Hunter Buffs Finally!

Classes Hunter
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My main issue is that, much like First Avenger or Heavy Ammo, it’d be very finnicky, whatever the tuning may be, such that even under ideal balance it’d be nigh required for places with enough 3-target fights, but otherwise avoided like plague rats.

I realize (after all, all stacks are unspent stacks — unless you just mean the stacks that would otherwise be replaced in overcapping them), and that’s why it would then devalue anything that buffs your normal spenders of those stacks.

If you’ve taken Chimaera and Target practice, for instance, now you have to hold Aimed Shot until those stacks are spent in order not to waste those bonuses… at which point you now waste this lesser bonus. They’re essentially what should be a choice node, but you already split Precise Shots from Wild Quiver, so…

To remove that anti-synergy, you’d need to make those Wind Bolts scale with those talents. The easiest way to do that would be to have it automatically simply fire off a no-cost-but-reduced-strength Multi-shot if Trick Shots was consumed or Arcane Shot (Chimaera Shot) if not.

I honestly wouldn’t even mind seeing Multi-Shot alone if Trick Shots wasn’t some 70+% of its value prior prior to Bulletstorm. It just… needs to have about as much damage contribution as Bulletstorm or Trick Shots adds to it.

We already have that via Natural Mending, though, without the anti-synergy with Calling the Shots (since it doesn’t ignore contribution from Aimed Shot, with CtS will increase as portion of total uptime). I’d recommend just dealing with that at the class level, either by simply reducing the base CD on Exhileration to 90s or by buffing virtually all class talents enough that even a buffed Natural Mending wouldn’t seem so obligatory.

That certainly wouldn’t be bad, though the 12% Avoidance is then given to the side that already has +5% eHP or +10% Leech… making the rich richer, so to speak.

Personally, I’d probably just go with…

Lone Wolf - Increases your ranged attacks’ damage dealt to their primary target by 10% and increases your Tertiary Stats by 5%.

  • Or, trade out “tertiary stats” for “Leech, Speed, and Avoidance”.

But again, I’d rather make baseline the allowance for Hunter, with full balance, not to use pets if their spec skills do not force them to do so. Ideally, that’d be done by…

  1. giving all pets an AoE,
  2. putting a “Siphons 10% of your Attack Power to maintain your spirit bond with your companion” clause right on Call Pet itself…
    • …so it’s clear from the start that you technically retain a bit more ranged burstiness under CDs if you don’t have a pet (though your sustained damage will be identical)…
  3. and returning Beast Training to Hunter, complete with a Lone Wolf tab (alike to any other pet’s Beast Training tab).

Would the current Steady Focus feel annoying to you, assuming common sense polish changes (like Countershot not breaking your streak) were applied?

To me, it’s not; far from it. But I could understand if it were.

But, it would be damn annoying to me if I felt like I had to spend 6 seconds at the start of each fight putting up a buff that could forever after be maintained with just 2 seconds’ time. It’d feel like an anti-burst tax, something specifically designed to get in the way of MM’s otherwise sniper-like theme of bursty opening damage.

A spitball counter-suggestion, if I may:

Hunter’s Rhythm (replacing Improved Steady Shot) - Your Focus generation is doubled while casting Steady Shot or while out of combat, and you gain Haste equal to half your Focus thus generated in the last 3 seconds, to a maximum of 10% Haste. This bonus lasts 12 seconds, retaining the highest amount achieved.

  • That wording is very rough, but what you’d essentially have there is the ability to start combat with 9% Haste, and using a double Steady Shot or a Death Chakrams would build you up to 9% Haste, while any single Steady Shot would bring you up to 6%.
    • We generate 6 Focus per second, pre-Haste. Steady Shot = 2 seconds, pre-Haste. 3 seconds, therefore, is enough time to generate 18 bonus Focus, with that benefit actually increasing slightly with up to 10% natural Haste or so to that max of 10%.
    • (That 6% is higher than I’d like, but this is a spitball example and for an obligatory talent that’d smooth out Aimed Shot’s cast times.)

That’d only make changing its proc chance from RF from 25% to 100% all the more huge. I’d agree it’d be a bit smoother (though less reactive) if those procs only came from RF, since you could always just open with AiS into RF

That’s… not really what I’m referring to. You’d go from 17-21% immobile outside of Trueshot and around 40-68% immobile during True Shot to… 0% immobile. Even if your immobile cast times are CD-based… you’ve removed 100% of immobile cast times.

The only cost: you’d lose any control over when to use those Aimed Shots (granted, the whole reason for that control / the 2 charges was to time Aimed Shot to when it was safe… and now that’s no longer even an MM mechanic under this build).

