The current changes to melee hunter make it almost worthless for us to play melee at all, which is one thing that seemed the most interesting to me for SoD to being with?
Raptor Strike no longer being “spammable” and being added back to your next melee swing just feels clunky. You seem to be wanting us to play Survival and traps, however you make it near worthless for us to grab the new Wyvern Strike rune if that is the case.
Even as a “two handed” option, the build went from being really smooth on live to waiting a ton for RNG procs of Mongoose Bite or RNG resets of Raptor Strike.
We have three attacks if you take Wyvern Strike, all being over 10 second cooldowns. We are waiting very long just to be able to even press a button. And even then, you buffed traps to do much more damage than Wyvern Strike ever will do? So why would I select this rune at all over Trap Launcher, even as a two handed option?
The addition of Wyvern Strike seems very exciting, however, the current placement is funneling us into a weird playstyle of taking Chimera Shot where we want to Wyvern Strike > run away to Chimera > run back in for another Wyvern Strike because we simply have very long cooldowns on buttons to press at any moment, even with Mongoose Bite triggering somewhat often? Some people are even suggesting we go full into Chimera + Lock and Load where we will do Wyvern > Feign Death trap (because no combat trap) > run away Chimera reset #1 > run back to melee Wyvern > run away again Chimera reset #2 > run back to melee Wyvern all before Flanking Strike is usable again and Raptor Strike will just freely fire off a macro to all our spells whenever it’s up? Then once Feign Death is off CD, we’ll repeat this process. I feel like this is a very clunky playstyle.
A second thing is that with this Raptor Strike being “next melee” style of an ability, Raptor’s Fury will very rarely reach it’s potential of five stacks. It is currently bugged on the PTR, but just counting it out in my head it was very very rare that I got to three stacks in the duration time. With the buffs to T.N.T, I feel we will rarely ever use this rune due to Raptor Strike not being an instant cast attack any longer.
I believe the core issues here, is Wyvern Strike being place on the feet slot, as well as all of our attacks being such a long CD, even with the “reset” mechanics in place. My main suggestion is the Wyvern strike change, however, the others could give us some useful changes as well. My suggestions are simply opening up the rune placements a little:
Move Wyvern Strike to the gloves slot.
-This gives 1 melee ST option, 1 melee AOE option, 1 ranged ST option, and 1 ranged AOE option.
-This also makes this rune an option as if we start playing Survival, we’ll always want Trap Launcher due to trap talents + T.N.T rune buffs, which makes this rune obsolete and dead on arrival.
Move Beast Mastery off the gloves slot to the chest slot OR cloak.
-This gives us the option to either play with a pet for 10% pet damage, or play without a pet with Lone Wolf self buff damage.
Move Cobra Slayer to helmet slot rune.
-This gives melee hunter a decent option where we won’t be having to try and do some weird Lock and Load tactics because honestly, most helmet runes are very poor.
-I personally think this is the most “out there” solution, due to us never really planning to drop Catlike Reflexes on the helmet due to the cooldown reduction that it gives us, however, if cooldowns are addressed, I believe this could give us a nice helmet rune option where we currently are lacking as Rapid Killing and Lock and Load are completely worthless runes to melee hunter.
Another “last resort” option would be to just give us Trap Launcher as baseline, because with the current buffs and changes you guys are making, I don’t see a world where I will want to ever swap this rune out for anything else, similar to how Heart of the Lion was before.
I also think some cooldown times need to be adjusted, otherwise we are going to end up having a lot of downtime in our playstyle, while other classes, or even our counter spec of ranged hunter, has much more fast-paced/interactive toolkits.