Hunter has quite a few runes that could be re-slotted to improve gameplay and build diversity.
Regarding Ranged Hunter, there are 2 potential styles of gameplay:
- Lock and Load
- Steady Shot
Curently, only Lock and Load is supported with runes. To begin with, Steady shot competes with Expose Weakness on the Belt slot, which is an opportunity cost that cannot be ignored. This alone creates an enormous rift in how both playstyles scale with gear.
Suggestion: Since Lock and load and Steady shot are competing styles of gameplay, their resources being both GCD’s and Mana, please consider putting Steady shot on the Helm slot, to compete with Lock and Load directly, since the two are incompatible as runes and are on different item slots.
Having competing gameplay defining runes on different item slots, rather than the same item slots, creates dead runes or misleading and “incorrect” decisions. I know the developers put in a lot of effort into making each rune, so identifying which runes are gameplay defining and putting them on the same slots as other gameplay defining runes is a pretty good rule of thumb for organizing powerups.
Although only Lock and Load seems to be intentionally being supported in P4 with the Trap CD reduction rune, it is still possible to reslot various runes that do not synergize well with lock and load or compete for Lock and Load synergy (such as the new trap reduction rune), to allow for Steady shot to become a viable gameplay option.
Suggestion: put a high performance rune that is slightly worse than trap CD reduction in the cloak slot to help Steady Shot’s performance relative to Lock and Load. This could be something as simple as moving the Rapid fire rune to the cloak, or creating a new rune that synergizes with Steady Shot.
Additionally, Steady shot consumes an exorbitant amount of mana compared to Lock and Load based gameplay, so I would suggest removing or significantly reducing the mana cost of steady shot. Thanks for reading, and have a good day!