Alpha Feedback- The state of Hunter design going into The War Within
Hunters need alarmingly enormous attention and focus. On the scale of reworks to at least MM, and probably BM and maybe Survival also. I am primarily a competitive PvE player with gameplay mechanics and design philosophy being my main focus. Number tuning and balancing is always variable and adjustable on a patch-to-patch basis. Design is something we are usually “stuck’ with for expansion length durations at a time. Getting design right, being fun, engaging, and powerful all simultaneously is the goal for all specs in the game. I imagine there are numerous issues with the class in other areas, such as PvP. I don’t PvP personally myself so I can’t offer detailed feedback in those areas, I hope that someone else who is capable does so. Design should work well for both PvE and PvP, or in the case that it is focused on one or the other, at least not negatively impact the other primary endgame activity. Hunter design currently fails to meet your own stated goals for design of talent trees in numerous ways. Each individual issue is not catastrophic on its own, but this is a case of death by a thousand tiny cuts. The totality of the issues in combination together leave hunters in a clunky, unfulfilling, unfun situation. The lack of attention to fixing these issues over a long period of time makes the feelings even worse.
Hearing that Hero talent updates might be on the horizon in a future build is positive news, but it barely begins to scratch the surface of addressing the problems with the hunter designs that lessen the day-to-day enjoyment of playing the class in endgame PvE content.
Class Tree Design Philosophy
Our class tree is the basis for the shared identity between the Hunter specs. The class tree is probably the least-important tree to get “right”, so this isnt the largest issue on its own. However, in combination with the spec trees, it is an issue. If Hunter had room for cool ideas, flavor, utility, they would be in the class tree. The class tree is meant to be about options. The original talent preview said
“Some of our biggest goals in a class and talent revamp are to increase player agency over your character’s progression and build, provide meaningful rewards while leveling, and reinforce your character’s connection to both their class and their spec.”
It also noted “The class tree contains a core set of abilities available to all specs in a class and has a higher proportion of utility choices. It’s a place where you can, among other things, choose some abilities or passives that draw from the identity of other specializations to give your character some hybrid flavor, or simply to grab something particularly useful for certain content.”
Here is some stated design goals for the significant reworks recently given to Affliction warlock
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Ensure each capstone is interesting and exciting.
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Reduce the amount of throughput talents, to free up utility choices.
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Reduce the number of ranks for talents that don’t warrant multiple ranks.“
Here are some from Fire mage, the additional nodes about opting-out of complexity and simplifying rotation are not needed for Hunter specs.
- Allow you to acquire each specialization’s core gameplay with less talent point investment.
- Provide new nodes that can help you adapt your damage profile to better match a given encounter’s demands.”
Class-wide Issues
The Class Tree has numerous nodes related to pets, despite Marksmanship in PvE having no use of pets. This does not match with drawing from the identity of other specializations or providing agency. In short, MM has 2/3rds of a class tree. This is not unique to MM, but certainly feels kinda bad. In reverse, the only real ability for BM and SV to pull from MM is in the form of Explosive Shot. (not even barrage, as I will mention)
It also requires pathing through several nodes that have no use in PvE, such as Binding Shackles.
Some utility is effectively locked behind other utility, even when you might only want the latter option.
If I want Scare beast, I MUST take Tranquilizing Shot, even in cases where I have no use for Tranquilizing Shot. Making Scare Beast effectively always cost 2 talent points (if not more).
Several throughput talents are dependent on Utility. There have been numerous raid fights in Dragonflight that had 0 use for Binding Shot or Scatter Shot. Yet both are ALWAYS required to be taken for access to Hunter’s Avoidance. This results in even fewer available class tree talent points to be given “agency” and make compelling interesting choices with.
Hunter Utility Issues
Sentinel Owl
- is just bad, it is not useful utility. There is no situation in dragonflight in which you were excited or compelled to bring a hunter to your raid or M+ group because of Sentinel Owl. What purpose does it serve in existing if it is only BARELY useful on a single raid fight in the entire expansion (Echo of Neltharian, better hope the people who got Volcanic Heart were in your specific group of 4 other people for this to be useful for them). If the design is going to stay leech/ line of sight related, it just needs to be raidwide to ever be compelling. If you want to keep it as a party-wide benefit (similar to Windfury totem), then it needs to change away from those effects. I’ve suggested a “Nature/Arcane” version of windufry totem as a possible idea, as those are the two main historical spell schools within the hunter identity, and it would give Boomkin, Arcane mage, Assassination Rogue. Something like “all nature/arcane damage is increased by X% for Y time”
Scare Beast
- was not used in any raid fight in the entirety of Dragonflight. It was also not used in all of Sepulcher. It was also not used in all of Sanctum of Domination. The last time it was useful was on Huntsman Altimor, the 2nd boss of the raid. Why does this ability have a cast time? Isnt BM supposed to be fully mobile? Why does this have a focus cost? What other utility buttons with such extremely narrow use cases have such additional resource and movement restriction requirements? Why is such a weak utility needed to be further kneecapped by these factors? Why should I ever need to worry when fighting Huntsman Altimor that I shouldn’t spend all my focus, in order to be able to CC an add?
