You spent a pre expansion development cycle on the original dark ranger. You spent a short live development cycle on what’s live now. It is still obvious. You’ve made bm a monster in pvp and ruined marksman. Everything about the rework still feels like a net negative.
Withering fire is the only thing in the tree that does anything for marks. Withering fire makes base marks damage impossible to tune. It is too powerful and too random to consume as much power budget as it obviously does. If you ever make marks “good” via tuning with this effect, it’s not going to be palatable for the rest of the meta.
Everything else about the dark ranger tree is just way too well streamlined for bm in comparison to what it does for marks. It is literally the worst of both worlds. Everything about the old dark ranger was healthier. This is just so much worse overall than what we started with.
So I’m no top tier, or anything. However, might there be a possibility that it IS well put together and it’s just not as easy to play as it used to be?
i do know, this sounds a lot like what the DK release/patched response was like.
We were wiping the floor in PvP right after the release, then after they nerfed them, we all complained about how its not balanced, but they were perfectly balanced.
I’m not talking crap saying your complaints are void, I’m just putting the idea out there that maybe it might just need more direct attention. Might just not be a walk in the park anymore, so to speak.
Nah, the problem here is what the withering fire mechanic does for marks. You press trueshot and your aimed/rf casts auto send your deathblow procs for you off global. So if anything, it’s actually way easier. It’s just super random and volatile. If base marks damage is tuned high enough to be threatening/meaningful outside of trueshot, you’re just gonna be randomly oneshotting things in trueshot. The old dark ranger was a lot more consistent and didn’t present super polarizing oneshot scenarios that the rest of the spec had to be balanced around.
It’s also not as simple as just buffing base marks dam and nerfing withering fire proc damage. This is why it’s so important to realize how little the rest of the hero tree does for marks, because if you make that change, people will either just not complete the hero tree so that they can cast unnerfed black arrows in trueshot, or they’ll go sentinel to take advantage of further modifiers on would-be-then buffed base marks damage. That one ability is more or less making the whole spec bad.
Meanwhile, everything else about the dark ranger tree passively benefits bm to the nth degree. Bm gets its spec tree kill shot modifier passively via having its rotational pets out. That also makes black arrow cleave to 4 additional targets. Marks needs death blow procs for its spec tree kill shot modifiers, so the function of over 80% casts doesn’t really mean anything. A lot of its spec tree kill shot value is tied to +crit and +crit damage, both of which are nerfed in PvP. Hounds passively proc for bm rotationally via kill command and dire beast, and they benefit from all of the +pet damage talents in the bm tree. Bm gets to cleave apply crows more, gets to proc shadow surge and bleak powder more, and gets basically 4x benefit out of everything that procs off of black arrow since it passively cleaves.
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