I just think your post is a distraction away from a real solution. I’ll ask again, have you seen Bousted’s post from earlier?
Just trust me, it’s a better redesign. Go check for yourself. I don’t know the guy. He’s not in my guild. I got no dog in this fight. His design just looks really fun to play. Yours doesn’t.
And I think if Blizzard’s 3.5 remaining SoD devs get on here and a see a billion different ideas thrown around, who the F knows what they’re going to do. I think the hunter player base needs to get behind a single idea to make it clear to them what we want. Doubling talents into runes smacks of poor game design.
Here you go:
The one thing that Bousted’s post is missing, which you addressed also is: What is going to be the buff that Survival/BM hunters bring?
You can’t have all the specs bring the same buff, coz then people will only accept whichever one of the specs does the most dps. “Want to play BM? F you, Survival does 200 dps more, we want you go to survival.”
I think we’re lucky with BM, because we can simply steal from TBC. I think Ferocious Inspiration can be implemented pretty easily.
For Survival Hunter I think you have 2 choices:
Give them the upgraded version of Hunter’s mark, which gives both ranged AND melee attack power, or…
Give them the druid’s 3% party-wide crit. They already have that talent, “Killer Instinct”. Just make it party-wide. I would make sure this doesn’t stack with the druid buff. This would take some pressure off the need to bring feral druids, especially for alliance (with no shamans for WF totem).
You didn’t “ask” the first time, this is what you said:
That, my friend, was an order. I don’t appreciate being told what to do by random strangers I don’t know. I don’t think you intended it this way, but you come across pretty aggressive in your posts and I feel defensive and want to argue because of it instinctively. I bring this up because you have good ideas and I generally agree with you, but the way you approached me by attacking my ideas with comments like this:
REALLY doesn’t encourage me to want to agree with you. You can take this feedback any way you want, but I wanted to point it out in as kind a way as I’m able in the hope that you take it genuinely. You’re hurting your (rather good) arguments by approaching people this way. I’m more than happy to amend my original post if you make a good argument (and you do!), but tearing down double-digit hours of work I put into this post is not a good way to convince me that I should change my mind or suggestions. We’re on the same side here friend.
On Topic
I totally agree. I indicate this at the beginning of the post, but I’ll reiterate it here: I don’t actually believe many of these changes are the best options going forward. I created these suggestions based on what already exists and would be easy to implement or adjust (from a coding perspective). Blizzard’s team is obviously stretched thin, and I wanted to suggest solutions that were actionable so that something happens. Bousted’s post is indeed excellent, and I like many of his ideas more than the ones I suggest here, but a good number of them are also entirely new and would require a lot more work on the coding and development side to apply.
Thank you for the link to Bousted’s post. I agree with what you mention a few times in that thread: that designing runes around a specific playstyle is really the way to do business here.
Overall, I like the idea of BM or Surv having their own unique buffs to bring to the party in the context of TSA being a raid wide effect. Slotting a ranged hunter into your melee groups for the buff feels awkward.
I spotted this idea when I was sifting through the different versions of the game, but never had something good for Survival. I really like the following suggestion though:
I’m very fond of this because it is both thematically relevant and already exists in the form of the Druid’s version of the ability, so it should be easy to port over.
I do have concern though for the Alliance side specifically. A Feral Druid is still necessary to bring WF to the melee group and would also have this 3% party-wide crit buff. A survival hunter wouldn’t be bringing anything new to that situation, and thus might fall into the situation you indicated earlier of “We want you to play x spec because [its better for the group]/[your spec doesn’t do anything for the group.]” I think we can agree that we’d like to avoid this.
Finally
Sincerely, thank you for making me aware of Bousted’s post. I hadn’t seen it before and there are great ideas over there. I do think the overall flavor of his changes fall along the lines of “This is the ideal if Blizz has the time and manpower”, where mine approach the it from “Blizz is stretched and has only the barest minimum time and energy to give each class.”
I plan to take a closer look today and amend my suggestions with the good ideas found there, but don’t be surprised if many things don’t change. We’re approaching the topic from two different viewpoints, and I think that the perspective offered by each is valuable.
Also, this guy is assuming that your intention was for your entire post to be implemented in it’s entirety. There’s only bits and pieces out of any of our posts that actually can or should be fully implemented. Your post has SOME of the best ideas that I’ve seen come out of the Hunter community on this topic.
That’s precisely my approach. I’m a big believer in scattered inspiration. Some ideas here are good, some ideas elsewhere are good. By all means, mash all the best ones together. I want the best result, not necessarily my specific suggestions.
Not sure if you saw my reply that got removed. I simply stated that you’re ideas were far more nuanced than some other ideas I’ve seen and that you clearly understand game design better than some people who were claiming that you don’t. Also, that you shouldn’t listen to someone who is telling you that you should stop posting so that this other unnamed post would have a better chance of being seen by the devs as opposed to letting the posts stand on their own merit. Especially when your post is just objectively better than any other hypothetical post I’ve seen.