You’ll have stripped a fundamental mechanic from the spec, and not in a way that really leverages any nuance in its place.

Whereas this, at least, is a rare bonus; it doesn’t altogether replace a core MM mechanic.

And this, likewise, at least incentivizes skillful pacing and can therefore reward knowledge of upcoming dangers.

  • That said, if possible I might recommend borrowing of the code/tech used for Evoker to make Aimed Shot two-stage, wherein one can optionally consume stacks to complete the cast for full damage but 33% less cast time per stack by having it cancelled (by your movement or enemy breaking LoS)… or just let the normal cast roll, holding onto those stacks for now.
Tangent (Spitball):
And then, if you really want some further interplay with that, I'd recommend, say, bringing back Double Tap (perhaps in place of Target Practice or Tactical Reload) and making it so Double-Tap isn't consumed until the consuming channel/cast is completed... meaning that you can double-dip it by using Rapid Fire until just before the very last shot in the channel and then clip that an instant-cast Aimed Shot to get the doubling on both.
(Of course, this would either have to be prevented in PvP, or Double Tap would simply be tuned down in PvP, as it was in Shadowlands, and partly balanced around that available combo.)

I’d agree. I just want to be sure the choices are relatively balanced and I’d prefer that the groundwork for meeting shared constraints (the minimum mobility/sustainability requirements) be laid out from the start, with the different corners of those builds just augmenting that in different ways.

  • That’s in no small part just because it would suck to feel obliged to play a relatively ultra-immobile build just because it ekes out some ~5% more theoretical ST damage that may even perform higher even in practice and therefore feel obligatory — or, worse, won’t actually perform as well in practice but your raid-mates will think that it will and may therefore insist you use it.
    • Else you just don’t really care about them/raiding/success/others’ time/being-a-chad…
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After thinking about it, you have to consider how many times you actually gain Deathblow in 3+ target fights, and it’s really not too often outside of Rapid Fire procs, or at less than 20% health. Regardless, it’s a pure DPS increase in my newest iteration. (Gives flat 20% crit to all Kill Shots, and 30% bonus damage on two different targets, so not mandatory, but it’s still powerful).

The current damage for Wind Arrows is roughly 10% of Aimed Shot’s damage. By spawning 2-3 wind arrows, you are gaining 30% of an Aimed Shot. Current Arcane/Chim/Multi damage is around 40% of an Aimed Shot, and with Precise Shots, that bumps up to around 70%. You would have to be okay with giving up a TON of damage over spending these shots more effectively elsewhere.

Updating the tree with this.

Was thinking of adding more value to a perk, but yes, adding this on a class level is necessary.

For this section, I want to note that Survival and BM need pets. Adding LW to both of them would do nothing but hamper them. If MM wants a Pet, it should do so to play more defensively (as I do now, when playing in the Open World, or strictly for movespeed/extra tankiness). If MM wants to go without a Pet, it should be for the offensive value. I’d like to think the RP reason is “I don’t have to be so careful about my crossfire without my Pet jumping at the enemy, so I can focus on firing quickly and effectively”.

Let’s not make Pets AoE. I feel like BM should be the Pet Master.

I thought of this, and it would add a lot of complexity. But it would also mean dealing with Blizzard Balance once again. It’s hard enough as is trying to get some Blue attention here.

It’s still rather annoying to me. It exhausts before Trueshot is finished, and sometimes - especially when I have a lot of random procs in LnL - I’m capped on focus and have to break rotation to either stack it, or waste focus again, or go without the buff. It’s clunky. The thought of smoothing it out to “when you restore focus you hone in on the kill” makes a lot more sense to me, and would be overall better on a build (especially if you only need to sneak one in every so often).

I think I understand it, but I’d like to say that Momentum would just be simpler to understand and wouldn’t require micromanaging as much during combat. There’s already enough appearing beneath your feet in high Keystones and mechanics to worry about, having it function as a soft passive would be best. (Some people just ignore Steady Focus in general, anyway.)

I think it’s preferable to have cool combos over reactive procs. If you want a random proc, I’d say toss a small chance on Aimed Shot to also proc it. But otherwise, give us a feel-good button after casting Rapid Fire.

It may be a “fundamental” mechanic, but that doesn’t make it “fun” to play. MM Hunter should have the option to play more like Legolas if they want to, or if they want to be a turret sniper on the far hill, then they should have the option to spec into long range, never move, hard cast everything too.

The solution is to just remove WG under Trueshot. Done. Now you have to sit still and be a turret.

