Trap Launcher - Real Talk & Solutions

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

We need to have a long discussion about Ranged Hunters.

1) How it plays in PvE and the impact of the most recent hotfix.
2) The issues being seen in PvP regarding traps and how better to address them
3) Some fun, quirky ideas that could be used but are probably beyond the scope of Season of Discover

A Ranged Hunter does PvE
Currently, PvE for the Ranged variant of Hunter is centered around talent and rune synergies that greatly enhance their trap abilities. These include:

  • Resourcefulness (Reduces trap mana cost by 100% & their CD’s by 40%)
  • Trap Launcher (Gives traps a 35 yard range & separate Fire/Frost 15 sec CD’s)
  • Lock and Load (When a trap is triggered, the next Shot is free and doesn’t trigger CD)
  • T.N.T. (Increase damage of Fire type traps by 10% & gives them 50% melee AP bonus)
  • Entrapment (Gives traps a 25% chance to root targets for 5 sec)
  • Clever Traps (Increases duration of Frost type & damage of Fire type traps by 30%)
  • Trap Mastery (Decreases chance traps will be resisted by 10%)

As you can see…this is a lot. For PvE specifically this yields a pretty fluid rotation where the hunter will use alternating Fire and Frost type traps, with 2 shots in between each to make use of the free cooldown.

Now that Frost Trap has been removed from Trap Launcher, the hunter must rely on Freezing Trap to fill the Frost type portion of the rotation. There are a few problems with this in PvE.

  • Freezing Trap will cause pets to stop attacking the target if the target is able to be frozen; this includes both the hunter’s pet if they are using one, or pets from other party/raid members. This can result in a small dps loss.
  • The party loses the mob control benefit provided by Frost Trap; many tanks made use of the trap to loosely kite packs of enemies to take some stress off the healers.

PvP Concerns are Valid
Many of the concerns being stated about group PvP involving hunters are valid. There is a real problem that needs to be addressed to make the game more enjoyable for everyone.

What are these concerns?

  • Oppressive coverage of Frost Trap resulting in impassible walls of AoE snares and roots (no man’s land) which essentially walls melee out of participation and discourages many types of active gameplay.
  • High damage AoE that seems impossible to dodge (made worse by the point above).

These are valid concerns and they center around trap abilities. Sadly, the recent hotfix to remove Frost Trap from Trap Launcher does little to address these concerns. I will explain why, along with provide some suggestions for real fixes.

1a) The first culprit is the talent Entrapment (see above). This talent currently applies to ALL of a hunter’s traps both Frost and Fire type. For the traps that persist (Frost and Explosive) it has periodic chances to apply beyond the initial moment the trap is triggered.

1b) The next culprit is Clever Trap’s increases combined with Resourcefulness and Trap Launcher’s cooldown reductions. Frost Trap persist for 39 seconds on the ground once triggered with this setup, while only having a 9 second CD. While you may only have 1 untriggered Frost type trap active at a time, there is no limit to how many triggered ones you can have.

2a) The bonus damage from melee attack power provided by the T.N.T. rune only (and fully) applies to the instant damage portion of Explosive Trap deals when it is triggered, and is further enhanced by other damage modifiers like Clever Traps, Lone Wolf, and Mortal Shots.

So what about solutions?

  • Entrapment should no longer augment Fire type traps at all.
  • Entrapment should only have a chance to proc once; when a target first interacts with the trap (be it the initial trigger or the persistent ground effect).
  • Entrapment should have a diminishing return to reduce the effects of subsequent applications for a period of time. Example; if the first application last for 5 sec, an additional proc would only last for 3 sec, then 1 sec before the target is immune to the effect for a period of time regardless of what hunter cast the trap.
  • There needs to be a cap on the total number of triggered trap effects that can be present at once for each hunter, for each trap type. If we are feeling generous this number could be ‘2’ however I’d also be okay if it was limited to ‘1’ just like untriggered traps. This does have a small Quality of Life add for group PvE as currently a hunter can potentially find themselves in a situation where a triggered Frost Trap is going to pull additional enemy patrols and they cannot cancel out the trap by casting a new one…
  • The bonus melee attack power scaling added to Explosive Trap from T.N.T. needs to either be split between the instant damage and the damage over time portion of the trap, or fully moved to the damage over time portion to reduce the front-loaded burst potential of the trap. This rune is responsible for the majority of the damage being seen currently after it is amplified by the other runes/talents discussed earlier.

What about the fun, quirky stuff?
Oh yeah…I did mention fun and quirky things that could be possible solutions.

