What was the actual point of the Dark Ranger rework?

I’m having a hard time understanding the decision making process at this point. Everything about the new version is worse in all applications, pve and pvp.

For pvp, I believe that they’ve introduced something that is going to be impossible to balance in the long term. The base values of aimed, rapidfire, and black arrow are going to have to remain low in order to avoid situations where they accidentally global something when you get procs in your trueshot burst. Getting procs vs. not getting procs can vary how much damage you do in a 6-8s window by so much that it’s just going to be impossible to have meaningful button presses outside of trueshot.

Everything about old dark ranger was boring, but it was also incredibly consistent. It also worked properly. It seemed like a hero class tree that a pre expansion development/design effort went into. This version feels like exactly what it is - something haphazardly slung together last minute that turned out to be a horrible idea in practice.

Please just revert it.

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The Dr rework actually improved on it gameplay wise. they just missed the mark on tuning. honestly i tested DR on the PTR under the assumption that the Bugged double dip mastery was the real BA damage. it felt impactful and there was some other bugs looming in background. mostly interactions with razorfragments. i felt DR would be insanely strong if these had been fixed. the real issue with it right now is they dont got a knob to turn to fix the awful numbers. BA is all the damage and hounds/crows is less than 2% combined. no ammount of increasing anything but BA is gonna have an effect on it. that being said, they can fix the bugs and then go from there. looking at current logs DR is dead and not even off meta junkies like myself will even touch it.

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Really, really, really sucks because it’s all I want to play. Once they reworked it, I dug deep into the fantasy. Changed my character to the Dark Ranger customization for the Void Elf, got excited that next week we can get Sylvanas’s armor,(although I’m only going to use parts of it.)

Was really tired of Sentinel, and really excited for the class fantasy of playing one of those Dark Rangers you’d see sometimes with Sylvanas, like Velonara.

But since I actually do raid, and I don’t do just casual solo stuff… Can’t play the spec I want to because it’ll impact other people. Hell, even with it double dipping into Mastery I was still getting beat by our rogues, paladins, DKs, and mages last week.
They’re phenomenal players, don’t get me wrong. But I still wasn’t competing with any of the meta classes. I don’t understand the changes to further nerfing it.

Edit: That’s sort of the problem with this, and it’s reminding me of the Covenant problem in Shadowlands. Wanting to lean into the RPG aspect of the game for personal fantasy but not being able to because other Covenant/Hero Talents are meta compared to the flavor of how you want your character defined.

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I believe that we had this discussion on TL but I think there’s now room for the aimed/rf multiplier to come back into the new DR tree. The 80/20 talent is unneccesary anyway. Just put it there.

I think my long term concern is really more directed at the pvp perspective. Imagine actual rf/wailing/rf burst from pre-11.0.5, which was very strong. Add the chance to proc today’s value black arrows off global woven into that burst. It’s just logical that the off global procs make that burst capability too strong. So what do you do then? Leave base values alone and nerf withering fire so that even the non-cleave procs are heavily reduced in value? Okay, but at that point, I’d rather have the option to actually cast kill shot procs instead of having ones that tickle sent off global.

Then say that they don’t want to put +aimed/rf damage back in the hero tree. You can’t just blanket buff rapid and aimed shot for marks in pvp because then those spells become too strong if you go sentinel (with additional aimed/rf mults). Just seems to me that there are a lot of really difficult design corners that they’ve painted us into.

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Yea for pvp they have backed themself into a corner, however they can fix it with pvp tuning like they have been doing. doesnt mean the pve aspect of the spec has to absolutely suffer. and yea bell tolls feels worthless. overshadow here would help drastically. darkhounds need to proc as much as it did pre rework and crows can maybe proc off the BA dot instead of the main arrow? like crows and hounds are cool, but if they do no damage whats the point of them. also freaking fix all the razorfragment issues. i checked yesterday and BA now does less damage than killshot even though its reduced by armor. they got their work cut out for them and that might be why we heard radio silence. but if they move all the stuff we actually need to 11.07 after i waited 2 months for 11.05 im lose it.