This… wouldn’t fit, in my opinion. If Aimed Shot were something more like a Charged Shot, which could be its own Ability - then yeah, that could be a great sniping ability. If anything, it could replace Aimed Shot, and be a required sit still and hard cast.

What I feel would be optimal is to have WG be the generalist approach to how MM should play, where it dips a bit into everything, keeps a main damage cooldown and a bit of AoE, but doesn’t force you to move all in on one side or the other. It would be great for PvP and Open World, but if you wanted to maximize ST, you’d want to drop a lot of AoE damage and hone in on one side of the tree more - while keeping the core of the build mostly intact. And if you wanted AoE, you’d drop some points here and there on the far right, and look into filling out the left side of the build.

I want to say that with how toxic WoW is in content, it’s not unfair to say that players are going to be meta’d into playing a build they don’t want to play just because it gives more damage. This is very common already, where people minmax for content and get whiny when someone doesn’t minmax too. Someone will get chewed out if they bring all ST damage to tons of trash, it’s just what happens.

I personally hate the RNG procs I get. It’s not reactive. It’s unreactive - I cast a spell, and I don’t get the proc, I’m a touch upset because I’ve run dry for several casts. It’s why I moved on to several other MMOs over the past… seven? Eight years? I came back to Dragonflight hoping the dropped the RNG design, but they have not. This is really my last chance for this game to change before I’m forced to give it up for Gw2 again, or another MMO that doesn’t pull the RNG lottery wheel every time I want to deal some damage.

RNG in combat isn’t good game design, it never has been, and never will. This expansion gave me hope, but it’s still unintuitive procs and unintentional button mashing that requires several addons to keep track of it all. This is why I push for a build’s clarity, and to strip RNG. It’s all sensory overload for me, and I don’t even focus on the action half of the time. Just the numbers flashing and my brain melting from everything being dumped on me.

https://imgur.com/a/K6McB6H Updated it a bit.

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Overpowered, most likely. Consider: The current talent only gives the +20% crit bonus, and here you’re giving at least 60% additional damage in 3-target fights — where, depending on whether they’re considered separate attacks or duplications, each of those may also trigger Razor Fragments for quadratic* gains.

  • *Assuming RF does half the original’s damage, 2 targets would be an extra 60% damage [new RF hits both targets for 15% each], while 3 targets would be an extra 150% damage [both new RFs each hit 3 targets]. And that’s without even accounting for the original bonus crit, which is already decently powerful, to where this could be a 180% KS damage bonus in 3-target situations.

It’s… probably still workable, fundamentally, but there’s a good chance it would need to compete with later capstone AoE sources in order not to just be obligatory.

Then that would leave that talent as literally negative damage. That will not work.

I’m not suggesting you add it to them. Lone Wolf does not force you NOT to take a pet. Having Lone Wolf just means you’re not forced TO take a pet.

That it’s a class baseline skill would make no difference to SV or BM, just as Fury and Arms being able to use shields or Assassination being able to use more than just daggers would weird them out.

It just means MM isn’t spending a talent just to get back an option that should be available to anyone not specifically dependent on a pet, nor is that option hidden behind a baseline passive many MM hunters won’t even notice, since it never gets a highlight nor is it put on their bars.

That would not change. That pets would additionally have a baseline AoE spender alongside Bite/Claw/Smack would in no way take the “Pet Master” aspect away from BM, who is able to spread the more powerful per-target ST version to all and can even cleave Kill Command. Having that just means that you don’t need elaborate conditionals for Lone Wolf to be an actual choice when balanced to only affect ST (instead of it being forced in AoE or effectively forced out in ST), and that you’d have greater QoL during leveling.

I agree with that. I just think it would be a loss. To me, part of the charm of Steady Focus is that it isn’t always worth keeping up and instead requires a degree of forethought.

Given that we can now extend Trueshot via Eagletalon’s makes it feel a bit mismatched (though that was because a lego was made easily accessible, not being of any change to Steady Focus itself), but that too could easily be handled by giving it a duration roll-over (up to 3s rolling over to the next refresh, giving SF a maximum of 18s on re-up without strictly decreasing the frequency of interaction with that mechanic).

Fair enough, but you’re still going to have to balance the talent against others. If even just half of your Deadeye procs were to come from RF, you’ll have doubled the power of the talent. So you’ll likely need to make it a 2-pointer unless you buff other talents to compete (and since some, like Bursting Shot, are functionally stuck roughly as they are, while others could mess with relative values and interactions… that won’t be too easy).

There’s effectively no difference between charging one’s normal shot for greater damage (via a better-placed hit, as on Aimed Shot) and… aiming.

