I did a quick test for Melee hunter on the PTR vs live servers. I wanted to see if our raw damage unbuffed either increased or decreased. I wanted to also test the number of Raptor Strikes able to be used within a 100k damage window. These tests were performed on the level 1 dummies in shimmering flats as there are not level 50 dummies on the live server. Due to this, the test hunter is unable to use mongoose bite. Thus, both the hunters had lone wolf on for their chest runes.
The rotation was Raptor strike on CD → Flanking to fish for resets → carve if both on CD → Wing Clip if all else is on CD.
There are a few notable differences between the characters, and they are the following:
PTR Hunter - Survival spec
Live Hunter - BM Spec
They both did NOT use a pet as the PTR hunter is still bugged and hunters are unable to summon pets / tame new ones. The wrist rune “Raptor Fury” also is bugged on PTR and only goes up to one stack. But due to the CD on raptor strike, with good RNG, I would be able to hit 2-3 stacks before it ran out on average for the test server.
I was forced to use recount on the test servers and details on the live servers, so there might be a small difference in DPS displayed there. The breakdowns of the hunters are the following:
TEST SERVER HUNTER - 100k total damage, DPS was 688:
31 raptor strikes used, counted as 44% of my damage at 44k damage
111 melee hits with 39% of my damage at 39k
LIVE SERVER HUNTER - 100k total damage, DPS was 770:
48 casts of raptor strikes used, 65% of my damage at 65k
102 melee hits with 27.4% of my damage at 27k
-ADDITIONAL INFORMATION-
NO CDS
NO PETS
SAME RUNES
TEST HUNTER WAS SURVIVAL
LIVE HUNTER WAS BM
STRICTLY USED RAPTOR STRIKE, FLANKING STRIKE, CARVE, AND WING CLIP
I apologize if I stated a few things more than once, but the goal of this very rough comparison was to see if melee hunter was nerfed / buffed in their raw damage output. From what I tested, melee hunter feels more clunky to play due to raptor strike CD nerf with a lot of time where there is nothing to do compared to live servers.
I would love to see some melee hunter specific aspects such as aspect of the beast giving 5%/10% bonus to melee attack power, the back slot rune for increased movement speed be a set bonus for melee hunter. I would also love to see survival spec to be more melee hunter focused while retaining trap buffs for MM trap spec.
I’m hopeful that there will be some changes and melee hunter will be a viable class to play as I personally enjoy the spec over MM. Thank you everyone for reading! P4 Hype.
DPS SCREENSHOTS: imgur . com/ gallery/live-server-test-server-hunter-1uepSo3
NOTE - Remove spaces to see screenshots as I am unable to hyperlink nor link screenshots in posts it seems.
