Oops, probably shouldn’t have used my classic character lol
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What a mess. Starting to look like HM is here to stay in this form.
Could at least make it spreadable to other targets with an AOE or even having a 30% chance to do so, capped to our now 5 mob/target cleave. This would work for all specs
For BM make it was spread to unmarked Mobs via a Cobra shot Target swap for up to 5 targets.
This would help with the Arcane shot debacle.
Some version no doubt could also be applied to SV and MM.
All this aside I would much rather it be gone baseline with PVP utility.
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deadzones are terrible design no class should have deadzones
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He knows. He was sarcastically suggesting bringing back two historical hunter mechanics that are widely regarded as atrocious design just for the sake of “flavor”, as a satirical critique of bringing back poor mechanics like Hunter’s Mark just for “flavor”.
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Idk why, but I was really hoping we’d see more to BM hunters. I don’t mind the play-style, but it gets so stale over time.
#https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/feedback-hunter-class-changes/490705/914
The Kyrian Covenant ability Resonating Arrow has received several changes in this week’s Shadowlands update. The radius has been increased, which should make it easier to use against targets who are near the pillars in maps such as Nagrand Arena. Additionally, when a target leaves the Resonating Arrow area, the effect that allows you to ignore line of sight towards them will last for an additional 4 seconds.
Flayed Shot has had a minor update that makes the bonus Kill Shot no longer cost any Focus, so it can be used more freely.
We’ve implemented many bug fixes to Death Chakram, and it will no longer chain to targets that are under crowd control effects that break upon taking damage.
The design of Wild Spirits has been simplified quite a bit. Now, when you cast the ability, all targets in the area now take some immediate Nature damage. Any ability you use, including Kill Command, will now cause up to 5 targets in the area to take extra Nature damage. This extra Nature damage will ignore targets that are currently affected by crowd control effects that break upon taking damage. There is no longer any difference in behavior when using single target versus area damage with this ability.
Well, some changes to our covenant abilities just recently announced.
Sooo, just the basic class stuff and “everything” else left on the to-do list now then eh…
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Well, hopefully Wild Spirits isn’t the disaster people have been saying it was now, and will at least be usable.
The change to resonating arrow is prolly gonna make it the required arena choice for MM at least, and the free focus cost on proced flayed shots is going to make it very competitive I think.
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Here is where I see the updates:
- Venthyr - Still a solid option for pure single target MM with Dead Eye. Still has Focus issues, especially compared with Necrolord (-35.5 Focus/minute compared with Necrolord), probably Flayed Shot itself should just be free. Will need to sim it to determine which is better. Still mediocre for SV, who have no talents that interact with it, and especially BM, who has no talents and don’t get Mastery scaling on it.
- Necrolord - Basically unchanged, just QoL fixes to prevent breaking CC, which will make it better in arena, and slightly better in M+ comps that rely on hard CC rather than stuns.
- Kyrian - Cements its hold on PvP, bigger radius will help in M+ as well. Likely lost substantial ground to reworked Wild Spirits, entirely dependent on tuning. Still less useful for SV than BM or MM as they are less susceptible to being LoS’d.
- Night Fae - New design is much better, both the instant damage and just proccing AoE damage rather than a bonus per target with shared ICD. Likely to supplant Kyrian for M+ if the tuning is done right.
Overall, looks like Necrolord is still the safest pick, because it will work reliably and consistently in all content, and the Focus provides a valuable benefit for all specs. Everything else seems at least viable in raids, M+, and PvP, with each having a clear focus.
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Nope. The focus cost on Kill Shot was never the issue in the first place (seriously, it’s 10 focus 3 times per minute on average, or 4 with the conduit).
The focus starvation issues with Flayed Shot are the result of Dead Eye, and how stuffed the MM rotation is, and how little room it has for adding additional Aimed Shot charges. And that’s 90% the fault of Precise Shots, if we’re being honest.
New design is definitely better. However, I still have concerns:
- Is there still an ICD on it? That would still break Aimed Shot -> Multi-Shot, which is extremely common for MM in AoE. Same for Aimed -> Rapid or Aimed -> Arcane in single target.
- This ability is heavily dependent on your ability to activate abilities rapidly for the duration, since it triggers per cast. That means anything that takes longer than a GCD is losing potential procs. That also means downtime for BM and SV is lost procs.
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Currently Venthyr’s ability Flayed Shot has no use in aoe which feels very bad when you’re stuck in those situations as a Venthyr. Blizzard mentioned that specific covenant conduits would patch the weaknesses of the covenant abilities but that’s currently not the case with Flayed Shot, so i came up with an improved version of Flayed Shots conduit.
It would be cool if the conduit made it so the Kill Shot proc would work like Hydra’s Bite works for Survival. E.g. “Empowered Release: Flayer’s mark increases the damage of your next Kill Shot by X% and fires Kill Shot to 2 additional enemies near your target”.
This would make Flayed Shot worth while on cleave without being too strong in aoe and keeping its core functionality of being primarily a single target ability.
For PvP:
Not sure what the purpose of giving BM back arcane shot was if it is going to be COMPLETELY useless, I get not having it dominate but its unpressable after the nerfs.
Additionally, I think Kill Command needs a buff, don’t give us another BFA with stealth mastery nerfs to our pet damage and a useless core ability that forces us to look elsewhere to be viable, easy fix would be to make kill command nature damage or just buff it by 50%.
It’s been 5 what, 5 years? Pls allow BM to be somewhat viable.
Honestly, probably the easiest way to handle it would be to make Kill Shot innately cleave via Trick Shots, trigger Beast Cleave, and have the same CDR effect as Carve.
Flayed Shot is a really good example of why the covenant system doesn’t work, though. Neither Flayed Shot nor Death Chakram scale with AoE at all, while the other two do.