And I mentioned it only because it gives a second aspect of control for your mechanic. In that way, one could actually store those procs —choosing when to spend them, and being able to gamble successfully in spending them early for just the DPS increase instead of the whole increased mobility, for instance— instead of being forced to use them before every 4th filler, which would otherwise offer far less agency.

Fair enough. I just feel that the center/generalist approach to MM should have tools to deal with the immobility of Aimed Shot rather than being able to just utterly remove that immobility; the latter, I would think, would be the more niche choice that’d come at opportunity cost on paper for the possibility of performing better in practice.

It should be a decently competitive build across the board, but in a fight that has little need for mobility, a run-and-gun/Legolas build certainly shouldn’t beat out the less mobile builds.

Granted, those differences are relative. Run-and-gun would only make a generalist/centered build feel bad if that generalist/centered or even turrety build had no tools to deal with its contextual needs.

Which is why I mentioned not wanting the option to take zero mobility. Even if there might be some fights for which a skilled enough player (or one with enough Tiger’s Lust casts and Leaps of Faith) could actually manage without taking a single mobility talent, it’d just feel worse to have to seemingly give up damage for even a bare minimum of befitting mobility. And while I’d be fine with a slightly higher rate of immobility for that spec than our current 17-21% outside of Trueshot, I wouldn’t want them to lack active tools for dealing with that.

Emphasis on active means, though. To me, any ways of axing MM’s constraints (i.e., being able to do away with them completely or without much of any thought) should actually be pushed out and away as to come at opportunity costs, making their builds ideal only for truly mobility-intense/hectic fights (or, niches therein, such as the errand boy having to do all the mechanics as the casters and melee continue to disassemble the boss), even if sometimes still performing better in early prog even in more typical fights.

Where you have WSG then, is a good place for such (though I wouldn’t consider that a central or generalist build, as it attempts to undo what MM has done all the way up to that point); I just feel there ought to be MM-tailored mobility earlier on.

This comes down mostly to semantics, I expect.

If you know with 100% certainty that A will cause B, you ultimately just have a two-step action, with no intermediacy. You didn’t have to track anything. You didn’t have to respond to anything. To me, that is unreactive.

More importantly, though, that RNG is a major factor of balance. Take a 25% chance and make it a 100% chance, and you’d have to balance the proc down to a 4th of its relative power (if a GCD skill, then a 4th of its damage bonus over whatever you’d otherwise have ended up pressing, or the average thereof over time). And, at least for a general build, I’d rather have a solid Kill Shot some of the time than a lesser one all of the time. (Though, like your suggestion, I’d have it grant a temporary charge rather than just refreshing the cooldown.)

I personally have to disagree, as it does at least make combat less rote.

It can go wrong, too, if done poorly, and there are other reasons for decision-making/compromise that can help with that, such as contextual depth (holding normally synced-up AoEs for adds, choosing when to cast multi-charge skills based on upcoming dangers, when to delay ranged rotational skills for upcoming downtime, etc.) or syncopation (when your GCD-CDs are set to align and you’re forced to consider the opportunity costs of delaying them in order to achieve the least waste of value over time), but used well, it can be a pretty great addition.

And I’m roughly the opposite. While I like fairly intuitive mechanics, I like them to have plentiful nuance, and I usually like tracking a minimum of 3 interdependent things at a time even before adding in contextual sources of complexity. And so naturally, I do think there should be some reward for doing so, if only because otherwise a simpler build equal on paper will always outcompete a more complex build in practice, which would reduce the perceived range of choice available to a player (whereas being balanced in a way that’s mindful of in-practice performance would offer greater apparent choice).

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It’s debatable.

That’s because it’s not meant to be positive damage. It’s a mistake recovery or Trueshot buff. It’s not intended to increase your damage. If you are capped on Aimed Shot, it’s better to waste two stacks of Precise Shots in most cases just to stay off cap, and on cooldown - in case you get a Lock and Load proc. Staying at 1 stack is optimal. And during Trueshot, you’re not going to cast much outside of Rapid Fire > Aimed > Aimed > Kill Shot or Arcane/Chim Shot > Rapid Fire > Aimed > Aimed… and so on. It’s a net buff to damage during your burst phase, or if you’re on cap with LnL proc’d.

Adding a skill that does nothing for them wouldn’t be good class design. That’s adding Fireball to Warrior. Or Hamstring to Frost Mage. But I will relent, if this means freeing up another talent point, then fine. But if it’s baseline, then it should be a flat 10% damage buff. No complaints then.

I still don’t think pets should be as effective as the Hunter when it comes to cleave or AoE, unless if it’s BM. But I’ll relent on this too, as long as MM damage doesn’t suffer because they’re not running a pet.

