I have been playing this game for 20 years and I have seen classes, specs and systems go through significant changes over and over and I have also noticed a common theme. It is very clear that the developers have favorite classes or classes that they design AND actually play. It is also clear that Hunter is not one of them.
Besides Hunter, I play 27 other specs including tank and healer roles and I am a Multi-CE mythic raider and from drawing on all that experience, I firmly believe that the Hunter class needs a serious redevelopment.
As I see it the Hunter class has several main issues. We finally roughly have defensive parity with many of the other classes so that is not as much of an issue as it once was, but besides that the hunter talent trees are too bloated, the damage profiles are not broad enough, and some of our most important tools are locked behind a pet. These are all antiquated designs from previous eras of wow that I actually played and know about personally. If you play ANY of the other favored and better designed classes (which I have and do), it is like night and day compared to playing a Hunter.
Please Blizzard PLEASE just bring Hunter to parity with the other classes.
Reduce the talent bloat, several talents can be combined (like multi-shot and tricks shot or beast cleave) so that Hunters can explore more diverse damage profiles with the builds that they chef up. No one likes to be so AOE or ST specialized, its just not a modern class design for WoW.
Improve the Hero talents. They are incredibly passive, boring, and in some cases the flavor is not supported at all (How does Dark Ranger summon more pets than Pack Leader, come on?) and they lack basic common-sense fixes like making the Sentinel circle follow its target. I am sure you received complaints about Wild Spirits in SL, why would you design one which is totally passive so we can’t even try to outplay its flaws?
PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PUT LUST ON THE HUNTER. Most if not all pet tools should be on the Hunter as an aura or simply a button separate from pets as 1/3 of the class’ specs do not really use one and even BM wants to run defensive pet over bloodlust pet. Why are Hunters THE ONLY class which must sacrifice something (damage, defensiveness, dps uptime, etc.) in order to bloodlust?
Thanks
A long-time fan and player of the Hunter class
It’s a good start on the Hero Talents, but it’s not enough! And your take on the talent bloat Snozay is wild, you are just 100% wrong about talent bloat. It’s a big problem with the class right now.
Also based on your activity, you’re getting schooled left and right. When you’re responding to a post bring actual cards to the table and talk about specifics.
If you can’t do that it’s better to remain in silence if you can’t bring a good conversation up.
Talent not buttons lmao their point is about things like multi shot and beast cleave being seperate points and making the tree stupidly expensive to spec basic AoE for example.
But Hunter’s button bloat is arguably less a problem than talent bloat in the Class Tree?
The button bloat is, what, Explosive Shot and Salvo being unnecessarily split?
Or… maybe just Hunter’s Mark existing at all as more than pure utility (instead of our simply having a Hunting Party raid aura)?
Ehh, maybe about equal if we consider that Mend and Revive are still needlessly split, but at least that can usually be macroed (with a small chance, though, unfortunately, of bugging out).
~3 bloat-points or ~3 bloat-actions. Either way, some small room for improvement.
Now, if we get into the Spec-specific trees as well, though…
Thanks for the understanding. Still, I should have at least taken a glance first, haha.
Right, but it’s still bloat, and ideally, no talent outside of the specific core should be outright required, let alone without its being leveraged specifically for its own effects (and, frankly, there are a lot of times we’d want to pre-pop Salvo to get another use into an AoE fight before single-targeting [say, for the boss], or may want to use Volley specifically for Trick Shots — not so hugely as with Dragonflight S3/S4, but still).
Compare, for instance…
Option A:
Explosive Shot – 30s CD. Afflicts your target with Explosive Shot.
Salvo – 45s CD. 15s duration. Your next Multi-shot or Volley afflicts up to 2 enemies with Explosive Shot.
—to—
Option B:
Salvo – 2 charges. 22.5s recharge. 15s duration. Your next multi-target ranged attack will consume one charge per enemy hit, afflicting its victim(s) with Explosive Shot.
If Explosive Shot is learned, Salvo’s recharge time is reduced by 10 seconds and the maximum number of charges is increased to 3.
That is a BIG problem when you combine it with the other issues. We have a ton of passive talents that should just be part of the baseline abilities, we 2-point nodes, we have talents that need to be combined. It’s a mess!
Also freezing trap needs redesigned for pvp. Requires ground targeting. Can be physically dodged and has rng when opponents stand on top of each other. It’s just awful.
