Seems like Blizzard missed the point

Classes Hunter
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Title, in reference to bringing back old spells.

Arcane shot is cool and a definitive hunter ability that I truly believe all hunters should have, but having a spell just for the icon on my bar is pretty lazy IMO. Referencing BM specifically with the last point. Why bring back a spell that’s never going to be used? Sure back in the day we had spell books chock-full of dead abilities, but why just bring them back to continue being dead?

Wheres the synergy? Wheres the fun? Wheres any reason at all to press this button? At this point in time for my PTR character, which is in no way representative of SL endgame or damage numbers, Arcane shot deals roughly 4x as much damage as cobra. Unless I’m mistaken, there’s still no reason to ever press it because of the CD reduction we get from cobra. And no way they could ever balance it, since Arcane shot has no other effects associated with it. It would just come down to “Pressing cobra for KC cooldown reduction is no longer worth it, spam arcane shot while you wait” or “KC cooldown reduction from cobra is still worth more than arcane, spam cobra when nothing else”.

Then there is Hunters Mark. You 'member, right? Well it got merc’d. No more group utility, no more rotational fluidity, just a pain in the backside debuff to keep up just to maintain our baseline damage output. Blizzards obsession for Global CD’s is coming through in spades in SL (Sorry bout ya, Mages) and not even HM was safe. It, much like Arcane shot, is cool to have back, but makes little sense in the way it was implemented. I’d prefer to have it either off of the GCD altogether, or remove the damage component from it. Or both at this point. A lot of the responses saying “Just don’t use it” are reductive and clearly made by people who don’t understand how this game works, and has worked for… ever.

Tranq shot, on the flip-side of this coin, makes quite a bit of sense. It gives every hunter the baseline purge/soothe that came with spirit beast pets, without actually having to have a spirit beast(or a bat or w/e, i know it isn’t locked to SB’s). Still gonna use spirit beasts for 90% of the dungeon and just swap them out for lust pets as needed, but I can appreciate the effort here and it does make sense. Good change.

Just kinda hoping for an [Arcane shot (Rank 2)] to appear the in BM spellbook, where they make the spell useful and synergistic with the rest of the rotation.

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Even if it doesn’t synergize with the BM toolkit, arcane shot might still have use in pvp due to the fact that it ignores armor.

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So.
I think they are fixing it next build. But. Right now…
If you use arcane shot over cobra. Yo do 10-15% more damage overall. Yes, even vs KC reduction from cobra. Plus arcane ignore armor.
That because of the focus used. While I think that a neat idea. Use one or the other. I think it should be more balance with talents.

So Hunter mark… be great on a boss… on trash or aoe. I’m just mark one and if that dies, I wont mark another until next pack is pulled. I don’t care if I do less. Then again, I rare pug much. I have a guild.

I still don’t understand Tranq shot (or SB purge) I never use it as I forget I even have it. Plus I don’t even know when to use it.

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I’m not sure how other hunters feel about this, but I sort of missing having aspects. Instead of getting mark back I sort of wish we got our aspects back. Sure, you sit in hawk most of the time, but it doesn’t negatively affect you like HM. On the flip side, I liked being able to aspect for the moment. Cheetah for kiting, pack for group utility, monkey for damage mitigation, etc… IDK it was nice having a mechanic like that to manage. And I feel like current cheetah is just absolutely pitiful for a 3 min CD.

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So does it play out as basically BM wants to hold off on using cobra until within CD windows, when the extra focus regen would mean more shots, and in turn way more KCs? or is it just arcane shot only, across the board.

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They don’t know what to do with classes, look at all the classes that have problems excluding hunter, they hate the current changes blizzard have made and there is only 1 month until pre patch. I doubt they will fix all the classes in 1-2 months, they rushed this expansion and I can’t wait for people to realize that once it comes out.

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As of right now. Blizz I think said they looking into it…

If you use Arcane over Cobra. Damage overall will do 10-15% more damage.

Kc will do more because cobra but as stated, damage overall be high with Arcane.
This to the focus cost and arcane ignore armor.

My sources are Icyveins and youtuber Nubkeks… Icyvein say 15%. Nub says 10%.

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I feel like Blizzard doesn’t know what hunters should be. Hunters should be utilizing traps, different gadgets, mobile. BM is mobile, that’s nice, but I mean MM should be too. A Marksman that isn’t mobile is gonna end up getting captured or killed. Survival, well survival should do what it sounds like it’s supposed to do. More emphasis on traps meaning a wider selection of traps, improved traps and gadgets, to help them you know survive more. I just think at this point, they’re just throwing things against the wall and see what sticks.