I will not agree on Steady Focus. It’s often not taken because it’s micromanaging when you should be focusing on the mechanics of the fight.

Yes, but removing the RNG doesn’t mean the damage has to go down. It means that the luck aspect is removed. Tell me, if two hunters have the exact same gear, perform the exact same rotations, but the first hunter has 12 procs of Deathblow and five procs of Lock and Load, and the second has none due to bad luck - how is that exactly fair? Sure, you could say the law of averages this, or the chances of this are rare, but it still happens. I’ve gone several encounters dry. I’ve gone one encounter with 7 LnL back to back. The difference on the damage meter is very high when luck is or isn’t on your side, and when the buttons light up on your screen saying you’re lucky, it doesn’t feel like skill, but a distraction from the skilled part of the game. Which is maintaining your health, dodging mechanics, understanding the boss, timing your defensives, and following the flow of battle. Not hammering a button when it lights up.

RNG is not a nuance. In every other MMO I’ve played, RNG is not a factor in combat. Whether that be FF14, Archeage, Guild Wars 2, and hell - even the updated version of Runescape has dramatically reduced RNG. I’ll even say Lost Ark and New World is has very little RNG in combat, at least any that matters.

I think it’s time I finally put down this gambling simulator and focus on games that reward skillful play, and not RNG procfests.

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MM and BM buffs and Survival?

Serpent Sting and Death Chakram cannot be counted because both specs will benefit as well.

Survival the ugly duckling of blizzard!

1 Like
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Yes, it does when removing the RNG means quadrupling the frequency of the proc.

Let’s say I have a 10% to deal 10000 bonus damage on any RF.

If you have a 100% chance to deal 10000 bonus damage on any RF, those two things are not equal.

Now, if you have a 100% chance to deal 1000 bonus damage, then sure. We’re back to the same damage over time.

At that point we’re just trading burst pressure / thresholds for reliability. That’s fair.

But no, you cannot just increase the total damage that would be provided if that talent was already balanced, no matter what your reasoning for the buff is.

Unless you are intending to buff by that particular amount, and have warrant to do so (the talent is underpowered relative to others, or its competition and the spec as a whole is and you’ll deal with those, too), removing RNG doesn’t give license to so hugely buff something. If you double proc rate, expect to halve the effective gains per proc. Etc., etc.

But that “gambling” literally has a higher skill ceiling. The weight of a given action will shift equally over time with or without that RNG (e.g., the relative value of an RF reset from Surging Shots based on its remaining CD), but there are a greater number of contexts that thing can interact with the opportunity costs of doing so because it’s timing is less likely to be so steady.

  • All this depends on exact implementation, of course. A reliable partial CDR can likewise have many vantage points. But, by and large, a degree of randomization tends to raise skill ceiling, not diminish it, even if that extra height isn’t something every particular player may no how to handle/optimize.
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“Gambling has a higher skill ceiling.”
No. No it does not. Let me explain why in one simple post.

I am fighting another player with the exact same talents, gear, and set up. The only differences between me and the other player is RNG. We both have 200k health, the same rotation, and neither of us are going to use CC. By all accounts, this is a completely fair fight. Everything is equal.

We both have 30% crit on Aimed Shot. Assuming no other talents or special abilities, a crit is worth +25% flat damage in pvp (50% in PvE) based on my recollection. Our aimed shots do exactly 20k each shot.

We both start casting Aimed Shot at the exact same time. Our shots hit at the exact same time. But his crits, and mine does not.

On one attack, he has done 12.5% of my total health, and I’ve done 10%. And then he gets a LnL proc instantly, and pops another Aimed Shot that instantly crits for another 12.5% of my max health.
In roughly 3 seconds, I’ve lost 25% of my total health due to double RNG. The other player feels amazing, because he just got a massive upper hand for free. And I feel terrible, because I didn’t get ANY luck. And to add insult to injury, he got another roll on the RNG table for Death Blow, and got it to proc too - dealing another 30,000 damage crit. I’m now down 40% of my max health in THREE gcds.

This is not skill. This is luck. I am at an overwhelming disadvantage despite equal skill and gear, because I wasn’t lucky.

The more random procs, the worse the game is. This is a flat fact. It’s one thing to make progressing gear RNG based, but to make combat RNG based is also terrible.

