I agree with and proposed myself swapping Hunter’s Avoidance and Trailblazer back when they made the changes. Run speed is more important than aoe DR for leveling.
However- “are hit by targeted damage” is a direct nerf. Current Trailblazer activates even when we’re under attack, making it useful for running from mobs/enemy players. Just keep it as is.
Hunter’s Mark needs all damage components removed. Hunters have been baying against this for six expansions now. It’s hated and needs to go.
Personally, I like having Hunter’s Mark increase your effective range you can hit the target, giving it thematic, niche, but non-mandatory utility.
Unbreakable Bond doesn’t actually remove Spotter’s Mark. Mark still procs with your pet out- the only thing you lose is 20% more Aimed Damage when Marked.
Fixing the pet/no pet issue: I think we just need to go as simple as possible. Give Marks access to the passive/abilities of their current or most recently dismissed pet. Put Lone Wolf on a choice node with Unbreakable Bond, roughly equalize their dps. If UB: Pet applies your Spotter’s Mark. If LW: Intimidate/Spotter’s Mark/etc uses an animation of your dismissed Pet “leaping from the shadows” without actually summoning it.
Piercing Fire doesn’t seem effective in any content, secondary enemy positioning is far too finicky- PvP humans move all the time, PvE you can’t move freely when the ground is soaked in circles, mobs are programmed to spread around their target in a close circle when meleeing.
Yeah, don’t reply to Snozay, at best, they’re a diehard anti-petter and have nothing constructive to add. At worst, a blatant troll.
Overall- I like or don’t mind most of these changes, and commend all the thought you put into it. I wish the WoW devs cared as much as you do.
Wait? Dumbed down MM? I played MM before the rework here and there and it was one of the easiest classes I’ve ever played in my life. After the rework, the talents actually offer a way better gameplay loop and a more challenging or rewarding set of interactions.
Yes, I admit some things could be better. Namely the way they overnerfed Kill Shot to allow for too many new modifying talents to keep it propped up. That’s gripe a for me personally.
I don’t mind people’s being anti-pet. I have no interest in using one myself, either, hence my failing to notice that Spotter’s Mark still works with a pet up. It’s just the complete, if intentional, failure of reading comprehension that gets me.
I’ve suggested this one before, as a ~10% range increase. Gives a bit of safety dodging around AoEs for melee and the occasional freedom from downtime during spread mechanics and a bit of extra positioning freedom for ranged.
Oh, I’m aware. That’s intentional. I do think that if it gets taken more often and stays, though, it’s just going to get gutted or removed, given what else we’ve seen nerfed of late for PvP interactions. But fair enough.
Keep in mind also that under the present wording, it also gives an average of 7.5% movement speed throughout, greater the more you drop offensive uptime.
This is among the general changes, though hidden at the time of your reading because apparently it fries certain other orc/dwarf brains.
Yeah, it’s very WIP and I’m open to suggestions. I mostly just wanted something that didn’t need to adhere to the rhythm of Multi → Spend, Multi → Spend.
I’m going to be trying my hand at Pandarian Marksmanship soon anyway, but yea, you have to purposely play like to make it so. I guess that means not consuming Precise Shots, not using Trueshot, not using Harrier’s Cry, not using Volley, etc…
If you just cast nothing but AiS, RFire, and Steady, that’s one way to underperform…but if you do everything else, you’re .
I’m getting used to the way the spec works right now, but I preferred the previous iteration.
My wishlist is to have barrage back and for Salvo to apply to Multishot again. Barrage is nice for pulling packs in solo and only being able to pull a few at a time with multi (because mobs are too spread out) is too slow. Salvo with multi was better IMO because it only required 1 talent to get instead of 2 with volley (1 for volley, 1 for salvo).
Out of curiosity, how would you feel about a choice node between Rapid Fire and Barrage, where Barrage could be, say, right-clicked to swap between attacking only non-incapacitated enemies engaged against your party vs. just hitting literally everything in a massive cone and, after an initial randomized sweep (covering the full area of effect), would prefer already engaged targets, piercing through them?
Make the rate of fire double that of Rapid Fire and Focus generation per shot half or whatever.
In that way, you’d basically be sacrificing some single-target throughput in exchange for every Rapid Fire (now Barrage) automatically benefiting from Trick Shots.
Roughly even in two-target.
Passively, via oGCD, or via autocastable-toggleable oGCD?
I’m all for being allowed Salvo separately from Volley, but… it takes the same number of capstone talents to reach as before, which is —alongside how many other good choices its parent nodes lead to— what determines its accessibility.
We previously needed Focused Aim 1/2, Focused Aim 2/2, and Small Game Hunter to reach Salvo.
We now need Bullseye 1/2, Bullseye 2/2, and Volley to reach Salvo.
You couldn’t previously reach Volley before without (somewhat redundantly, unless using old Bulletstorm) buffing Multishot, and many would waste the 15s pre-charge available to oGCD Salvo by macroing it to Volley anyways. …Which is also probably why we now can’t take it without Volley.
On that note, I suspect we could make good use of a separated Salvo (ideally, imo, oGCD preempt-able + auto-castable) by…
[useful but optional] reducing Bullseye and Focused Aim to 1 point each,
swapping the places of Bullet Hell and Salvo,
allowing Bullet Hell (now in Salvo’s old position) to path also from Ohn’ahran Winds OR moving Salvo (now in Bullet Hell’s old position) over 1 column left and allowing it to path from Volley as well while also moving Windrunner’s Quiver 1 column right to path from Bulletstorm.
