How and Why Marksman needs a change

Classes Hunter
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It seems like beastmaster has a ton of easily accessible damage that isn’t too complicated and utility along with survivability while having the ability to be at ranged and stay at ranged.

Survival doesn’t have ranged, but it has insane sustain, versatility, and really good damage no matter the content.

Both of them are pretty easy to use in content as well.

But Marksman seems to have the plus of extra damage at the cost of any kind of class versatility. Sure, if I am set up for it and have proper support I can hail into a guy hard. But if any element is awry and I have to move to answer mechanics my dps is next to nothing and the overall damage over the whole fight is low. On top of that I have no way to keep things at ranged from me and very little in terms of survivability. It’s a hunter a strong breeze would kill.

One thing I would change are how traps work. They are okay as is, but really hard to aim and in a lot of content they’re useless as they either don’t effect the target or you’re in PvP and they are gone in a quarter second. I think that they should be targetable at the very least. Like if I am toggled to someone I want it to work like a bolus and simply snare them rather than having a cumbersome animation and then a spring setup time.

The next thing we need to fix is our survivability. And I am gonna advocate for a huge /dr. Stay with me please because this would not come without a cost.

So basically we have no pets to keep attention and we have way less stuff to heal and shield than survival. Honestly I think that we are by far the squishiest class as even my destro lock without any healthstones or pots and half the health with the gear they have vastly outlasts my MM hunter best in slot main. As such I advocate a flat 40% damage reduction. But in exchange we get rid of some abilities that were meant to keep us level. I think that “Survival of the Fittest” and “Fortitude of the Bear” would not be necessary if we just simply had some good /DR. I only advocate we keep exhilaration as a panic button.

Next I want to talk about our viability on content and that damage drop off should we not have the right circumstances. I think that we should drop our 10% damage buff in exchange for the ability to actually do everything we do on the move. And speaking of being on the move I wanted to talk out aspect of the cheetah next.

It’s a weak move. I have never caught up to a group going faster than me, or a PvP player with a flag with this ability or darkflight one after the other. The aforementioned lock class however does have an ability that I adore which allows them to basically take a dot in exchange for a big speed boost almost akin to a mount. That is the kind of thing I think hunter needs, but let’s flavor it to be more hunter like. Maybe instead of damaging us already squishy hunters it gives us a debuff that makes 20% of our attacks miss. That is pretty massive and would make sustaining combat in this forms, especially without the 10% damage buff, pretty much useless. Just make it toggleable.

Next I want to talk about speed in general. We have a pitiful 6% passive speed, but also a 30% increase when out of combat. I can attest that almost anyone without a speed boost that I can see on their buffs can outrun me. They can catch up and run right past me without an issue. It’s pretty quick too. I think it would be better if we just took away the 30% out of combat and buffed the 6% to be something like 20%

Finally I wanted to talk about our damage shield ability, aspect of the turtle. It’s garbage. There are classes that already are tankier than hunters are who get slightly shorter damage shields with the ability to attack. I am fine with something like this. I don’t need a massive damage shield that disallows me from taking actions that can get burst through pretty easily anyway. I will take a short, strong shield I can do things in.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I know I am gonna get comments like “just git gud” forums are just toxic like that, heck people are in general. But I hope I get more people giving me feedback and conversation.

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All good points and concerns. Too bad they will be thrown in the trash and ignored by the community and then by Blizzard because Blizzard has their hands full appeasing BMs.

When I propose that the best chance MM(and SV) will flourish is when they are divorced from BM spec into a class of their own, and that gets attacked without cause, then you know your talking points won’t survive. Because we need to have our own dev that will listen and work with us.

Putting MM in its own class apart from BM(and we can suggest for now it would be a two-spec class shared with SV) will pit us up against all other non-Hunter classes. Say if it has its own moniker “Ranger”, the Ranger class will be balanced and designed in its own way, for it to compete with non-Ranger classes.

We got to put the horse in place before the cart. The horse is a splitting of the Hunter class we know now, the cart is the new MM with up-to-date traps, up-to-date mobility and survivability, etc… In this way, BMs won’t hog up all the attention and feedback.

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Why you seem to have this delusion that they will magically pay more attention to MM if it doesnt share a class with BM I dont know. Both BM and MM will still exist. Its also literally never going to happen and a completely pointless waste of discussion space. You can believe in it as hard as you want with every fibre of your being and make it the core of your very existence in this world - it still wont ever happen.

