the risk/reward component of occasionally delaying {trigger} until after {proc receiver}, as not to waste it, and sometimes getting lucky matters more for poke becoming kill pressure than getting unlucky is likely to reduce a would-be kill to a near-one, at least in regard to this mechanic.

This one I really like. Let’s take this one and leave Surging as is.

Letting them use any and all of their ranged attacks via their hand-crossbow is definitely a good first step. Ideally, attach QoL to that and have each automatically melee ability convert to its ranged analog when out of reach (Raptor → Arcane, Muzzle → Countershot, etc.). An eHP passive would also likely be worthwhile, yes.

Personally, I’d like to start from the extreme basics:

  • Fix pets.
    • More HP, more baseline mobility, Avoidance also affects anything applied through AoEs or cleaves (including DoTs thereby applied). ← Vital
    • Give us back Beast Training. We shouldn’t have only some 3-4 real pet choices for arena.
  • Fix skill acquisition.
    • Concussive, Kill Shot, and Countershot and/or Misdirection should be baseline, with Wing Clip gaining all additional effects/triggers Concussive has and automatically replacing Concussive (with its double-duration, no-CD version of CcS) when in melee range. The only reason not to offer Kill Shot baseline would be to offer it as actual choice, such as on a choice node between Kill Shot and lighter bonus damage on an ICD (no GCD opportunity cost, but less of a discrete mobile damage bump) against targets under X% HP. Countershot is useful everywhere and therefore a non-choice except to bots who refuse to interrupt, who shouldn’t be counted. Misdirection is useful everywhere but in leveling as a Lone Wolf Marksman, and that is niche^3, making it again a non-choice, though at least Rogue is similarly afflicted, so there’s some precedent for leaving it on the tree.
  • Fix our tree’s sometime excessive limitations on what all we can take.
    • Separate Intimidate and High-Explosive Trap; let us take both.
    • If Kill Command’s going to be on the class tree instead of a separate version each featuring in BM and SV’s trees alone, it should be of at least some utility use to MM.
    • Freer pathing.
    • Stronger nodes in general in order to offer a bit more range of choice, especially where nodes are presently rarely taken.
    • Cull/replace the waste from the spec trees (many of which, like Bombardment, you already mentioned).
    • Etc.
  • Functionality improvements.
    • Have Disengage launch back much more rapidly in a dive-roll, more akin to Chi Torpedo but able to climb over,and therefore not be stopped by, any obstacles outside of cliffs, and maybe cancellable early by our attacks. Don’t let Steady Focus be cancelled by anything but a completed ranged attack (no more Countershot cancelling it). Have Volley itself cause the effects of Trick Shots and snapshot across the whole of any casts/channels started under its effect, rather than purging an existing Trick Shots. Have Bloodshed cleave, though at just (Beast Cleave %) duration and %damage_bonus. Have HET double-detonate, so that it doesn’t so often inexplicable miss enemies visually within range just because, by server time, they arrived at that position 10 ms too late to be caught by the trap. Perhaps have use of an immobile cast while moving under Aspect of the Cheetah cause you to continue sliding forward (though with very limited turning of one’s path [not character; you can 180] and decreasing speed) while casting. Relatively subtle changes like that.

Thereafter, finally… I think the two charges on Disengage would be our best and more fitting path forward. And maybe some manner of CDR for Disengage on the same talent.

Miscellaneous:

  • I honestly would prefer to get rid of Streamline and just make Aimed Shot a 2s cast baseline. It’s awkward for the rhythm of True Shot and its surroundings/tuning work(s) in such a way that it doesn’t feel good to get the faster Aimed Shot so much as it just feels bad to have a normal one.
  • I don’t want to see Hunters depend on a throughput-affecting aura buff to be taken to raids. I’d sooner risk having 0 - 6 hunters than call them balanced just because they’re guaranteed 1 and only 1 slot.
  • Talents like Windrunner’s Guidance should see use in PvE as well and shouldn’t be outright obligatory for PvP. Changing them to the likes of a 40% movement speed buff after Aimed Shot is… not that. Or rather, it’d be useful for some fights, but not others, all while axing a large part of MM’s contextual gameplay more so than offering tools to skillfully optimize around it. That’s also a large part of why I want to see Trueshot simply to leave more room for things other than AiS, rather than to see it outright allow for mobile AiS casts.
    • (Though having Aimed Shot and any shots affected thereby — Wind Arrows, Precise Shots, Deadeye — leave stacking Speed-increasing wind trails easily could be, as it could then provide acceleration to allies, too, so long as there is also a throughput-increasing effect enough to make that utility not too expensive.)
  • Food for thought: Axe Revive Pet, replacing it with the ability for your pet to be healed even while “dead,” and “reviving” once it’s reached 40% HP. Healing received in that state would be reduced in some way, of course. Additionally, have Mend Pet both channel AND attach its HoT.
  • Mostly PvE related, but I’d love to see Primal Rage turned into from a Pet skill into a Hunter skill (say, Horn of the Hunt), and the Ferocity ability replaced by a party-wide Leech bonus of bursty-but-decreasing value over a brief-ish duration.
  • Your other suggested pet changes sound mostly great. Baseline Leech, especially, seems a very fair but QoL-high way to go.
1 Like
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Blockquote Just make sure that reduction applies after Trueshot’s own, or it will go wholly to waste. Even with that, it may still go wholly to waste under Trueshot.

I wanna say that the main effect of Trueshot is going to give you plenty of Rapid Fires as-is, with around 4-10 Aimed Shots and 2-5 Rapid fires over the duration depending on buffs and haste. The core part of the ability isn’t just the reduction on Rapid Fire, more so the flat +30% damage it gives to Rapid.

And there could still be a small % chance to grant an instant refill to Rapid Fire, just like how the new Lock and Load grants an 8% chance to gain lock and load on auto attack + 100% chance on third cast of Arcane/Chimera/Multi.

Blockquote Talents like Windrunner’s Guidance should see use in PvE as well and shouldn’t be outright obligatory for PvP. Changing them to the likes of a 40% movement speed buff after Aimed Shot is… not that. (Though having Aimed Shot and any shots affected thereby — Wind Arrows, Precise Shots, Deadeye — leave stacking Speed-increasing wind trails easily could be, as it could then provide acceleration to allies, too.)

I think falling more in line with the overall idea of a Windrunner is far more important. And it could be exceptionally useful in PvE as well for kiting, giving Marksmanship far more freedom in the open world and harder content, especially raids where movement is REQUIRED, or Mythic+ with tons of swirlies. It solves a lot of issues:

  1. It grants more movement options for using the core class skill. If you know you’re going to be mobile, choosing a more mobile variant and a less AoE heavy build would be far superior. This also focuses more on Single Target damage and putting all of your burst into Lock and Load > Windrunner’s Aimed Shot.
  2. It does not change your overall DPS too much, as you’d often want to bunker down and focus fire when you can for Trueshot. This puts a large gap in your rotation by throwing in 3x Arcane, then your assured Lock and Load, then start casting your Windrunner’s Aimed Shot, followed by a few Steady Shots to recoup Focus + Rapid Fire off cooldown (which pairs well with reworked Lethal Shots).
  3. When you bunker down, you can instead focus on simply nailing your target with as much damage as possible. Your rotation changes to Double Cast Steady, pop Trueshot, Aimed, Aimed, Rapid Fire, Killshot, Aimed, Aimed, Rapid Fire, Kill Shot. Aimed, Aimed, Rapid Fire, Kill shot - around here you should be just about out of Trueshot. Perhaps keeping Trueshot the way it is should be the way forward; it’s your bunker down option.
  4. It opens up the Hunter’s survivability in tons of circumstances, not to mention damage. If you’ve played Mythic+ and got hit with a quake in a tight hall, you know the pain of dropping your cast (often times in Trueshot) just to run a few feet away.
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Aye, but your main constraint in PvE is something spawning on you within that Aimed Shot’s cast-time, not your need to get from point A to point B within Aimed Shot’s cooling time and need the 21% movement time back.

I’m still more a fan of just having it grant, say, 25% Haste, and then 25% effect again towards casting times and cooling times. The 25% cast time reduction on Aimed Shot amounts also to a 25% DPS increase over its uptime, as its opportunity cost is thus reduced, so there’s still plenty of emphasis on Aimed Shot, but no longer quite so much as to move MM’s time spent immobile from 17-21% to two-thirds, leaving it no time for other mechanics.