And that’s a good thing. It means it’s consistent. It means it’s fair. You know if you see rapid fire, you’re about to eat a Deathblow if you don’t interrupt the cast. If anything, Deathblow should only proc after the final arrow from Rapid Fire lands. If you don’t finish RF, it should fail. That’s entirely fair in my eyes. It opens counter play. It gives consistent results. Rapid Fire is a fair warning to the other player that they’re about to receive a very volatile burst. And if the numbers need to be tweaked for consistent results, I’m happy with this. Because it’s now a skill based issue. Not a flashy button-go-lucky issue.

RNG in combat shouldn’t be a thing. Other MMOs remove all RNG from combat, and they have some of the best gameplay around. WoW’s gameplay is readily old and dated. Next you’re gonna tell me that being dazed while mounted is a good mechanic. Or just dazed from being hit from behind in general is great for the game, and adds to it. Or that having to consume food buffs every wipe in a raid is peak gaming, along with running back to the boss.

This inability to change and approach the modern market is what kills games. WoW is struggling enough as is. People are complaining about the lack of “lethality” in Hunter, especially in PvP.

In Vanilla, a MM Hunter had only a few bits of RNG, and none of them were flashing buttons on the screen. Your concussive shot had a 1 in 5 chance to stun a target for 3 seconds, at the cost of five talent points. That was it. It was a 20% chance to give you a bit more safety when you used a defensive ability. You also had a tiny fraction of a chance to gain an attack speed buff passively - for some talent points in BM. And people hated aspects like this. Remember Warrior’s Mace Specialization? People DESPISED this for a reason. It was strictly negative RNG against them, that they couldn’t avoid.

In Wrath, you had more talents for crits in the MM tree. And you had a SS talent that randomly gave you a small damage bump to an Aimed/Arcane/Chimera shot. You had a 10% chance to gain a speed damage boost, but still, you weren’t fighting RNG for big damage bumps in MM. You just had to worry about crits, but that’s passive, and you’re not too concerned about a million procs, talents, cooldowns, and items. You had a few core class tools, maybe a trinket, and maybe a potion or some other such item - but for the most part, you focused on your rotation, positioning, and boss mechanics.

MM Hunter in Cata had NO RNG procs, save a very select few like Master Marksmen - which was a 60% chance to grant a stack, and you gained those all the time. This wasn’t terrible RNG.

MoP didn’t have RNG procs on damage. They didn’t have to balance around this garbage. They had a few tiny, passive buffs you could gain, much like previous expacs. But it wasn’t crucial on screen flashes for bonus damage.

It was in Draenor, often regarded as the worst expansion for a SLEW of reasons, that terrible RNG crept its way into MM. But you had to choose the RNG in one of three nodes, often with better choices alongside it that would give 100% assured results. You had a choice between Lethal Shots, Deadeye, and Double Tap. And you had a choice in Calling the Shots, Lock and Load, and Volley. Because of this, you could avoid RNG entirely if you wanted to.

But now, Lock and Load is a REQUIRED node, because it’s a flat damage increase to take it, and there are too many “never take” nodes clogging up the tree. You must choose to take RNG procs whether you like it or not.

RNG was not a major factor until the game had its worst expac of all time. There is NO SKILL in RNG procs. They are flat out unhealthy for the game, and a frustration. The law of averages does not apply in short scenarios, which makes up the vast majority of the entire game. This includes PvP, Open World, and basically all PvE scenarios.

Giving the option to choose RNG or Consistency should be there for players who want consistent, thoughtful, well-planned results. The current implementation is brain dead and out of your hands entirely. It is 0 skill. It will never be a skillful play. “Wow, you got 3 LnLs, that’s amazing skill - insane. I’ve never seen someone get 3 LnLs back to back like that. I’m dead, but clearly, you’re the better player.”

Combat Lottery needs to die.

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That’s… nothing to do with skill ceiling, though.

At most, that’s to do with (a fallacy regarding) agency, fixating on the particular iteration instead of on the best decision. You had the same choices under the same weights. The situation could as easily gone in your favor, and, over time will go in your favor proportionately to your making the best decisions.

  • Which, yes, may sometimes include playing the long odds when chance is all you could have, instead of simply accepting defeat.

The complexity of mental calculations and the speed at which one must handle them is what results in skill ceiling, not just the reliability with which button presses result in such and such amount of value.

Yes, you could remove crit chance, procs, and everything else from the game so that rotations are wholly pre-solved and two equal-ilvl players will always simultaneously kill each other, but the game would not be made better for having done so.

No, that is an opinion.

I understand the viewpoint, and would likely feel the same way if I did not know how (or for whatever other reason, want) to manage them or did not want to think about diversions from my ideal plan of attack, holding CDs to capitalize upon for an opening chancey burst in PvP (be that RNG or an enemy slipup), etc., but it is an opinion — at the same level as any claim that Mastery should(n’t) exist (regardless of its particular implementation), or that there should be (no) M+ at all, or no Crits, or no Resilience, etc. It might be better without them, but it also might not, and more is to do with the details of implementation than anything so fundamental/bimodal.

