Other classes have long melee range anyways. Or ranged abilities. Survival needs raw mitigation or self healing because it has to stay melee to do dmg. Roots break on dmg too. Kiting is not an acceptable dmg mitigation in modern arena.
Not all root breaks on damage. Counterattack didn’t break on damage in the past.
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Ok so retribution is getting a rework, maybe we don’t have time for a hunter rework and perhaps there are even more classes ahead of us that the developers have decided need it first. But it’s important to communicate that to the player base so we aren’t wondering. This just leads to unneeded frustration and confusion.
Druid, Paladin, and Hunter have traditionally been the most played classes in wow, but the hunter development cycle has always been slow for the past couple of years. A lot of classes have had multiple reworks and while not always successful, at least got their chance. It has been frustrating to not even hear that hunter is on the backburner.
I work in game development myself so it’s understandable when you have a lot in the stack and only so many developers to tackle the problems. The thing that makes me frustrated as a player though is the lack of communication.
Blizzard has been great about doing roadmaps for the game lately and I am loving wow again for the first time in years. I would just love to see a roadmap for class adjustments as well or the reasoning behind some of the decisions being made.
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I was under the impression that there was a Class lead dev that covered both Shaman and Hunter, don’t quote me on that though.
For a big company like Blizzard, they should have enough bandwith to work on more than one class at a time and a Ret rework shouldn’t limit changes to other classes.
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I can’t see a 4th spec ever being implemented but with the new spec trees it should be possible to provide the RSV experience again, which would be my preferred choice. They need to take the survival tree and spread it out a bit more, kind of like WW monk. Left side of the tree is geared towards melee, middle of the tree is geared towards traps/dots/bombs/aoe, and right side of the tree is geared towards ranged. They can help make this work by adding some melee based choices into the baseline hunter tree and take away things we should automatically have…looking at you concussive shot, misdirect, and tar trap. Also remove some of the bloat, why do I have to spend a point on SotF and then 3 more points just to make it decent?? Yeah, I get the CD reduction helps other defensives but we shouldn’t need 4 points just to get 1 decent defensive.
There is a lot of room for improvement in all of the hunter trees and I believe that it would be doable to allow both a ranged and melee version in survival with an overhaul that would be on par with what they are doing to ret.
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If you look at the width of the current trees on a class like fury warrior and and look at how many of the abilities marksmanship took from WOD survival hunter, I’d say there’s a case to just add a branch to MM hunter and let MM go either instant cast dot ranger or long range nuke sniper.
You’d place aoe and general talents in a middle tree branch and more of the playstyle specific ones on the right and left.
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He’s representing the majority of Hunters with those statements 
If this comes at the expense of our ranged capability in melee range, or requires us to be near/in melee for full DPS, absolutely not.
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I agree with you, you would think something would have been said by now after weeks of frustration and posts about the changes and state of the class. But we can’t really do anything else other than wait and see what happens.
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I do appreciate a community council member trying to do something.
These people trying to derail the conversation are being very counter productive.
Like most people have said I wish we could get some indication that the devs are aware of these issues, and what the plan to do to address it.
BM hunter issues are my biggest concern, but Survival and MM are also down bad as well. The class as a whole is at the bottom of the meters overall with zero raid utility. Crazy how long this is going on. I feel like part of the problem is how no real steamers play hunter to draw attention to all of this.
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Nah, I was thinking more like utility stuff. Instead of bursting shot, buttstrike to knockback, wing clip not being replaced by concussive shot, counterattack, etc.
Appreciate the effort, but, there has been zero engagement from Blizzard around hunters for months on months. It is impossible to have a dialogue with another side if they don’t even participate.
At this point, I’m really hoping that there is no Hunter Developer, because, the counter to that is that there is actually a Hunter Developer, in which case, the last few months is completely baffling to have been done with zero communication. Regardless of which side of the coin above is true, Blizzard should be embarrassed by the lack of communication, especially in the Dragonflight year of “we are listening, and engaging more”. Perhaps, but certainly not if you are a Hunter.
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Agreed. Better no communication or updates because there is no one to do it than there is someone but they are completely inept at their job!
craven’s stratagem effect needs to come back with the shorter cooldown version, hunter’s mark should increase all physical damage dealt to the target by 5%, and the legion trait where aspect of the turtle healed you for a percentage of your health should come back.
Maybe give all hunter specs mending bandage on top of it.
Bring back the battle rez pet, make animal companion pets have their active and autocast abilities while applying passives.
Reduce the cooldown of camo too.
True shot aura and another group buff on top that would grant allies “thrill of the hunt” increasing ranged and melee phyical crit chance and replenished caster’s mana when landing a critical strike.
Giving guardian druids and/or all druids leader of the pack back and placing it in the druid tree as a capstone talent would combo well with a physical comp of a hunter/monk/warrior core.
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I would love to have pet talents again so we could have those kinds of benefits like Bullheaded, Heart of the Phoenix, Bloodthirsty, Last Stand, Cornered, etc.
Current Hunter pets feels so one dimensional. 
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First. Thanks for posting this here and on CC.
Hunter tree’s are really sad. Compared to other tree’s they have limited options and way too many +10% damage talents. It’s hard to go from warrior or shaman to the hunter tree. The tree is just so boring and plain.
I think hunter has a huge identity issue that is causing the specs to be so limited and/or janky.
Hunter started as a class with 3 specs that were ranged, with 1 pet, and few melee skills.
Now we have:
Ranged with 2 pets (AC is basically required)
Ranged with no pets
Melee with 1 pet
((Note: Ranged with 1 pet is no longer a viable option. Sad face.))
As you pointed out in the post, this causes a huge set of dead talents (pet talents, ranged talents) for MM/SV, limiting an already limited tree. It also leaves SV ignored (no melee talents in the class tree, but lots of ranged?!! I think this is the only spec in the game totally absent from their class tree.). It’s hard to add stuff that works for 2/3 specs only (or 1/3 specs). Honestly BM comes out the best as it can use the pet and ranged abilities.
Truly these are 3 classes stuck together as “specs”.
Suggestion: The Shaman tree has the same issue (specs very different) and solves it by making the class tree utility only. Pet/damage skills should go into the spec trees. Make big spec trees (add 10+ talents to each), and a tighter class tree with existing utility + new utility only.
Or redesign the specs so they share more in common.
PvP Issues:
The hunter theme of defence by kiting needs to be looked at. Hunter still strong in PvP 1v1 but struggles a bit outside of duels. And the arena cage is particularly problematic. Making them super tanky seems wrong though. 2 changes or disengage? Idk
PvE Defence:
Hunter has a hodgepodge of abilities now, (turtle, aspect, bear). But other classes got so many new ones. For Hunter, which shares themes with warrior and rogue, I’d like to see something on short CD like feint or spell reflect. Not those exact abilities, but something on a 30 sec CD, that gives a short (4-5 sec) DR/avoidance (20-30%). This is to replace the FDeath bonuses from SL that we lost.
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The most frustrating part is not the damage, because in mythic + I can keep up with most classes as MM. As I get to 16 or higher keys, getting an invite is almost non existent. We do not bring anything useful to a group, minus lust but at a cost. Even if we provide lust, we sacrifice a strong defensive. No one wants to summon a pet and dismiss for 3 seconds during a fight, that’s just annoying and punishing. The class seems old, and unpolished.
I am happy for Retribution Paladin’s but they are performing exceptionally well right now. To have one of your most popular classes being bottom of the food chain is really concerning.
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