too many 2 and 3 point talents that make it feel like we’re not able to pick up core functionality of our spec.
several passives and abilities that exist currently have been decoupled and are 4-6 point investments to pick up instead of 1-2.
some of the new talents are fantastic and wish we had them ages ago.
many of these talents however feel entirely empty without the current mm tier set or tier 18 set, no lego’s, and are 10+ talents to do basic things.
obvious issue points -
- Core hunter
trailblazer and agile movement should be merged into a single 2 point node that gives 6% movement, and then 30% outside of combat; not 5 entire points for the literal principle that hunters are supposed to be known for… mobility.
the left/middle seems to be designed for soloing content and while i like fogged crystal and stuff, these things are effectively worthless in 99% of the content, these shouldn’t take up nearly 1/3rd of the base hunter tree for only the very casual players who want them, it needs to be replaced with actual decision making as currently there’s like 3 nodes we take 100% of the time, or “you don’t need this atm” and pick up other stuff that also doesn’t matter for the desired content that’s niche.
improved mend pet 3 points? my brother in azeroth what? scare beast 6 talent investment for a niche CC? i bet warlock gets fear baseline and isn’t a niche CC that takes 6 points to get something we can just use freezing trap for.
improved traps … just cooldown reduction? 100% tar trap size? flare legendary?
nessingwary’s trappings, 3 points? this is too expensive for this, and is currently entire ignored as that’s too many points for stuff very little players actually want; please review the legendary powers usage of this… why in the forsaken frozen hells is this even back a 3rd time to be ignored? absolutely out of touch talent.
chakram vs death chakram … lmfao this isn’t a choice node, this is a meme “daniel” “the cooler daniel”
seriously… who in their right mind would even compare the two let alone pretend one is worth picking over the other?
IMO this would be a good spot for the flare legendary with some point cost reductions to the left side to get here, and while you wouldn’t need to take the left side, it would certainly make the flare burn better as a choice; an actual choice.
- Beast mastery
barbed shot’s DoT still doesn’t stack or roll over on itself making any and all “barbed shot damage” or excessive refunding of charges of it entirely pointless because it’s just dire frenzy; i understand this was meant to be a pseudo old explosive shot short term dot on 2 targets ability but it does so little damage it’s not worth doing (and this coming from a horde HoF before HoF existed raider).
please please please make this stack on itself finally =(
aspect of the beast - 50/100% … does this mean 20% leech apology with ferocity as a “haha oops we forgot you guys are squishy and have little healing since survival STOLE spirit bond” this is a nice buff to this talent as a whole, but i’d rather prefer BM just has it’s original passive healing spirit bond, not the bastard melee child who stole it from the pet class that has less interaction with it’s pet than the bomb throwing idiot.
thrill of the hunt and dire beast should swap places.
the very top of the BM tree is stacked so heavily we need to pick everything but 1 node because of stacking damage onto pets and kill command absolutely no exception.
Beast cleave should be 1 point, not 3. we literally don’t have AoE without beast cleave and kill cleave.
in for the kill - this has been a problem since forever, and all the core hunter abilities are the same… none of them actually work with mastery which makes them effectively worthless to cast over the THIRTEEN TALENT POINTS that all buff pet damage and kill command.
it’s not like kill shot gives a separate dire frenzy or pet damage buff after using and until something happens kill shot is questionable to even pick up as bm atm.
stomp 2 points is weird cause we’d never just take 1 point in it, and there’s several interactions that i don’t know if they exist or not which is why this post isn’t 70 pages long as it’s not till alpha and numbers needs to be adjusted that i can give any feedback on the subject.
Wailing arrow as BM same as kill shot / in for the kill… mechanically it is opposed for the player character to use abilities as mastery and only buffs pet damage.
dire pack is too expensive of an investment to give 10% per dire beast on abilities that hit like wet noodles.
- Marksmanship
this is a mess. whoever designed this probably thinks we’re somehow keeping the tier set we have atm with multiple 4+ talent point choices to get abilities and passives that are as of currently entirely skippable for single target due to how expensive an investment it is, but also needed for AoE making many core functionalities too expensive to pick up because there’s 10 additional talent points needing to be spent on multiple rank nodes instead of making new and interesting talents and decisions we have LEGION REWORK 2.0 where we have a second coming of chopping up our passives into different talents AGAIN then telling us we have a choice in what we can pick while also entirely telling us to get foxed because we still don’t have the full fledged old passives such as critical strikes with aimed shot refunding half it’s focus cost with careful aim.
additionally to all of this… we S T I L L do not get a ranged DoT spec with mobility aka real survival playstyle thru talents when it costs you literally freaking nothing to make the tree wider in order to facilitate the old ranged survival spec inside the talents now because it’s not a 3 choice row system anymore. i mean ffs cmon are you even trying? did you think we had forgot? did you think we had forgiven? you get the point.
outside of the extremely obvious “the cost of nodes is too dam high” i’ll more or less address the core philosophy of the tree as there is simply too much to say at an individual node level currently.
aimed shot - too much focus (ba dum tss) on this doing damage and synergizing with so many things, yes it is the core of what marks is as of BFA, but not what all hunters want to be slammed into playing forever as a “pretend sniper” ; the point of talents is OPTIONS and we have 2… AoE and Single target. not a damn thing about this talent tree is a playstyle option.
you either play hard cast aimed shot, or hard cast aimed shot, or hard cast aimed shot but it’s 3-7 targets. absolutely genius design guys.
light/heavy ammo i will not discredit as one of the better talent designs but i want to make this VERY clear… marks is not a 80%+ health single target hyper niche spec anymore, and we do not have the option to be that either. there is not a world where we don’t take AoE/cleave talents when there is literally always aoe/cleave for dungeons, most raid fights, and thinking it’s okay to have the “option” of a pure st build for like 2-3 raid bosses a tier is some serious synthwave out of touch mentality.