...

Do you mean Battle for Azeroth?

Draenor had:

  • Posthaste | Narrow Escape | Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimaera
  • Binding Shot | Wyvern Sting | Intimidation
  • Exhilaration | Iron Hawk | Spirit Bond
  • Steady Focus | Dire Beast | Thrill of the Hunt
  • Murder of Crows | Blink Strikes | Stampede
  • Glaive Toss | Powershot | Barrage
  • Exotic Munitions | Focusing Shot | Lone Wolf

Sure. Choice is good. But, again, if you have a choice node, it literally cannot be expanded to two nodes to make up your having at least doubled its power, which means not only that you’ll need to tune down the rewards for the side that guarantees the result so that they have the same value over time (i.e., so they are balanced), and but also to balance to something at least roughly reasonable versus other talents unless you’re attempting to make it entirely obligatory.

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And preserving RNG on RNG does not improve the game, either.

In Archeage, you can reach 100% crit rate. No talent points will give you random procs - they are consistent, or tied to crit, which is the first layer in RNG. I stopped playing this game because it was too pay to win, not because the combat was terrible - no, the combat was some of the best in the entire MMO genre, as it was based off of a combo system. Slowed players took more damage from certain attacks, certain effects would trigger stuns and CC when combo’d with burst moves, everything was guaranteed - and you controlled when and where it happened. You could make two opposing skill sets work together through combos; I made Archery and Vitalism (healing) work through obscure combos that Vitalism had in its tree, that often shocked some of the most hardcore players in the entire game because it was so complex.

In Guild Wars 2, I love the combat system. There is 0 RNG in any tree, it’s all 100% skill based, and the ceilings are CRAZY high. The best Ranger players will literally be on top of you, jumping in and out of stealth, you blink and you’re dead - and their combos are absurd. It’s actually terrifying to play against a seasoned player, because they know exactly when to dodge, when to turtle, and they will trounce you on any build they have. You will deal 0 damage and you will be bewildered. What’s funny is that Rangers don’t even have a real stealth option; they can only get it from a combo field from an attack off of ONE pet, or through a Sigil which gives very short term stealth when you place a trap. It’s crazy because you’ll only see them when they’re slamming a greatsword on your head. Oh, and you can still reach 100% crit rate pretty easily, which is expected and required, as at that point you’re building crit damage. And damage numbers are consistent, too, with no variance.

But WoW’s combat has no nuances like this to it. Skills are very stagnant and boring; very, very few chain one into the other in a fluent motion. Very few pair well as a followup, or none at all. Why do you think WoW has so many troubles with builds being 2-3 buttons? I actually only really hit… what, Aimed Shot, Arcane, Multi, Rapid Fire, and Kill Shot? With very rarely a duo of Steady Shots thrown in? That’s 90% of the game. Hitting six buttons, or more accurate - five, as I have a choice between Multi Shot or Arcane shot. There are situational buttons, but those are… just situationals.

I’m not saying make WoW into another game. I’m saying make WoW’s combat fun, not situationally fun, not randomly fun, but fun. The core gameplay isn’t great, especially on MM where all of your damage is on one button, and the rest is filler between Aimed Shots.

Do you know what my combo was on AA?
Proc Steady Shooting - which is basically a better version of True Shot on a short cooldown - and start charging Snipe, the only sit still and aim ability Archery had. As soon as Snipe fired, cast Mirror Light - a Snare and Damage Taken Debuff on the enemy - which would trigger Snipe’s combo effect. This would trip the enemy, make them take +25% damage from the Snare, +15% from Mirror Light, and then I’d cast Stalker’s Mark - granting an extra +15% damage on my attacks.
Then I’d cast Flame Skewer, a 3 phase AoE piercing attack, on them as they’re tripped - which would impale them in place as another stun. Since I’m in Steady Shooting, I could pop off 3 shots of Blazing Arrow for VERY high burst damage. But you see, the Skewer effect is short lived, and I’ll lose the 2 follow up skewers if I don’t cast them soon. So I would literally weave in blazing arrow > skewer > blazing arrow > skewer, all instant casts I could do on the move, and finish my last blazing arrow. Keep in mind, they were still under CC from this chain combo. Then I would use my wing glider to fly up into the air, and cancel it during the ascent - this would allow me to keep my upward momentum, but allow me to attack. And in the air, I would use backdrop - a disengage - which would allow me to instant cast Concussive Shot, a high damage attack that silences your enemy and does more damage to bleeding targets… which Blazing Arrow did, inflicted bleeding. While falling, I could cast Mend - an AoE massive HoT, and Resurgence, a personal HoT, for 4k+ HP a second (and I only had around 40k HP). And I’d land with a Charged Bolt, which was another massive burst, that would also increase the duration of silences applied to the target.