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I already said how it would go. Every class, at least in theory, has their own devs. In before snarky “small indie company” remarks.

I would definitely hate for Ranger to share the same dev as Beastmaster, unless said dev knows how to work with two different classes.

You mean COEXIST in the same class? Let’s hope not.

Actually, it already has happened as I’ve said: BM is already its own class now.. It has the majority and the critical representation, development, and manpower.

Hunter in this way is a defacto one-spec class. Just not formally in the fashion of full MM and SV exclusion. What I was saying is that it will stay this way another 6 years or so long Retail will go.

It would take a miracle so that MM and SV get some needed shine, and I don’t see that happening. BM will never lose.

Because it would take fire and brimstone, all four Horsemen, to make MM and SV worth maining in the same class. BM won’t tolerate it, even if they’re made to.

You ask me what’s more believable. I think it’s easier to do an innocent split than the combined judgments of conquest, war, famine, and death.

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I mean in make believe WoW sure anything is possible in the land of make believe.

But here in real WoW it will never happen. Move on.

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No. We do not deserve greater magical passive mitigation than a tank. Nor an additional layer of 40% passive physical mitigation either.

You can’t rightly make an improved Survival of the Fittest permanent and then say you “got rid of” it as if in compensation.

Nor should we be removing levers required both for sane tuning and skill expression.

The requirements for that 10% damage buff —and its mere existence— is itself an issue, yes, but we should not have the option to remove what most makes our playfeel distinct from that of BM.

Simply allow for your most recently summoned pet’s passive effect and access to their utility action to persist even without the pet, make Lone Wolf baseline as a mere auto-shot damage increase, move Hunter’s Knowledge into its place, and you’re golden. You now have your Leech or Stamina to have on-par survivability.

It’s 90% for 3s, 30% for another 9s. That’s not particularly weak, providing only 3.8% less total bonus movement than Sprint.

It is probably overly infrequent (as, say, Sprint is a 1-minute CD while Cheetah is a 3-minute), but luckily, we also have a 50% for 4 per 20.

Put Cheetah and Turtle on a 2 minute CD baseline and rework Born to be Wild slightly and we’d be fine in that regard.

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Guys. . . can you please, kindly refrain from posting if it’s not about the proposed changes I mentioned? I really feel that this has been totally co-opted by some very strange ideas and I put a lot of effort into the post.

I respectfully disagree, and thank you for actually responding to the post as opposed to this other weird stuff. I genuinely feel that a 10% damage buff isn’t close to the class identity, but rather the concept of being a hunter without a pet is and as such we need to answer some real challenges that take more than any amount of skill to undertake. Now I will concede that I am simply not the best at hunter, but I really think that running and gunning fits the class identity and allows us to way better answer mechanics without a damage drop off which I think is far more important and will improve damage in most cases far better than simply giving us a 10% damage boost.

I disagree on cheetah, and would just rather have a fun, easy toggleable like the lock. It just feels much better and is easier to use.

The 40% damage mitigation I think really would fit considering we only wear mail and also without pets seem to get vaporized in a second in most scenarios. I feel like when you talked about it you kinda ignored the parts where I mentioned that my weak warlock has way better survivabity in cloth. I genuinely don’t know why that is but I, as a MM hunter, cannot seem to survive much of anything. Any burst our level just takes us down. It really does feel like we have some sort of negative armor. I am not saying we do, I just think that the pets and/or survival stuff really do equate to far more than a 40% damage mitigation although if you have a better alternative that answers that I would love to hear it.

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Back home. Whew. Gotta love that H-town traffic.

I probably…shouldn’t be reprising my old role here because of some bitter memories, but since you asked…

There is no RPG bible that says rangers or hunters must always be with a companion beast. Even in the Warcraft lore, archers and archer heroes did not really use pets. Tyrande and Sylvanas from WC3. So the Hunters that said pets must always be permanently affixed were wrong. The only WC3 Hunter unit that ran a pet was Rexxar + Misha, and he was the main Beastmaster hero. Classic.battle. net even calls the neutral BM hero a “warrior Hero”. Hmm, WARRIOR? So obviously BM should have been a WARRIOR spec according to WC3.

A warrior Hero, able to call forth the creatures of the forest to serve him. These lone wandering forest dwellers come from all backgrounds and cultures, seeking the essence of combat through the mimicry of wild beasts. Attacks land units.

