This removes the melee weaving aspect of the build which is clearly the developer’s intention with it. Not sure if you’re trying to tell them to straight up abandon the idea of melee weaving.
I understand what you’re going for here. It’s similar to the shaman 2h rune and would be great for a pure melee 2h build. The 2h melee weaving build would actually want an attack speed reduction though. A % dmg increase balanced out with an attack speed reduction.
The runes you get at the specific level brackets don’t need to fall into specific slots. I think they really boxed themselves into a class design and balance problem by releasing the content the way they did. Now that we’re about to hit 60, to me it doesn’t make sense to maintain such a rigid restriction. Does it really matter if a level 25 has a bracer/belt/boots/back rune? Not really. They’re not raiding at that level like we were in phase 1 either.
The problem there is there just aren’t enough rune slots available to make that accessible to every build, without making trap launcher baseline.
Without adding something that will allow a player to instantly disengage and reconnect with a target, melee weaving sucks. They may be able to tune the damage so it works in pve, but that build in pvp where your target is constantly moving and you’re also likely slowed/rooted/stunned with no means of clearing it kind of sucks. With that in mind, yes I deliberately killed it.
I don’t think I necessarily agree with that. Yes a damage bonus is better, but leaning into that being the primary modifier creates a class that can land single hits that are too big, which ultimately will become a source of complaints in pvp.
I agree, stop trying to make surv 2h only plz, I’ve been a surv hunter since day 1 playing dw, and it’s painful that the spec is turning into a 2h melee weave spec. I want a dw/2h surv trap spec, like the whole tree suggests it should be.
Your replies there are kind of contradictory. Is it good or bad in pvp? lol. I personally think it’ll do ok in pvp if you take imp wing clip and counterattack and I don’t think the beefy hits will be a real problem balance wise but yeah of course people will complain they always do. That said though I think they intend for the melee weaving build to be a more raid focused spec and in a raiding environment we want our melee hits as spread out and as big as possible.
While I agree with survival being a trap/melee specialization, I think it’s a disadvantage for it to be a dual wield specialization. The reality of the matter is one will always be superior to the other when it comes to dual wielding vs 2h, so you’ll be forced into a particular meta no matter what. Specializing survival to 2h benefits the build in two big ways. First, no other class at the moment wants a slow 2h weapon. Second, the runes can contain specific attributes which synchronize better with a particular build.
Yeah it shouldn’t have such a rigid restriction by level, I don’t think its a big deal that later on in higher levels you gain a rune that goes to chest for a “lower level rune slot”. The issue is just if you get a rune at a lower level only usable at a higher level. Also the runes kind of built into a progression of leveling, so its keeping things in mind of your class building upon itself, not just the final destination. It’s also something to be mindful in case you make all the runes at a lower level slot unusable. It just depends where the discovery is and when its accessible, no reason to not give a lower level a helm rune for example, if the discovery remains the same.
You just gotta force it in with other runes 
Besides that, what do you think of Wyvern Strike rune also adjusting aimed shot to another ability?
How do they contradict each other? One is that requiring constant movement from ranged to melee is bad for pvp without significant mobility abilities to enable it, which hunter doesn’t have. Especially in a meta where every other class has increased mobility themselves. Relying on a proc chance isn’t good enough.
The other is a damage concern of boosting weapon damage too high which gives them too much burst.
These are completely independent problems.
It’s kind of tough. I think the biggest problem is now you either need another rune or you need to add it to an existing one. Also that kind of forces survival into a 0-11-31 build. To be honest I’m not huge fan of the Wyvern Strike rune already forcing talent choices. No other class has to deal with that.
You’re missing 9 talent points. The surv build is 0/20/31 so can easily pick up aimed on the way to Mortal Shots.
Personally, I would love to see them finally figure out the final builds for every class. Make sure it’s more or less good. Then re-release sod with lvl 60 immediately open. Turn the earlier raids into small 10 man raids that people are welcome to do to lvl up and get some intermediate loot/xp, and just allow us to head straight to 60.
