Shell Cover - When dropping below 60% health, summon the aid of a Turtle, reducing the damage you take by 10% for 6 sec.
This effect can only occur once every 1.5 min.
This is after the buff that reduced the cooldown to 90 seconds. While previously, healing on packleader could have been considered too high, this new cooldown is insanely weak. A mere 10 % Damage Reduction can’t even compare to the aspects of the other two Hunter Hero specs.
Compare it to the following for dark ranger and sentinel respectively
“heal for 15% of all Shadow damage dealt”
or even better “Exhilaration grants you 3 sec of Survival of the Fittest. Survival of the Fittest activates Exhilaration at 50% effectiveness.”
Which effectively empowers two of your cooldowns giving you more control over when it activates.
Each time Sentinel deals damage to an enemy you gain an absorb shield equal to 1.0% of your maximum health, up to 10%.
Which can be stacked very easily and basically does effectively the same DR sentinel is providing (by shielding 10% of your health) it outperforms it by miles.
Shell cover could have a 30 second cooldown and it would probably still be outperformed by these options on the other hero specs.
I will never understand why we now have 5 or 6 something defensives and they are ALL on 2 minute or more CDs. we wouldn’t even NEED so many if we had just 2 we could reliably press before every 2 minutes. And it’s a simple matter of adjusting the focus cost to CD reduction mechanic to be reasonable, if it were twice what it is, or maybe triple, we wouldn’t even need this many defensives with exhilaration having more up time.
Best damage mit Hunters ever had was Chelonian crest from Torghast, now 5 stacks might be too much, but like 2? That’s reasonable.
No Borrowed Power means endlessly growing ability creep paired with constant yet erratic pruning, leading to virtual borrowed power. Blizzard can’t figure out a horizontal progression system (well, they can, but it’s SoD’s glyph system).
SoD’s glyphs are one solution to vertical progression issues, like we’re currently facing. Horizontal progression means more options but still confined within a limited use set, so that mechanical complexity, keyboard space, ui space, can be conserved.
Yes, it can run into power creep, the same as vertical progression. That’s a lesser issue than the aforementioned issues and can be dealt with in execution.
They are only superficially similar.
Both are systems layered over their respective base classes, with a set of choices.
However, SoD Glyphs are broader, more fine-tuned, and more expandable.
They present more independent choices (~17 equipment slots vs a single hero spec), and more options per choice (every glyph within its slot vs two Hero specs). An endless number of glyphs can be added without contributing to bloat since there is a cap on the number that can be active at once. The only way Hero specs can do the same is by adding more Hero specs. The chances of Blizzard merely adding new specs to sell Midnight- I’m doubtful. Their current trajectory is to add another layer - “Mythic specs” or whatever.
And while Vanilla classes were bare and could afford one additional layer, Dragonflight classes were already full and bloated, before Hero specs, let alone whatever new progression comes in future expansions.
And while SoD is a one-ff in-house mod project, expansions are commercial endeavors that need to sell units, and that requires Features to hype it- systems that are significant leaps in power progression. Blizzard is on a path of no longer hard-wiping previous progression systems, which means we’ll a load of cruft building up, with periodic prunes to keep everything maneagble. Such prunes are… not going over well with the player base that lose beloved abilities. See Disc Priest and Rapture.
The current system is not sustainable.
PS- I don’t really care about power creep. Some new ability displacing an old one is a non-issue to me. Characters gaining bigger numbers over time is the point of an RPG.
I care about mechanic creep, ability creep- the cumulative number of factors that go into building a character growing beyond easy comprehension. The number of abilities growing to the point they cannot fit in the screen or the keyboard. That the complexity makes it impossible to balance- as an over-performing glyph can always be nerfed on its own, but a nerf on an overperforming ability in a manifold web will have cascading effects throughout the class.
Honestly, a lot the older abilities need to be looked at and brought up to modern standards. You could make that exact same argument about Cheetah, etc.
