While we don’t have any specific Hunter changes to announce at this time, we want you to know that we are reading your feedback and we’re working on cleaning up all three of the Hero Talent trees and fixing issues as they arise.
Your feedback on the talents has been very helpful thus far, and we expect to have some revisions in a future build of the Alpha.
Thanks and happy testing!
This feels like the last 15 years. I will make this easy for you Blizzard.
Beastmaster wants an exotic pet with a function. Stop the lazy one pet fits all. The beast SHOULD hit hard as hell.
Marksmen like to hit really hard with their shots. They sacrifice movement to hit real hard. They should be a single target monster when they don’t move.
Survival hunters like to use beasts, traps and melee hits to cause mass chaos and aoe damage. Hook them up. Floor trap bleeds, mass roots, stuns, fears, poisons. Hook them up.
Blizzard has so much class feedback over the entire course of dragonflight and prior, it’s wild that they’re okay with the class as is. There are also some great ideas in the Pack Leader feedback post alone.
Below is my feedback from Pack Leader’s feedback thread and I’ll continue to revise this post accordingly:
More (Passive) Defensives & Externals:
Reuse SL hunter’s mark and feign death conduits.
Changing the 6% avoidance node to flat-out 6% DR or re-tune BM’s mastery so vers is more appealing.
The Aspect of the Turtle can provide a DR to 4 nearby allies to match Mage’s mass barrier.
Defensives in general should be off the GCD, especially exhil.
Roar of Sacrifice can be a usable external in PVE in the class tree, it’s never taken otherwise as the 6% avoidance will always be taken for self-survivability in pve content.
Pet specializations, more specifically BM, need to be able to leech through pets so leech isn’t worthless - this can be a talent point to not disrupt other pet specs like Demo Lock.
BM’s Sprit Mend needs a major buff for rot damage.
It’s just silly how many talent points a hunter needs to give up to make Survival of the Fittest nearly as good as Pally’s Blessing of Sacrifice.
Better Class Utility:
It would be nice if explosive trap can toggle between knocking up or side since sanguine still exists, giving us access to an AoE albeit with a travel time that is less than ideal still.
Hunter’s Mark should increase damage for the first and last 20% by 5% to compete with what other classes bring to the table such as DH and Monk’s debuffs. An additional 1% overall is very weak. Hunters are known for their Kill Shot execute, the current execution of Hunter’s Mark as a Raid buff contradicts with this.
Alternatively, give Hunters a 5% agility buff. Mages have a 5% intellect buff and that seems beyond unbalanced in the grand scheme of raid buffs. This change alone opens up more possible group comps and better synergy for M+ groups.
On the note of raid buffs, Survival still is fighting for a raid spot with other melees due to lack of utility/externals. Even something simple like “nearby allies +3yd range to all melee abilities” works. It can make it dramatically easier to conserve space in melee if the playable area is suddenly 3 yds bigger on each side.
Pet specializations, more specifically BM, need to be able to leech through pets so leech isn’t worthless.
Return the ability of pets being able to Battle Resurrect so Hunters can be the Swiss army knife for m+ comps.
Tranq Shot removes needs to remove multiple stacks of buffs to be comparable to evokers or at minimum, be able to jump to multiple targets.
Provide more pet flexibility - let us set any pet as ferocity/cunning/tenacity in the stable. Hunter always needs to give up something to gain another perk i.e leech or a defensive (Fort of the Bear) just to gain a Freedom (Master’s Call) while a class like Monk or Pally gets this with just a talent point.
General Class Tree Suggested Changes:
The 'Ability does 5% more damage" or ‘Gain 2% Crit damage’ nodes need to go, they’re such lazy placeholders for tuning that have been around since DF Alpha. Those nodes should just flat out be added the spec accordingly. Survival has more than any other spec in the game - meanwhile pally has 1 node which does more than our 2 point nodes.
Barrage is a useless talent that sees no viable usage in raid or m+, replace it with Flayed Shot or an alternative ST option.
Kill Shot is shared with all 3 specs and needs to hit like a truck. With current tuning, this button is almost not worth pressing for BM. For Survival, the button can hit harder to give more of a bursty profile.
Steel Trap is a dot an awkward ground-based trap with a travel time delay and can miss the target. This trap is just not fun to use and is not usable for large raid boss encounters such as Sennarth, Terros, and Volcoross.
Stampede requires a buff to be competitive with Death Chakram.
