Hunter Redesign Suggestions

In Development Season of Discovery Phase 4 PTR
1

I doubt any developer ever reads this, but here is a rework of the hunter runes that enables some actual fun builds. Obviously the numbers are likely too strong, I don’t have any data to determine how to perfectly tune each thing.

4 Archetypes for Hunter:

Ranged Lone Wolf Trapper Marksman

  • Lock and Load
  • Resourcefulness
  • Lone Wolf
  • TNT
  • Chimera Shot / Explosive Shot / Kill Shot
  • Expose Weakness / Survivalist
  • Master Marksman
  • Trap Launcher

Ranged Pet Marksman

  • Rapid Killing
  • Focus Fire
  • Beast Mastery
  • Steady Shot
  • Chimera Shot / Explosive Shot / Kill Shot
  • Expose Weakness / Survivalist
  • Kill Command
  • Cobra Strikes

Beast Mastery Dual Wield Melee.

  • Catlike Reflexes
  • Cobra Slayer
  • Beast Mastery
  • Raptor’s Fury
  • Flanking Strike
  • Dual Wield Specialization
  • Melee Specialist
  • Carve / Cobra Strikes

Survival 2h Melee.

  • Lock and Load / Rapid Fire / Hit and Run
  • Resourcefulness
  • Wyvern Strike
  • TNT
  • Chimera Shot / Kill Shot
  • 2h Specialization
  • Melee Specialist
  • Trap Launcher

Rune slot options:

Head

  • Lock and Load
  • Rapid Killing
  • Catlike Reflexes
  • Hit and Run

Back

  • Resourcefulness
  • Cobra Slayer
  • Focus Fire

Chest

  • Lone Wolf
  • Beast Mastery
  • Wyvern Strike

Wrist

  • TNT
  • Steady Shot
  • Raptor’s Fury

Gloves

  • Chimera Shot
  • Explosive Shot
  • Flanking Strike
  • Kill Shot

Waist

  • Expose Weakness
  • Survivalist
  • 2h Specialization
  • Dual Wield Specialization

Legs

  • Kill Command
  • Master Marksman
  • Melee Specialist

Boots

  • Trap Launcher
  • Carve
  • Cobra Strikes

Changes to Runes:
Cobra Strikes: Critical Hits with Steady Shot, Mongoose Bite, or Flanking Strike cause your pets next two attacks to be critical strikes.

Rapid Killing: Reduces the cooldown on Rapid Fire by 80%, and Rapid Fire now increases melee attack speed as well. While Rapid Fire is active the cooldown of Kill Command is reduced by by 3 seconds.

Master Marksman: Increases your ranged critical strike chance by 5%, and reduces the mana cost of shots by 25%. Using any other shot now reduces the cast time of your next aimed shot by 1 second, stacking 3 times, effect lasts 30 seconds.

Melee Specialist: Raptor Strike is now instant. Mongoose Bite, and Raptor Strike have a 30% chance to reset the cooldown of Raptor Strike. Grants the Hunter the Ability Harpoon. Harpoon: Hurls a harpoon at an enemy, stunning for 3 sec and pulling you to them 0-35 yard range, 30 second cooldown.

Kill Command: Give the command to kill, causing your pet to deal 150% attack damage, 6 second cooldown. Critical hits cause your next Steady Shot to be instant cast.

Cobra Slayer: Mongoose Bite now activates when an enemy dodges your attack. Mongoose bite deals 100% weapon damage, and has an additional 30% chance to crit. Cannot be dodged, blocked, or parried. Has a 30% change to reset the cooldown on Flanking Strike.

Wyvern Strike: Replaces your Wyvern Sting with Wyvern Strike. Wyvern Strike deals 100% weapon damage and poisons the target for % weapon damage over 10 seconds. Removes the minimum range requirement from Chimera Shot.

Dual Wield Specialization: Increases the damage done by your offhand weapon, causes your Raptor Strike to strike with both weapons when you are dual-wielding, and reduces its cooldown to 3 seconds. Also causes your Mongoose bite to strike with both weapons when you are dual-wielding.

Trap Launcher: Now benefits from the range increases provided by the Hawk Eye talent.

2h Specialization: Deal 25% more damage with 2h weapons. In addition each time you strike an enemy with a two-handed weapon, you gain 30% attack speed with two-handed weapons, lasts 10 seconds.

