Honestly so much of my gameplay is focued on maintaining the buff I forgot it was even a talent in the first place.
Yes but Blizzard will just ignore what Hunters actually need
I mean, aside from the Frenzy duration extension from the Azerite trait, which is going away in a ~month, maintaining Thrill is identical to maintaining Frenzy, no? It’s basically just a self-amp from Frenzy. Stacks the same, lasts the same duration.
I don’t feel like it needs to be baseline. It doesn’t alter BM gameplay at all, since maintaining it is the same as maintaining Frenzy, which you already do.
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I don’t see how that correlates with being baseline. You would still maintain Frenzy even if you didn’t take Thrill of the Hunt.
The logical reasons to make a talent baseline are when the talent is completely dominant so everyone always takes it, or the rotation is clunky without it so not taking it sucks.
Thrill of the Hunt is only powerful when you can maintain 3 stacks of Frenzy for long periods of time, so it scales with crit. It’s not completely dominant early on.
Thrill is dominant because of tuning, not because it completes the class or baseline kit or something. Thrill adds literally no additional gameplay. You’re already maintaining Frenzy, and that’s already your highest priority as BM. Thrill just adds a personal buff to an effect you’re already maintaining.
Talents that make an existing thing better without changing the gameplay around them are good things to have as talents, at least for one of the talents on each tier. They’re a good alternative to talents that add buttons or change gameplay, if you’re not interesting in doing those things.
Like, might as well argue that Stomp should be baseline, too. I mean, it’s near universally taken, after all. Nevermind that it doesn’t add anything gameplay-wise, and nevermind that Barrage and Stampede are hilariously undertuned. It’s dominant, so it should be baseline, right?
See, this is the problem with the “everyone takes it, so it should be baseline” thing. Whether peeps take a talent might be based on the gameplay impact that talent has, or it might be purely due to the fact that it’s the highest-tuned trait.
Nearly all fire makes take Meteor, not because there’s anything particularly engaging about it, but because it’s simply the stronger talent on that tier. Nearly all feral druids take Sabertooth, despite it leading to a remarkably degenerate rotation, simply because it’s the strongest talent on that tier (in most situations). Most Sin rogues take Poison Bomb, not because there’s anything engaging about it (it’s literally just a random proc), but because it’s the only talent on that tier that provides single target damage. Same for Elaborate Planning, actually.
Talents that should be moved baseline are ones that feel like they complete the kit of a spec, or as you point out, if the rotation is clunky without them. First Blood and Demonic for Havoc are good examples, as are Demonic Circle for locks (baseline in SL), Primal Wrath for Feral (literally their only AoE spender option), Hammer of Wrath for Ret (baseline in SL), and Echo of the Elements for Elemental. None of those should be baseline just because of their dominance (in fact, nearly twice as many elemental shaman take the completely passive Earthen Rage with no gameplay interaction at all over the gameplay smoothing QoL option Echo of the Elements, simply because it’s usually numerically stronger). They should be baseline because they complete the kits or smooth out the gameplay of those specs.
Thrill does neither of these things. It adds zero additional gameplay at all, in fact. It’s a stacking effect that mirrors an existing stacking effect that’s already your highest priority thing to stack and maintain.
Yeah, I agree with you. I’m also not advocating for Thrill of the Hunt to be made baseline. I think you might’ve misunderstood what I meant about TotH.
I just mentioned the talent being completely dominant as a reason because it makes it “de facto” baseline, while pretending to be a choice, which is annoying for the intended effect of talents which are special additional effects you’re supposed to choose.
Say, for something like Stomp. Yeah it’s completely dominant in all situations but it doesn’t affect gameplay. So of course making it baseline adds nothing, you could just as well remove it entirely. The point here is not “getting stomp” but removing stomp from the talent row so we can get real choices in its place. But since people don’t like pruning, making it baseline becomes a commonly accepted way to remove a talent. I would be fine if it was just gone and replaced with something more interesting.
My point is that being completely dominant diminishes the value of talents, so it’s a valid reason to do something about it. Making it baseline is just one of the options. I wouldn’t really suggest to lump them all in there just like that though. The talent in question, Thrill of the Hunt, is not completely dominant, nor it improves gameplay, so I don’t consider it to qualify at all.
Thrill was not used until it was “fixed” in 8.3 to where it added to your pet. Before that no one took it.
Ok, so, that is completely fair. I’m not really sure that this is a “get rid of Stomp” or “get rid of Thrill” thing, though. While granted, neither talent is particularly interesting in its own right, passive talents without substantial gameplay impact still have their place in the talent tree. Casuals are peeps too, after all, and many of them prefer a rotation that requires a bit less focus and attention.
So the problem still comes back to tuning. The issue is that Thrill and Stomp are both passive non-gameplay-impacting talents and wildly ahead of the other talents on that tier.