- This is also a good time to double check the ranges on hunter spells and utility, Being in range to DPS but not to CC is clunky. Scatter Shot suffers from this same issue for the ranged specs.
Tar Trap
- is a good slow. However it also almost completely negates Concussive shot from ever existing. In no time during a raid in Dragonflight was Concussive shot a better option than Tar Trap. Why do both exist if I will only ever use one of them? Illusions of choice that don’t actually practically affect reality.
Tranquilizing Shot + Improved Tranquilizing Shot
- This button being on the GCD feels bad. I am never happy pressing this button. The only time I would have been happy pressing this button was on Tarragrue, which an anima power negated entirely. It’s only other use in the past 2 expansions of raiding has been on Raszageth, and not even to dispel an enrage effect, just as a magic dispel. Improved Tranquilizing Shot does not make pressing this button feel substantially better. It is not worth a talent point, partly because Tranquilizing Shot itself is rarely worth a talent point. This focus generation (or some other positive effect) would also feel much better if given to successful Counter Shot interrupts, as is the case on several other classes.
Freezing Trap
You frequently create mobs which are at least commonly CC’d, if not required to be CC’d in encounters. Lihuvim adds, or Larodar last phase for example. But Freezing trap is the only CC which unless you can preplace on the spawn of these mobs (some of which do not have consistent spawns or a visual indicator of spawn location prior) that requires you to predict the pathing of these mobs. Some of these mobs randomly fixate a certain player, making them inherently have unpredictable pathing. In order to consistently freeze trap adds on Lihuvim (which you could not pretrap because the trap would be consumed by the intermission adds spawning in the same location, and which were out of range of the boss due to the room being enormous) required first Binding shotting the add, and then freezing trapping them once rooted, requiring 2 CC’s for a single mob to be hard CC’d. No other class’s hard CC is limited in such ways, they are much more on-demand and consistently reliable.
Hunter has no access to any AoE stop, something almost vital to M+ in modern designs, with our closest options being Explosive trap, something antithetical to M+ or…. Bursting Shot, yeah I almost forgot about this ability existing because its in the MM SPEC tree for some reason. Should be a PvP talent.
Master’s Call
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targeting is weird. The Hunter needs to be in range to cast it, but the actual cast range is based on the pet location, so it can fizzle easily. The pet also has travel time. Using this on raszageth was clunky af.
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Why are hunters losing a defensive for gaining the utility to cast freedom.
Wailing arrow
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has a cast time, BM is meant to be fully mobile, it contradicts design.
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AND has a slow travel time. Interrupts are reactive, Wailing arrow is unable to be used reactively, Cast times on enemies are too short for wailing arrow to be used reactively, making available use cases for the ability significantly smaller and fewer in number in practicality. This feels bad, it feels clunky. It is also placed in strange places in the tree, making it compete for capstone level talents, it is a utility button. It belongs in the class tree, if Barrage can be there, so can Wailing Arrow. I have more to mention regarding Dark Ranger Hero Talents in that section.
Design and Tuning Issues within the Class tree
Kill Shot
- is the shared identity button across all 3 specs. Yet it has not been tuned to be the case in PvE situations. BM not pressing Kill Shot as a dps-viable option has been viable. This is just simply a tuning failure which contradicts design philosophy. Moreover, each of the spec trees has dedicated an entire talent node to enabling kill shot. Deathblow for MM, Hunter’s Prey for BM, and Coordinated Kill for Survival. If the shared design of all 3 specs is supposed to relate to Kill Shot and/or Execute, why not simply have one talent in the class tree which can enable Kill Shot above the execute HP threshold, enabling more agency choices? Why make 3 separate talents in all 3 spec trees which accomplish the same thing? This directly contradicts the stated design philosophy of the spec trees vs. the class tree.
Stampede
- Not used in all of Dragonflight Not buffed in any patch notes in all of shadowlands. Not even mentioned in Pack Leader. Why does this talent and ability exist if it is never going to be supported. It is the illusion of choice. There is no additional agency or decision making in providing this talent as an option, it is a noob trap which serves no other legitimate purpose.
Barrage
- This talent is not usable with a 2h weapon. Why is it in the class tree? Oh well at least BM and MM can use it right? Well no, because yet again, this talent went unpicked all of Dragonflight in PvE, there was not a single situation in which it was an optimal choice. Yet again, it was also not buffed, adjusted, redesigned, or changed in a single patch note in all of Dragonflight. If a talent is never viable, it is the same situation as if it never existed at all.