Do you see how complex this is? None of this is gated by RNG. There is no flashing lights. No other player in the entire American server could do this. I was widely regarded as the best Ranger, and would be best Archer, in the entire American servers… if I could keep up with the massive grindfest that is the eternal armor grind, to get the best gear possible. And wow, was the community extremely toxic for a pure PvP game. What truly killed the game was the overall lack of endgame content, and the publishers constantly pushing for P2W, because PvP centered MMOs are always P2W.

But in WoW, tell me. What can I do to perform cool combos like this? Can I do it 100% of the time? Is what I do always impactful, or only impactful when the game decides it’s impactful? When can I outskill a player who has all of the luck, and the same skill as me? When can I do something better than something who always gets their proc, who always gets their crit, that always has RNG on their side? The game has decided that I am not going to have the luck this fight, so I’m effectively in a losing battle.

RNG doesn’t raise the skill ceiling at all compared to combo attacks and depth. It’s also why I’ll never play FF14, and I’m happy to let them run off and do their own thing. The community and story is their savior. The world, combat, and overall gameplay is not.

This is my last post. From this point on, I’m closing this tab and I’m uninstalling WoW. I’ll come back and check in a few years, to see if they removed RNG Combat Lottery yet. Until then, I’m going to play games that focus on skill, not procs and RNG, and I won’t have anything to complain about. The only reason I came back to WoW at all was because I wanted vertical progression, and that’s not an option in Gw2. I thought the game would be better than Legion. I’m ashamed I spent money on this expac and bought time for this game. But at least I know other MMOs I enjoy don’t charge me a monthly sub.

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Re:"Crit/Procs/RNG is always bad for combat."

I’ve played and enjoyed both Aion and GW2.

And, I’ve never said you need RNG in order to reach complexity (just as you do not need field effects or status-effect-dependencies to reach complexity). But it literally just another one of those systems.

  • SE-dependence in Aion allowed for a degree of telegraphing and, upon knowing who you were fighting, reaction to the status effect and preemptive to its follow-up. On one hand, that’s cool. On the other hand, it partly devalued tracking enemy CDs as the enemy provides their cues for you, and meant that your actions were that much more constrained and, depending on your class, linearized, which could delay what felt to many like the meet of the matter (see Ret comments on Seraphim now, for instance).
  • Field effects, though to me they quickly just become zergy in any high-player content, likewise allowed for distinct/discrete branching choices that also incentivized or allowed for area denial — something damn cool to see in PvP. The downside, obviously enough, was the sheer amount of visual bloat and the ability to have your cool set-up actions denied just by (forced) movement.

No one’s going to have “all” the luck. Nor are you going to be repeatedly unlucky arena match after arena match. Your procs are, in time, going to regress to the norm (the amounts stated), for better or worse.

For the record, FFXIV starts at only a 40% throughput bonus on crits, and no one pushed above 65% or so in a given expansion.

XIV also has RNG only on two jobs, where it there’s no longer any skillful use to be made of their affected resources. Which has received much complaint by all but a group which, at strongest correlation, likes the game as simply as possible. Despite being a minority, they have been quite pandered to, which is why for most jobs (endgame version of classes) the game is much less complex now than it was two expansions ago.

The only RNG in XIV, effectively, is crit, and it’s a very mild crit.

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Sad these got reverted

136

You laid this out well. Really hate the RNG on top of RNG, chance of a chance to get a benefit.

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They still didn’t address the core issue with Hunter. This is just a bandaid fix nothing more. Both from a PvE and PvP perspective.

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138

Since they won’t fix our defensives they should add a 50% damage buff to hunters on bosses in higher M+

That way when we die (and we will) we can still compete!

:3

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139

I can get behind this. Still curious what this latest round of buffs will do to us.

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140

They keep budding Bm non stop. Show some love to SV and buff it’s damage

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You do realize that the bow that makes BM look good right now is being nerfed? The buffs are to make up for that.

But I do agree that all the hunter specs need to be reworked.

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142

rofl the monkey paw curls, 10.1 hits & the patch-notes be like, “we fixed the issue some hunters were having contributing to high level keys”

the fix:

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143

Would of been a funny bug if that potion worked when you Feign Death.