Howl of the Pack Leader

Classes Hunter
1

I really like the concept of Howl of the Pack Leader, but it feels rather clumsy in execution.

First, we have to generate a buff that then has to fall off to then cause your next Kill Command to summon 1 of 3 greater beasts. Between the appearance of the buff, the duration of the buff, which beast you will get, and duration of the beast, trying to keep track of all of this information as it comes and goes in an ever-shifting buff bar is quite the struggle without an add-on.

Below are a few suggestions that I believe would greatly improve Pack Leader gameplay.

Rather than a delayed buff, Kill Command should actually become Howl of the Pack Leader after 20 seconds, whether in combat or not. This would cause the ability to idle as Howl of the Pack Leader even while out of combat. This would allow us to initiate combat with Howl of the Pack Leader instead of having to wait 20+ seconds for our offense to actually begin.

Similar to how Wildfire Bomb used to work, when Kill Command becomes Howl of the Pack Leader, the icon should display which greater beast we are about to summon, and the tooltip should list the additional effects.

Lead From the Front should reset the cooldown of Kill Command and convert it into Howl of the Pack Leader. This would effectively give the Hunter a window of having 2 active greater beasts with control over which 2 beasts they want to pair together.

Another option that could improve the player’s ability to see when and which greater beast would be summoned next and which beasts are active would be to have Pack Leader give the Hunter an additional resource bar that works in similar fashion to Warlock Soul Shards.

We could have a silhouette of each beast or their face below the Focus Bar that would gradually fill up as the time before the next Howl of the Pack Leader decreases. Once full, Kill Command would become Howl of the Pack Leader.

Once cast, the silhouette for that beast would shine brightly for the duration of the beast, but would gradually empty as the duration ticked down. Meanwhile the silhouette of the next greater beast would be filling up as the time until the next Howl of the Pack Leader ticked down.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

2

While I generally agree, this can also be reduced to a 1 icon weakaura.

While addons aren’t (or at least shouldn’t) be required for gameplay, it’s also not nearly as important for majority scenarios, since I think the only thing where you realistically “play around it” is having a bear + bw for a big aoe pull.

3

As Survival, each rush from the Boar increases the number of targets my next Raptor Strike will hit for each target struck, up to 4 additional targets. This means Raptor Strike shoots high up on my list of priorities while the Boar is active, wanting to ensure I don’t miss out on that cleaving Raptor Strike before the Boar rushes again.

When the Bear is out, Kill Shot becomes high priority because Cull the Herd causes Kill Shot to increase bleed damage by 25%, Born to Kill causes Cull the Herd to increase Kill Shot damage by 25%, and Sic 'Em causes Deathblow procs to make Kill Shot strike 3 targets.

And since Sic 'Em doubles my chance to gain Deathblow procs during Coordinated Assault and Coordinated Assault doubles my chance for Kill Command to reset which gives me more chances to fish for Deathblow procs, I will want to make sure my Coordinated Assault covers the full duration of the Bear.

The Wyvern enhances all damage, but its duration is extended by Wildfire Bomb, though it only takes 2 Bombs to cap out on extending the duration by 10 seconds. So while not overly demanding, I do need to make sure I get those 2 Wildfire Bombs off.

4

It actually doesn’t change the priority on ST, and on AoE you’re not using it at all.

But again, you’re generally not going to be sitting on cooldowns for them to sync.

Which is fair, but again almost guaranteed to happen naturally.

Overall, for both of the specs there is very little that you do to “play around” those buffs.

1 Like
5

And, given the frequency of ES/WFB/Butchery on PL, that could actually be a meaningful priority change rather an a mostly mere “natural” occurrence, yes. The boars come out decently quickly one after the other, so it’d be easy enough to waste the opportunity otherwise.

I don’t think the KS is strong enough to have that impact, sadly. It’d be great if it did, as that’d feel fitting and fun, but we’d likely need to see KS buffs first for it to actually be a consistent gain, let alone a noticeable optimization.

I honestly wish it weren’t extendable and just had a higher multiplier, so that we could be encouraged to ES, KS (Wyvern), and then go ham into our burst windows.