Barrage is especially egregious because it present a lose-lose choice. Atm we chose “tune it so it is not viable” but the alternative choice of “tune it to be a dps viable option” comes with it introducing a new button to 2 specs already either entirely or nearly GCD locked, with better things to spend focus on. And barrage is worse because as 1 button, with its 3s channel time it effectively eats not just 1, but 2 GCD’s into your rotation. And it is also on a 20s cooldown. If you assume a number such as 15 GCD’s per 20s, that means this singular button alone would account for 13.5% of all your time spent, so unless the specs otherwise have 13.5% downtime it diminishes the capability and flow feedback loop of the rest of the core spec functions
Steel Trap
- This talent is serpent sting, except it has an awkward ground based target, a travel time delay, and can miss the target. Nobody enjoys playing with this talent. It is clunky, it provides no engaging gameplay, no even DoT uptime maintenance due to the cooldown. How do you target this ability intuitively on Sennarth, Terros, and Volcoross? Luckily Survival’s melee range makes the usability less of a concern for them due to the low travel time, but that contradicts the design of MM’s mastery which allows it to play at a longer range than every other spec, making the travel time issue as maximally impactful and awkward as possible.
In total, between the required throughput nodes at the bottom, the mandatory pathing, and the defensive nodes. Hunter has a grand total of 6 points to spend on choices. 5 if you want both points in “Pathfinding” and 3 if you want both points in “Born to be Wild”. Those 3-6 points are spent not to get exciting utility, but to get things which are useless a majority of the time in raid. Camouflage, Sentinel Owl, Tar Trap, Tranquilizing Shot, Improved Mend Pet, Concussive Shot, Trailblazer, High Explosive Trap, Entrapment, Binding Shackles. In the rare event that one of these is useful in raid, the necessity to acquire it eliminates effectively all choice within the class tree entirely. Potentially even requiring losing 1 point in valuable throughput or defensive nodes you DO want, such as Natural mending or Born to be Wild.
General Design Issues
Misdirection
- Hunter’s unique utility is in “threat redirection” via Misdirection. However for 2 of the specs, this utility is SEVERELY hindered from being as powerful and useful as it is intended to be. Pet threat is not redirected properly, making misdirection effectively entirely useless for BM. Furthermore, MM is still target HARDCAPPED via Trick Shots. The majority of our threat is only redirected from a maximum of 8 targets per cast, if there is more than 8 targets in a situation where additional threat redirection is useful, we simply have to cross our fingers that the “correct” mobs get ricocheted to and threat redirected from in order for a tank to hold aggro on the entire pack. This is not fun, this does not feel good. Its an inherent logical contradiction of design.
Leech
- is also a near useless tertiary stat for BM, as pet damage does not apply leech properly back to the hunter.
Exhilaration
- being on the GCD feels bad to press and use, it is clunky. I have 2 other universally available buttons which heal lost HP, HP Potions, and Healthstones. Both of these alternatives to Exhilaration are not on the GCD. If I am in danger, getting myself at an HP level to be out of immediate urgent danger as quickly as possible is the best option to me as a player. I will use these limited use, longer cooldown health restoration effects as a priority over exhilaration in danger scenarios. The design of Exhilaration contradicts its own intended use case. Exhilaration cannot be used proactively, it is reactive by design. Furthermore, you design Cooldown reduction effects to Exhilaration, which ignore that often it sits, available, able to be used, and not used in the exact situation it is built to solve, instead favoring an HP potion or Healthstone use in its place. Meaning it sits with the cooldown available, and cooldown reduction going to waste. The design of the talent would be a good talent, if Exhilaration was off the GCD, but because it isn’t, the design of the talent fails to be properly impactful.
Hunter’s Mark
- The shared identity of all 3 Hunter Specs is Kill Shot. Our class identity is inherently tied to execute as a unique strength. Hunter’s Mark is directly contradictory to this design. Hunter’s Mark’s design is bad in general, as it can frequently become effectively useless in any case of early boss HP not mattering to progression, such as when stopping dps for a certain reason, such as on Fyrakk. Hunter’s Mark also has little to no effective benefit in Mythic Plus, in contrast to virtually every other raid/party unique throughput buff.
Durability
- Yep this is a real issue. Legacy of the Windrunners wind arrows for some reason appear to consume weapon durability when they proc. This means that despite not dying (feign death! sadly also useless 95% of the time in PvE) you will frequently find your weapon breaking only 2-3 pulls into a boss, while the rest of your gear is perfectly fine. The longer the pulls, the worse this problem is. This was noticed and reported early in Dragonflight, it has never been bugfixed and still remains an issue currently.
Beast Mastery Issues
The spec overall suffers from being “too simple”. I think having a simple and easy spec to perform well on is good for the game, no problem there, however hitting the skill ceiling of a spec so early feels bad and just kinda wrong, like I shouldn’t be able to do that so easily. It lacks the ability for the player to opt-in to more complexity for the sake of challenging themselves for a negligible minor reward of throughput increase. Players with the ability to do so would enjoy chasing an extra 2% dps, while the rest can safely ignore it and play the spec as it exists now happily.
