Apologies for the long winded and rambling post, I’m exhausted and disheartened with the state of the game and the way that class adjustments have been handled in SoD to date.
For clarification on the datapoints I’m going to bring up we will be looking at the top .1% of players represented in Encounter damage, Boss / Trash damage, and trash damage as 3 separate categories for our analysis.
Many of us in the top end speed running or parsing communities are very frustrated with SoD and the anticompetitive nature of how updates and class balancing has been handled. With hunters and warriors coming top of mind for P2 as the winners and losers so far (yes warriors are doing fine on overall but boss armor is kek w). Let’s focus on hunters for the sake of this discussion as they are the target of a game changing nerf coming next week.
Hunters were released this phase with new runes that empower their melee abilities with the rotation consisting of #1 Raptor strike, #2 flanking strike (which serves to buff raptor strike), and #3 carve for trash aoe (you rune swap if you have a pet, or run full time as lone wolf), #4 wing clip is a filler for windfury procs as necessary.
Raptor strike was empowered by multiple new runes “melee specialist” which makes raptor strike instant on a 3 second cd with a 30% chance to reset the cd. Making this the bread and butter of the melee rotation, and our only meaningful damaging ability which is problematic on it’s own. Further buffed by the Dual Wield specialization rune which increases offhand damage by 50% and gave an additional 30% damage to raptor strike for wielding 2 weapons of the same type, this was kind of a cool feature unique to hunters, causing us to prioritize weapons no one else wanted in the raid (fist weapons)
---- This is where the nerfs comes in — Last week blizzard gave us weapon speed normalization (1H weapons are considered 2.4 speed for sake of dmg calc), making the slow and interesting fist weapons they put in the game more or less a wash other than their decent stats and debuff for the raid. They are still BIS - pre DW rune nerf.
This is where game design decisions become questionable, the choice to remove the 30% bonus for using similar weapons is getting fully removed? not reduced, not replaced with something else to incentivize this unique gearing flavor. Just removed completely. No one wants these fist weapons anymore in raid, they will rot. Hunters now compete for the 2H axe like everyone else. I don’t see how this is good design. You could have easily replaced the 30% raptor strike buff which was determined to be problematic with something else, hell even just a reduction to 15% or 10% like single minded fury nerf in P1. They could have changed it to a stacking haste buff for raptor striking which would make uptime and cooldown management something players need to track. They could idk, make our other melee moves actually do any damage at all? Why is mongoose bite the same as wing clip, it’s useless. Beyond frustrating to give us 1 button, force us to play melee, waste our time gearing for similar weapon types (hours and hours and hours of work burned) just to take a huge dump on the class when we’re only rank 3 dps overall in Gnomer for top .1% of players.
We didn’t ask to play melee, we made a hunter to play ranged. You made ranged worthless. Created a scenario where raptor strike was hitting too hard (our only ability) then nerfed it into the dirt. GIVE AND TAKE. not take and take. I’m so tired of bad game release state followed by sloppy, heavy handed, brutal nerfs. We put hundreds of hours into this game to be competitive, but you’re massive game changes with little reasoning and thought make staying competitive a game of chance. Did I pick the right class? Did the devs randomly decide to nerf me into oblivion this week? Time to reroll x infinitum.
Mages and warlocks are 90% of the top 100 players for Encounters, and encounters / trash IN THE CURRENT STATE. After nerfs they will be the only thing on the top page (hurrr armor nerfs tho) no, that’s not an argument for a 23% nerf to damage of the rank 3 dps.
yeah you spam raptor strike at such a high level