I do, but for M+, you’re unlikely to be able to reach those talents anyways without crippling your AoE potential.

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I think the rotation for kiting open world would be something along the lines of:

  • Start with 2x Steady to pull in mobs, gain Steady Shots.
  • Pop 3x Multis for some nice cleave and buildup, maybe a Barrage/Explosive if you have it.
  • Lock and Load pops. Cast it. Instant Aimed Shot + 3 Windrunner Arrows + Next Aimed Shot can be cast on the move, giving you a small window to pop another Multi > Aimed (normal cast).
  • Since you gained the Steady Shot’s effect, the first aimed shot you cast that isn’t Lock and Load should cost -10 focus. You might have enough focus left to throw down a Multi Shot > Steady x 2 > Rapid Fire to fill out your focus, you could definitely repeat the loop and have the same Marksmanship gameplay, but on the move. Very burst heavy, with periods of middling damage/build up into that burst.

Perhaps something along the lines of Sniper Training could come back, to encourage Hunters to stand still in Raids/Dungeons when they can? Beast Mastery is the most mobile class in the game, but by all means it has very little reason to be IMHO. Marksmanship has no pets, and at the highest risk of being caught out with few defensive tools to escape.

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You can, but that’s never been as intuitive as just having the mobility constraints attached to Aimed Shot itself. WoD Sniper Training also left us immobile >50% of the time instead of 17-21% of the time.

At least it has historically suffered from a lack of AoE burst often enough to have commensurate downsides, but yeah, I’d have to agree that it seems a bit undertaxed for what it gets in that regard.

Aside: I’m curious why you chose the 3 hits of Arcane/Multi/Chimera as the tuning bonus to / reshuffling of Lock and Load over just, say, generalizing LnL to all attacks (per attack, not per hit, as not to overpower Multi), wherein instant shots would already have an advantage (and perhaps with a Heating Up mechanism — increased chance per failed proc, stacking until next success).

Fully Random Tangent: It’s always been odd to me that people think in terms of seconds rather than in GCDs. To me a 2.5s cast on a 1.5s GCD class is stranger than a 2.25s cast, because the latter is a 1.5-GCD cast while the former is a 1.67-GCD cast.

Aimed Shot taking 1.5 GCDs and Steady Shot taking 1.25 GCDs would make, to me, more sense than a 1.67 and 1.33-GCD cast, respectively, and yet those things would be abhorrent to most just because they would, on a class with a decimal value in its GCD speed also have an (extra) decimal in their cast times.

…Nevermind that they’d each be disproportionately smoother, more applicable, and better able to resync (1 in 2 SSs resync to all skills — instead of 1 in 3 resyncing, staggered, with either Aimed Shot or with all else) with that modest reduction to cast time…

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Blockquote Aside: I’m curious why you chose the 3 hits of Arcane/Multi/Chimera as the tuning bonus to / reshuffling of Lock and Load over just, say, generalizing LnL to all attacks (per attack, not per hit, as not to overpower Multi), wherein instant shots would already have an advantage (and perhaps with a Heating Up mechanism — increased chance per failed proc, stacking until next success).

Consistency is key in all circumstances, and I’m planning for a suggestion like this in both PvE and PvP, since it can still retain its base proc chance. If you’re suddenly hit with an Aimed Shot/Sniper shot from Stealth, you know that at most, you have 3 Arcane Shots until you eat a really painful burst. As it stands now, with just the RNG, you could eat 4 aimed shots in several seconds from severely good RNG, or you’ll help the MM hunter take a dirt nap.

On top of this, I’m thinking in PvE and exactly what situations in which I need Lock and Load to proc the most. Since I have very few defensive options, if I accidentally pulled a pack and my Feign is on cooldown/I accidentally wiggled the mouse while feigning, or my friends are terrible at the game and somehow pulled an entire camp, I know I’ll have to fight and pin down a full pack of mobs or get dazed to death. Tar trap helps, but I have no time to sit still and actually work on a single Aimed Shot. I’m stuck spamming Multi Shot on 10+ enemies at a time, dealing no damage, and moving nowhere.