6

Another option that could improve the player’s ability to see when and which greater beast would be summoned next and which beasts are active would be to have Pack Leader give the Hunter an additional resource bar that works in similar fashion to Warlock Soul Shards.

We could have a silhouette of each beast or their face below the Focus Bar that would gradually fill up as the time before the next Howl of the Pack Leader decreases. Once full, Kill Command would become Howl of the Pack Leader.

Once cast, the silhouette for that beast would shine brightly for the duration of the beast, but would gradually empty as the duration ticked down. Meanwhile the silhouette of the next greater beast would be filling up as the time until the next Howl of the Pack Leader ticked down.

7

KS would just need to be buffed to cartoonish damage or actually interact with the spec to be worth it for BM or SV

8

If KS’s net damage (e.g., when including all bonus effects even onto other skills) is greater than that of your filler, it will see at least occasional use.

If it can’t compete with even our filler, then it literally cannot be a “consistent gain”, no matter how small.

“Its net damage needs to buffed to where its useful.”

“But then it would need to be heavily buffed!”

…

Whatever extent of damage increase it takes to make superior to at least post-Serpent Raptor Strike is both (A) necessary and (B) far from necessarily “cartoonish”.

Our rare and “powerful” attack that requires specific procs or HP thresholds even to use dealing less net damage than a filler… is cartoonish.

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9

slap a monfoose fury generator and benefit from it and call it a day for SV. for BM it needs to do something pety

10

Honestly, I feel like that having this or that other ST skill provide MF stacks, especially without a direct RS/MB strike, would be a pretty jank solution, not the least because it’d be of no value to Sentinel (which tends not to be taken in focus-damage or ST situations and therefore doesn’t take Mongoose Bite).

If we start making random things generate Mongoose Bite, then we’d have less and less control over when to start into an MF window… all while providing less significant, less intuitive, and less balanceable a solution than just to make it faster for Mongoose Bite to reach max damage through itself.

This could come via whatever means:

  • If we wanted to reduce the stacks-gap in terms of damage per uptime without decreasing the apparent damage range, we could have MB incur a reduced GCD and Focus cost baseline but ramp up to full with a more than proportionate increase to damage.
  • Or, far more simply, we could just reduce the total number of stacks and commensurately reduce the duration, allowing it to better be woven between and thereby avoid anti-synergy with competing GCDs.
11

It’d be a very easy solution to immediately fix the problem. Could easily just make Sentinel like MB more as well for AoE.

This really isn’t a problem at all right now imo

12

The results of making KS scale with and supply MF stacks:

  • You can no longer hold off MB windows until you have more Focus without failing to use KS as often as possible (say, for when an enemy may drop below 20% within the next 10s otherwise),
  • You now face priority conflict between consuming Deathblow and holding Deathblow since it ramps from the same thing that procs it, and
  • Resultantly, you have just squished the previous MB-alternative meant to allow for some control to its timing and to offer immediate full damage opposite MB’s burst… into a Focus cost reduction and small damage buff to MB/RS while making RS less of an option since KS benefits from MF1–5 but cannot be punished similarly to the base damage of MB itself.

Changing Kill Shot into an unlocked ranged empowered Mongoose Bite may be “simple”, I guess(?), but it’s also detrimental to the whole point for which KS existed when it was just better tuned.

Why do we need to trade KS for Civet Crunch instead of just having Kill Shot allow for immediate GCD-burst (subtle over time or not) as before?

The problem isn’t that KS is KS. It’s that everything else was so power creeped that KS is now too badly undertuned to leverage its otherwise fine design.

I’d much prefer its way to scale better not come from making it a redundancy with an altogether different design. On SV, that means keeping it from scaling with MF, even if maybe it could supply stacks (though then that begs the question of why not X, Y, and Z as well). On BM, that means not having it grant Frenzy, even if perhaps its damage could ramp with Frenzy or trigger a bonus attack or whatever else.

13

You don’t do this now

You wouldn’t do this. It would just be a free KS that would give you a stack of MF.

Yes that’s what I said. Without KS interacting with anything spec related it’s just not worth the GCD unless it does silly damage, much like explosive shot.