Frankly, Blizzard has done an absolute garbage job at balancing talents (or heck, specs) in BfA. Legion was a bit better, but their balancing focus seems to have declined considerably over the last few years. Used to be that when a talent was absolutely dominant for even an entire tier, that talent saw some tuning at the least in the next point patch, if not in one or several iterative hotfixes before then.
Now? You have talents that are 5%+ ahead of the other talents on that tier and are completely untouched for the entire expansion. Heck, Piercing Shot for MM was an outright DPS loss to use in single target at all (and also atrocious in AoE) until they made it bypass armor in like 8.2 or 8.3. And I told them about that during the freakin’ alpha for BfA, and kept telling them about it through release.
Like, I’m not sure if they’re just understaffed, or tied up in mountains of administrative red tape, or have simply stopped caring, but their balance work is absolute garbage lately.
Anyway, long story short, the reason those tiers have no choice is because Blizzard won’t put forth the effort to balance their freakin’ talent trees. I don’t really see that as a reason to move them baseline, as that won’t necessarily fix the issue. Maybe they move Stomp baseline, and then Stampede is balanced as the best on that tier, and the other two talents are still dead.
The funny thing is, Thrill of the Hunt is not wildly ahead of the other talents in its row at all. A Murder of Crows is actually competitive for single target, and it’s only slightly worse that TotH due to the high uptime we can get of 3 stack Frenzy at this point of the expansion along with crit synergies like Dance of Death.
Crows is stronger than TotH under several circumstances. It’s just that once you have enough stat synergy for One With the Pack to be top tier, TotH goes along with it. Everyone uses it right now because it makes sense to take OWtP and TotH together with DoD and that’s the current build, not because it’s actually overpowered.
Once we start Shadowlands and Dance of Death goes away, along with out high crit and haste, the uptime of Frenzy is going to drop a lot and I bet A Murder of Crows is going to be stronger than TotH again (OWtP will also drop in value without DoD). Which is why I don’t even consider TotH to be a problematic talent choice. Most of the time, TotH will be the cleave talent while AMoC will be the single target talent.
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One with the pack will likely stay the choice in SL… Chimera Shot is lack luster especially for single target. Scent of blood is rather meh, its predictable but in reality will slow down the usage of BW as to not waste them.
As far as Thrill goes it works with OWTP, on that tier it is not really out of balance with crows but crows is clunky at best and while Thrill on its own might not be much better it does make OWTP stronger… its one of them things you take both or neither.
It’s really hard to say until we get some sims. Chimaera Shot was stronger than One With the Pack at the beginning of BfA. Even if its damage seems lackluster, it’s still a focus generator that hits much harder than our filler, and if they keep Cobra Shot at 45 focus as it is in beta right now, having a focus generator is going to be very nice. One With the Pack adds almost no dps if you have very low crit. And under those circumstances, crit may not even be the best stat to focus on, which makes OWtP even weaker.
thats why thrill is taken with OWTP.
I wonder if covenants will muck with that balance, tbh. Resonating Arrow clearly synergizes well with One with the Pack, as well as with the Bestial Wrath crit damage legendary.
resonating arrow will be highly situational. IMO it is number 3 in usefulness unless they fix Night Fae then it will be the worst IMO.
I dunno, especially for BM and SV, Flayed Shot seems relatively weak. Kill Shot has no real interaction with their kits. And for MM, it has a lot of potential, but focus starvation issues are severely holding it back.
Resonating seems a bit of a waste for SV, but for BM, the synergy with the Bestial Wrath legendary appears stellar. You get a 10s period every 2 minutes where you have +30% crit and +30% crit damage and +25% damage done, and then you can also layer Killer Cobra or Bloodshed and Murder of Crows on top of that. That’s some pretty stellar burst, I expect.
Thrill of the hunt is only a dps increase because of dance of death azerite higher crit mean higher up time no one was using thrill until 8.2 because no one was using dance of death before 8.2. Murder of crows without dod is a higher dps increase atleast in single target.
right now you should not be using cobra shot in the beta at all. arcane shot only.
until we see how blizzard intends to fix this it’s probably also too early to call which talents for what situation. but if they do keep cobra at 45 and nerf arcane into uselessness, then chimera may be the way to go because we WILL be focus starved for a while.
except resonating can just be moved out of in pvp, and if you don’t know the fight may lose it’s lustre in pve too.
chakram does a LOT of damage for bm and mm though.
No one was using Thrill before 8.2 because until then it didn’t affect your pet’s crit, only your own. Since like 75% of a BM hunter’s damage comes from their pet, that was a massive hindrance to the talent. Sure, the DoD build certainly helped it, but much of Thrill’s early weakness was simply because it was bugged.