I love Pack Leader and think conceptually the spec/hero tree is there, but there are a few issues with the gameplay that make it not so smooth.
A few of these are down to tip of the spear interactions. Firstly, lead from the front should auto cast a beast, so you don’t have to cast kill command when you’re already at 3 stacks.
Secondly, I think Fury of the eagle/spearhead should consume tip of the spear stacks (more damage with more stacks) and be on a 30/1min sec cd to line up with CA. Having FotE gain 6 stacks feels weird and you end up overcapping so often with CA/FoTE which doesn’t feel good at all.
Thirdly, there should be bonus dmg to having beasts out, so more beasts = more damage multiplicatively. This would involve a rework of wyvern, which i get to in the point below.
Fourthly, i think the beasts should be less passive. For example, the boar increasing the damage of mongoose bite and making it aoe is fun, interactive gameplay. what impact does wyvern and bear have on your gameplay? I think they should buff different abilities, like boar with mb. Bear does a lot of damage but it’s not all that interesting. Wyvern could make WFB become a poison bomb, doing extra damage and have the dot stack. Bear dot could impact 1 or 2 next kill shots to hit all targets affected by the bleed, or generate extra tots stacks. just some examples
Finally, figure out a solution to make kill shot feel good to press (for example bear buff above), get rid of butchery and make flanking strike do good aoe damage.
IDK i like the idea of melee combat with your pet and being highly mobile and summoning beasts and what not. I just think rotation wise it’s a bit messy and doesn’t feel the best. The good news is that is fairly easy to fix.
Boar interacts either with RS/MB (via Viper’s Venom / Contagious Reagents) or Butchery. Wyvern interacts with everything but most therefore most noticeably with your CDs.
I mean, in effect it gains 3. The only difference is that you only need half the channel to get there, in case your target escapes you half-way through and you want to follow up with something else.
This would just mean overall bank and burst cycles that would deemphasize what makes each PL beast unique.
With 4 piece set, there is already a bank and burst cycle. I disagree that the beasts are all that unique. Wyvern really doesn’t interact with your gameplay(saying it interacts with everything is the same as saying it doesn’t interact with anything) and the bear offers a very mild butchery cdr. I think they could be more interactive. And I want my damage and gameplay to be rewarded by having 2-3 beasts out at a time. It feels good when beasts are rotating quickly and youre getting a lot of different procs and i think your damage should impact that more directly.
Do you have any suggestions to improve the spec, or you think the gameplay and iteration is pristine right now?
Then you might as well say that CA and Bloodlust interact with nothing, despite their being worth working around.
Then you’re inherently asking for a lesser portion of each beast’s benefit to come from anything unique to itself, siphoning that portion unique value to instead come from the beast’s value as just any beast to then be counted towards some general buff.
We already have indirect multiplicity between each, in getting a Wyvern’s portion more out of the prior or next summon or, if Contagious Reagents weren’t so gameplay-bypassing (and didn’t so weaken the max damage Serpent Sting could do for ST or focus damage) applying and popping Stings. I’d be fine with allowing those indirect synergies to tighten up for greater leverage, but I don’t want to siphon their value towards mere “keep beast points high” in any way.
Where such gameplay implications would already be enforced by other effects, rest assured that I don’t like them either.
I don’t think it’s pristine, but one doesn’t need to think so to not want what is entailed in another suggestion. I’d say only that it’s… mostly basically fine.
I’ll throw some of my own suggestions up after work, though, if I get a chance, sure.
Bloodlust and CA are cooldowns, like every spec in the game has. They don’t interact directly with the rotation, but they don’t need to. They interact with other players and the mechanics of the dungeon/raid. IMO PL beasts should directly impact the rotation, like how boar changes MB prio.
I would like boar empowered MBs to do more damage, as well as the aoe effect. As of right now, a boar does nothing in single target, except add mb stacks and a bit of damage. They could have it something like boar makes your next mongoose bite strike 5 additional times, split evenly between enemies to make it impactful in ST.
I’d prefer the indirect multiplicity be a reward for good gameplay of having more beasts, and rework wyvern to be more than an “indirect synergy”
At the very least, I think we can agree that CA auto summons a beast, rather than requiring the initial kill command
Agreed about contagious reagents. SS in it’s current iteration is a weird unfriendly dot.
You can feel heroism though. From much quicker skill usage
Apart from charge and 3 tips proc, you can’t really feel CA. You know you do more damage, but it doesn’t feel different in gameplay.