I’d prefer it to interact with MF but I want MF baseline. People who don’t like playing with red raptor strike are really over complicating the ability in their head. I do not want KS to interact with WFB at all because I’m sick of everything revolving around WFB, which doesn’t leave a lot of options besides

  • MF interaction
  • Tip interaction when we’re already drowning in the resourcce
  • Focus interaction which is meaningless
  • Completely revamping the bleed package of KS and making the effects baseline
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14

If you have windows to manage, nothing is non-interactive if its presence can better situate what is interactive. They’re still complementary in terms of gameplay and skill expression.

The problem, ultimately… is the vapidity of Mongoose Bite after its duration has both been buffed and its competing GCDs removed. In Shadowlands, this was still an issue, but far less so; KC, SS, KS, and WFB could still more obviously prepare more effective MB windows by timing their un-synergetic actions away from the MF duration.

When you have things that can be used around the MF window to better prepare it, you still have felt synergies even without having to turn Mongoose Fury increasingly into just The Way of the Mok’Nathal.

Often, they don’t like playing with red raptor strike because it’s merely red raptor strike. A lot of MB’s biggest critiques are the same people who most enjoyed it in Legion.

Starting the slippery slope of adding skills to Mongoose Fury, moreover, just makes MB all the less unique, turning it into a simple generalized ramp-up around which you are ultimately balanced anyways… which then just means that SV is uniquely unreactive, rather than MB being able to provide an interesting APL-shifting pseudo-CD via the MF window.

And that may be the crux of the difference. I don’t. I want MB to be distinctly MB, not be stuck with two colors of Raptor Strike with one (red RS) simply leaving slightly more of your damage up to coincidence than the other (blue RS).

For that to work, though, it can’t have such a bloated duration as to be impossible to meaningfully min-max. MB could actually have more going on to make it cognitively interesting if (A) its duration and max stack count were shorter/lower and perhaps even (B) if it didn’t replace RS entirely (since Serpent Sting itself is now long dead and Infusions went from interesting to gutted, watered-down mess to outright gone, too).

Then don’t. You don’t need to make it revolve around either one. It is perfectly fine for it to just deal decent, instead of pitiful, damage.

Buff the net damage. Could just be a straight 500% AP, with obligatory talent modifiers also affecting its own as not to increasingly fall behind. Maybe Guerilla Tactics causes it to bleed for 50% extra over 6 seconds even while increasing WFB’s direct damage by 50%). Maybe baseline the bleed-amp. Whatever, so long as it’s not watering down MB or any other system that would otherwise work better through increased attention to its own optimizations.

Meanwhile, I’d greatly prefer it if MB’s effective-max duration were shorter, it stacked more quickly, and it had more intervening actions available around it so it wouldn’t just be red-filler. It should feel like a granularly-timeable mini-burst window. It shouldn’t be Raptor Strike but with extra punishment for bad luck in exchange for 2 talents’ worth of ST bonus damage never taken for Sentinel but obligatory for Pack Leader.

15

I don’t think this can exist in a world where RS and MB are mutually exclusively, because the way the spec works relies on a resource spender with no cooldown that you can use as needed.

MB baseline means people will be forced to interact with MF and realize it’s not nearly as daunting as they imagine it is.

MB baseline means more borrowed power (talents, tier sets, etc) can interact with it in more creative ways.

16

They don’t have to be, though. MSV launched with them as separate actions. There was no need, in trimming down from Legion’s 4x spinning plates, to remove even the ability to pace our repeatable GCD nuke and, if not for the addition of serpent sting and more frequent WFBs, to gut control over our MF window.

People haven’t been avoiding MB because it’s daunting. People have more often avoided MB outside of ST because it’s so often been a damage loss relative to taking other talents unless propped up by borrowed powers, as on Pack Leader… largely because it takes so long to ramp as to force anti-synergies rather than allowing for skillful expression in avoiding such.

More importantly, though, if MB plays identically to RS… what is the concern outside of greater choice in talenting towards ST vs. AoE? As long as we restrict the nuance available to MB to ensure it can directly replace RS, it’s never going to be of any unique interest.

