Meaningful choice , when the punchline is the joke 
The main reason I did all 4 is hopefully at the end of the expac all the covenant sets will go into general transmog then I 'll probably ger rid of 1 or 2 of them .
Plus since this is so meaningful that I can’t see all the stories on one toon I made 2 extra for SL.
Hunters must be buffed by 10% to compensate for 9.0.5 nerfs.
10% aura buff is too much in my opinion. Reverting the 5% nerf on Aimed Shot and Arcane shot would be the strict minimum. It would make us be a mid tier class in raid instead of lower tier.
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.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/26#dataset=95&aggregate=amount&sample=7
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 … ?
Man I’ve been asking to revert the double tap/aimed shot nerf pre season 1 I don’t think blizzard un nerfs hunters ever lol this sucks.
he said, making a post demanding reinstatement of the dominance of a specific build and covenant instead of fixing the class as a whole.
mmhmmm, doesn’t come off disingenuous at all.
Looks like you didn’t understand what I was trying to say.
I was disappointed in people that play only BM “happy” to see MM being brought down. When what was needed was a massive buff to BM and Surv to get them to MM damage output.
And on the second quote, well … it’s pretty obvious. I simply want all spec to be close in damage so we can choose what to play without being pressured to go for the stronger spec.
Both post communicate the same message. Buff our lower performing spec to bring them to the level of our higher performing one without nerfing our best performing spec if a nerf isn’t deserved.
but the OP isn’t “Hunters as a group need a buff” its " Night Fae MM nerf has to be reverted"
I currently play Marksman and they did a mistake by doing that nerf so it’s what that post is about. BM was seeing some buff at the same time so we can see that the devs try to do something about it even if it’s not enough yet. Tbh idk why I bother answering you when you’re obviously a troll.
I was MM up until this past week to try the BM buffs out, this nerf didn’t affect me because I’m not the “chosen” covenant. Maybe I’m hoping now that there isn’t a single specific build parsing near the top that the class as a whole can be raised up. Yanno, like what I’ve repeatedly said on each of these threads.
Oh okay, bring everything down just for the hope that something isn’t BIS.
Perfect balance is close to impossible and there will always be a BIS setup for a spec and always a class stronger than others. But lowering the difference between to top specs and the lower ones has to be one of the priority for Blizzard to promote the viability of all specs in all content.
good one. ecksdeeeeeee
“bring everything down”, as if it was opposite day and every build except one was great. You’re a real treat.
as Kreez said, of course there will always be a best (and worst) but the idea is that every spec is at least viable and not one specific build being so far above the rest that its absurd.
I would love it if they buffed both BM and MM. I have this whole spider thing I’m going for. Just doesn’t feel the same with only one spider, pet spider and the spider mount. I like having that big old army. Same reason I would love them to make stampede work like it use to with pulling pets from the stable. RAWR feel the wrath of my spider army!
I added the follow-up post I made a few days ago to the first one so new readers are able to get easy access to it instead of randomly seeing it amongst the 115 replies.
