BM Hunter. Primary changes to BM are updated CoTW, master handler, and savagery talents. CoTW is too bugged to get a good look at on the PTR, but it’s still probably not as good as running the generic/passive build with big bleed damage anyway. The primary thing that is noticeable is the KC cdr mechanic with master handler. Just putting barb on two things before a BW window lets you effectively spam KC during your window. It’s not necessarily that much more overall damage, but you now have the ability to burst way harder inside of BW windows.
Sub rogue. It’s talent tree got massively cleaned up, and it makes a hell of a lot more sense now, but the end result is a lot more damage. It will release with multiple ways to oneshot/cheese kills in dance windows until it gets additional tuning.
Assasination rogue. Sudden demise in particular is still going to be super broken even at it’s updated pvp coefficient. The amount of bleed damage required to trigger the effect is approximately a half duration garrote and rupture. Running passive exsanguinate, arterial precision/zoldyck, and the other generic bleed talents, bleeds are massively buffed, and the 10% death mechanic is pretty much guaranteed just by nature of your basic stuff existing on targets. The way the mechanic seems to work is that it sends bleed damage equivalent to the target’s remaining health as soon as the condition is met. This mechanic does not finish the duration of bleeds and thus chain procs off of itself off-global, so it’s actually going to kill through every non-immunity wall in the game by nature of it infinitely looping through the wall dozens of times per second. Once sub is nerfed, this mechanic will actually become the most broken thing in the game imo.
Outlaw rogue. Like sub, outlaw just got a lot of QoL improvements that make a lot of sense, but the result is a bunch of damage. KS actually kills stuff now. KS isn’t its only burst mechanic, either. It’s gonna catch people off guard. Has potential to be the rogue spec to play once/if the other two get nerfed. But overall is REALLY good.
Havoc DH. Not much to talk about with it, but it just does everything that it does now better.
These are the things I’ve mostly looked at on the PTR so far, and they’re the most common things to be able to test with what people are doing on PTR.
Am glad to see it, honestly. The spec is way better set up and imo in a much better position to succeed, even once everyone is tuned back to semi-honest levels.
I’m glad you brought up a healer. It’s actually really hard to get a good look at healing on the PTR because of the untuned damage that a lot of the DPS specs are doing. But 60s trinket and reduced CD on healing buttons is a really big deal. IMO, they should consider unnerfing CC as they go through balance passes at the beginning of the season. As they iteratively nerf the big damage offenders, it’s not gonna take much for the healing changes to completely take over and make the meta way too slow. 60s trinket by itself is enough of a change to negate some of the setups that a few specs/classes hinge around.
They need to remove Precog as well going into the next season. Made this post before and had people saying playing a caster is impossible without Precog.
I think precog as a mechanic makes sense from a high level design perspective. There is this weird friction without it where the ranged classes really have to be able to do too much damage within a casting window without it, or they all have to have some kind of instant damage profile competitive enough to work, or melee have to be mega pruned to not just roll over them, or they just don’t work, or they only work when played with other ranged specs, etc.
More things can have more cool things with the mechanic in place. It’s not perfect and there are definitely things that need to be improved, maybe a small icd, etc., but I think overall it’s something that some players don’t like but should get used to.
Oh, I’m sure you can find a win condition outside of CCing a healer 3 times in a row inside of a 2 minute window. If not, you can probably do it just the same inside of a 90s window.