But after doing some mental math, and thinking on it, having access to 1 lock and load every few Multis would have saved my dumb friend’s - and my own life - countless times. Instead of relying on RNGesus granting me a 5 second reduction 30% of my shots on Aimed Shot, if I had ONE proc of LnL, I could suddenly do some REAL damage, and start cleaning up. I could even pretend I had a panic rotation for when I had to be mobile and play it off cool.

Changing the RNG aspect from “a crucial damage bonus” to “a focus saving bonus” would save me a lot of heart ache. I have a balance druid friend who can’t AoE, and a BM Hunter friend who can’t Kill Command… so I’m covering a lot of ground with my MM Hunter, and I’m sure other players would love to be able to “occasionally cast Aimed Shot while moving if they fulfill the right conditions”. This makes these conditions accessible, while also restraining how much AoE you could take (just having Trick Shots would help with a build like this).

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dude, to tell you the truth, we just need craven back + flayed shot (you don’t even need the legendary that hit other targets, I forgot the name), can it be degenerated? yes, but what is not currently degenerate? The Hunt critizing for 150k+, warriors with their infinite close-gaps and damage, rogue with kidney+shiv+deathmark, mages giving 1 shot, feral killing 2 or more targets in the arena, disc priest rivalizing with some dps… and so on…

Tell me what is not degenerated in the arena today? Yes, we need craven + flayed shot back to improve our situation, paladins are getting a complete rework, throw the bones at us with craven + flayed and we’d be happy.

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I mean, Feign, Shadowmeld, Freezing, Turtle, Scatter, and HE-Trap all still waste the enemy’s Hunt?

Okay, fair enough. Should be neat. Again, was just curious if it was more about getting rid of the RNG or about redistributing indirect contribution.

Random Thought: Since your filler spenders will now be your way to grant an instant Arcane Shot (which is a damage bonus in addition to a mobility bonus, as you save 1 second [two-thirds of a GCD] of uptime by casting it instantly), you will have times where you may need a GCD of movement, but not necessarily to grant yourself 2-2.67 whole GCDs of mobility, but may soon need to do so. That's fine if you're keeping your Focus low enough and aren't running Steady Focus / aren't under Chakrams, but you'd essentially have to Steady Shot to hold onto the stacks generated thus far so you can cap them at a time more in need of it (be that for mobility or burst). Granted... that in itself adds depth, so... yeah, I'm cool with that.

P.S. You can quote people by just selecting the next you wish to quote and then hitting the button that pops up above your cursor/selector-pick.

???

How do you mean? It’s not as if you’ve altered the free-cost nature of LnL procs here. (Which is a place you could move PvE throughput around on for greater mobility, so long as we’re not yet sufficiently mobile for PvP.)

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Yeah we need that, we need those tools to CC the healer and some to get the warriors or other meele off of us.

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Without a quote, it’s a bit hard to tell which tools, exactly, you’re referring to.

As the forums signaled this as a reply to me, though, I’m going to guess my suggestion to split Intimidate and HE-Trap, allowing us to take both?

Or are you just saying it’s not like you can save those tools (Meld, Feign, Freezing, etc.) in order to deny telegraphed enemy burst against you?

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Blockquote Changing the RNG aspect from “a crucial damage bonus” to “a focus saving bonus” would save me a lot of heart ache.

By giving an option to activate something that is traditionally RNG, it would technically mean the free bonus can be a forced bonus, thus turning it from “free damage proc” to “a controlled proc that can occasionally activate for free, saving me some focus if I wanted to incorporate the forced version into movement”.

Just my mind’s way of thinking of it. Big numbers go unga bunga, after all, so getting a free Lock and Load when you typically work for it seems like a good bonus to have, and in longer fights (raids) it’d feel more like free focus saving than anything.

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Okay. Not how I’d look at the hefty damage bonus of the extra charge and 67% less uptime cost of AiS from LnL, especially if you have to spend 60 Focus to get it there deliberately, but fair enough.

While we’re at it…

I don’t want to see Craven return. We already have most of its latter effect via Survival Tactics and even that works perhaps too much against DoTs and too little against all else.

  • I’d almost rather Survival Tactics just suppress, rather than purge, debuffs, or purge only the highest-indexed among them and suppress the rest, etc., while providing some other, more universally applicable form of value in compensation.