1a) Trap Launcher could change Frost Trap & Explosive Trap to Frost & Explosive Grenades! These would burst instantly at a location either slowing targets (Frost) or dealing instant damage (Explosive) within 10 yards of the impact point. The slow (now being a magic debuff) could be dispelled and the damage could be scaled appropriately. There would no longer be persistent ground effects for either, and Explosive would not have a damage over time portion.

1b) The above change would allow for the normal Frost & Explosive Traps to exist for melee hunters (or those not using trap launcher) which would be stronger variants than the grenades but require dropping in melee range. It also eliminates the hunter annoying his PvE groups with a blinding ice sheet on the ground that can hide mechanics.

I think they really need to consider reversing the hotfix made to Trap Launcher and take steps to actually address the underlying concerns. I feel the suggestions above are more in line with actually fixing the PvP problem while preserving PvE performance. As things stand currently, all of the problems above are still present despite the inconvenience added to hunters with the Trap Launcher hotfix.

EDITS FOR ADDITIONAL SUGGESTION/SOLUTIONS

  • Reduce the range of Trap Launcher to 20 yards (down from 35) and add Frost Trap back
  • Tune the damage of Explosive Grenade to include a debuff that increases Explosive Shot damage taken.
  • With Trap Launcher equipped, the cooldown of traps start once the trap is triggered or disarmed instead of when the trap is launched. This would have little effect in PvE outside of missing a trap, but would prevent stacking traps rapidly in PvP.
11 Likes
2

Take explosive trap away from trap launcher too.

Delete resourcefullness.

( I main Hunter )

2 Likes
3

Considering you just asked for them to completely kill ranged hunter AoE and hurt them in ST, I both doubt you main a hunter or that you read half if any of what I wrote above.

6 Likes
4

Just trying to make the volley rune relevant that everyone seems to have forgotten about.

Traps are from the melee tree after all.

5

They would need to either buff the Volley rune more or make it so you no longer have to channel for it to be relevant. As it stands right now, even making Explosive Trap melee only…you’d get more bang out of walking in to melee to drop it, then walking out to Explosive Shot.

Volley just inconvenient with too much opportunity cost even with the 3% AP scaling.

6

I think if you want to implement all of this hunters need something. Entrapment is already RNG and even though it can be annoying at times I walk though traps all the time without it ever applying to me and have it happen to me all the time as well. As far as fire traps go they can only proc entrapment on the initial hit/application.

We need disengage or freedom or something. Its just absurd that hunters have gotten 0 mobility/escape mechanics. A warrior can just death grip you into their raid and be full prot lol death grip conc stun you lose its just over.

We still have an 8 yard dead zone for pretty much no reason at this time. The TBC deadzone would be fine. We have 1 defensive that is talented and rng and only useful against melee attacks. We have no way to heal and we have no way to get away from people once they are on us outside of freezing trap. Frost trap doesn’t do too much in melee range since all the melee classes have an answer for it.

On top of all that MM is really the only viable pvp spec atm. You could also play LR/Scatter but I think that Trueshot is better atm. BM is WORTHLESS a pet is the most useless thing in the game and not just hunter pets but ALL pets aside from the temporary pets like shaman wolves and shadowfiends. Melee hunter has no ability to get to targets and will still lose to most other melee classes because it really has nothing going for it.

I think the best compromise is Entrapment DR so you can only get rooted a maximum of 9 sec. And make it so you can only have 1 instance of frost trap down at a time per hunter. I don’t think entrapment should only work on the first tick simply because it is RNG if it procs or not and the fact we still have no mobility.

I been doing AV ALL DAY and the turtles still looked the same everyone was still getting rooted its just the hunter had to die half the time to set a trap down because there are 7 prot warriors with death grip in every BG and hunter just felt way more boaring. I have muscle memory for using frost trap that is now useless and I just waste my trap half the time.

Everyone sits here talking about how its impossible to miss traps but traps fail all the time, It is not a skill issue its a trash heartbeat issue that has been in the game since classic launched in 2019. I watch people walk over traps ALL the time and not trigger them. Sometimes people will get frozen before the trap even lands and other times I will watch a trap land and someone will skey out of it without it ever going off. You CAN avoid traps it is not impossible.

Plenty of Hunters ran entrapment last phase, myself included. And it was not an issue then. It is only an issue now because almost every hunter is now lonewolf MM as it is really the only viable pvp spec and because of the BRM event and AV.

As far as explosive trap with TNT goes if they decide to leave this awful and boaring frost trap change in the game I think explosive trap should be left alone. Yeah it does big dam but thats all hunters are allowed to do is big dam. And converting some of its damage to the dot on the ground is pretty useless if you cant compliment it with a frost trap to keep them in it.