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So i guess how I’d do pvp tuning

  1. Reinstate the old aimed/rf modifiers back into the new DR tree
  2. Nerf withering fire such that the direct procs are 35%-50% value (cleave procs are 25%) in pvp
  3. Increase base value of black arrow in PvP such that procs outside of withering fire still mean something.

We praised the new dark ranger on the PTR because we thought this would be the “real” damage, we didn’t know about the bug.

The new one feels super weak.

we lost 20% aimed/rapid, and additionally lost the + 10% to all damage during withering fire procs, so overall we lost 30% during burst

What we got instead is a weak version of kill shot, that with the latest tuning does less damage than the normal kill shot even on plate+shield targets, and we also got the gimmicky burst that got nerfed to the ground. The extra black arrows that now do 25% damage in pvp hit for 150k. It’s a joke

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If it turns out that they accidentally cut mastery in half for everything ( and not just black arrow), i would not be surprised.

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The changes in the patch this week make the class feel so much worse imo. Things actually felt solid after the rework for DR, especially visually. The nerfs from this week, at least for me, feel quite noticeable and as someone who just moved to hunter specifically to play DR, it’s super sad

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Damage feels lacking, did they tweak some things that weren’t listed in the patch notes?

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the rework was great, before they nerfed it 2 and a half times. when it hit for 2.5-3mil it felt worthwhile speccing out of sentinel to take for Raid and m+, especially with tyrannical. now it maxes out at like 1.5m which is less than what a good aimed shot hits for. they dont know how to balance.

I’m in a similar boat. I’ve said in a few threads just how absolutely heartbroken I am that I have to play Sentinel (since I raid) instead of Dark Ranger. Changed up my Void Elf and everything to be a Dark Ranger and now I have to go back to summoning a bird that poops lasers that I was bored sick of.

It’s depressing. I’m dreading tonight’s raid since I have to go back to bird poop slinger. I’d actually been looking forward to logging in and playing my hunter. RIP the cool class fantasy I want.

Maybe it performs better for BM in raids; I honestly don’t know since I don’t play BM and haven’t checked. But if that means I get to keep the cool aesthetic I like I’ll just go tame two undead pets and play BM as long as it means I can keep playing DR despite the fact I enjoy MM and don’t care that much for BM.

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The DR is really fun to play, but realistically it’s just DoA for seriously pushing harder content. PL and Sentinel are both significantly better. Feels like a waste and I hope they fix up the tuning as the reworked anesthetics and gameplay really are great

Yeah, imagine how much of a slap in your face it is to work hard on getting those animations looking so good, just to have all your work go down the drain because someone nerfs your brand new work into obscurity, making it completely DOA.

That’s some poor management, right there.

Guess it sorta illustrates the kinda circus fire that must be going on behind the scenes with Blizzard lately. It’s something else.

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Funny thing is, before the known bugs get fixed, there comes a new bug: if you use black arrow as opener on a unharmed target, it will just vanish and won’t do anything. THAT BUG IS ON A SPELL WHICH CAN ONLY BE USED ON 80% ABOVE OR 20% BELOW. By the devs’ current performance, I expect this bug to be fixed after the next raid comes…

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I’m all out of copium so I found the best solution… Just reroll into one of the FOTM classes

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Hoping MM doesn’t become a consistent underperformer. Probably won’t complete the XP if so.

Don’t feel bad brother!! Us Frost DKs haven’t really been relevant for years then the passed couple of weeks it was Looking promising, I’ve always been unholy, I said oh maybe this is frosts time… so I invest a bunch of gold and time building my frost set… for blizz to come in and nerf into a black hole!! And there never move the bar a little.no no no they have to go all out dropping 14 spots in does rankings behind fire mages…

thats blizzard for you

The point is to taunt us…just Blizzard reminding us that they hate hunters and anything Sylvanas related

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