This was a clear nerf to Night Fae so that they can make other covenants more viable. But I think they ignored the fact that it is “Night Fae” covenant that is holding the MM up.
Even after the slight buff, I think MMs are still not been able to recover the damage loss.
MMs were already suffering issues with their Single Target damage (which is mostly needed in raids).
Blizz is in tough spot to balance between giving covenant options and not changing the meta.
If they buff core ability more (due to different interactions), it may very well change the meta to be Kriyan now as oppose to Night Fae hence pushing all hunters to switch (for example).
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I don’t know why they care about the meta any more. The only raid out for this tier keeps getting nerfed. Now would be a great time to experiment. I don’t expect parity in numbers but the spread should only be around five percent. As far as hunter’s go they could buff arcane shot. It has no effect on AoE. For BM and survival they could buff kill command damage. They should also add an armor effect after disengage is used base line. This would help improve our survivability and promote class identity in the form of improve kitting in PvP. It would also make us tanky enough to do some neat things in mythic plus.
I mean, it’s literally impossible to balance the covenants for hunter at least (many other classes have the same issue, though). Flayed Shot and Death Chakram don’t scale with AoE at all, while the other two do, so tuning can only sit in one of two places:
- Flayed Shot and Death Chakram are better in single target, but substantially worse in AoE.
- Wild Spirits and Resonating Arrow are better at both.
We’ve had the latter so far, and they’ve expressed resistance to changing the meta (for good reason, if I was faced with the prospect of having to re-grind everything I’ve done for the covenant so far because I now needed to swap to another, I’d just straight up quit, no questions asked). Even if we had the former, it’d still leave us in a crap position, because we’d either be good at ST or good at AoE, and since we can’t just hotswap covenants like we can talents, that’s a semi-permanent decision of which we want to be good at. Being forced to choose between performing below our balance point in one of those two areas, without any real ability to easily switch, suuuucks.
So personally, I’d rather half of the covenant abilities be simply inferior than have all 4 covenant abilities be crap in half of the content. I mean, ideally they’d instead make Flayed Shot and Death Chakram scale in AoE (make Kill Shots from the Flayed Shot proc ricochet like Trick Shots, and bake in the Torghast Chakram-applies-Explosive-Shot power to Death Chakram baseline). But failing that, the current setup, while sucky to those that prefer Venthyr or Necrolords, is still better than all of us sucking in one of the two damage profiles.
The issue with that is that there’s a fairly precarious balance between Aimed Shot and Arcane Shot, especially during Trueshot. If they buff Arcane Shot too much, it means we end up having to burn off Precise Shots during Trueshot, which means the Aimed Shot CDR is like 80% wasted.
Arcane Shot only makes up around 20% of our overall damage, which means to make up the ~3-5% we lose from the WS change, they’d need to buff it by around 25%. Even without Precise Shots, Aimed Shot is only ahead of it on DPF by about 40% and DPCT by about 45%, so that very easily pushes it into the territory where Precise Shots becomes mandatory during Trueshot, and Aimed Shot stops really feeling as relevant.
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Hunters. The true april fools joke.
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You seem to be maliciously pleased when commenting on Hunter woes…
So Mage, what magic, what spell will free you from this guise, this seeming of a bitter and twisted malignant little gnome, small of spirit as well as stature, glorying in another Classes troubles?
And what, I wonder, would emerge, were you freed from such an enchantment?
An avatar of Diana, or perhaps lost Nimrod, returned, who can say?
I will look to the future for the answer of my question, and I hope it is a happy one.
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to balance this game, the covenants would need a 3rd skill in contrast of what they have, lets say wild spirits…
its a aoe skill meaning night fae need another skill that is single target focus, and they both get into cd when either is used
Here’s a thought (and maybe this has been suggested before): Trueshot instead gives you like, I dunno, 8 charges of AiS that, if used in 20 seconds, have a 1.5 second cast time. If you don’t use them all before expiry, you lose that bonus. Or a larger stack of, say, 12, but it also applies to Rapid Fire. I’m just pulling those numbers out of my rear end. Upside is you wouldn’t feel punished for using your Arcane Shot procs.