And on top of all this resourcefulness is the only viable cape rune atm as it has been in most phases with most hunter runes. We have def had some of the worst runes in the game. Volly is a trash ability that will NEVER be good in pvp and even if they gutted explosive trap into the dirt as well as explosive shot it would still only be “okay” for aoe. Hit and Run Nowhere… idk who that was even made for if that isn’t the most useless rune in the game idk what is. It does absolutely NOTHING for PVE and is pretty much worthless in pvp as well.

2 Likes
7

Long reply but given you took the time to read mine, I fully read yours. I don’t intend for them to implement any of the suggestions I made without also reverting Trap Launcher to include Frost Trap. If they do, they are doing the class a disservice.

Meathook is something we already have to flirt with using Trap Launcher if the warrior is paying attention as it has a 30 yard range to Trap Launcher’s 35 yard range. If the warrior is anticipating a trap being throw, he only needs to step forward for 0.5 a sec and he can nab the hunter. This is obviously made worse by melee only traps…

Hunter does lack any real defensive, self sustain, or personal utility outside of their traps and raw damage output. I do hope you can see how Explosive Trap in current form could be a problem though (it front loads damage and can’t be dispelled). It’s essentially a better version of Living Bomb. I also agree its possible to evade traps, but for a lot of people its not going to happen if your aim is good…they just don’t react in time, or they have a slow or other CC effect that prevents them from making the needed adjustment in time.

While Entrapment is not new and was being run by some last phase, Resourcefulness is new and just made the problem worse with more frequent traps (went from 2 up at a time to 4 being possible). While the DR combined with limiting traps for a single hunter might be enough of a change to address one hunter, the moment you add additional hunters the extra adjustments are needed else root city, root root city xD

M y warrior is still 50 because I leveled hunter to 60 first this phase and decided to fully invest in making it the best it could be. I quickly made note of the problem traps were going to be though early on…knew changes were coming, but the change that came was insufficient and ill directed.

8

Their design philosophy for SoD appears to be as follows:

When implementing a new function or feature, make it a rune or skill book.
When a new rune or skill creates a problem with existing design, tweak the rune/skill first whenever possible.
Only touch talents when absolutely necessary, and primarily to add functions.

So seeing as they seem unwilling to adjust talents for any negative reasons, and even less so for multiple adjustments, it seems highly unlikely for them to take such a heavy talent focused approach.

I think this would be a great option not just from PVP but from PVE too. Right now hunters in PVE just explode aoe damage up front, immediately ripping threat off the tank. I think spreading out the damage over time smooths out the gameplay for the entire party.

1 Like
9

Just make frost trap not able to be used in instanced pvp. Problem solved

10

The problem extends beyond instanced PvP (Blackrock Eruption event for 300% bonus honor in Blackrock Mountain comes to mind).

Also…there are problems other than simply Frost Trap…but making Frost Trap completely non-usable in PvP would be an absurd change (unless you meant specifically with Trap Launcher but even so…there are better solutions).

11

If they take explosive trap away from trap launcher too the might as well give hunters a new rune but we all know this wont happen since the devs are to lazy, lack talent, skill and just don’t care but they are still going to remove explosive trap away from trap launcher.

1 Like
12

I just ran some dungeons after the change and it’s actually stupid playing this class now. It annoys groups, disrupts tanks and other dps who have pets, and is generally annoying unless the mob is immune to traps which is really only bosses

1 Like
13

Hunters should not been able to use traps in battle in the first place. Really weird give hunters that possibility. Now they been spoiled with unfair traps and when they just get a mini nerf that will only affect them in soloing dungeons. Which no class are supposed to be able of doing. They start crying. As a shadow priest that been nerfed phase after phase i dotn feel sorry. As a priest i cant solo pull so why should hunters be able doing it?

14

Best solution is to make this only be affected in Bg’s but the massive nerf for PvE content is massive

15

Lol shadow priest bring other utility to the raids its that simple

Hunters have been NERFED EVERY SINGLE PHASE!!! They start off strong then end up at the middle/bottom of the meters

1 Like
16

There is no reason for trap launcher to be a thing. It literally is an oxymoron. Traps are set prior to the thing happening. A bear trap doesn’t work by throwing it at a bear’s face.

Best solution is to just remove the ability.

2 Likes
17

Lol then your going to destroy hunter dps

18

Okay? Why should I care about that? DPS is too high, anyways. Hunter DPS should be “destroyed”.

19

Hunters always start off on the top and then end in the middle each phase

20

You’re malding over AOE trash DPS, which there are plenty of other classes who are also doing amazing AOE DPS (Shamans, Druids, Warlocks, and Rogues)