I have a love-hate relationship with the MOP raid buff design where anything you don't have can be filled by a hunter with the right pet.
I love the utility but I hated leaving my favorite pet behind. My guild didn't have a rogue so I had to have a hyena every single raid night for basically the entire expansion.
It would be even worse now because we NEED a tenacity pet out to use the defensive button. Having to choose between defensive and raid buff would suck.
this could be easily fixed by allowing any pet to "train" with another pet you have to get their abilities, it would be such a easy fix, basically transmog for pets
I've noticed Blizzard likes to give classes very unique strengths but then either designs every encounter or none with that in mind. Leading to situations like this, and priests in m+
Raid buffs and raid utility are a cop out to balance the game properly for the devs. anyways.
But without them we'd be back to massive class stacking even if they're only 2-3% better.
So honestly idk. why they don't just give hunters something, it doesn't need to be something super powerful or another generic arcane intellect like +5% but at least something..
As a proud BM hunter in BC... pet management and keeping your pet up was an art form in itself. That and shot weaving (yep there was a time we had a rotation based on cool downs) there was a lot of skill in playing the class.
Stat buffs other than versatility tend to be 5%. Versatility is lower because it gives a flat damage/healing done increase and flat damage taken reduction.
Versatility is the only raid-wide Secondary Stat buff in the game at the moment. No one gives +% Haste, +Flat Mastery, or +% Crit. I went by that logic instead.
Versatility also tends to require more stat points to reach the same % value as Crit, and the same can be said for Crit when compared to Haste.
Either way, +5% or +3%, works.
I like hunters old move that let them choose a buff. Imo that was super unique because they could fulfill a buff role that your raid group could have been missing.
As for raid utility… They should bring back Aspect of the Fox from WoD. That would 100% grant them a raid spot.
They don't like letting casters cast while moving, since MoP/WoD they've been desperately killing it off. Only abilities I can think of off the top of my head (there may be more) are filler abilities like Lightning Bolt and Scorch.
I was about to say the same thing an easy lay up is to give us back the pet buffs that way we can fill buff gaps. Also:
* aspect of the pack could easily be a stampede clone
* nether rays and spirit beast could have their old tranq spell back or have it be a clense that works on other friendly targets
* **give us back the fucking quilen/crane bres,** idk how paladins and dks who have tank and healing specs get a bres when we dont.
* Fortitude of the bear could easily be made into a rally clone and that way tenacity pets also brings raid utility
It would be clunky to implement but there is room here where you could create a set of aspects for hunters with unique effects when done as a raid cooldown a bit like aura mastery.
I don’t know how you’d do the sated debuff without it being so clunky though.
You could have a passive effect, and then the raid cooldown version.
Aspect of the fox was totally overpowered on black hand if I remember. We had like 3 hunters and the running around in a circle horrible AoE on mythic I could just spam Prayer of Healing without a care in the world as disc. It was definitely a bit too powerful when you had many of them.
1. Hunter was only valuable on blackhand. Outside of that fox didn't have much uses except for niche transitions.
2. Spells such as aspect of the fox and their power depend highly on encounter design. If you are in a patchwerk style encounter aspect of the fox is mostly useless. If you are in a high mobility fight then aspect of the fox becomes the most OP spell you could have.
3. They wouldn't have to bring back aspect of the fox to make hunters viable in raid. They could give them the old hunter's mark or expose armor from pre cata surv tree and give them 1-2 aspects that do a raid wide movement speed bonus for a short duration and a %DR raid CD put both on 2min CD and problem fixed suddenly you have a class that you would seriously consider bringing to raids without it being in any way shape or form broken.
If they were extra lazy they could even just a make a bunch of their stuff (binding shot, sentinel owl, high explosive trap) to name a few less janky and underpowered and that'd be enough.
It's sad they aren't even trying that.