The spec inherently limits itself, it contradicts with itself, it overcaps on resources. The basic function of BM is kill command as top priority, cobra shot to spend focus to generate more Kill Commands, and barbed shot to generate focus and maintain frenzy/thrill of the hunt buffs to sustain the kill command and cobra shot costs. However the priority has flipped, skipping step B in this process. The actual dps priority is Kill command, followed by barbed shots, which generate kill commands (via War Orders, and Master Handler Talent in the spec tree, as well as the design of Call of the Wild as our primary 2min cooldown). We now have 2 buttons which generate kill commands, and Barbed shots do significantly more damage than cobra shots, and do not cost focus. This inherently directly contradicts with talent design all over the place. The more talents you make buffing barbed shot, the more that any talents which buff cobra shot become unpickable and nonviable options. We have several talents in the spec tree which are dependent on casting cobra shots, but we keep casting cobra shots less and less as the spec develops and grows with secondary stats, tier set bonuses, and now Hero Talents. Further, we are so aplenty with focus and barbed shot charges, that we frequently overcap and waste or munch charges or focus in optimal gameplay, not as a player skill issue, but as a core function of the spec performing at its peak potential. It feels like a spec’s design is nearly always fundamentally broken or clunky if the basic generic common resources are not generated and spent in a sensible proportion. Too much or too little in both directions feels wrong, that the design is not matching with its intended performance or gameplay purpose mechanically. I should not have to feel as if I am playing my spec’s design incorrectly in order to achieve the optimal throughput performance, these two separate concepts should be in alignment as much as possible, and design or performance adjusted to ensure this is the case when they separate out of alignment with one another.
BM also has a LOT of boring talents. Talents are choices to alter the gameplay mechanics of your spec, talents should not be lines removed from hotfix tuning patch notes in order to make your basic spells function and deal proper damage.
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Pack tactics- Passive focus Generation increased by 100%
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Aspect of the Beast- Increased damage of pet abilities by 30%, and increased effectiveness of pet passives by 50%
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Animal Companion- Gain a 2nd pet, each pet deals 65% of normal damage
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Training Expert- All pet damage increase by 5% (10% for 2 points)
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Killer Command- Kill Command Damage increased by 10% (20% for 2 points)
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Sharp Barbs- Barbed Shot damage increase by 20% (40% for 2 points)
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Thrill of the Hunt- Passively gain 8% crit for 2 points for playing the 1 mechanic of your spec
There are several more talents which use more flowery obfuscating ways, but still boil down to “Increase damage of Kill Command or Barbed Shot by some amount”, being Dire Frenzy, and Brutal Companion.
14 total points in our talent tree which have no real gameplay mechanical impact, they don’t change what buttons you press, they don’t change the order of those buttons, they don’t add new buttons, they make the buttons you were already going to be pressing do more damage for pressing them, thats it. They are passive, mostly invisible, and unnoticeable, background effects. You could delete these 14 talent points and simply adjust the attack power damage of kill command and barbed shot and the spec would both play identically, and end up doing identical damage. Those aren’t talents, they are attack power ratios pretending to appear as talents.
Bm also must spend 4 talent points to enable their AoE playstyle. While this is similar to some other specs, it doesn’t feel particularly good. There are still design issues here. If talents are meant to be choices, this could be a single 4 point node instead. Separating it prevents a tooltip from becoming too large and makes the effects distinct and incremental on top of each other, but there is no situation where if you spent 1 point, that you would not spend the further 3 more on top. It is an illusion of choice again.
Survival Hunter
- This is the spec I play the least, But it also suffers from the “boring” talents similar to BM.
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Spear Focus- Mongoose Bite damage increased by 5%
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Sweeping Spear- Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, Butchery, and Carve damage increased by 5%
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Improved Wildfire Bomb- Bomb deals 12% increased damage
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Sharp Edges- Crit damage increased by 2%
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Tactical Advantage- Flanking Strike damage increased by 10%, and Wildfire Bomb damage increased by 4%
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Ranger- Kill Shot, Serpent Sting, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, and Explosive Shot deal 20% increased damage
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Ferocity- Pet damage increased by 10%
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Kill Companion- Kill Command damage increased by 5%
Not only does Survival have the largest number of these boring talents, it also has the fewest nodes of the spec trees. This is always going to be true for some spec in the game, it isnt a problem in itself, if those small absolute # of nodes are each all compelling interesting choices and options for the player. These talents are not compelling or interesting options, they are attack power ratios which should be part of the baseline expansion level tuning of a spec, the same as they are for every other spec in the game on other classes. The Survival talents also are extremely expensive, points-cost-wise, with many of the multiple point nodes being these same boring uninteresting nodes.
MM Hunter
has the same “boring” talent issue.