This also means that Beastmaster spec, in the Warrior class, should have been for all races. Even gnomes that take up this path, because it said “all”.

h ttps://classic.battle.net/war3/neutral/beastmaster.shtml

In this way, a petted Hunter was unique to BM only. Granted, from the get-go, the Hunter class tried to scoop up everything, but it would have been out of line to suggest that MM and SV specs must always have a pet, and even out of line that BM has to use a ranged weapon(because Rexxar didn’t use bows/xbows/guns).

Consider how Dragonscale Armor talent was worthless when dotters were practically never the meta. Something like that should have been baseline, where we always took 20% less magical periodic damage.

Also about damage mitigation, we don’t have solid dodge and parry skills like we used to. We used to have Deterrence but that’s gone. MM cannot “parry” with its ranged weapon. Traps have also insufficient as debuffers in this respect, especially when it came to mitigating yellow hits. It’s not the white hits we ought to worry about.

So yeah, in short we went way off the deep end according to Warcraft 3(you can thank Jeff Kaplan and Alex Afrasiabi for their “brilliant” EQ ideas) and ways that Hunter could actually mitigate yellow damage ON DEMAND was either taken away or overlooked completely.

Especially as I used to preach it(and current gameplay videos from Lonewolf HD, WFOS, Pavle, etc.) MM’s don’t KITE anymore. That has been an obsolete defensive skill since Leg. You move for positioning, turret the best you can, or hit the gas. You can only do one of these at a time so it helps to be fluid as Spike Spiegel. Any MM trying to fly a kite(like Soullscape probably still does) is a klutz.

@Istolilly Make sure you get this down.

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It fits the modern BM identity. That’s all.

Take a look at even BM in Classic, though, and you’ll see that’s not exactly Hunter identity. Even auto-shot originally had a hidden cast-time with every ranged action adding a 0.5s cast-delay thereto. Perhaps that was just to reduce animation-overlap, but whatever the reason, by TBC, our specs’ rangedness fell pretty well in line with that of other ranged specs.

Running and gunning is not a class identity. It’s a BM perk. The rest still have to think about pre-positioning, even if less on average and over time than most colleagues in role.

It can easily provide no damage increase among skilled Hunters, such that you have a Hunter with parity in self-sustain and utility on one hand or, on the other, a needlessly neutered, dumbed-down version with slightly weaker single-target atop that 10% loss and none of the utility or the self-sustain seen by the other specs. And if that does not come with an straight buff to the spec, that will simply mean we go from the worst ST in the game to the worst everything.

Then what are you paying for it?

We currently start at +90% movement speed. Burning Rush is 50% and costs 4% HP per second.

Your pets do not reduce the damage you take anywhere outside of open world content. An additional 40% freakin’ percent mitigation out of the blue… doesn’t fit anyone.

That’s not a thing. Nor would it be relevant to magic damage.

Pets do literally nothing, in themselves, for your survival in group-content. Only Predator’s Thirst and Endurance Training do, as you have access to Fortitude of the Bear anyways.

And a even 70% mitigation for 6s per 180s is not going to be stronger than 40% mitigation always and forever. MM dies primarily to “rot” damage, not bursts we can rotate FotB, SotF, and Turtle for. 40% is already larger than many specs’ best defensives.

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Almost all of these are taken and responded to out of context. Please read my whole messages before you comment.

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Running and gunning fits the modern BM identity. That’s all.

Take a look at even BM in Classic, though, and you’ll see that’s not exactly Hunter identity. Even auto-shot originally had a hidden cast-time with every ranged action adding a 0.5s cast-delay thereto. Perhaps that was just to reduce animation-overlap, but whatever the reason, by TBC, our specs’ rangedness fell pretty well in line with that of other ranged specs.

Running and gunning is not a class identity. It’s a BM perk. The rest still have to think about pre-positioning, even if less on average and over time than most colleagues in role.

Similarly, your desired “run-and-gun” mode can easily provide no damage increase among skilled Hunters, such that you have a Hunter with parity in self-sustain and utility on one hand or, on the other, a needlessly neutered, dumbed-down version with slightly weaker single-target atop that 10% loss and none of the utility or the self-sustain seen by the other specs. And if that does not come with an straight buff to the spec, that will simply mean we go from the worst ST in the game to the worst everything.

