The issue isn’t the nerf itself.
The issue is that when some large damage reduction gets added in (such as trinket set bonus, or whatever) – this won’t get changed back.
It’s not right for some classes to be doing the damage that they’re capable of doing right now. A damage-taken decrease across the board is needed so bad…and when that comes, MM has nothing left, this nerf will not be reverted, and BM is left with broken pets.
The issue is that it’s mistargeted.
The issues people have are specifically with the double tap opener. So instead of specifically targeting that, they do nerfs that impact us in all phases.
Double Tap is especially strong in the opener because both shots benefit from Careful Aim, even if the second one shot not if the target was already brought below 70%. So if you fix that, then you don’t need to nerf the second shot as much which now affects us outside of Careful Aim. Though I guess you can use it on Rapid Fire in that window now…
I haven’t seen anyone complain about Aimed Shot’s damage outside of the burst. So they’ve reduced the number to reduce that burst. But now that affects us in all areas of the game where it didn’t feel out of place before. We’ve seen what hapened for all of BfA when they gutted Aimed Shot’s damage.
And then they didn’t even touch the biggest culprit of all the “one shots” in Resonating Arrow which is seen in every single one of those screenshots. Not only does it make the required double crit exponentially likelier with the 30% increased crit chance, it also gives 9% extra damage from the conduit (184) and another 12-13% damage from the Pelagos mastery buff. So now hunters of other covenants are getting hit disproportionately.
Double tap nerf was all that was needed, the aimed nerf was un-necessary
It literally doesn’t, the nerfs are for PvP only.
I think they may mean in the arena/bg game
like it makes us weaker in the in-between burst phases of a match
I mean I guess, but the base AiS nerf was only 10%, and not even actually 10%, but reduced back down to 100% damage from 110%, about a 9.1% nerf.
Double Tap has been problematic since it was introduced in BfA, I’m only surprised it took them 2 pre patches and 4 full PvP seasons to nerf it in PvP.
It’s fine for now, but it may come back to bite us if they buff everyone defensively baseline as a blanket, imo marksman still needs scatter off trap DR and pets need survivability increases in pvp, those are the 2 major things i’d want for the class atm
personally never found double tap that fun anyways, you use a global to do a 2nd aimed shot so in a way you’re just casting an aimed shot in 1s instead of 2.5 (not including movement of course but at its core not super interesting)
Yeah I’m less concerned about the damage than our utility toolkit.
Scatter off Trap DR, or revert Bursting to a Disorient instead of a Snare.
Pets need to inherit more armor, more stam, get passive DR, get Cower back as an (undispellable) active DR, or a combination of the above. Maybe Cower baseline for all specs, and increase the defensive stats inherited for BM pets.
Reverting pet rez to 2s isn’t even my preferred fix here (it would just paper over the issue by letting us get them back easier).
My stance on this has been that since BM damage effectively all comes from the pet, and a BM Hunter with a dead pet is a free kill, killing the pet should require nearly the same level of commitment as killing a player - pop damage cooldowns and prepare to dispel HoTs if you want to guarantee a kill.
Yeah i agree with pretty much all of this. MM being a damage bot isn’t why i play hunter, i like having tons of utility, i dont wanna play a ghetto destro lock.
Pets are unusable right now so thats already 3 utility spells gone, masters call, mortal strike or slow, and roar of sac.
Fast res is bad, but killing pets shouldn’t be free. you should have to actually try to kill one
I meant it affects us in PvP outside of the burst window.
The base AiS nerf is only 9.1% (100% damage, down from 110%), so I’m not that concerned.
The Double Tap nerf is honestly like 2 years in the making. Is Double Tap ever used with AiS outside the opener?
The real problem with the nerf is that in true Blizzard fashion, it is the laziest, quickest and most reckless “fix” to the problem without addressing the root of the issue; Aimed Shot.
Aimed Shot commands such a ridiculous percentage of the MMs overall damage, it isn’t remotely funny. It also happens to be practically impossible to get off in PvP against virtually any melee spec who’s player is not currently in a coma (and against Sub Rogues, I am not even sure about that). The issue was never about the damage MM did as much as it was how it was nearly entire frontloaded in the space of two globals because once that combo is fired, if the target wasn’t dying, you were likely to be instead. MM has the defences of a rusted outhouse and trying to get AS off while being tunneled is virtually impossible.
This is where most classes would fall back on their other moves but in the case of MM, you don’t really have any. Arcane Shot doesn’t do much damage without Aimed Shot to buff it, Rapid Fire is a little better but has a long cooldown. And… that is pretty much your entire damage toolbox. MM is so hopelessly dependent on Aimed Shot that virtually nothing else does anything except be there to support Aimed Shot.
The logical solution would be moving some of that damage out of Aimed Shot and in to other abilities. This would be a win for all parties involved; MM would have other tools to use when Aimed Shot is not practical and you would not see the nonsense we have for the past few weeks that prompted the nerfs in the first place.
Of course though, this would take effort and understanding where changing a few numbers in a table is much easier. So as a result, we get the quick and dirty nerf to MMs damage output in PvP while the powers that be wilfully ignore the underlining issues with the spec. The same issues that were pointed out time and time again in beta, I might add. I should be at least a little surprised but I really am not in the slightest.
I personally think they need to do something about the pet rez length. It may not need to get completely reverted but I see a lot of Hunters blowing turtle just to get their pet rezzed back up. Sorry, but Hunters are short on meaningful defense as is and blowing that cool down just to get your pet back up and almost instantly killed again is bad design.
The bigger issue is that pets die so quickly in the first place, with no commitment from the attacker. An Afflock or Shadowpriest can drop a round of DoTs on the pet and kill it through Mend Pet, then happily go back to melting faces while the Hunter gets interrupted 4 or 5 times trying to get the pet back.
Pets need more DR, and preferably an active ability like Cower to further increase it on demand.
As an SV hunter, Im sad about the MM nerf because when I would get the double tap opener done on me, it was the first time I felt like I was dealing with a sniper situation. We’ll see how that feels going forward.
My hot take is Blizzard just really likes the name Double Tap so they keep the talent despite it being so hard to balance around.
One fix is quick and can be easily determined by math, the second involves a complete spec redesign which fundamentally changes the way it plays. They will always opt for the former, the latter needs to happen between expansions.
Now, they need to also do the latter more often like they did with Shadow, but that’s a different issue entirely.
This excuse falls flat when they have had beta testers for two expansions saying “Hey, Double Tap is a problem, especially combined with Careful Aim, it means Aimed Shot base damage has to be artificially low or the opening burst is way too strong, please redesign this to be less gimmicky”.
I noticed you decided not to quote my next paragraph where I said it should have happened, but that’s cool.
I’m agreeing with you that it should have happened.
I’m not saying you are making excuses for them, I’m saying that Blizzard trots out that excuse far too often for longstanding issues.