Scare Beast just exists, it had no usage outside of afflicted week and even then, it’s useless as ice trap is a better solution for the affix with no cast time. This node needs to be removed.
Survival Suggested Changes:
Surv’s CA should be a 1:30 CD and Spearhead 45s. CA’s kill shots and bomb empowerments just need to flat-out be stronger and hit like a truck, same with Mongoose bite which is for the most part, interchangeable with Raptor Strike.
Add the DF S3 tier set to the Survival tree as it’s very popular and desired for AoE content.
Survival’s mastery is effectively a worse version of versatility that works for only focus spending abilities making it pretty much worthless since it doesn’t make bombs hit harder or offer much passive defense.
Reference previous successfully liked legendaries and liked abilities or previous talents like from Season of Discovery and add them to TWW spec trees such as for Survival:
Flanking Strike - (30s CD) You and your pet deal simultaneous instant 100% melee damage. Afterward, your Mongoose Bite and Raptor Strike deal 10% increased damage for 10 sec, stacking up to 3 times. Raptor Strike has a 20% chance to reset the cooldown on Flanking Strike.
Energized Ally - Damaging a new enemy grants you 3% haste for 10s, up to 5 stacks.
Frenzy Strikes - Butchery/Carve increases the damage of your next Wildfire Bomb by x% for each target hit, up to 5, stacking up to 15 times.
Maybe a CD that uncaps Mongoose Fury stacks for a time.
BM/MM Suggested Changes:
Misdirection does not direct the threat generated by pets rendering an otherwise great tool useless for BM.
Remove the cast time on Wailing arrow. The cast time makes it slightly unpredictable if it will land in time and contradicts the design of BM being fully mobile.
BM suffers from being too simple and resource-capping Barb Shots due to Barb Shot’s buff duration lasting 10s in the last round of changes in S3. This has resulted in BM’s skill ceiling being at the floor and it has truly become a mash 2 buttons spec that many believe it is.
BM must spend 4 talent points to enable any AoE. While this is similar to some other specs, it doesn’t feel particularly great. If talents are meant to be choices, this could be a single 4-point node instead or at minimum, Multi-shot can be moved to the base kit. On that note, Multi-shot hits like a weak noddle for BM and is dire need of a buff, especially if it continues to have interactions with hero talents.
My main focus is on the beast master getting its identity back. Pets in general getting their abilities back. I will probably just post that. I agree with everything you say. In addition, all hunter specs should have more ways to interupt/stun.
Make multi-shot baseline already and remove the minimum target restriction for MM, currently it is the MOST restrictive aoe in the game.
Improve the damage profile of MM and BM, Surv has plenty of cleave in its ST build but MM and BM have to go all in to either AoE or ST with a heavy toll on the other, this just isn’t up to date with a majority of other class and spec designs in the game.
Take the important utility and defensive tools off the pets and put them on the hunter, the class has 1/3 of its specs that don’t use a pet and even the specs that use a pet, having to choose between personal survivability and group utility is not a fun or satisfying choice.
Fix the glaring hole in the Hunter defensive toolkit: rot damage. Shorten our defensives cds (some of the longest in the game) and/or put some baseline, not talented, passive healing into the specs that work no matter what pet or even no pet is out.
Before you go tinkering with the Hero talent trees, Fix The Base Trees, they have not been significantly updated since DF beta. Do you really expect Hunters to stick around for 3 expansions with these same unchanged, DF beta, talent trees? We all know you can do better, just look at the modern reworks for literally ALL the other classes.
Put Wailing Arrow in the class tree and make it instant cast!
Improve Hunter’s Mark to be on par with the other raid buffs, make it effect the first and last 20% of the target’s HP at a minimuim!
Traps are some of the hardest CC and utility to land properly (they are not a target based cc, the hunter actually has to place them accurately for them to work, including accounting for distance variable travel time), actually reward the player skill by making their proper execution meaningful; improve the utility / power of all the traps and make at least 1 provide something unique and actually useful that can’t be imitated or replicated by any other class.
I will leave it here because these are just the baseline fixes to bring the Hunter in line with every other class, I won’t even bother to tackle things like gameplay loop, retro animations, the rule of cool, etc.; the things other classes have the luxury of complaining about. At least just bring Hunter up to the minimum, that’s all we are asking for!
I totally disagree with this. A pet should offer a level uniqueness and diversity to the hunter. The exchange for a pet should be something added to the specs that dont use them.