if marks has barrage/explosive shot it doesn’t excuse us from not being able to use trick shots effectively with no volley, no rapid fire, and a 6 point investment to get what is currently literally just 1 talent that’s been dead all expansion as it too has been split into two nodes.
there is no option for us to cast aimed shot on the move, no option to replace aimed shot with explosive shot, or have aimed shot be instant again even if it was a super expensive talent investment to do so.
lock and load should be a 3 point node that’s 5,9,14% chance, followed by another 3 point node of aimed shot has 33% 66% 100% reduced cast time.
careful aim should be a 3 point talent of “you do 40% more damage to targets above 90/80/70% health” and not just aimed shot.
bullseye needs a branching path to focus refund on critical strikes that’s also an extra 50% critical strike chance against targets above 90/80/70% health so we can have the historically highest player percentage playing a single spec and not just because it was overpowered design that not a single hunter asked to be reworked back.
we also do not have black arrow, real explosive shot, and no option to even remotely have that playstyle again, you can VERY EASILY add a further right side of the tree that follows a more DoT based playstyle that changes aimed shot into old explosive shot, black arrow that procs lock n load down the tree as well, and FFS can we get serpent spread as a node under serpentstalker’s trickery instead of this garbage can chewed up bone version of what we’ve been asking about for 6 god damn years now… arcane shot and multi-shot applies serpent sting. that’s it… it’s not a big ask, and we shouldn’t need to “compromise” on a game that you can literally just balance the numbers because we want to play a certain way that you’ve removed.
it’s not like we’re asking for aspect of the fox back. we just want to play how we used to be able to with still giving the “stand and aim” sniper enjoyers the option to also enjoy their desired playstyle too and not have an either or situation which has lead to the resentment of most of the hunter playerbase.
- survival
it’s still not fun and is still just a bastardization of beast mastery and “wouldn’t it be cool if we had melee hunter like back in the good ol days” … no. no it wouldn’t. this should’ve been a 4th spec from the start and not removing most hunter’s favorite spec, stealing and removing abilities from beast mastery to give to this half engineer half melee bm trash in the expansion all about spec identity.
this is such a far cry from trying to capture the “rexxar” vibe because you can’t even dual wield.
what exactly IS melee hunter’s identity? it sure isn’t “survival” because you’re throwing explosives while being right next to them and near your pet which has more interaction between them than the literal hunter spec that’s all about caring for their pet beast mastery.
the sad thing about survival is at this point if marks could just play like old ranged survival and it was fun we’d stop caring… but it’s just never been the case. it’s still nothing like a hunter, stole passives and abilities from another spec without being remotely unique in any sense, and it’s not enjoyable to play because of that.
the only reason players are playing survival now is because it’s 3 buttons to do the 2nd highest damage in the game with minimal effort… not quite as braindead as warlocks and their abusively overbloated utility kit which is what leads me to the final point.
- mobility, utility, survivability
hunter for a very long time was the “hunter job” class. it’s literally still called a hunter job because only hunters did it, we babysat the crybaby warlocks and mages who didn’t want to do it and we took pride in it.
now we don’t have mobility, utility, or survivability.
we’ve long since been the squishiest class in the game and liability to take to progress because of this.
we don’t have any unique utility anymore, you can argue “but binding shot is so good” there’s a million other AoE CC’s that are just as good and better, it’s not a separate DR or with ring of peace for example absolutely no DR.
mobility… the original reason we don’t have survivability has been completely stripped away from us to the point we spend more time standing still to cast aimed shot than most other casters while never getting any damage reduction for doing so.
aspects as aura’s were removed, most of which are entirely gone while what we have left is mockeries of what they were.
iron hawk for our DR? gone.
fox? “too overpowered”
cheetah/pack? it’s now a sprint cooldown instead of optional active, and “griefing” despite easily being able to have trailblazer effect other players.
wailing arrow is not silencing shot.
frost trap (now tar trap) used to be relatively rare to have an AoE slow, now everyone and their mother has one. DK’s death and decay is the best at 90% slow, and takes a few seconds till it’s on par with tar trap, and is effectively just a root with a much lower CD.
freezing trap? lots of classes have permanent CC like this now, and most of the time is just used as an extra interrupt if they’re even trappable.
so what actual less common utility do hunters bring?
lust/hero… specifically tied to a pet that 2 other classes can also cast, and if you’re playing marks you lose 10% damage for casting it, and then if u want to dismiss your pet it now has a cast time because “haha hunters and pets have a connection” … as if lone wolf wasn’t an indicator that maybe we don’t as marks?
i don’t understand why marks isn’t able to have 10% leech and lust without a pet if lone wolf is taken (as it’s a talent now, not baseline even tho clearly you’re taking it since damage stacking)
survivability of a not that very mobile but still people think it’s mobile class -
turtle, a fake immunity that doesn’t clear debuffs or prevent damage already existing on you and you can’t attack during it.
exhil - a long as hell CD to heal for 30% health, you can cast mend pet with a leech pet and heal this much basically.
(when no pet only) or tenacity - THREE MINUTE cooldown for 20% DR for 6 seconds.
feign death is useful sometimes and most other times it’s only used bcus of a mistake.
that’s it… compare this to warlock which isn’t meant to be mobile.
the post is already long enough to go through that total bs and with all the utility, survivability, mobility that warlock has it should NEVER be top damage but is literally always top 3 without fail… hunters don’t actually care to be top 3 dps as we were supposed to have high utility, and 100% mobility as the trade off for not being highest dps and because we’re SUPPOSED TO BE mobile we had less survivability.
none of this is addressed in these talents. we are currently and going forward seem to remain just a worse warlock/mage.