I haven’t bought DF, because of the decisions Blizz made to our class. and you guys have read some of my posts and comments around the forums.
With that being said, I am hoping to talk to some of you guys that are trying the specs out but mostly BM and MM, to give good non whining feedback to help me decide if I spend my few bucks or not.
How are the specs feeling at 70?
How’s MM tree fully loaded?
Can MM compete with BM?
Playability, how is it?
Sure gear could keep these numbers down and make us unable to be 100% sure, but then again the whole world needs gear…
I’m mostly coming from a PvE perspective, and I think? you’re into PvP. I’m just gonna be general aside from the bits about PvP I know.
BM is a slight improvement over SL with 2 charges of KC, but its flow suffers a bit from the stat crunch and beast cleave duration being cut down.
Survival is back to being a meme spec, but if you liked legion survival you’ll probably like (or at least tolerate) the playstyle.
MM is pretty similar to pre-tier MM with a few tricks. I’m personally not a fan of MM so I can’t give an in-depth analysis, but some like it, some think it’s poorly designed.
MM has really bad ST but more burst than BM (BM doesn’t have burst anymore, very flat damage profile). MM and Surv are at the bare minimum of viability for PvE, BM is the best hunter spec by a lot, but it’s not that good overall. All 3 are okayish in PvP from what I understand. BM is bad in situations like shuffle where you need the burst. MM depends on lining up big hits and can still be shut down, and it just doesn’t bring good damage. And hunter is very squishy.
I think you can try any of them. For arena I’d say Surv > BM > MM, PvE BM >> Surv > MM. I don’t really know about BGs, MM might still be good there.
So many of the dungeons have MILES of trash. Like, an insane amount, and you’re always cleaving.
MM has so much crap on cooldown as well, you’re always firing off an explosive shot, or throwing a chakram, or volleying for salvo.
Trueshot also feels much better with the last few nodes in the Marksman tree. Lots of focus to dump aimed shots and multishots without being stressed over focus depletion.
I think I’ve gotten lucky with gear. I did 6/8 M0s yesterday, and snagged six 372 pieces, so I’m sitting around 360 overall.
Usually top on damage meters but take that with a huge grain of salt as people aren’t geared yet. Doing like 30-40k overall DPS in a run, sometimes higher depending on mob density in some dungeons.
I’ve only done one dungeon - as bm - but my aoe deeps felt okayish. I still had Rae’shalare and they haven’t yet locked it to 61+ like all the other cool shadowlands weapons, so I essentially had an extra talent point. I was up against an outlaw rogue and two evokers, and whether I was top deeps on trash depended entirely on whether deep breath was off cd for the evokers, lol. On bosses I was ahead by miles, so I suspect we’ll be in the same place we were in season 4, good on sustained ST, less good at aoe. Better than s4 at least because Kill Command cleaves.
Edit: I UPDATED MY MOG WHY is the forums putting me in my gross levelling gear and yet not updating my level?! the humanity!
Been doing a mixture of things as SV. World, Quest, Dungeons. Been using a AOE build to level.
In Dungeons, it feels decent. The rotation uses a mixer of butchery, bombs, and explosive shot. You use Fury of the Eagles off CD. Also depending if you have death c or stampede, that can also be in the mix. For the bosses, you are using mongoose and kill command as the primary damage dealing.
Gear wise I have been unlucky, but I am building out my LW skills and have made several pieces for when I hit 70, which will be today. I will start doing more dungeon then. I still need to adjust talents and work on the rotation, but overall SV feels decent. In M+ you truly have more buttons to push. DPS wise, I been top and second on the meters, but this is all pre gear as I say. I’ll see how it shakes out once I hit 70 and start to gear.
Isn’t Beast Cleave longer now? 6 seconds instead of 4?
EDIT: Oh you’re talking about the tier bonus. I guess they could consider making the 6 seconds a little longer.
I haven’t played much 10.0 BM. I only played a couple hours of it in prepatch and I don’t have Dragonflight. Early on in the beta I played a bit but not a lot. Usually the problem I have with BM since Legion is they tend to bandaid complexity/engagement by slapping on random CDs like Explosive Shot or Bloodshed. So BM’s toolkit of active abilities often ends up being 30% short-cooldown actives that are part of the core rotation and 70% are tacked-on cooldowns. So you’ll have an extremely hectic opening sequence and cooldown phase but huge stretches of mindless rotating between 3 buttons in between. It looks like Survival is tuning into this as well.