Survivalist: Reduces damage taken by 25% and makes the hunter immune to snares, roots, fear, poisons, bleeds, and disease for 10 seconds. 2 minute cooldown. Usable while stunned, disoriented, or feared.

Beast Mastery: Your pet’s damage and health are increased by 20%, its Focus regeneration by 50%, and it takes 50% reduced damage from other players. In addition, your pet’s Growl now also Taunts the target to attack it for 3 sec.

Hit and Run: Your Frost Trap now activates instantly. While you are in its effect you are immune to slows and roots, and gain a 50% increased stun resistance. You gain 70% movement speed for 3 seconds after using Raptor strike.

Chimera Shot: You deal 135% weapon damage, refreshing the current Sting on your target and triggering an effect:

Serpent Sting - Instantly deals an additional amount of damage, equal to 25% of your current ranged attack power.

Viper Sting: Silences the target for 5 seconds. 45 second cooldown.

Scorpid Sting: Disarms the target for 5 seconds, and bypasses immunity. 45 second cooldown.

Wyvern Strike: Inflicts the target with Chimera poison, which increases damage taken from all sources by 5%. Resets the cooldown on Wyvern Strike.

Freezing Trap and Scatter Shot no longer share a diminishing return cooldown.

17 Likes
2

Nice idea.

3

It appears you lost some runes along the way. I’ve assigned them slots here that are non-conflicting with your established fantasies.

  • Improved Volley - Boots
  • Sniper Training - Belt
  • Serpent Spread - Cloak
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Those were intentionally deleted, and replaced with Survivalist, Kill Command, and 2h Specialization. Serpent Spread, and Volley have no real use cases, they’re dead runes. Sniper Training is a terrible gameplay mechanic and was replaced with the Master Marksman effect.

3 Likes
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You’re right. I didn’t read the whole thing before commenting (sorry it was pretty long and I was pretty tired when I first looked at it), and it’s an excellent baseline starting point that Blizzard could literally copy and paste and tweak from there.

I think it was smart to start from the back end of “what are all the “Archetypes” that people want to play hunter as?” and then design and distribute the runes from there.

The final piece of the puzzle that’s missing is that melee hunter is now the only spec that doesn’t bring some kind of raid buff/debuff/utility. Without it, the spec will be a failure because everyone will demand that you run ranged Hunter for TSA.

And a great way to buff up the damage for the Survival spec (now that you have all the right runes etc.) is to include talents that support those runes.

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Your comment makes it very clear you didn’t read, or maybe didn’t understand, the original post.

1 Like
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This is pretty good. A 3 second stun on harpoon a little extreme. I’d make it a slow instead. Will edit as I keep reading.

The only thing that’s missing is - if Melee Hunters (both BM and Survival) don’t bring some kind of raid butt/utility, every Wartard GM will go “bro, where’s my trueshot Aura?”

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the entire surv weaving build requires that you take wyvern sting so i think they kind of covered their bases in that regard. but i would love to see some tweaks to the surv tree. easiest thing i can think of is to make killer instinct party wide. they do need to do something with rapid killing though. unless they make traps useable in combat baseline or rework rapid killing to have some synergy then surv has no helm rune.

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They would be the only melee class without a spell interrupt. A 3 second stun is definitely justified imo.

I was considering adding in the tier set bonus to rapid killing as well in this list, which is that is also effects melee attack speed. For that same reason.

3 Likes
10

Dude, the more I read your post, the more I like it. Just edit it to include that we need a new “aspect” for melee hunter that give crit or melee AP to our parties so that we actually get invited to raids. And I would still revamp the Survival talent tree to make our traps and our 2H dmg better, but otherwise your re-design of the runes are excellent.

We need to get your post in front of Aggrend somehow.

BM is easy, they can just give them Burning Crusade’s Ferocious Inspiration.
But Survival needs a raid buff/utility. You guys have any ideas for something cool/new?
Any thoughts on that? One option could be to help out warlocks with their curses? So, give the survival hunter a talent that lets their traps apply curse of elements? Increase fire from fire traps and increased frost damage from frost traps? I know that warlocks get frustrated when they’re the only lock in the group and have to cast curse of reck.

Another useless ability that could really use a buff is arcane shot. That would help a lot with the range weaving too.

2 Likes
11

The only thing that would make sense would have Chimera apply a debuff to the target that increased physical damage done or spell damage done to it when used on a target poisoned with Wyvern Strike. This would overlap with the planned additional rogue poisons though.

