Devs: “We want everyone to feel strong. We’re going to buff classes and not nerf them. Buffs feel good, nerfs feel bad”
Also Devs: “Nerf all the hunter’s shots. Nerf the hunter’s pets. They should be last on the damage meters, even though they are the only pure dps class left in the game.”
Hunter has been nerfed so hard it is no better than the base classic toolkit. The developers have gone completely against their own statements made multiple times in interviews and releases about SoD. Hunters have exactly two (2) abilities in the entire game that scale with their gear, multishot and aimed shot. Not even the new skills properly scale as chimera does less damage than an auto attack and uses serpent sting damage in its calculations which is spell damage that doesn’t scale with hunter gear. Pet damage does not scale at all with gear. Hunters are strong early because of this, and the fact that range hits don’t get glancing blows/have a higher base hit rate. They are extremely weak later.
After the nerfs, at 25 my primary damage source is auto attack. It is 80%+ of my dps, the rest is mostly pet auto attack. I just afk in fights now. I regret giving you guys $15 as my only options to play now are reroll another class or quit.
24 Likes
Yes, but it goes a lot deeper than that. Hunters have received 4 nerfs now. 2 of them came just before the servers went live and only because content creators such as Sarthe put out videos detailing why Hunters would be the strongest class in the game due to the values that the clearly untested and unplayed original Lone Wolf and Sniper Training runes had. I doubt that they ever tested them in either version, because they don’t seem to play hunters and know what might make them fun or interesting. Passive upgrades to a dull rotation where most damage comes from auto shots brings nothing fun or unique to the class. We did have something fun with explosive shot, but it was clearly too strong and needed a nerf. Instead of a reduction in damage, what we got was an entire retooling of the skill into something that is essentially useless, it’s a shell of itself. No reason to run it when multi-shot exists unless there are a whole lot of enemies on top of one another. It’s a worse arcane explosion. CS was nerfed for no reason, nothing said about why, just nerfed into the ground. And as you pointed out, it doesn’t even scale.
Hunters were only strong right now because they start with most of their kit at low levels asides from Feign Death. We also had some bugs with pet ability scaling that were fixed and then we got additional pet nerfs on top of just fixing that, wow. We are poised to fall off significantly in the next tier and beyond. Thanks for another nerf bat today, Blizzard. Hunters will suck now and forever. And the community will say we deserve it.
There is zero separation from era and SoD. What can you even discover as a hunter? We get nothing cool or interesting. I don’t care about the raw damage of the class at 25, what about Hunter going forward? What was the vision for the class? The runes have almost no synergy… they just sort of give small boosts to the original builds we see in era. It’s the laziest implementation of them all, and BM with strong pets was the last real hope. The scorpid needed to be fixed and nerfed, absolutely… but the other pets? Just, why?
13 Likes
Just look at our runes vs others. We are a class that can only DPS but yet get nerfed constantly when we get close to being the “best”.
Example of our runes vs others:
Hunter - 10% crit and need to stand still for 6 seconds (so unusable in PvP or raids)
Warlock - 10% crit for you and your pet, and no movement penalty.
Warrior - 25% bonus to physical damage done for 12 seconds after activating bloodrage or berserker rage.
Even our 15% extra damage for a loss of our pet is insanely low.
Just look at the newest “hotfix” - Only looking at the Aspect of the Lion change:
Each raid will have only 2 hunters. Each hunter will be forced to use Aspect of the Lion as the rune on their chest. So no Cobra / Master Marksman. This means each Hunter will be forced to go BM since you can’t save mana by using Master Marksman. So you will be auto attacking a lot. But get this - Aspect of the Lion nerfs your pet (mine reduced stam from 156 to 147) + they are nerfing pets to be unusable.
As you mentioned - hunters are turning into buff bots which only auto attack in raids. The class isn’t fun to play, we didn’t get any cool new mechanics like other classes or interesting ways to play our class. The majority of our runes are worse than others and the very few that were better got nerfed for doing the only thing our hunters can do - damage.
