Preview: Hunters in Shadowlands (speculation)

Classes Hunter
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Some of my personal thoughts:

  • Hunters will somewhat homogenize back into a single play style, with class specs providing flavor in certain directions.
  • Survival and Beast Mastery specs can both be either melee or ranged depending on your equipped weapon.
    • Melee weapons will change Arcane Shot into Raptor Strike, Multishot into Carve, Kill Shot into Mongoose Strike (mimicking Kill Shot’s functionality), etc. Talents boosting either of these abilities will affect both appropriately (ie “Serpent Spread”, an old Survival talent which caused your multi-shot to spread serpent sting will also cause Carve to spread serpent sting).
    • Using abilities with dual-wielded weapons will strike with both of them at the same time. Using abilities with a single weapon or two-handed weapon will otherwise function as expected/normal.
  • Lone Wolf will be available for both Survival or Marksman Hunters.
  • Ammo pouches and quivers will be returning in the form of hunter specific trinkets, increasing ranged attack speed and possibly providing additional benefits. Can be enchanted similar to other ranged hunter weapons.
  • Survival talents will once again focus primarily on enhancing their traps, utility, group utility, and DoT-style damage (poisons, burns, bleeds, etc). Examples:
    • Trap Mastery: Grants two charges of each of your traps and allows you to have two of each unique trap out at a time. Also grants the ability to disarm traps, similar to the rogue skill.
    • Serpent Spread: Causes Carve and Multishot to spread the effects of your Serpent Sting for half of its normal duration.
    • Hunting Party: Increases the attack and movement speed of you and your party/raid members by 10%.
  • Beastmaster talents will once again focus primarily on enhancing your pet(s) directly (more health, defense, damage, attack speed, etc). Any utility and so forth gained from the hunter will be gained through enhancements to the pet. Examples:
    • Beast Hypnosis: Fear Beast now allows you to mind control an enemy beast instead of causing it to flee in fear.
    • Roar: Your pet’s Growl will now generate aggro against all nearby enemies, and has a shorter cooldown. Also increases your pet’s defensive stats.
    • Dragon Training: Allows you to train dragonkin. Dragonkin are special pets that have enhanced resistances to certain damage types (based on the type of dragonkin) and several other abilities that are unique to the dragonkin family.
  • Marksman talents will focus on enhancing ranged combat (as expected, though hopefully this’ll be their best iteration yet). Example:
    • Perfect Aim: Doubles the casting time and resource cost of aimed shot, but quadruples its damage.
    • Blast Off: Using disengage while targeting an enemy within 10 yards will also deal damage and knock that enemy back. Enemies near the target are also slightly knocked back away.
    • 360 No Scope: Aimed shot is now instant cast.
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Slight review or something for this ,Finale, but if BM were to get Dragon Training, it would be a be-all pet and talent choice and certainly make BM at least more used than other specs.

I honestly think that if the Ranged/Melee duality was added back in, it could help fix some the the class’ issues, especially those around Survival(or make a Ranged Version of Survival with a different theme or playstyle).
I hope that pets get upgraded back to how they were before, where pets were unique, such as the Quilen being able to revive or just each family having their own unique perks and not ability copies that are shared.

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My speculation is largely pessimistic: I’m 99% certain that MM is going to be the underpreforming turret spec with a few old abilities slapped on so Blizzard can claim they’ve been listening, BM will outperform it by being the go-to easy mode, and SV will have more tools to make it even better at melee combat.

Predicting that hunters will give more free HKs than a Chinese protest, and if real life is any indication, Blizzard will squash them just as quickly.

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I certainly wish many changes take place in Shadowlands, but I believe they’ve already said that we shouldn’t expect some major overhauls.

I’m really not sure if hunter specs will be changing that much, which is a shame because MM is simply horrible, survival is melee so no thanks, leaving BM as the only option.

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I would love to see ‘Subclasses’ added where we could choose a melee subclass or some sort of shadow ranger for MM.

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I’m definitely hoping for 4th specs.

Would love to see Dark Ranger added as Hunter’s 4th Spec and having an Inquisitor or Zealot as Priest’s 4th Spec (Ranged Holy DPS).

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I hope not! We don’t need ANOTHER marksman class. Some of us want to play ranged with a pet, and we don’t want to be a pet remote control.

Instead of decimating the Hunter class to fill their sundry fantasies, they should to create another class to satisfy their wet dreams. I’m tired of them trying to cram 5 or 6 different play-styles into 3 specs. That’s what ruined that class to begin with.

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