Priests already have this from phase 3 on a head rune.

Anything buffing arcane shot would have to replace an existing thing to keep the rune count equal to the other classes. I’m not really sure there’s a way to fit it in at the moment.

BM is easier to fix. Just add abilities to the pets themselves, which are unlocked by using Beast Mastery. No new runes required.

Both BM and Survival benefit from aspect of hawk. Pets only scale off ranged attack power. I’m not sure this is necessary.

2 Likes
12

These are amazing ideas and suggestions, would truly be a dream come true, especially for me as a 2-Hand hunter enjoyer

2 Likes
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  1. I wouldn’t do that to Chimera, because then ranged Hunters also bring that in addition to Trueshot aura. That’s why I wouldn’t apply it to runes, but rather to talent trees. That way you can either bring Trueshot aura, OR Ferocious Inspiration, OR [Survival buff/debuff]. Seriously, if my GM makes me go MM to bring TSA I’m done with this game.

  2. Yeah, I would just in general buff the damage of arcane shot - not enough to make it more powerful than Aimed Shot (which it shares a CD with), but powerful enough to be meaningful. Then it could be part of the survival hunter range weave. Right now it’s completely useless.

  3. Eh… I would argue melee BM’s benefit from Aspect of the Hawk is super gimmicky and the little bit of pet DPS it gives doesn’t exactly feel like the ability was designed for that purpose. Maybe just make Aspect of the Hawk’s AP be both melee and ranged.

But we need a raid buff/debuff for BM and survival or you won’t come to raid. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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Bumping for visibility. Haven’t seen a better post yet.

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I like your ideas but personally would like to see a dual wield trapper build, it would only be possible if they made in-combat traps baseline and make trap launcher just ranged traps.

Probably not gonna happen but I just like survival tree and dual wield.

3 Likes
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I have the same feeling. I would like to see trap launcher be baseline as well. It’s extremely painful to not have them available to use for melee currently. My only concern is that traps end up being so good that the BM runes ultimately get ignored for their intended play style, and everyone just takes the trap runes as the default for everything. Then that would motivate the devs to either buff pets or nerf traps. With the attitude around pets in general since the start of the season, it’s fairly obvious to me that would result in heavy trap nerfs.

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17

i’ve been a broken record about making the ST 3 set baseline

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Perfect. Why this wasn’t the chimera effect from the jump I have no idea.

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I agree that traps should be baseline, but launcher should be a rune. A really strong, bursty, 2H raptor striker shouldn’t be able freeze trap a clothie from 35 yards, run up and decimate them. It’s what I’m currently doing in phase 3 and it’s just ridiculous.

For the Survival Lone Wolf build, we will need some more mitigation since we won’t have a pet. They need to lower the CD’s on deterence and counterstrike drastically. Then counterstrike could be the ability that let’s us use range weaving in open world play. But again, the dodge requirement is stupid.

Bousted’s suggestions above are fantastic, but I still feel we need a revamped Survival talent tree to support the build.

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I like a good chunk of this and I agree with the idea of starting at the class fantasy and then creating the runes to follow that. Those are definitely the 4 class fantasies most people have for hunter. I don’t know if you’ve taken into account how the runes are divided by level (chest/legs/hands -25, boots/waist - 40, head/wrist - 50) and where the discovery would change or not, because it can lead to some wonky stuff. It doesn’t always matter if we’re just focusing on level 60. For example, getting wyvern strike from chest rune at low level could be weird like if it swapped with the rune discovery from the crates rep or if none of the runes are useful at a low level.

I wanted to mention one thing in another post about the possibility of adding wild strikes or the horn of lordaeron buff to melee hunters, whether that be survival or BM. Wild strikes better suited for survival 2h melee I think. Horn of Lordaeron could also go to arms warrior or bear druids…

I’m surprised you didn’t utilize Expose weakness rune with Survival 2h, since they get 15% more agility.

Also, you should take advantage of the fact that they can also somewhat change talents through runes, if the talent point offers an ability, such as the most obvious new Wyvern Strike or Shadowform. In this case, I think of Survival 2h talents and what do they go to afterwards? You can of course push for BM talents, buff the pet damage or we can go to marksman and by altering Wyvern Strikes that it also changes Aimed Shot into Aimed Thrust or Slash, then you have another melee ability. Or better yet, Aimed shot becomes a type of harpoon ability with the wyvern strikes rune