11 Likes
I would love to look at the actual hotfix notes tbh, do they even post them anywhere? Cant see them in the thread at the top
they’ll update it later today, it’s kind of annoying but they don’t tend to update it til later in the day despite hotfixes going out throughout the day
2 Likes
This is because devs working on SoD don’t understand how the classes work and scale through the leveling to late game in classic. The warlock and warrior skills are vastly more overpowered than anything hunter received, they just appear weaker at 25 because of scaling. Warriors and warlocks lack the gear to fully utilize those buffs. Hunters however don’t scale but appear stronger early on due to the way ranged attack mechanics and pets work.
At 60 hunter is about to be dead last in dps, and it’s not even going to be close. They’ll be equal to a holy priest’s auto attack at this rate.
5 Likes
True this is another thing that is extremely frustrating. Randomly playing the game and suddenly your abilities are worse than before or even in some cases do things completely differemt (like Lion being party only and debuffing your pet…). I would expect this out of an indy company. I had huge hopes now that Metzen is back but if this is how they operate…
4 Likes
Pet was brought down to where it should be. Thanks Blizzard.
No seriously, if you thought taking 100+ Poison damage a tick by a pet, at 25, not counting it’s autos was “proper” then I got a Bridge I’d like to sell you…
Claw is hitting between 20-35 at 25 prior, not sure right this moment. That’s more in tune with a 25.
100+ Poison with 50+ auto attacks, every 2 seconds? Yeah, no. Was whack yo.
Yes, and at 60, it will still do the exact same amount of damage as it does at 25. Yet another person, who doesn’t understand scaling.
5 Likes
And even with the scaling, hunters average 4 more dps across boss fights than rogues do. Rogue nerf when?
2 Likes
Warriors, rogues, paladins, and feral druids are all doing greater or equal damage in BFD before the hunter nerfs according to warcraft logs. All of these are hybrid classes now, which following classic design should be doing less damage than hunters.
8 Likes
agree that the scorp needed to be nerfed. but why others? Why are hunters being messed with the most?
disappointing. sucks logging in to a weaker character
7 Likes
You think 25dmg is right at lvl 25? I do that with a melee attack on shaman at lvl 8…
3 Likes
Yes the scorp was broken and needed to be fixed but this nerf just killed the class.
You have no idea what your saying
4 Likes
I’m just gonna keep huffing copium until next phase.
I…It’s gonna get better…
Surly Blizzard will be like damn we really screwed up hunters we’ll fix it.
It’s gonna be alright hunter friends… we’ll survive… Right?
Wait never mind I’ve played Survival on Retail since Legion made it melee. We’re screwed.
2 Likes
Arcane shot hits for 35
Serpent sting does 16 per tick
Explosive shot hits for 20 damage per tick.
Chimera shot is 85% an auto attack, plus 40% of a serpent sting which is pathetic.
None of these abilities scale with gear. Meanwhile druids are running around blasting people for 100 damage then 50 per tick damage with sunfire. Hunter ability damage is a joke.
14 Likes
Carve proccing is a thing right now but requires a lot of work and a good weapon. However, if people start complaining about that as well. It will most likely also get nerfed.
2 Likes
Carve proccing? As in it proc’s weapons? Because it’s pretty garbage it seems.
2 Likes
I believe that SoD will be much like Vanilla at launch, where there are a ton of hot fixes and this next 5-6 weeks will be a roller coaster for most classes. Seems hunters were the first to go through it and yes it feels bad. I chose a melee hunter as my main and it will be for the duration of SoD. Hopefully Blizz will be responsive to our feedback. Appreciate you all fighting the good fight. Cheers!
1 Like
You hunters can get big mad all you want but it’s true.
My 25 lock is shadowbolting for like 68 damage for a 3 sec cast and my corruption ticks for like 20.
Your scorpion pets are auto attacking for 52 to 58 damage autos and over 100 damage crits and the poison is ticking for almost 100 damage on the first stack.
Hunters need looked at again.