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Crack Shot- Reduce focus cost of Arcane and Chimera by 20
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Hunter’s Knowledge- Aimed and RF Crit chance increased by 5% (10% for 2 points)
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Target Practice- Arcane and Multi Shot damage increased by 25%
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Focused Aim- Aim and RF Damage increased by 5% (10% for 2 points)
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Sharpshooter- Crit damage increased by 2% (4% for 2 points)
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Tactiacal Reload- Aimed and RF Cooldown reduced by 10%
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Steady focus makes us spend 2 points on a talent you would never take only 1 point in
Hunter’s don’t have talent trees, if you remove half of these talents and tie them into the baseline tuning of specs, as you do for the majority of other specs, it becomes clear that Hunters have a lack of choice in our trees. We have the Charlie Brown version of Spec Trees. We don’t have talent trees, we have a talent trunk with singular branches, not a canopy of compelling choices and mechanically engaging interactions. If you lack the ability to come up with compelling and mechanically interesting talents, it suggests the specs themselves are fundamentally broken and limiting your creativity, just as they are limiting the players choices. I am not in the developer meetings when brainstorming tier sets, hero talents, or building these trees, but I have to imagine it is obvious how many fewer exciting ideas are presented when discussing Hunters, because as a player, the results make it evidently clear as day.
MM Hunter is in most need of a rework. It has so many design contradictions all over the place that it necessitates it at this point, desperately. It was needed in Shadowlands, but did not happen. It was needed in Dragonflight, but did not happen. This is now the 3rd fresh expansion cycle with the same fundamentally nonsensical clunky functioning of the spec barely held together by duct tape, It needs to happen now. MM Hunter used to be one of the most popular specs in the game, Survival Hunter was the least played, until Dragonflight season 3, where Marksmanship hunter actually surpassed Survival to being the least played spec.
Rapid Fire is a longer CD, Harder Hitting button. It is supposed to serve as a “High priority/Better Steady Shot”. It fails this goal by being less efficient for it’s primary purpose (being a shot which generates focus, rather than spends it) because it generates less focus than Steady Shot, and over a longer cast time. Wouldn’t it clearly make better and more intuitive design sense if, for example, Rapid Fire generated 15 focus to Steady Shot’s 10? The design is contradictory and internally inconsistent to itself in this way.
Similarly, Steady shot is sometimes NOT a secondary priority to casting Rapid Fire’s, Because Steady Shot is tied to Steady Focus, which is often times a higher priority to activate or maintain compared to casting Rapid Fire. It does not make design sense to prioritize casting my lowest priority, generator, always available ability, as a priority over the long cooldown limited-use 2nd largest contributing damage ability of my spec. Would a demon hunter ever want to cast Demon’s Bite to generate fury when it was already capped on fury instead of Eye Beam? No. Yet sometimes we end up casting Rapid Fire and Steady Shots for Steady Focus even while overcapping ourselves on focus, it makes me feel dumb and that my spec is not designed properly when this is the case.
In addition, Why must hunter’s make manual macros to add [nochannelling] conditions to our core rotation spells, what other class or spec in the game needs to go to such lengths to avoid knowingly or unknowingly accidentally canceling a main core rotational damaging ability?
Why must I Invest in a talent unrelated entirely to Rapid Fire (Crack Shot) to gain access to the ability? What if I plan to play a 3+ target only fight and want to use Rapid Fire (Because its one of the abilities which benefits from Trick Shots). Why do I have to take a talent which does not benefit multishot at all, and is completely wasted in this situation to access this ability?
Our spec appears to be built around the A leads to B leads to C of : Aimed shot into Spending Precise Shots stacks on Arcane Shot, into generating the focus to repeat this via Rapid Fire and Steady Shot. So why does our main damage cooldown of Trueshot interrupt this sequence and make A leads to nothing but also C is now a higher priority than B? The payoff is completely backwards. If A leads to B, B should be the payoff of casting A. Fire mages crit, which lets them instant cast Pyroblast. Combustion doesn’t mean fire mages stop casting pyroblast, that sounds so obviously ludicrous on its face, yet that is how Marksmanship Trueshot currently works, we stop prioritizing the spending of Precise Shots during Trueshot.
Worse even still, is that you have now openly embraced the design of Power Infusion, as a supposed claim “choice” of who to cast it on, as individual player performance can sometimes supersede a spec’s coincidental synergy with the extra haste granted by Power Infusion. Yet the design of Trueshot contradicts this design. You have stated that Trueshot is intentionally a weaker cooldown, that this allows MM Hunter to be stronger outside of Trueshot to compensate. You cannot simultaneously claim that PI is a choice, while also admitting that Trueshot is being designed intentionally to be a weaker cooldown than others. What that translates to as a player is “if you play MM, you will never get PI, not as a player choice, but as a developer one, in direct opposition to our claimed philosophy”. That does not feel good to hear as a player. Having my cooldown be so obviously clunky and nonsensical feels bad enough by itself, to hear that I am knowingly designed to also never compete for a claim to receive Power Infusion on top makes MM players feel they are treated as a 2nd class dps spec.