Similarly, Flayed Shot may create button-bloat issues. I wouldn’t be entirely against it, but given that we already have Deadeye, it’d almost make more sense to just let one choose between generating Kill Shots from Aimed Shot / RF casts or from Serpent Sting if you wanted to be able to generate Kill Shots during downtime (time LoSed, CCed, otherwise unable to AiS, etc.).

  • If that would create multi-target issues, could easily use a global per-tick chance instead of per-target, though I’d rather diversify the two talents a bit, personally.
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Aside from the pet taking damage for the hunter as a passive cooldown of sorts, you could make Disengage usable while CC’d/disabled and either give you a running speed boost (so you can get away) or damage reduction after use. Additionally, letting SV attack while under the effect of Aspect of the Turtle (rename it to Aspect of the Snapping Turtle) might be something to consider.

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I am referring to “additional free procs of Lock and Load through RNG factors, not Arcane/Multi/Chimera shot generation.” I don’t want to completely remove the RNG. I want to offset RNG through force procs when you need it (this being kiting). I would consider the free, RNG procs to be focus saved when you’re standing still and hard casting Aimed.

So to reiterate, as I feel like you’re not understanding me: This is how the tooltip will look on Lock and Load.

  • Lock and Load: Your autoshots have a % chance to grant Lock and Load. Lock and Load grants one charge of Aimed Shot, and causes your next Aimed Shot to be instant cast and consume no focus. Additionally, each third cast of Arcane Shot, Chimera Shot, and Multi Shot triggers the Lock and Load effect.

Maybe I just misread your post. I think you do understand me, but I just want to reiterate the core point (no harm no foul). Perhaps an addendum could be added that:

  • Lock and Loads generated from Arcane Shots do not grant additional charges of Aimed Shot.

But at that point, it would be an entirely different ability, and would deserve its own point on the tree. If you want to remove Streamline entirely, why not shove this new Talent into Streamline’s place? Surely 60 focus and 3 gcds for 1 instant cast Aimed Shot is fair. It would cost 25 more focus to obtain Aimed Shot this way over just hard casting, but you are mobile. But I will note: placing it in Streamline’s place makes little sense, as Lock and Load is on the middle-right of the tree, near the bottom.

I also want to say that I really, really want a cool effect for Legacy of the Windrunners/Windrunner’s Guidance. Having double RNG for 3 talent points is… really terrible, for an end-of-the-tree talent. No other talents at the bottom of each tree has this horrible of RNG tied to it. I 100% believe that the bottom of the tree should be your bread and butter, and if your bread and butter is locked behind TWO doses of 25%/3%x6 RNG, then your “bread and butter” is effectively worthless. I also want to note that when I ran LotWR and WG, I had one proc through an entire dungeon. At the time, I had to drop Trueshot to get it to work (I was pre-level 70). It was NOT worth it, and a MASSIVE DPS loss in its current state.

I want to see it converted into a strong passive that makes you feel like a true Windrunner, a brilliant Marksmen of astounding skill; what better way than to turn your hard cast into a refined aimed shot, fire wind arrows off at your target, restore a bit of focus for each wind arrow, and give you a 3 second speed bump? That is tree defining. And if you wanted a bump to your AoE, you’d still lose points in Trueshot, so you truly have to choose: Hard casting for higher damage, massive cleaves in AoE, or soft casting for mobility? Or a lil’ bit of all three? You wouldn’t be able to go deep into AoE, and you’d be a little lacking in your hard casts.

I think that this rework is just perfect for the spec, truly a defining feature, and definitely new. It’s what I envision a Marksmanship Hunter to be; a true Ranger, basically, with insane movement and bursty ST damage. It nails the fantasy perfectly. Of course, others would think of MM to be something else - but at its core, it’s a lone wolf badass with potency and precision. And this fits well, and it’s complex enough to make it unique.

You could still add in the raid utility to Windrunner’s Guidance as well.

  • When you obtain Windrunner’s Guidance, you drop a spectral feather where you are standing. Friendly targets who touch the feather will gain x% increased movement speed for 3 seconds. Feathers last for 9 seconds, or until collected.

Reminiscent of Priest’s movement ability, it’s a passive effect, and has raid utility to help dodge mechanics/reposition faster, without allies wasting cooldowns. Would also be insanely good in battlegrounds, especially for supports.