Truth? I am not doubting what you say, it’s just that it’s been 15+ days since you said it.
Hurrah for ‘Borrowed Power’. One change to one Covenant ability, how it affects mostly one ability, and from contender to beggar… or so some make it out to be.
I wonder what other Class/Specs are relying on a Covenant prop?
Danski has been campaigning for a while to just straight remove the CD from Aimed Shot entirely, which would necessitate a redesign of Trueshot anyway.
And frankly, I’ve been campaigning for roughly equally as long to turn Trueshot into just straight haste. It just granting legitimate haste removes like 90% of the issues with it:
- Passive focus regen is naturally increased by the same proportion.
- Aimed Shot no longer dips under the GCD.
- Arcane, Steady, and Rapid all see improvements to GCD, cast time, and channel time, respectively, meaning all of them benefit equally with Aimed Shot, and none of them feel terribly to cast during Trueshot anymore.
- Aimed Shot’s CD is naturally reduced by haste, but not by as extreme a margin as current, meaning we don’t have an absolute glut of AiS charges and don’t have to decide between overcapping AiS charges or Precise Shots stacks (of course, this is negated entirely if the CD/recharge on AiS is entirely removed baseline, as Danski is proposing)
- Haste doesn’t substantially affect the rotational make-up, as basically everything (focus regen, cast times, GCDs, cooldowns, etc) is sped up by an equal amount. If it’s, say, 50% haste for 15 seconds, it effectively just compresses 22.5s of our normal DPS rotation into 15s time.
- It restores how MM’s cooldown worked (under the name “Rapid Fire”) from Vanilla through WoD.
- It’s way way easier to understand. Heck, the current tooltip for Trueshot isn’t even accurate, because the accurate representation just gets silly. Mechanically, how it functions is:
- It straight halves the cast time of Aimed Shot, but does not alter the GCD of Aimed Shot, so the base cast time is 1.25s on a 1.5s GCD. This causes innate clipping regardless of haste level (you can see this by casting Aimed Shot back-to-back during Trueshot, there’s a noticeable ~0.2s “pause” between the cast finishing and the next cast starting), and that clipping gets substantially worse with haste. With lust and Streamline, that pause can be upwards of a third of a second between casts. Since AiS is innately below the GCD during Trueshot, this causes Streamline’s benefit to be entirely wasted for the duration of the cooldown, and usually wastes a solid chunk of Steady Focus’s benefit.
- Reduces the cooldown of Aimed Shot by 69.23%, ie.
1 / 3.25(tooltip claims 60%) - Reduces the cooldown of Rapid Fire by 70.59%, ie.
1 / 3.4(tooltip also claims 60%)
The only real downside is that Rapid Fire’s CD isn’t affected by haste, which can be solved in one of 3 ways:
- Rapid Fire’s CD is affected by haste baseline, because why the heck isn’t it?!
- Rapid Fire’s CD is affected by haste for the duration of Trueshot.
- Rapid Fire’s CD is simply reduced by 33% (or,
1 - 1/(1+TrueshotHaste%), if other than 50%) for the duration of Trueshot, to avoid other haste having an impact for the duration.
The only other issue is that stacking haste CDs (ex. trinket, lust) can run into the GCD floor. This can be fixed by specifically lowering the GCD floor during the CD (Adrenaline Rush already does this, incidentally) from it’s current global value of 0.75s to, say, 0.6s.
At 0.75s, the GCD hits cap during lust at 9.9% haste from rating if Trueshot is 40% haste and at 2.6% haste from rating if Trueshot is 50% haste. At 0.6s, on the other hand, you’d need 28.2% haste from rating (that’s 930 haste rating, though that notably includes any burst haste from trinkets/procs/etc) to hit the new floor even with lust up and Trueshot granting 50% (historically it’s only granted 40%, though).
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Druid for sure.
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