IMO, prepatch BM felt a lot better than 70 BM. Stat crunch has a bit to do with this, but in pre-patch we just felt more powerful. I lost resonating arrow for death chakram, which is just not as good. RA felt like it provided more meaningful burst, DC just keeps us from being pitiful. I don’t think I gained any other buttons.
I know we’re going to feel less strong as fresh 70s than fully geared end-xpac, but there’s nothing to compensate really.
man, thank you for reminding me, i checked details and my death chakram hits 7 times every 45 seconds for 1800 damage per hit. my barbed shot is ticking for 2300 damage per tick. chakram really needs to hit a lot harder to make it exciting to press.
ideally i’d like its dependency keen eyesight (2%/4% crit) to be made a single talent, death chakram to be moved up one tier to be on the same line as artic bola/serrated shots, and the shadowlands lego effect ‘bag of munitions’ (2 targets hit by chakram are hit by explosive shot) should be where chakrams is. this wouldn’t be too different from the feral tree which had adaptive swarm and convoke in it with their legendary effects as the capstone node.
(stampede could be removed from being a choice node and moved into the bm class tree, since lbr, only legion bm beast cannon aficionados are picking it anyway.)
i’ve spoken previously about how im one of the 1% of hunters who actually liked wild spirits, and i’ve read the feedback from the hunters who hated it and can concede their point - but death chakram is exactly what i feared it would be, a weak, unexciting spell you hit because well, what else are you going to do with your time? on my druid i love it when convoke comes off cd; i even enjoy wild hunt on my DH - but chakrams is just “well, this is a change from barbed shot i guess”.
I can’t comment on the 70 perspective but I read here about Chakram and Christ it needs to be buffed but a good 50% to become an exciting talent. Otherwise just like you guys said its just another random button to push during a fight.
I think explosive shot needs to be changed as well and do instant damage then the explosion damage, and also have its damage increased because its not worth nothing.
I was thinking about the Steel Trap, and that should NOT be a freaking trap, it should go to the target like a shot. We’re full of random things and that talent has got to be changed as well.
For MM, I think that the 3% procs from the arrows must be increased, I rarely get it. AIMED shot only has a 25% chance anyway and that rarely procs. So terrible terrible terrible IMO.
If they wanna keep it at 25% okay, but make the arrows a 50% chance to proc so you actually get them procs.
For BM I think the problem is too many 2 and 3 talent point picks that isn’t necessary and would allow the whole tree to perform better if they remove a few points, and its not a lot 3-5 points removed would make it pretty decent.
Been doing quite a few dungeons at 70 on both MM and BM. Over all, BM is easier to keep good dps but I’ve been much more successful with MM - The burst feels crisp and real good, but it requires more input and attention.
That said, this is my experience at M0 with 360 ilvl. I’ve read all the doom and gloom posts like everyone else, perhaps later on and at higher keys and ilvl things gets worse and we fall to “trash-tier” like testers have said numerous times, but right now, I really don’t see the problem.
My main issue lies in the lack of choice we get when chosing pets, please let us assign a category to our pets, I would love to use the pretty new ones but they are all cunning or tenacity.
This for me. BM is fine but, surprisingly enough, MM just feels better right now. Survival is a dead spec. The damage isn’t good enough to over ride the simple fact you have to chose between doing decent aoe damage or decent single target damage.
Im enjoying pvp on bm. I like last seasons rotation better but definitely feels a bit awkward but my only real complaints.
Need more stat options for bg gear ( not sure about conquest as i havent found the vendor for conquest yet. (Needs more mastery options.
Blood shed needs either a half gcd or no gcd to be smoother play. Getting up 3 barbed shots, beastial wrath, and blood shed to start doing what some classes can do in one to 2 globals. Just makes bm feel a bit clunky.
The rotation seems strange with kill commands on cd yet frenzy stacks too. Feels like 2 playstyles molded into one.
Example: if you want fast damage then you need to start kill commanding early. If you want to min max kill commands then you also start kill commands early…yet this sets you back as if you want to start ramping damage up for long game you would instead want to stack frenzy first.
If you stack frenzy first you lose out on possible kill commands being wasted. If you start with kill commands your ramp up time takes longer. Makes for an awkward answer to ur rotation.