If all 4 are balanced on single target, then Flayed Shot and Death Chakram are dead abilities, because peeps will naturally take one of the two that’s useful in AoE and does the same output in ST. If Flayed Shot and Death Chakram have an advantage in ST, then it’ll feel terrible to have either of the other two in an ST situation (about as terrible as it feels to have Flayed Shot or Death Chakram in an AoE situation, actually), and it’ll feel absolutely mandatory to be running one of the ST ones for most raid fights.
There’s no possible way to balance that away. When two of the abilities have zero AoE benefits, you can’t balance them for both ST and AoE. The only real option is to make all 3 soulbinds for those two covenants grant AoE benefits. Unfortunately, they painted themselves into a corner with that one as well, because the soulbind tree abilities are the same for all 12 classes and all 36 specs, so they can’t balance, say, Venthyr to have stronger AoE without it breaking other classes (like warlock, where Venthyr and Night Fae are their only AoE options).
They haven’t left themselves any knobs to tune here. Conduits aren’t specific to certain covenants (though the number of each you can access is, another issue), soulbinds are global to all classes, and individual covenant abilities across all classes vary wildly as far as areas of strength go. They say they’ll balance it, but they’ve designed the system to be impossible to balance.
Incidentally, I’d like to highlight something else here. They removed reforging at the end of MoP because you needed an addon or sim to tell you the proper combination of reforging to reach the hit and expertise cap and maximize your other stats. They also removed hit and expertise at the same time, making that issue largely moot, but w/e. They’ve now implemented a system that is even more impossible to optimize without a sim.
Consider that you have different benefits from all of the following:
- Covenant choice
- Covenant ability
- Soulbind choice
- Number of potency conduits
- Soulbind passives
- Different path choices
- Legendary
All of those vary wildly between the various options. You have 4 covenants, each of which has 3 soulbinds, each of which has at least 2 path splits along their soulbind tree. Each path split generally has one type of conduit and then a passive that usually provides a benefit in a different area than the conduit (ex. most paths with a potency conduit slot grant a utility or defensive benefit, while most paths with an endurance conduit slot grant a utility or damage benefit). Each potency conduit slot has 5+ options (4 spec-specific or general options, plus 1 covenant-specific one for that covenant ability). And on top of all of that, you have legendaries, of which there are typically 8 options (4 general and 4 spec-specific).
Even with only a single potency conduit, that’s 4,320 combinations, and it rises to 17,280 with 2 potency slots and 51,840 with 3. It’s straight up impossible to determine which combination of covenant, soulbind, soulbind path choices, conduits, and legendary are going to be the optimal pick without a sim. Raidbots is now mandatory if you even remotely care about optimizing your output.
But they removed reforging because you needed an addon to tell you how to optimally reach hitcap.
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I don’t care necessarily about being perfectly optimal, but just thinking about the number of possible combinations gave me an instant headache and absolutely zero desire to even put the slightest bit of my own thought into that beyond the initial covenant choice.
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so Tranquilizing Shot without any weapon animation on Survival its so weard… hope they fix that before pre-patch release.
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That’s basically where I land, and I kinda do care a bit about optimization (though not world-first-push perfect optimization to be sure). Fortunately, we have raidbots, so I’ll just sim it and see what percolates to the top.
Pretty much this.
Why do they insist on going even further with these tiring systems? We haven’t seen even one of them at a decent level from the start. In fact, it has in many ways gone in the opposite direction for each new system/expansion.
Ironically, the system I found to have worked the best out of the ones we’ve seen so far, was the Artifact-weapons of Legion(despite their many flaws). Not purely because of balancing/tuning ofc.
And frankly, artifact weapons only really became reasonable once artifact knowledge progressed to the point where a new 110 could reliably get every node in the tree complete (except the infinite one, of course) in a couple days or less of WQs. The capped AK mechanism of SL (where the cost decreases rather than the sources increasing, but the cost per level flooring at 1k AP) was infinitely more tiresome, since a new 120 still had to grind for a week or so just got get up to 50+ neck level and even start to see new essence slots open up. And then they had to grind for the essences themselves, either directly or eventually via the Echoes. And Azerite armor was quite annoying until they stopped scaling the unlock level in BoD or EP and basically just let them all be fully unlocked at drop (except for fresh 120’s, which often only have the first ring unlocked, if any traits, since the first ring unlocks at 15 and you often hit 120 closer to 8-10).
Really, none of these systems have been terribly engaging or fun. They exist to artificially prolong and inflate game time, at the cost of gameplay enjoyment, and have only become “good” when their obstacles have eased to the point of being essentially irrelevant. In other words, when we can actually play the game rather than mindlessly grinding to boost those stockholder metrics (well, until Blizzard invents a new grind, like Echoes for corruption).
SL will be more of the same, dialed to 11. Anima grinding, Maw grinding for conduits and gem sockets, Torghast grinding, grinding to swap covenants, grinding our way through the campaign of each of the 4 covenants so we’re not kneecapped when (not if) we have to swap, grinding out legendaries, grinding out itemlevel upgrades for conduits, and that’s all just the release systems. 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3 will surely have their own versions of essences and corruption.
No doubt, because Blizz will be trying to fix the issues with covenants and everything else by adding a new system instead of listening to the players telling them that it’s far too complicated.
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I would agree. Although the “good” part is, IMO, still debatable.
Yep.
They could fix the issue with a new Conduit for each Covenant ability that changes the function. Venthyr has a Flayed Shot conduit that makes it better at the same thing, why not an additional conduit (mutually exclusive) that makes it mechanically different, like the procced Kill Shots cleave to a second target, or two charges so you can multi-dot.