Marksman hunter nerfs for 9.0.5 have to be reverted!
Before starting to present my arguments I want to make clear that I’m only talking about PVE, Raids as it’s what I’m the most familiar with and care about. This nerf does not apply to PVP as Kyrian is the favored covenant and the legendary getting nerfed is not used.
Current state of hunter in raid :
The raid logs I will refer to are 99 percentile in mythic as it shows what classes are capable when pushed at their limits. https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/26#dataset=99
As we can see in overall Marksman is currently in a good spot for raiding. Currently 7th out of 24 barely making it in the top 30% of DPS specs. If we go more in depth and look at fight by fight, the higher hunter goes on the ranking is number 4 on Lady Inerva Darkvein.
However the two other alternatives to Marksman are pretty much memes at this point. They’re both dead last and by a big margin. The one fight where the Beast Mastery spec has some value is on Council of Blood where it slightly beats Marksman. Other than that exceptions Survival and Beast Mastery are consistently in the top 5 worst specs.
Effects of the nerf :
I’ve spent a lot of time talking to multiple Hunters that share the same concerns as me. We all agreed that the most accurate description of the nerf is -30% Wild Spirits damage. Depending on the fight that nerf fluctuates between 4% - 15% overall dps. The low end being in a pure single target environment and the high end being on a trash pack that last about half a minute in mythic+.
Post 9.0.5 state of Hunter:
To estimate the effect of the nerf in raid let’s take a rough average of 5% dps loss, apply it to our current average numbers and compare it to our stance in the leaderboard.
Note that 5% overall dps loss is actually way lower than what the reality will be.
So we take our current dps of 6 791 and we multiply it by 0.95 to get our estimated 5% nerf.
The estimated DPS of Marksman hunter in raid environment post nerf is 6 451.
Now let’s compare it to the other classes before their respective buffs.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/26#dataset=99&aggregate=amount
According to the estimated DPS, Marksman hunter will be almost exactly at the current dps of Havoc which list number 20th out of 27. Which will make all 3 Hunter specs be in the bottom 25% DPS specs in that raid. And that’s not taking into account the multiple specs that gets actual buffs in 9.0.5. Meaning that it’s more than likely that Hunter will be even lower than that.
If you don’t agree or you have doubts, feel free to run the math on a boss to boss basis by taking off 30% Wild Spirit damage.
On top of all the math, we can talk about the value of hunter to a raiding composition. We have no raid buffs/debuffs, we are quite likely the class with the least sustain and mitigation, we have a fake immune that doesn’t work on half the mechanics, we are mobile and the dps rotation is quite simple.
If we compare our utility to other classes it’s easy to say that without having good dps numbers there is absolutely no reason to bring a hunter to a raid group.
It’s quite obvious that the current Marksman nerfs are totally underserved based on their standing in the raid. We are nowhere near the top 3-5 specs. If those changes go through without compensating buffs the spec and the class as a whole will become utterly useless.
One side note for my fellow Hunter players that favor Beast Mastery and Survival. The buffs applied to those classes for 9.0.5 could be qualified as jokes or as a big spit in the face. Marksman needs the nerfs reverted and the other specs of Hunter need actual buffs and not early april’s fools. This class is one of the most popular of the game and is constantly targeted by tuning mistakes. How do you think the players that only want to play hunter will react when they constantly get declined to groups because their class is bad ?
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EDIT : Follow-up post a week in 9.0.5
Quick reminder that this post is only about PVE and I did not include any PVP changes because I don’t know that much about it. Feel free to make your own Topic if you want to discuss it.
Follow-up to my initial post 1 week into the patch
After a week of raid we’ve got some data about the stance of Hunter in raid in the new patch. Disclaimer It’s still early in the patch and a few things are subject to change. We also have close to no M+ information as this week was Tyrannical and no one really tried to push keys.
We can see some other classes got descent damage boost thanks to their recent buffs and we can expect to see them improve over the weeks as people get more used to their new gameplay and therefor perform better. However, due to no new build being viable for Marksman and no new playstyle (for raid), it’s very likely that the numbers will not be going up compared to other classes. Therefor I don’t expect Marksman to be doing better in the upcoming weeks than it did this week.
Reminding of Hunter’s position before the changes and predictions :
Marksman was doing good hovering between the best 5-8 dps in mythic raid. On it’s best fight (Inerva) Marksman was in average number 4 in damage output.
On the other hand, BM and Survival were quite awful hanging around the bottom 4 dps spec at all time.
I was expecting Marksman to fall as low at 20th out of 24(wrote 27 in initial post quick I was probably half asleep) dps specs and I didn’t expect BM or Survival to get any better. Quite a high amount of people told me I was over estimating the nerfs and that Marksman would be mid tier in the worse case scenario. So, let’s take a look.
Current state of Hunter after the changes :
Nerf on MM, slight buff on BM and to be fair, I’ve no idea if anything happened to survival since it’s still doing less damage than a Ventyr Hpal.
To look at current data I will go down to 95 Percentile as a few people told me that 99 was too high and quite not accurate. On top of that there is not that many parses out since it’s only been a week.
Warcraft Logs - Combat Analysis for Warcraft
Let’s start by talking about the current state of Survival.
Beginning of the discussion.
It’s still terrible.
End of the discussion.
For BM even if it’s still hovering around 3rd to 5th bottom spec it got a nice change on the legendary item which is used and most BM players seem to be really happy about that change. Even if it’s ranking did not change much it got a fair damage increase and it’s not that far behind the low-mid tier specs. Except for the early April’s Fool on Spitting Cobra the changes were quite positive. A step in the right direction!
Marksman… well, nerf or bugfix, call it what you want, but the spec took a slap. It does not make the spec unplayable by any mean! However it went from a comfortable position of mid-high tier spec to a low-mid tier. A nerf that a lot of people agree on it not being necessary except for a group of die hard BM hunters that would rather have all 3 hunter specs be awful than have MM be better than BM. Currently fluctuating between the 19th and 21st spec on the average dps chart, Marksman is not doing too good.
Note : It is essential to compare Hunter at a level of play to another class at the same level of play. I see a fair amount of people saying that Hunter is totally fine because they compare themselves (Top 1-5% Hunter players) to the average of another class. We have to compare pineapple with pineapples here. (That’s a brand new saying, you know what I mean)
My thoughts… and yours ?
BM can be slightly more effective than Marksman on some fights which leave
Hunter players a choice on what spec to play on a few bosses. It’s quite nice to have our specs be closer to each other and have more of a choice to play the spec we enjoy the most. However that’s not really the way we wanted our specs to come close to one another.
Marksman Hunter advantages had massive burst damage every 2 minutes, nerfed to good burst damage but not exceptional. Hunter remains one of the best classes to do mechanics that involve movement as we are highly mobile and can keep good dps while on the move.
Hunter doesn’t bring any raid CD or buffs, it’s quite squishy compared to most other classes and it’s “immunity” is working on only half the mechanics.
Hunter’s viability is not that bad considering it’s ability to do mechanics, however, the overall damage is currently in the low to very low end compared to other classes. There is really nothing making hunters unique and essential to a raid team which is a shame.
If you share the same concerns as I have for Hunter during the end of that tier and maybe the next ones, share this post and let’s get a discussion going that will go up to Blizzard, even if we have to contact them via other platforms since they ignore their own forum.
Let us know what you think about hunter changes. Happy with the BM changes ? Are the Marksman nerfs deserved, undeserved ? Survival … ?