They finally gave us raid utility. But we have to apply hunters mark to the target to give a dmg bonus to the raid.
After all the crying during the SL beta to remove the 5% dmg bonus on hunters mark cause it felt awful they finally decide it male it raid wide instead.
Yeah it so is. 
Iâm so bummed.
its a slap in the face as they tease us with raid utility honestly. and its so mediocre like everything else we get it feels like. depressing
And it only applys to the top 20% of the fight rest it does nothing hurray. Not lol. Better not be on global cooldown. lol. Oh well maybe they will make it last whole fight would make us a little more useful I guess. lol
A 10 year old could come with better ideas
I hope they bug this, and it stacks with each mark applied. Raids will stack Hunters breaking whole encounters.
If it lasted the whole fight would be great but it dont so its garbage, 1% of the fights dmg as it stands good grief try again pls. lol
this just feels like a punch in the face while stepping on your junk and i canât help but think blizzard is going to pat themselves on the back and say âlook, we gave hunter group utilityâ
Add it to the pile of âThings we have that are just slightly worse than everyone elseâs thingâ
They tried to force this before and theyâre trying it again. They apply band aids to address the quibbles but miss the greater con- we do not want another empty button to press before we open our damage.
Slightly? Isnât it like 1/3 the power of the next worst thing? Or is my info out of date?
Why am I never surprised with the WoW community anymore smh
You realize that things are not binary right? If hunter got a 100% dps increase from having to do a 360 between every attack people would also complain despite the buff since the gameplay is boring.
Hunters have already gone through this twice already, its not popular to have to constatly reapply Hunters mark, it was made passive in MoP and completly removed in WoD. It was then added back as a talent in BfA and hunters complained again. They made it baseline 5% dmg increase in SL beta and Hunters complained again until it was removed.
If they want to give us a DMG debuff, give us the same treatmeant as everyone else and make it apply passivly, there is a reason why it works that way for everyone else. Or bring us back another utlity instead like aspect of the fox or our old ability to fill a missing raidbuff.
Receiving news that hunterâs mark was going to be the source of our raid buff feels like a slap in the face and kinda shows how disconnected the developers who work on the class really are. Hunterâs Mark in itself feels like a relic of the past or more of a flavor ability that never should have been returned to our kit. Blizzard has tried multiple times now to incorporate it back into our ârotationâ over the years and neither of them have worked out in the way players wanted.
The original use of hunterâs mark was, similar to this, a raid buff to range attack power. It remained this way up until itâs removal in WoDâs prepatch. It was always a bit clunky to reapply but in mists of pandaria, it was automatically applied to your target by just doing the rest of your rotation. Iâm not really sure why blizzard decided to remove it only to pivot on that decision several years later but here we are.
Maybe Iâm misremembering and all the hunter backlash is running together but since the author of this post believes it was shadowlands beta where we were told it was going to be baked back in and I have been thinking it was dragonflight but timeline here doesnât really matter. Blizzard tried to force hunterâs mark back into the rotation as a personal, hunter only, buff ON the GCD with a cooldown. This was met with so much backlash that blizzard quickly reverted it and hunterâs mark returned to a flavor ability with seemingly no other purpose.
In Shadowlands it did however see some use with the introduction of the endurance conduit, Marksmanâs Advantage. Marksmanâs Advantage seemed pretty good in theory since the classâs survivability has been lacking for some time but it didnât really bridge that gap on its own. This conduit applied a debuff to whatever you cast the mark on that reduced damage the target does to you by a flat percentage. I think this was somewhere around 9% with fully empowered soulbinds but again, my memory is a bit hazy. This seemed great but kept hunterâs mark as a fire and forget ability. However, the damage reduction wasnât as great as it appeared on paper. There used to be spreadsheets that are also lost to time that documented each raid and dungeon encounter and what was and was not reduced by the conduit. You might be surprised to know a lot of unavoidable, scripted damage wasnât actually reduced at all due to it being coded as environmental and not actually from the boss itself. It was a great idea on paper and one Iâd like to see back with better functionality in the future.
This new change in 10.2 is rightfully being met with backlash as well. It is being estimated to roughly be only a 1% dps gain for your entire roster during arguably the easiest part of an encounter. On farm at least in heroic guilds, bosses die in 2-3minutes max. Looking at one of my guildâs faster heroic kills, we burned through the first 20% in 15 seconds. The first 20% is usually burned through in only part of a lust window in normal circumstances anyway; that doesnât leave a lot of room for this ability to shine for the average hunter. On top of that, Iâm not sure if it really âsecuresâ a raid spot. I want to point out the tier that this is being introduced in has a raid boss that gains an absorb shield at 70% hp⌠below the threshold for hunterâs mark in a scenario where you could argue itâs PERFECT for.
I think blizzard also tried to give us a different approach to âraidâ utility with the very forgettable sentinel talent and the choice node that follows⌠5% leech for your party only is largely useless for how clunky the ability can be to ramp duration. On top of that, one of the 3 specs that would be giving it, being beast mastery, canât even fully benefit from the leech we grant in a raid setting. Blizzard needs to do better here and Iâm hoping the feedback thatâs being given on this forced hunterâs mark gets considered and they take a different approach.
Sorry for the novel like post but Iâm kinda very passionate about my class and I donât often voice my opinion especially not when stuff is still weeks out from live. I also have been asking silently for pet buffs to make a return in some form. I always used to feel useful being able to fill an empty buff slot with a pet in older expansions, even if that pet didnât match or look great. I donât have a lot of great ideas of any other abilities they could add but I think pets are a decent place to start. They can additionally add something special for marksmanâs talent trees to compensate under the lone wolf talent since they already gain access to the tenacity pet defensive without a pet if they do go that route.
Useless in m+ mandatory in pvp which will suck due to retargets, only useful on bosses
I have no idea why they are trying to bring it back again, and it was SL beta they tried this the last time. You can find some old reddit post on this topic if you search for hunters mark.
Modifiers were removed from Hunterâs Mark previously for good reason. When we asked for a raid buff or unique utility, we assumed they werenât going to backtrack on their own past decisions.
A 3% crit aura seemed like the easiest thing to do. Itâs not convoluted and it wouldnât result in stacking Hunters. It would give us that âone guaranteed spotâ. Simple and to the point.
Doing it this way just feels petty. As if they felt the pressure, but didnât want to give in, so gave us the most convoluted and weak option they could imagine.
Just for clarity:
yeah all the bad changes over the years kinda run together at this point. I couldnt remember exactly when this same thing happened but they need to just stop and hire people who play the class to look at it imo. Defensives have been lacking for quite some time; turtle doesnt work as a true immunity on a lot of newer mechanics. Theyre not sure what to give us for raid utility either and thats very clear. But I will say our tier for bm looks good minus all the bugs.
bleeeeh. I hate casting hunterâs mark so much, itâs not a fun button to press. Even when it was tied to a DR reduction conduit in slands I picked something else, itâs just such a terrible ability.
really feels like the devs, lacking anyone who actually plays hunter, cube-crawled over to the classic team and went âname an iconic hunter abilityâ. suppose we should be lucky it wasnât âfeed your pet and the raid gets 10hpâ or âevery time you exhaust a stack of ammo the raid gets 1% resilienceâ.
in the immortal words of that 1 meme, âsometimes⌠things that have been in the class for ages⌠are worse.â