State of BM hunter in PVE

In Development Season of Discovery BWL PTR
1

I did a testwerk on the PTR, and I was pulling around 1800-1900 DPS. I have 5 set T2 and up to 4 set for ZG for pet buffs. In no way am I good at hunter, but I’ve played hunter since P1 both melee / ranged. As far as damage goes, we’re at the bottom of the pack now. Boomies, warlocks, mages, rogues sit at the top, all around 3k+ dps. BM seems to do low damage comparatively despite giving my pet full WBs with the scroll as well. (normally pets only get ony + warchief’s blessing)

What I’ve personally noticed is the downtime between abilities, and the lack of damage from flanking strike / mongoose bite. raptor strike fully stacked hits hard enough, but the other abilities, even while taking advantage of the 20% damage boost from the T2 set bonus is quite lack luster. Flanking strike damage is a joke, and mongoose bite feel bad to press. Raptor strike feels strong, but with the constant RNG aspect of not getting resets, or the boss randomly dodging / misses which lead to a non-reset, it still feels very clunky and annoying to play. With the new weaving aspect of the T2 set bonus, it makes getting up to 5 stacks of raptors fury difficult. Making this a 25% damage buff with three stacks would be a nice start, or 40% with two stacks to consistently have the maximum output available would also be much welcomed.

With this being said, adding more consistency (revert raptor strike CD back to 3 seconds), buffing flanking strike to actually do some damage (it hits for like 500 damage), and adding weapon damage scaling with mongoose bite, not just AP scaling would be a good start. Possibly similar to shamans, having increased hit chance on dual wield spec rune would help alleviate misses = rotation stops for 6 seconds.

I do have to say my pet hits quite hard, but the BM hunter themselves still feel like a meme class with lots of downtime.

I hope some of the pain points for BM hunters are addressed with further patches.

End of rant. Thank you!

2

Yeah it’s pretty bad… surprised they even released it like this as if moving cobra slayer to the hands accomplishes anything, bm rune should be baseline since they nerfed hunter pets so much… literal shaman pets get utilility, speed and 2x that don’t flop over… imagine that.

3

BM rune does feel like it should be baseline possibly, or do some rune reshuffling to allow for more choices for BM. I doubt Blizzard will ever revert the BM nerfs, but adding some more power to melee hunter is greatly needed. I mean, we were top dps for awhile, which caused nerf after nerf. I wish they’d just “bring up other classes” rather than reducing the power.

4

I had made a post for these: This would at the very least clean up the runes and open build variety.

  1. Combine flanking strike with bm rune or make bm rune baseline since you gutted pets so much
  2. Make duel wield baseline
  3. move cobra slayer to boots so a hunter can now choose between trap launcher for ranged spec or cobra strikes for melee-
  4. this also opens up any lone wolf builds as well.
  5. You could make master marksman 25% mana reduction apply to strikes as well.

Overall: after tweaks
Then I think melee hunter is in decent shape and has options for a variety of builds even 2h and you are not blocking carve on gloves.

Then it comes down to Melee hunter needs to be able to do damage, which since rogues have no stacking damage modifiers / debuffs (For whatever reason they are melee hunter of p2) they should buff flanking strike to increase all damage by 15% for 30 seconds and increase the damage modifier of flanking strike to 130% - Raptor strike rune should give a base 30% damage to raptor strike and stack to 60% in increments of 15% (2 stacks + base 30%) - then they would at least be competitive, still gapped by rogues but competitive overall.