As for your desired Burning Rush version of Cheetah… what are you giving up for it (besides the greater initial speed of Cheetah, I suppose)? What drain cost would you be comfortable with? And where is Lock’s Posthaste in that equivalency?

And now the obvious mitigation clustertruck…

Negative armor is not a thing, nor is Armor relevant to magic damage, which is generally the more common contributor to our deaths. For you to be dying to things that make you feel like you have negative armor, you may wish to dodge/LoS better and/or recognize what things aren’t physical anyways.

Let me clear. 40% permanent mitigation is absurdly, should-laugh-out-of-the-room OP, even if you give up an active of similar, or even of greater, value. In this case, that’s because one is at best 3.33% uptime, while what you’ve suggested has 100% uptime for nearly the same effect.

And there is no stretch anywhere outside of open world solo play by which your pet’s indirect contribution is going to exceed making your defensive a permanent buff.

Pointing out strictly the parts most worth commenting on is not due to a failure to read the whole text.

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Okay so now I know you are not responding in good faith and won’t respond to you after this. But to give an example of why you are taking what I said out of content:

Was answered with

Which starts the sentence after the next one.

I have long learned to not engage with people like you because your point isn’t actually to argue or talk about an issue it’s simply to disagree and is often motivated by the desire to get a rise out of the person who you are talking to. I hope you have a good one though, and no hate. :slight_smile:

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cutting your DPS by 20% to move slightly faster is something 0 people would want and would cause a complete meltdown on the forums

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I don’t think you read either. I never said that. It would be a cut by 10% so you can damage while doing moving mechs thus vastly improving your dps overall. You see, you really can’t do even close to acceptable dps on bosses that require you to be on the move constantly right now. And that is a whole lot of them. If you can’t get a rotation off you were never doing good damage in the first place.

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it was literally something you said I don’t know what to tell you.

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Ah I see the misunderstanding. So this was related to the toggleable speed boost. This is not a flat 20% of your attacks miss all the time. This is meant to mitigate the power of a near mount level speed toggleable boost so that hunters have a major drawback to it and use it for the same reasons locks might use theirs instead of just running it all the time. I threw 20% out there because it still allows you to run, say, multi-shot for trash clearing in group content while allowing you to catch up to the group and keep up with them especially because a lot of tanks who lead are pallys and will just pull trash and run ahead with their special speed move. On top of this ranged typically are meant to stay in the back for most engagements so it would be nice to have a catch up toggleable button like locks have. It is not a flat 20% damage reduction for a permanent speed boost, but a situational speed boost option on the level of the lock’s. I hope that clears it up. :slight_smile:

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That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s exactly what he claimed would be untenable as a replacement for Burning Rush.

Because it is.

Do you know how much damage Druid does in Travel Form? Are you aware of its GCD cost? If not, they are respectively ‘none’ and ‘existent’.

Now, you want to give 90% of its movement speed while still doing ~80% of one’s normal damage… in-combat… infinitely, and per an oGCD toggle.

That’s not giving up something commensurate, especially as you’ve explicitly said that it should be at near-mount speed (i.e., the initial 90% bonus… but permanent). That’s brokenly OP.

That most Hunters will rarely use it —because when not needed it’s both comparatively crippling and wonky as heck even if still superior to every other class’s comparative tools— does not make it any less brokenly OP.

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Cool I am all ears. What’s your suggestion. Or did you just come here to to shoot everything I say down with no alternative. Because I hate to break it to you but MM sucks and is not fun to play. Also a 20% miss chance is not equal to 20% damage loss at all. But even if it was maybe the hunter can only use aoe abilities? I would love to hear a suggestion, not a shutdown.

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it’s potentially much worse unless the “proc” of completely missing your attack is standardized or is ppm like most things in the game, which would be extremely not fun to play around.

I hate to break it to you as well, but adding a toggle movespeed buff won’t change this?

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It was in my very first post to this thread, immediately after discussing why Cheetah, given Disengage, is not particularly problematic and why no Burning Rush equivalent is therefore needed.

If you don’t find MM fun because it requires forethought, it’s probably not going to be made appealing to you without becoming unappealing to those who already enjoy it.

If it’s because of random bits of jank, that’s not something you’ve made any effort to address here, so you’ve given us no reason to assume so nor to advise you on suggestions that’d fulfill your desires.

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