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This seems to be the consensus at this point. Giving them the benefit of the doubt even, I would still say their vision of hunters as at odds with what hunters actually want. I would go further and say the entire class design team (If there is one? I’m not sure how they project manage) is weak. While I think hunters are probably in the worst place of all classes right now, there seems to be not enough resources dedicated to class design across the board. Hunters feel like a hallow shell of a former class, but unfortunately it’s not the only class like that. I also think a lot of that blame should be on the pruning and on transferring our class power to expansion tied systems.

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Th fact that they can’t be bothered to fix simple bugs seems to indicate that they don’t care about Hunters at all. How hard can this be to fix?

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/macro-petdefensive-is-still-broken/627092

They haven’t communicated with Hunters in a very long time. They certainly haven’t provided any indication that they have seen our concerns. We’ve been throwing stuff against their wall for years, and it feels like they don’t even look at the forums. The silence is deafening.

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Because Blizzard can’t tell the difference between “more abilities” and “better abilities.” I never poked any fun at the four-button rotation because simple doesn’t equal stupid, but here we are, looking at SL and what happens when the devs pay any attention to the “MOAR BUTTONS” screechers. Now we have more buttons, but each of those buttons means less and less.

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Ya they had a perfect game going and they had to go ahead and throw it away

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Yep, this.

As far as unpruning goes, I’ve said it before but…there are many things from past iterations of the class which I would prefer over what we’ve seen so far(arcane shot, steady shot, hunter’s mark, etc).

Class:

  • Distracting Shot, also able to interact with Misdirection. Baseline.

  • Master’s Call, baseline.

  • Aspect of the Fox, baseline. WoD-edition.

  • A defensive dispel as a replacement for the pets that used to have a purge.

  • Posthaste, baseline.

  • Camouflage, baseline.

Beast Mastery:

  • Change Animal Companion so it becomes a baseline passive effect, similar to what they did with Lone Wolf for MM. No more locking such defining elements behind a talent.

  • Revert Dire Beast to it’s Legion-design. Allow players to choose between Barbed Shot and Dire Beast.

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I’ll just leave this quote here:

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The funny thing is, what I was expecting to see with SV was a lower CD on traps - somewhere along the lines of 15 seconds - to emphasize how important CC and snares would be to its core design.

Nope. Just take this spear, choose the mandatory Mongoose Bite talent (I don’t even know what the other choices are), and flail away at melee range.

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Having only 1 pet defined my class for 12 years. It should remain a talent option with 1 pet being the default. Every class that was “defined” by their Legion changes has been summarily reverted, so let’s not start redefining classes again. The talent row as it exists now is as close to balanced as it can be, and the options make sense. If you want an execute, it’s there, if you want a dummy pet and a 100% passive with ~1% exta damage, it’s there.

This was broken and broke entire encounters. It’s too powerful and the difference between having 1 hunter, 2 hunters, 3 hunters, etc. in a raid is way too large with how powerful this was.

Pretty redundant with our 100% mobility. The pets that have this option still do, and can be summoned prior to engagements where you may need this.

The pet purge has already been replaced in tranq and we can defensively dispel with PVP talents to a degree. We can interrupt, purge, stun, soothe, slow, CC, completely immune, drop combat, and be 100% mobile with several speed boosts. Defensive dispel seems like something that could be forgone.

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They should have just replaced cobra shot with arcane shot and have it have all the same functionality/interactions has cobra. Would feel way better shooting arcane shot than the squiggly little shot that cobra is.

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Or just revert cobra shot to it’s old style with the cast time. This so arcane becomes our focus dump and cobra shot has a bit more meaning to it than just “press this when you have nothing else to do and enjoy the passive benefits”.

As much as it triggers me to say “meaningful choice” these days: CS isn’t one, but it could be. Def a strange world to be in where we got a spell returned but it will either be a dead spell, or the only spell and entirely replace CS, but no inbetween.

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It just shows how little thought was put into it. It’s pretty obvious that having two abilities that do the same thing don’t work together. Arcane Shot is a spender with no cooldown, so it completely overlaps with Cobra Shot, a focus spender with no cooldown.

Serpent Sting would work for BM since a DoT can’t be spammed. Steady Shot would also work since focus regen doesn’t overlap with focus spender. It’s so easy to unprune without messing everything up if they took more than 2 seconds to think about it.

That quote Danski posted from Maldoren is perfect. Here’s Arcane Shot back… oh wait you weren’t supposed to use it. Facepalm.

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If you don’t understand when to use tranq shot then you are pretty noob at this game and prob should not be commenting on class balance. Just sayin…

1 Like