Also - Bousted, instead of removing the requirement to make Chimera Shot usable at any range, they can just give us really short cooldowns on deterence and counterstrike. I would also remove the dodge requirement for counterstrike, so then range weaving would be easy. I actually forgot we have that, since I didn’t use in phase 1-3.
I hope they don’t make ranged weaving a thing, it’s good in theory but very problematic for uptime and damage throughput as well as boss mechanics etc.
I don’t think worrying about balancing the weaving playstyle in PvP should be a very high concern. Weaving has only really ever been practiced in raid settings, and I’m personally alright with it being a PvE only feature. A lot of chatter has been had on “Disengage and Harpoon”, but unless those abilities are on 3 second cooldowns to let you engage and disengage between swing timers, they won’t be useful for weaving. The whole idea of weaving is to use both your swing timers to deal damage every hit. A refresh-able movement speed makes the most sense in this case.
From a PvP perspective, I think this version of Harpoon is excellent for melee hunters. Like I mentioned above, it wouldn’t move the needle for weaving hunters at all.
I’m not a fan of the lottery reset mechanic for both Raptor Strike and Flanking Strike overall. I’d rather have enough decent abilities with predictable cooldowns for an actual rotation, with maybe one reset mechanic to shake things up. I do understand keeping it though in favor of focusing on other, more critical, problems with the class.
Overall good post! Thank you for taking the time to share.
The lottery mechanic exists because hunter has a mana bar. It’s the same reason paladin and shaman have lottery systems for melee. While rogue and warrior have spam abilities because they can deplete their resource.
#givehuntersfocus
That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought of that. I’d even argue that Hunters really have no resource due to Viper existing.
Even though the change to Art of War drastically nerfed Paladins, I do prefer their current PTR lottery mechanic over Hunter’s for two reasons:
I do think Paladins got hit a little too hard with the AoW change, but that’s not the focus of this thread.
I feel like with more abilities and, in the case of survival, range-weaving, letting raptor strike work up to 5 stacks doesn’t feel smooth at all.
I like the idea of raptor strike being on a three strike cycle, where the CD resets automatically after the first two hits, and then a longer cooldown triggering after the third hit. The damage would increase dramatically with each hit and could possibly include some kind of CC with the third hit. Perhaps the knock back that Hunters get in retail from “bursting shot” could be included here?
So your rotation would look something like: harpoon in, Wyvern strike, raptor strike (1), raptor strike (2), raptor strike (3, which also knocks the target back), chimera shot.
Of course this wouldn’t work against raid mobs, so we’d also need disengage for raiding.
The biggest issue weaving has is it is only viable in raids. There’s no effective way to use it in any other content with the way they currently have it implemented.
Weaving 100% works both in PvP and in open world. With the current build we have both imp Wing Clip and Counterattack available.
And every single class you would wingclip or counter attack can instantly free themselves from the effects, and/or instantly teleport back to you. Meanwhile a hunter has no way to remove slows or roots from itself.
Just wingclip and hope for a 20% proc bro is the weakest response ever. Once you apply wyvern strike you can’t even freezing trap them either.
Yeah so not every class can just free themselves unless you’re talking about trinket which hunters also have. But you’re also kind of missing the whole point with weaving in pvp in that we can do both. It doesn’t matter if someone closes the gap on us because we have melee damage and it doesn’t matter if someone creates a gap on us because we have ranged damage. Regardless we CAN at least some of the time weave in PvP. Also, I think you have to concede that Wing Clip and Counterattack definitely work on mobs in open world. None of this really matters though because if they want to design a pure raid spec for us then that’s ok it’ll be a raid spec then and you can use MM or BM for pvp/open world.
Warrior: Warbringer, meathook
Rogue: Vanish, Improved Sprint, Shadowstep
Shaman: Decoy Totem
Druid: Shapeshift
Paladin: Freedom
Are we even playing the same game?