Yes, first they need to restore turtle to its former glory. The buff was no different than a pally shield. Except the hunter has limited healing. They also need to add better sustainability like a leeching shot on a minute timer that can basically do heavy damage and return a good amount of health health to the hunter or whoever he targets would be fun.
I don’t agree here either. The traps serve their function. The added difficulty to execute represents the diversity of the trap. They work on all creatures as opposed to other classes that only work on certain types. For damaging traps in melee, a simple cast at target or at cursor is fine. Some hunters mess this up, but that just adds complexity to the class.
there is no benefit to the “complexity” of a ground reticle. sure, freezing trap works on everything (unless the mob floats) (unless there is another mob near) (unless there is ground artifacts in the y axis or anything on the ceiling), but it’s just not worth the hassle.
not to mention, DPS traps again are just entirely too annoying. whats the benefit of tying damage to the trap? how does it outweigh the negatives? we tried that in legion and it was just thoroughly annoying
Yeah I was just going over survival Hunter talents and I believe it might have one of the most if not THE most 2 point talent nodes. I believe I counted it clocking in at a whopping 14 for the right tree, while all hunters share the left tree clocking in at another 14 talents at 2 points.
This means survival Hunter has 28 talents nodes for 2 points total for a massive 48 point investment. You compare this to Retribution in War Within with only 7 in the left tree and 2 in its right tree.
Not only that but many of the talent points are vanilla 5% damage increases often many stacked for one talent. It ends up meaning that survivals damage swings wildly based on its tier set.
I’m very much jealous of the amount of builds and directions many other classes are capable of.
Something I find very interesting is the lack of alpha feedback on the alpha forum. Only a few players have posted any feedback. At first I wondered if the forum was closed to player posting completely because there were zero players replies, but now I have seen a few. It makes me wonder if they got a bunch of the wrong people alpha invites. All I really know is I was shocked not a single hunter player has posted any feedback there.
Right now, BM’s identity as a “beast master” is tied to them getting to have exotic pets. A pet rework that would also give them something specific to tie to their fantasy identity would be needed, otherwise the backlash would be rather huge. In my opinion, I feel (as a BM main) that stripping us of the unique quality of exotic pets without addressing the need to retain our class identity in new ways beyond exotic collections would be like taking the lone hunter from marksmen.
Let me be clear-- I am not against it in itself, I don’t care if others want exotic pets without being tied to the spec. What I care about, as a BM hunter, is that exotic pets will be opened up without addressing how big a role it has always played in a BM’s identity, and what would happen to that identity if nothing else was altered to facilitate that loss.
They’re just pets at the end of day and they all (basically) do the same thing. There’s almost no reason for a handful of pets to be exclusive to BM when Surv also fights alongside their pets and MM avoids them like the plague anyway. BM’s identity is running 2 pets of their choice - really has nothing to do with exotic pets specifically unless you’re holding spirit mend to a high standard but, as I originally posted, it does a very mediocre heals and needs a buff. I mostly added that point as I see a ton of threads throwing that idea around today, I personally don’t care a whole lot as Survs can use leech from ferocity pets so it’s not like surv gains anything anyway outside of a minor heal at the highest keys where we need fort of the bear to survive 1-shots. The main point was letting hunters use whatever pet they wanted with their choice of cunning/ferocity/tenacity.
Exotic beasts were the first specific identity spell of BMs, dating back to Wrath. Spirit beasts also came out at that time to be the elusive exclusive for BMs. Animal Companion is fairly recent, starting with Legion’s artifact weapon before being carried over to the talent tree system. It’s not baseline to the spec, either. You can be a BM without two pets, and the only reason some don’t right now is because of the dmg boost it offers.
Again, I’m not against it, but I don’t think an optional talent should be our surviving “identity” ability without any considerations for how else the spec can be uniquely Beast Master and that’s my worry with opening up exotic pets-- that opening them up will happen without any consideration for how else to shape BM to be a master of their beasts.
But then again, my bias also involves the fact that I also see people on the forums wishing animal companion were either gone or seriously nerfed because they don’t want animal companion as their BM identity.
I have been testing and in all 3 of the Hero Talent Trees there is at least 1 critical talent that is simply not working at all. It’s very hard to give quality feedback when things are full of bugs and not working. Instead I have been submitting copious in game reports of the bugs and every few days I return to retest and resubmit. Until things are actually working, I cannot in good faith give proper feedback on the forums.
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