We also have a talent which turns spending focus into trueshot cooldown reduction. Cool. Good change from making it tied to arcane shot, since we won’t be casting that nearly as much anymore as I mentioned. Except Arcane shot is still our highest focus costing ability. Not at 20 focus, but at 40. Because Crack Shot exists. Which means in some situation where we NEED Trueshot to have the maximum amount of cooldown reduction, we won’t talent into Crack Shot, and in doing so, entirely lock ourselves out of the ability to also select Rapid Fire.
Lock and Load also makes Aimed Shot free, it semi-often procs when you are already near 2 charges of aimed shot, effectively nullifying the proc and not actually granting any extra charges during that timeframe, rather simply turning an aimed shot free. In a world where we need to spend focus to get CDR on our cooldown, this could be seen as a negative, and the talent is not taken, because of its normally beneficial effect. Talents are contradicting the design of other talents.
Multi Shot, Trick Shots, why are these two separate Talents, when you always want to pick them together? Well trick question, because you actually DO want to pick them separately sometimes. Why? Because even though Marksmanship Hunter has a dedicated ability to talent into for 2 target fights in Chimera Shot, many of our other 2 target talents are tied instead to Multi Shot. Now most of these talents are still useful and powerful on more than 2 targets, so for higher target counts this makes sense. But these talents should activate from Multishot AND Chimera Shot, not one or the other. These talents are contradicting the design of giving me a clear button that is precisely built for 2 targets and a separate one for 3 or more, I should not need both at once. The talents I am referring to being: Salvo, Bulletstorm, and Bombardment.
Volley is designed to be a burst aoe ability that lets you fire 3 casts which will cleave as if trick shots was active (6s duration, with 1.5~ lost to its own GCD, which also feels dumb, so 4.5s ish in reality). Ideally this means 3 shots in a row of Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire. If 2 or more of those casts are Rapid Fire, that means the spec would overcap on focus. If 2 or more of those casts are Aimed Shot, that means the spec would overcap and munch stacks of Precise Shots. Both scenarios feel like the spec is contradicting itself.
Readiness has similar problems to Trueshot and Volley. It also increases the number of casts we would have to do in an “opener” before casting Trueshot, in order to not overcap and waste aimed shot charges significantly. Delaying Trueshot for a LONG time in the opener due to needing to cast so many other bland, unsynergistic with anything else, CD buttons simply because they do high damage similar to Rapid Fire and want to be put on CD as soon as possible. And then by the time you have cast all of them, you need to double cast steady shot and spend the additional aimed shot you generated during all the time AGAIN.
Is Heavy Ammo intended to be a talent only used for 3 targets? Because currently it is somewhat appealing for 2 target situations also. Which feels somewhat clunky and dumb.
Precise Shots could be changed to provide the same damage bonus and 1 point grants 1 Precise Shot stack, while 2 points grants 2 always. This actually turns it into a 2 point talent that you realistically might sometimes only want to spend 1 point in. This is a cool way to customize the rotation of your spec based on how many arcane shots you expect to cast.
There seems to be 3 main “additions” to Marksmanship ontop of the baseline of Aimed Shot and Steady Shot. And we are able to select 2 out of 3 of them. The 3 choices being to amplify Kill Shot, Arcane/Chimera/Multi Shot, and Rapid Fire. I expected this would result in something similar to being able to rotationally ignore the 3rd almost entirely. This was where the variety of playstyle seemed to be sourced from, design intent wise. Marksmanship has felt too “samey” for a long time. Many other specs have pretty large playstyle changes they can opt-into via Talents. Glacial Spike vs Thermal Void Frost mage, Momentum vs. Demonic Havoc. Obliteration vs Breath of Sindragosa Frost dk. Marksmanship currently lacks something like this. Our spec even feels similar in AoE vs. Single Target. Something like Legion’s Patient Sniper and/or Sidewinders would be VERY appealing for me to see make a return in some form.
Is Target Practice meant to increase Chimera Shot’s damage?
Why does MM suffer defensively from lacking a pet? Lacking leech or additional maximum health should not be a factor in choosing MM vs BM on a fight, if the defensive need to mythic raid necessitates it, it should be available equally to both specs.
Why does BM Suffer defensively from needing to cast lust in M+? What other specs in the game lose damage or a defensive or maximum HP passively in order to cast basic group utility buttons? Do you think any other specs in the game would accept losing a 10% damage buff an on-use defensive, and 8% maximum HP to cast lust?
Hero Talent issues
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Much of my feedback has already been given in the individual threads on the forums
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The Trueshot Lodge class discord has a good compiled list of currently not implemented hero talents or bugged behavior occurring with them, those are not design philosophy issues and are not the purpose of my feedback here.
Sentinel
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Extrapolated Shots is not a Hero Talent.
