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.
Here is where I see the updates:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
so Tranquilizing Shot without any weapon animation on Survival its so weard… hope they fix that before pre-patch release.
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.
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.
Could, but that effectively mandates the use of that conduit or you only get half an ability.
So many interlinked systems to tune, it looks like a balancing/tuning nightmare.
I don’t even want to think what they will add in the middle of the expansion… More soulbinds? More conduits? Another cov ability but it’s a “minor” ability.
A good idea, this would allow a a bit of flexibility to tweaking the cov ability. Having done a key as a venthyr hunter, it feels borderline pointless even having flayed shot til you’re on a boss.
Having said that, the cov conduits already augment things slightly, and from what I can tell, they are essentially mandatory for all 4 covs. Especially for MM, as all MM conduits are relatively garbage.
At low ranks, yes, they are basically irrelevant because the increases are so low.
Max rank MM conduits are strong though. 50% duration on Trueshot is nothing to sneeze at.
Well, it is, but only because Trueshot itself is absolutely something to sneeze at currently.
Assume for the sake of argument that you are running Eagletalon’s True Focus for the 30% Focus cost reduction during Trueshot. This is assuming 0% Haste and you have 100 Focus and 2x Aimed Shot charges when you press Trueshot.
So I started this post trying to convince you that if you have appropriate Focus during Trueshot, it isn’t terrible, and extending the duration by 50% is worthwhile. In the process of running the sequence, I found that the 30% cost reduction from Eagletalon’s True Focus makes it PERFECT in terms of generation/consumption. You very slightly overcap Aimed Shot charges due to the CDR being 60% rather than 50%, but while you could theoretically shoehorn in another Aimed Shot somewhere, you would drop both Precise Shots charges and have dead time at the end of the buff with insufficient Focus to do anything.
Constants:
Aimed Shot - 24.5 Focus, 1.3s cast
Arcane Shot - 14 Focus, 1.5s GCD
Rapid Fire + 7 Focus, 2s channel
Time Focus Ability
00.00 100 Trueshot
00.00 100 Aimed Shot
01.30 75.5 Aimed Shot
02.60 59.0 Arcane Shot
04.10 52.5 Rapid Fire
06.10 69.5 Aimed Shot
07.40 53.0 Aimed Shot
08.70 36.5 Arcane Shot
10.20 29.0 Rapid Fire
12.20 47.0 Aimed Shot
13.50 30.5 Aimed Shot
14.80 14.0 Arcane Shot
All this has really done is convince me beyond a doubt that Eagletalon’s True Focus should be baseline, and let the Legendary do something exciting, maybe with Precise Shots always proccing 2, stacking up to 4, and Arcane Shot consuming all stacks generated. That would significantly improve the damage output without fundamentally changing the rotation during the buff, which is already substantially different from the normal rotation.
Not even that. Trueshot simply needs to stop being some hacky ad-hoc quasi-haste and just be haste. You know, like Rapid Fire was back when it was our cooldown. That would fix basically everything, because Steady Shot wouldn’t be atrocious anymore, the GCD would get scaled down like cast times, and our passive regen would get buffed for the duration as well.