The term “viable” to more than half the player base is “does this twitch streamer think this spec is good?” It’s sort of cringe listening to people like Maldiva say destro locks are garbage, or Cdew complaining about shaman healing, despite watching him play a game yesterday in which he casted 3 riptides and one actual casted heal, and then wondered why they died. I feel like each spec should bring something to the table and not be buffed/nerfed because they others are “better.” I suppose in the sense of sub rogues for example, they have a ton of control, I don’t get why people should just expect dying in kidney/triple DR cheap shot like they have in the past. I feel like sub rogues are actually balanced perfectly. I really can’t speak on frost/MM because I haven’t exactly faced them a ton, but perhaps they are a bit undertuned, I really don’t know. The issue is that they refuse to bring vendors back, so now its an rng fest to see if you can get the gear with the best stats for your spec. I just feel like you should be able to make any spec work, you shouldn’t just rely on someone telling you “x spec” is garbage or great.
That really wouldn’t fix anything.
The issue is Scatter DR and Precise shots mechanics preventing buffs and forcing 60-70% of our damage to be gated behind Aimed Shots long cast as well as making it our only option to dumb focus which isn’t fixed by that or most of the suggestions in these threads.
Frost lost too much going into this expansion.
Remorseless snare being nerfed to 20% (for noerason)
The loss of decomposing aura
The loss of obliterate and frost strike doing any kind of meaninful damage
What made frost work in Legion was that it had a very powerful 1 minute go with overpowered rune weapon + hungering rune weapon combined with gathering storm slamming into people was very significant damage. The spec now just plays at an absolutele snail pace even if you do nothing but stack hate. The downtime for the spec is simply far too severe for how little the abilities hit for. It efels extremely bad seeing auto attack and frost fever simply doing way more damage than any of your active abilities.
This spec needs an entire rework. Numers tuning will not fix its problems. Its downtime si too hihg, its damage is too low, it’s utility is too low.
aff damage isnt even a problem i know these forums like to make it seem like it is because of player error but ive seen a few affs do something like 14k dps against shaman teams that are good about agony
they just need to not be so squishy
How are aff locks squishy though? They are just as tanky as destro, and more mobile too since most of your dmg is instant.
I can’t do anything. It’s lame.
This is why MM is almost fun. Aimed Shot is the most important part of rotation but its far too long of a cast for such a squishy character. Mages get aura, warriors can heal and MM can die lol.
It’s mostly because they don’t have the same kind of peeling that the other two specs have.
Sure, demo and afflic have coil, but they don’t have double coil so it’s not worth taking over port.
Demo also has pet stun and can use that or cs talent for casters to help peel themselves against caster and melee same time. Afflic can only use one pet and generally they take the lock out, which would only help against casters.
Personally I’d like to see affliction damage cranked up a bit and demon armor reduced a hair (maybe 175-200 instead of current), but I’m extra biased toward affliction.
To be honest all MM needs is to be able to cast aimed shot on the run. If that happens MM would be great in PvP. Its really just a simple fix.
Make scatter baseline and make a cast-while-moving aimed shot talent would be really nice I think.
That would be perfect!!! Every other spell including rapid shot and steady shot can be cast wile moving, why not aimed shot.
Because we would not be much different from BM at that point and be nerfed into the ground like them. Also that it would not change melee uptime, it would just change our ability to deal with LoS.
Unlimited mobility doesn’t solve the problem. We were hyper pruned of control and that’s what we need to justify a squishy semi immobile ranged class.
Scatter off DR, baseline roots and move damage out of trueshot into the base rotation. Currently if you stack the right traits/talents you can obliterate someon every one min if they don’t LoS you. CDs, specially a short one just should not be that strong.
Curious how you would think it would make you similar to bm, all their abilities are instant cast and damage is tied to the pet.
That’s sorta like saying “arcane is like frost because they both have slows and have to cast sometimes.”
Maybe I should be more clear it would be similar in that both would have unlimited mobility. There is no outplay potential or thought when you have no constraints. MM needs control so we are rewarded for thoughtful play.
If anything you would change the steady focus talent to cast 3 steadyshots and your next aimed is instant. But given focus isn’t a problem we barely ever use steadyshot. The other two talents in that tier are pretty bad given hunters mark is dispellable and is on GCD and Streamline is mediocre at best since it’s a flat 20 sec CD and if you are not getting aimed shots off then you can’t get SuS resets.
Mm yes I see what you’re saying now, I’m ridiculously tired cuz I’ve been binge-playing skyrim instead of sleeping so reading stuff either confuses me or intrigues me.
I think that would be nice to have some form of reliable instant cast available for sure, rng can screw you harder than a power drill sometimes.
Thats why I don’t like LnL current design, it’s a very low proc rate (effectively once every 40-60 seconds) due to slow auto attacks and 5% rate.
Instead LnL should make aimed not cost focus and Make the target take 10/20% more damage for 10 sec. I originally though make aimed do more damage but with how double tap works it would cause some one shot levels of burst.
The sad part is give the current talents there are so many ways to fix MM without a class redesign. For some reason there is no indication that blizzard wants to fix us in PvP.
@Rawrzy, what about just giving MM silencing shot back + baseline scatter with the way it drs rn.
Marks historically countered mages but not so much anymore, maybe silencing shot would help that.
We have spider sting which is similar, just takes more thought/planning and is dispellable by some classes. We also have locks of knock backs for additional interrupts.
We don’t have a problem with casters as much as we have a massive problem being damage sponges to melee. Given melee uptime is so high and our kiting ability has been pruned we get severely punished for trying to cast aimedshot.
Historically hunters were kings of fighting melee and mages and lost to locks and other rot classes since we lacked sustainability. As of today we are good against almost all casters but get absolutely destroyed by melee.
I’ve made the suggestion to give MM freedom even when lone wolf is taken but was told that it wouldn’t do much.
I know spider sting is similar but spider sting goes off a cast rather than being a blanket.
in other high mobility classes such as DH and monk the mobility can be utilized in every spec of the class. Just thought everything else in MM plays to the mobility of a hunter except aimed shot. BM is pet based damage and can,at times, be inconsistent due to the pet AI. MM you have complete control which is awesome. Changing aimed shot would not make it more like BM,I think it would make it more like a hunter.