Sentinel says it stacks up to 10 times.
And then you made a node to effectively make it stack to 9 times.
You spent 2 nodes, instead of just making it stack to 9 times originally.
So instead we just effectively waste a node that does nothing.
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Sentinel Watch
CDR on trueshot would need to be 30s, to result in 1.5min CD to ever be meaningful. In the rare case of 8 casts of trueshot (14+ minute fight duration) to grant an extra cast, it would also result in losing 2 minute on-use trinket alignment and would probably STILL not be a gain.
The only way it would reliably be a gain is if fights are designed around 1min 45s CD’s. While this feels good for MM hunter, it feels bad for literally every other CD interval. Doing that would be a bad idea, do not do this.
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Sentinel Precision is also not a Hero Talent.
Its something that in every other class/spec in the game, would be baseline part of the tuning of a class/spec. Hero talents should not be taking the place of hotfix tuning patch note lines.
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Overwatch and Crescent Steel are talents that directly contradict with the design of Hunter’s Mark, again.
Hunter shared identity is execute, except in the case of our Raid Buff. Which is still useless on the current Endboss, and still useless in M+. Hunter’s mark was given like 800 responses of feedback on PTR before it went live to fix this obvious design mistake, Alpha would be a great time to be responsive in changing it.
Pack Leader
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Pack Leader repeats the mistakes and ignores the mountains of feedback given from Dark Ranger Already. It misses thematically, adds no interesting gameplay, has extremely poorly tuned “choice” nodes where there is no conceivable way for the choice to ever be reasonable, one is so far ahead of the other. It speaks to a lack of ideas and lack of understanding how the spec’s function.
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Mend Pet as a Heal over time, on the GCD. Feels awkward and clunky. Exhilaration being on the GCD already feels clunky. The Turtle and Survival of the Fittest aspects to this talent are good. You’ve correctly Identified that BM doesn’t scale at all with Leech due to pets and needs a source of passive healing, but the spec is already nearly GCD locked. Change Mend Pet as the trigger source to something like Beastial Wrath.
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Scattered Prey is simply ludicrously worthless, I hope this is a placeholder. Multi shot does no damage as BM, it is a GCD tax to enabling beast-cleave. This choice node will simply never be picked. No amount of number tuning on this talent or on multishot itself will likely fix the problem, it needs a complete re-design. Which is good, because “increase multi shot damage by 25%” is boring and uninspired in the first place, you can do better.
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Disengage giving a range increase is cool, but 5 yards is nothing. BM already has weird problem points of Kill Command having a longer range than Barbed Shot. MM is supposed to be the “high range” spec, not BM. Tireless Hunt is basically only useful in a “sylvanas chains” like situation where you are running for literally 30s+ which BM is already comfortable doing, but such a fight design is going to be hated by every other ranged spec in the game and I think we agree is a bad idea and should not be repeated. Which begs the question when do you forsee this ever being useful in PvE?
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Fenzied Tear and Furious Assault give more Barbed shots and Kill Commands, to a spec that already doesn’t need more of those 2 things. Are they nice for dps? sure. Do they make the spec more engaging or interesting to play? Not even a little bit. We already BARELY cast Cobra shot, these talents mean you can effectively remove cobra shot from your keybinds. We are losing gameplay variety and decision making points for agency with these nodes, not gaining anything. We’ve spent 6+ nodes in this tree to say “your kill command and barbed shots do more damage”. Those nodes say that in more flowery ways, but thats what they do when you boil them down.
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Beast of Opportunity is the only talent that I think fulfills the image of what people had in mind reading the name “Pack Leader”, Spawning more beasts is cool. Stampede is cool, it was a talent that nobody picked a single time in the entirety of Dragonflight. Why does a talent exist if people are never picking it, you never buff it over the duration of an entire expansion, and you make a hero talent tree called “Pack Leader” that still does nothing with it.
Give us more pets, give us more interesting gameplay patterns and mechanical minigames. Disengage could give our pets “Blink Strikes” for a duration. Aspect of the Cheetah could refresh Disengage’s cooldown. There’s lots of opportunity for cool ideas. I dont expect every single talent will be amazing. Making BM value crit is fine, making Kill Command more powerful is fine. But reading these nodes doesn’t make me excited. DK’s and Warlocks hero talents are fulfilling more of a “pack leader” fantasy than this hero talent tree. They got to have cool stuff that gave unique new effects from multiple units fighting alongside them in combat. Do that stuff.
Dark Ranger
I am still desperately hoping for a larger scale redesign of MM. Because at the moment this tree looks “fine” but will exacerbate the already existing problems with the spec. Many of these effects give you more aimed shots, when we already don’t always have the GCD’s available to spend the precise shots stacks we generate, wasted and munching them entirely. The focus generation of Dark Empowerment is not going to be sufficient to equalize the increased cost of more aimed shots, and during trueshot we already don’t need more aimed shot, we are already struggling to fit in the other required focus generation of Rapid Fire and Steady Shots for their haste buffs (steady focus during trueshot especially is awkward to fit). They are not solving problems or opening up new gameplay in the spec, just making the already clunky parts of the spec even worse. Overcapping aimed shot feels bad and is your #1 priority to avoid, these hero talents make it nearly unavoidable that overcapping aimed charges will occur, unable to be played around or avoided proactively.