I don’t know what goes through someone’s head when they write this much of an essay on the forums. Like do you think the class designers are going to read your post and offer you a job or something? Who is the target audience?
Some few ideas may look attractive to others, get borrowed, and see repetition elsewhere. Repeated often enough, some few ideas may actually see adoption. Quite a few borrowed powers, talents, and processes of baselining certain gameplay-positive changes began as such, after all.
I can attempt to bundle parts to focus on certain highlights, but the talent-by-talent changes are the only real extension here, together giving example implementation on 3 general design guidelines already largely agreed upon across this and many other class forums:
remove, sideline, or 1-point non-gameplay-affecting power talents,
reduce AoE/ST capacity variance (and thereby incentive to swap builds for categorically obviously superior performance) in favor of gameplay variety (and thereby customizability), and
prune unnecessary unintuitive restrictions (e.g., 11.1 Lone Wolf-equivalent preventing Call Pet instead of just being inactive while a pet is active).
If I was your English teacher, I would blush. You should consider starting from a point closer to here more often, imo.
To your point 1, some talents are two points specifically to prevent you from being able to use a build that takes advantage of all the strongest talents in all pathways. Specs built with more intentionally open trees have less powerful capstone talents.
2 - this I agree on. But it’s really a flat tuning issue. You don’t need to change everything about the entire spec again to accomplish it. It can be good at single target and also burst cleave with pretty slight adjustments.
3 - Yes, if you think about the pet situation logically, it’s a hot mess. You lose the ability to call a pet, then gain the ability to talent back into calling a pet, but this pet doesn’t do the stuff that it does while you’re in the other specs because you also have a talent to replace its utility while you don’t have a pet, and it wouldn’t make sense for you to be able to double down.
3 is a result of the mass of rp players threatening to quit the game and blizzard caving, thus resulting in a lot of buggy pet mechanics. This is a thing that really could just go back to the drawing board, but probably not something we are going to invent here.
That is true. I do think you can accomplish the same result without the intentional gating bloat, though.
Consider: Those bloat talents, whether they “feel” like them or not, are capstone talents. Because of that, you drop from 10 talents that seemingly offer gameplay-affecting customization to 4-8. Even if the non-bloat talents needed to be weakened due to their increased access (and thereby our being able to take more of them simultaneously), that still allows you to, say, split talents with bundled functions into a talent per said function.
Now, imo, that should simply be how we deal with all multipoint talents — allowing one to path through them after a single talent that already feels functionally complete but also allowing one to build upon that in a more obviously dependent way (such as a higher stack maximum) via further ranks — but that’s a gamewide change I couldn’t quite excuse including here.
Moreover, though, any need to weaken the non-bloat talents would depend on the devs caring that classes see the same power increases across each pre-level-cap span. From what we can see in game, though, that does not appear to be the case. As such, you could easily just have class X’s damage depend more up on their capstone tier (or increase more at/over Y levels) than most without issue.
The same can be said for Hero Talents now, in fact; they need only be balanced against their opposite choice in a shared node and their general Hero Spec needs only be balanced against that same class’s other Hero Specs, not the portion of contribution among any other class’s Hero Specs.
Tl;dr: That ends up virtually a non-issue because there’s no need for specs or classes to balance their capstone tiers, specifically, against each other, only for specs’ builds as a whole to be balanced against other specs’ builds.
Will get to the others as soon as I can. Sorry for the delay.
You can’t weaken Windrunner quiver in a way that makes sense for you to be able to use it in conjunction with more of the bottom right talents without making marks too good at everything at the same time or making Windrunner quiver suck.
I’ll concede that some might be harder to split than others, but I’m not sure that’s the case for Windrunner’s Quiver.
At present WQ essentially renders defunct all Streamline and Precise Shot generators except Moving Target, allowing you to save 2 mid-tier talents. Those are benefits not everyone is going to associate with the extra 80% Precise Shots and doubled Precise Shots–based CDR.
Moreover, it never currently generates any new gameplay considerations/mechanics, unless you call removing 3 former opportunities as gameplay additive.
Splitting it into two points could allow for a first point that carries the time-saving CDR and damage-efficiency benefits without rendering those other talents basically to wholly useless while the second could still simplify gameplay as before (perhaps with full double Precise Shots, instead of 2x90% value). Each point would feel thematically complete in itself, but the second takes it to a further gameplay- and build-defining extreme.
Meanwhile, the Aimed Shot talents of the left wing scale best with the likes of Bulletstorm and Ohn’ahran Winds, while Volley still scales best with Bulletstorm, deeper bottom right and, via Salvo, with Small Game Hunter, etc. A bit of additional tuning would be required for an ideal degree of choice, but there would still be reasons to go deep-left vs. deep-right even if one were allowed to tap into both ends.
Yes, it’s cross-webbed, with both Bulletstorm and AiS via Surging potentially affecting RF to in turn affect AiS further, etc., but I doubt that’s a bad thing. That kind of cross-webbing allows one to reapportion their damage sources, CPM, and weight of considerations (how responsible each optimization is for output in a given situation) without giving a significantly, consistently, and obviously best build each for ST and AoE.
to make it so. I guess that means not consuming Precise Shots, not using Trueshot, not using Harrier’s Cry, not using Volley, etc…
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