Why should it need borrowed powers (which could then as easily affect Raptor Strike or anything else) to have any gameplay impact (unless, by playing terribly, hamstringing yourself faintly more than was possible on RS) beyond “I see numbers cycling small to big to small again (at near-zero to zero optimization opportunity)”?

Shouldn’t the baseline itself offer interesting — something to noticeably optimize?

I just want MB to be more skill expressive — more worth deliberately playing around. Doing so requires a better context and, ultimately, a less bloated duration. I’d rather that be addressed first rather than risk just going Tips-2 on everything.

Now, we’re probably going to have different preferences as to how that should be done, but… if Mongoose Bite isn’t meant to be worth playing around… it may as well just be called Raptor’s Fury, a passive talent to be added to Raptor Strike. That seems a waste to me.

Aside: I thought Venthyr MSV without Mad Bombardier was largely the most thematic SV’s ever been, and it and CA-FotE builds in Dragonflight the most fun. I enjoyed Legion MSV, too, but for very different reasons, and it never felt like it could leverage resourcefulness or deliberateness to the extent I’d have hoped for from a spec of Survival’s description.

To that end, I’d love to see more soft-CDs involved, a return to a more frequent Butchery (ideally, usable even in ST), and a CD-less means of delaying or bursting MF windows.

For instance, maybe we make MB its own skill, independent of RS, and allow RS to consume MF stacks early, benefitting from MF at a higher portion based on duration remaining, and allow for “bestial” skills (Raptor, Mongoose… perhaps some other additions later on, such as Lynx Rush on a choice node with Explosive Shot, or Falcon Dive in place of Harpoon… maybe even a returned Serpent Sting or a classwide baselined Cobra Shot in place of Arcane Shot [weirdly out of place on a now-non-MP-using class]) to each store a portion of their Focus spent to nullify cost to another Beast skill. That’d give us some more interesting window manipulation possible.

Granted, I’d also like to see Wildfire Infusions returned in its full or even improved glory, and for spearhead to make more interesting use of bleeds (and possibly mobility and cleaves), so… pipedream.

17

Yes I am aware, but in a world where Blizzard is moving away towards excess cognitive load and the player base complains about button bloat every day, I don’t think that’s necessarily a good idea to go back to.

They avoid it because they think it’s daunting and they play it wrong. They spam MB and ignore KC and they feel focus starved. It doesn’t matter if it’s daunting in practice or not, if it’s perceived as daunting then it’s daunting.

that’s how the game works?

raptor strike is a terribly boring filler spell. mongoose bite replacing it is fine and good

18

That’s my point, though. I have yet to see anyone say it’s hard or that they think it plays differently from Raptor. I’ve heard only the opposite, usually as complaints that it makes the talent feel like bloat that simply makes our ST-filler damage in ST builds feel needlessly sluggish.

But you’ve repeatedly claimed they play the same.

If they’re the same, then they’re either both “fine and good” or both “boring”.

19

yes they do, but MB has the illusion of things going on and has actual knobs for things to happen. if MB were baseline, it would be all upside no downside

20

From a PVP perspective, I don’t dislike Mongoose Bite because it’s daunting. I dislike it because I have no interest in being perpetually gimped because I have to ramp up in melee range only to be CCed over and over for my effort. And I’m sure Mythic+ players run into similar issues with trash mob cleaves and affixes.

In concept, I much prefer Survival as a skirmisher that is able to harass from a distance, lunge in for short tactical bursts, and get back out before incurring life-threatening injury. That makes sense to me for a spec called Survival. Standing there hacking at your enemy like a lumberjack trying to chop down a tree is just begging for reprisal, which doesn’t bode well if your goal is to survive.

For these reasons I have been suggesting the following talent for years:

Kill or Be Killed - If you have more than 50 Focus, Raptor Strike costs 50 Focus and deals 100% more damage.

I have also suggested the following talent:

Cobra Strikes - When you lunge at your target (Coordinated Assault, Flanking Strike, Harpoon, etc) you immediately leap back 12 yrds and gain Aspect of the Eagle for 6 seconds.