I just think the talent trees in general implemented as is, are not great.
Too many dead talents among all classes/specs/etc but also with how many possible interactions there are hard to even try to make em viable w/o risking something else breaking from it.
Really wish we’d go back to MoP style talent trees with fewer but more meaningful choices, and a lot of current talent tree fluff just getting baked back into specs.
When stacked with Wyvern? Idk man, I feel like a 38% damage boost into FotE, 2–3 Butchery casts and a crapton of bombs over the overlapping 15 seconds feels pretty noticeable even if it’s just a damage amp.
That’s my point. Wyvern’s damage amp accentuates your highest ppgcd abilities and the influence of your other damage amps. That’s already going to feel decently interactive.
Anywho…
The main issue, imo, isn’t that the PL pets don’t chop up different parts of your kit each to give shiny glow borders. It’s that we’re chucking out beasts so quickly that they feel relatively unimpactful.
It’s, in effect, the (BfA/ShL) Wildfire Infusions issue all over again, and the last thing I’d want is for us to have yet more reason to just spam even harder (i.e., to “Mad Bombardier” HotPL, too).
Personally, “button bloat” or no, I’d rather both Lunar Storm and Howl of the Pack Leader be a separate oGCD — HotPL thereby choosing when to let out the next pet and perhaps but not necessarily accelerated by Kill Command, with KC in turn causing the PL beast to trigger its effect per use (a Boar rush, a Bear rampage, a Wyvern divebomb, respectively).
Granted, as far as bloat is concerned, I’d also prefer to see Kill Shot on a choice node opposite a classwide Viper’s Venom, so that one could avoid taking Kill Shot.
In this case…
baseline Kill Shot would be far more powerful (e.g., 500% AP outside of PvP, with a baseline 15+% Deathblow chance baseline, and —for leveling purposes as not to always favor Viper’s— would also be usable whenever the enemy has less health than Kill Shot’s nominal crit damage) and
this Viper’s Venom would cause one’s own physical attacks to apply Serpent Sting based on the %AP of the ability applying it (and, as a ‘beast ability’, benefit from BM’s Mastery) and concentrates its damage increasingly towards its first half of duration based on the target’s %HP missing.
Specs would then be free to take the opposite and augment either or both via spec tree talents, but Kill Shot would therefore remain wholly optional.
As “cheap” as it’d have been, before the new trees were announced, I was honestly hoping after Shadowlands that they’d just…
add a talent row for the (visually un-Shadowlands-ified) 3 most liked former Covenant powers per class,
and then just give us an extra talent per row every X levels, so some rows are about which talent we don’t bother with rather than which so talent we take.
Or, heck, just make like Essences with one further rank and let us pick X bronze/minor talents, Y silver/major talents, and Z gold/apex talents (e.g., 4/3/2 or so).
At the very least, though, if they insist on sticking with pathing limited choices, you’d think they’d…
collapse augmenting talents into the same node and just allow nodes/clusters to be pathed through after 1 point, with the node then just reading “2/3” to mean that you can only take 2 out of 3 of those talents and “3” just meaning that you can take up to 3 of those talents,
—and—
include some free-pathed talents (like Metamorphosis originally was for DH, so that one needed only reach level X to be able to take it regardless of pathing) to open up pathing further.
and bring back pet aggressive. I used it in the BG back in the day and it was awesome. Rogues had as much chance as a red headed orphan kid on adoption day. It was great.
You definitely took my quote out of context lol I said CA/Lust didn’t need to impact the rotation because their impact comes from their interaction with the mechanics of the game, rather than your abilities. Wyvern, as an unavoidable part of your rotation definitely should interact with the prio list of your core abilities, whether its WFB, KC, MB. What if bear caused your KC to generate two stacks of TotS and double focus., and wyvern caused your WFB to stack. This would make interactions between the three pets super dynamic, and make the pets feel like they’re doing something. I do think some talent flexibility would be nice as well.
You are 100% going to cast 2 WFB during Wyvern duration, without thinking or changing anything. and your pet basic attack increasing duration is hardly an interaction? It’s so passive i guarantee you wouldn’t even notice it occurring 95% of the time.
Ya know what I noticed? When you throw bomb at dimensius, it takes forever to detonate. I wonder how many tip stacks for bombs I’ve lost and consumed them on goose just because the bomb was still mid flight