I agree with the following:
- Beastmaster + Survival should be able to play with either a melee or ranged focus.
- Melee iterations would need to be equipped with mechanics which justify the loss of range, since ranged hunters typically don’t have to stand still for much of anything.
- Marksmanship + Survival should be able to play without a pet.
- This would largely require granting an option to Survival to move its kit away from Kill Command, since Kill Command is its primary Focus generator.
- Completely restructure the Hunter talent trees.
- There is so much to comment on here…
- Ranger Hero Class
- Trueshot reworked back into an aura with a Bloodlust activatable effect.
- Exotic Beasts available for all hunters.
- I’d add the caveat of permitting this via a class talent node. Beastmaster hunters would instead gain the effects of their current “Animal Companion” talent, and that talent would in turn be replaced with something else.
- The mechanics of Hunter’s Mark and its place in our toolkit need to be re-examined.
- Various abilities and/or ability names need to be thematically re-examined.
Things I don’t agree with:
- Marksmanship should be able to play with a melee focus
- Melee ain’t Marksmanship’s class fantasy. Majority of hunters want access a class with this specifically named specialization, not “Deadeye” or some alternate version which more linguistically justifies a “melee version of Marksmanship”.
- Beastmaster should be able to play without a pet
- Having “guardians” but no active pet would lead to really gimmicky math between “Lonewolf + Guardians” vs. “Pet + Guardians” DPS comparisons.
- Automatic weapon/ability swapping based on range.
- “Stat sticks” and math gets wonky during combat.
- Could feel really clunky having the game automatically swap between one or the other.
- Valewalker Hero Class
- Dark Ranger seems like a more interesting hero class fantasy choice. Valewalker seems a bit too druidic for my taste. While there are aspects to the Hunter class fantasy that jive well with druids, WoW hunters have considerably more variety as a whole.
- Pack Leader Hero Class
- We don’t need something that’ll likely just be a lazy extension of Beastmaster.