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Embrace the Shadows looks incredibly weak, even if you assume we do 100% of our damage as shadow I’m not certain it would be taken ever compared to smoke screen unless for soloing old raids or something (Which also need to be considered legacy content with the buff applied sooner). Similarly Darkness Calls is also likely to be severely weaker than Shadow Assassin. Both of their effects are also somewhat boring and uninteresting imo.
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Its hard to imagine Dark Chains ever having any use in PvE. Would be cool if you could “pull” the chain via disengage, allowing easy self-activation of your own Binding Shot, rather than needing a typhoon or something. Ideally aoe to work as an aoe stop or more reliable knockback compared to the laughably awkward uses of Explosive trap or Bursting Shot (Bursting never taken in PvE)
In short, the same issues with the spec trees are made worse by the Hero Talents. We will overcap on more resources more frequently, we have hero talent nodes wasted on “boring” based throughput adjustments which are otherwise baseline tuning hotfix notes for every other spec in the game, and redundantly make us acquire these same baseline attack power ratio adjustments in BOTH the hero talent tree AND the spec trees, sometimes identically to the letter the exact same worded talent.
For BM’s perspective again, the hero talents further decrease your likelihood of pressing Cobra shot, and increase the # of Kill Command’s and Barbed Shots, making the talents built to increasing the damage of Cobra Shot even more unpickable than they already are. I have spent durations of 40+ GCD’s on Alpha while testing before casting Cobra shot a single time. For these talents to be viable dps wise, they would need such ludicrously absurd buffs that they would read like Torghast powers, not talent tree nodes. Instead of this situation, these talents need to be redesigned drastically, replaced altogether to actually generate optional viable alternative choices, or the spec itself redesigned to open up GCD’s and functionality away from supplying us with so many Kill Command’s and Barbed Shots that the current designs can become viable choices without redesigns. The spec design itself would be my opinion of what should change, as the functionality of the spec itself is also showing in its claustrophobic construction of the available designs of our Tier set bonuses, and Hero Talent designs themselves, as evidenced by the results of Dragonflight and the Hero Talent Tree previews sharing the over centralized narrow designs related to barbed shot and kill command with the inability and notable lack of new mechanical interactions introduced to the spec in any of them. Examples like Stampede being ignored AGAIN in the Hero Talent tree of Pack Leader, and Wailing arrow being ignored in the Dark Ranger tree add to the disappointment and lack of ideas feeling from players. Pack Leader doesnt feel visually exciting, I doubt anyone else can notice a pack leader hunter from any regular BM hunter. Dark Ranger and Sentinel are somewhat noticeable, but certainly could do a LOT better. Hunter has had the short-end of the visual spectacle stick for a long time, We don’t even get to use weapon illusions on ranged weapons. Despite Flare having been useless since Vault of the Wardens, give us some flair here please.
I also offered some of my own ideas of more interesting and engaging mechanical designs for talents, so as not to be “just” negative, I feel bad pointing out so many issues without offering my own brainstorm ideas to assist in resolving some of them
Here: Feedback: Dark Ranger in The War Within - #26 by Riokaii-burning-blade
And here: Feedback: Dark Ranger in The War Within - #81 by Riokaii-burning-blade
Conclusion
I want to be clear that although I am harsh and blunt in my feedback that I appreciate the work and effort devs are doing for the game. Much of what has been accomplished with the talent tree redesigns and for other spec reworks throughout dragonflight and TWW alpha so far look like you guys do understand these issues and are capable of solving them effectively in ways that not only make the game better, but more fun to play at the same time. I want Hunter to be treated as equally well as those other classes and specs, I don’t think that is unreasonable. I don’t think it is possible to truly understand the scale of issues with the class tree, spec tree, utility options, core functioning and design philosophies, hero talents, and come away with any other possible conclusion: Hunter’s need dramatically important heavy dev attention and focus, urgently. A 3rd expansion cycle going by without these issues being addressed is untenable for many hunter players, with MM’s playrate already reaching endangered species levels of environmental conservation intervention, and Survival hunters barely able to mate in captivity enough to grow the population sustainably. Apologies for this being so long, I care a lot about this class and specs and I want to see them become closer to the potential fun I know they are capable of being in the past. If I had more time I would’ve written you a shorter letter.
(PS. please also know that my attempts at humor are to lighten the mood of my admittedly negative feedback, if they do not land properly, and are taken to be snarky or disrespectful, i pre-emptively apologize as that is not my intent in the slightest.)