As best as I can tell broadly, there’s roughly four ‘builds’ the rune combinations seem to enable for Hunters. I’m sure there’s more version and nuanced alternatives but I think broadly there is the following:
Ranged trap build
DW melee
Survival melee/ranged weaving
Some kind of non-trap ranged build (I’ll call it the BM build for the rest, but its more likely to be players running Marksman talents and all the non-trap runes, because honestly, the trap build isn’t for everyone)
It’s the last one I want to address. I think the biggest hurdle to a ranged pet build (which I would love) is pet focus. Pets right now dump their focus early in the fight, sending 4-5 basic attacks quickly and then for the rest of the fight at the mercy of waiting for focus to regenerate. As it stands, Focus Fire is the only way to generate extra pet focus, and it’s not very much. This lack of focus makes the rune Cobra Strikes pretty rough. As our gear gets better and you pile on world buffs and crit chance skyrockets, you’re critting with shots and generating far more stacks of Cobra Strikes than your pet can spend in any quick order.
My recommendation would be to combine the Cobra Strikes and Steady Shot runes, freeing up BM ranged hunters to take Master Marksman in the chest, and to change the way the Cobra Strikes component works; I’d love it if there were some kind of focus reward for your pet on Hunters critical strike (from shots, or on some kind of cooldown if all criticals). This would bring in a satisfying loop of pet damage increase as the Hunters gear and performance goes up.
Honestly any kind of focus reward for pets I think would truly enable the BM ranged spec to come online, because as it standards its substandard/borderline unplayable.
There is only one build.
Ranged Marksman with Lock and Load.
The removal of the CD reduction for Raptor Strike effectively killed full melee in all aspects.
Melee weaving survival isn’t going to compete against anything. Three quarter of the talent tree is still useless and deadzone is still a thing.
Ranged anything other than LnL marksman is a meme.
I don’t know if people are ready for how insane hunters will be in AV come P4. Any chokepoint like the bridges will be a nightmare to pass through through with hunters saturating the area with frost traps + explosive trap w/ entrapment, while spamming LnL explosive shots. Blizzard was even nice enough to give us reduced trap CD and Explosive Trap scaling too.
yea the reduced trap cd is mind boggling if it works with launcher. you can get the field up to 39 second duration and the only thing that comes close to balancing it in vanilla is that you can prevent hunters from dropping more by keeping them in combat effectively forcing a 30s cd. that isn’t a thing anymore.