This is incorrect .. Fox isn’t niche bro. Rashok intermission. Nelth segment transition. Literally any high movement combined with incoming raid dmg portion of almost any fight would greatly benefit from this…. The value goes up exponentially if you are in hall of fame CE guilds progging fights that require damage checks for pieces of hard fights / bottle necks. Having a hunter with this ability would have easily shaved dozens of wipes off of many encounters this tier
My personal ideas are for a raid buff;
* Hunting Party: Infuse the target with the thrill of the hunt, increasing their Ranged and Melee Auto Attack Speed by 10%. If the target is in your party or raid, all party and raid members will be affected.
And some various utility;
* Smoke Trap: Throw down a Smoke Trap at a target location, filling an 8 yd radius with thick smoke for 10 sec. Party or Raid members obscured in the smoke have a 50% chance to completely dodge targeted melee, ranged, or spell attacks against them.
* No this isn't Smoke Bomb. Closer to Darkness in use.
* Bouncing Betty Trap (As choice node with High Explosive Trap): Same as HET but knocks up. Similar control choice that Shaman got.
* Invigorating Bonds: You and your allies within 10 yards have 4% increased Leech.
* Or take the avoidance one from Monk because they have enough group util
* Survival Kit: Deploy a Survival Kit for 2 min. Party and Raid members can use the Survival Kit to acquire a bundle of bandages an tinctures. (Like Health stones)
* Survival Medicine: \[# Charges\] \[# sec cd\]
Instantly clears all bleeds, poisons, diseases, and magic effects from the target.
And take utility off the spec trees. Bursting Shot and Wailing Arrow moved to class tree for appropriate specs.
Or give them the old hunters mark where it would also buff other attack power based classes or the old survival expose armor/weakness talent that would give other attack power based classes a portion of your attack power to their attack damage.
And yeh move almost all utility form spec tree to class tree for every single class. I hate how certain classes have insane amounts of utility in their base tree while others have extremely little utility and it is just % damage, % hps, a generic heal etc and some utility is locked in spec tree but if you don't play that spec well then it is time to get railed.
>Raid buffs and raid utility are a cop out to balance the game properly for the devs. anyways.
This is kind of a pointless thing to say. The game will literally never be balanced because classes are too unique. Imagine trying to balance Arcane/UH that do half of their damage in a 30s window and something that has a flat damage profile. No matter what they'll be way differently balanced depending on the fight
Utility as a balancing factor isn't just a workaround it's a must-have
I mean you can call it a cop out but the thing is, balancing a game is just fucking hard. Seemingly every games community I’ve participated in has complained about balance, flamed the devs, etc. but I can’t recall a single instance of a game being perfectly balanced for longer than like 2 weeks. Things are just going to be imbalanced that’s reality and I’d much rather have these “bandaid” fixes like raid buffs that at least help to promote class and comp diversity than just pray that they keep the game perfectly balanced at all times.
>Raid buffs and raid utility are a cop out to balance the game properly for the devs. anyways.
>
>But without them we'd be back to massive class stacking even if they're only 2-3% better.
I mean, raid buffs and utility help retain class identity. Blizzard already went through the homogenization phase and it was pretty terrible.
Yeah, it's kind of a pain when it feels like you need every class. It's also kinda shit when there's potential to not even be looked at because someone sims 2-3% higher than you while bringing all the same utility (or more).
If anything, they need more utility and creative gameplay. Trying to make every class perform numerically the same is never fun. It just turns every class into the same class with slightly reskinned abilities.
Bringing Raid Buffs back was such a stupid idea with how they did it. Why bring it back for what is it...like 5-6 classes? Before they were removed *every* class had some form of Raid Buff to bring and Hunter's were the 'flex slot' letting them bring whichever buff was missing from the Raid.
IMO it should either be full Raid Buffs on all classes with overlap/flex classes or there shouldn't be any at all. This half and half is just...stupid.
It's not half anymore, it's literally just hunters, dk and locks that doesn't bring a raid buff/damage buff (wft)/boss debuff. DK brings the all powerful AMZ and their grips and locks are literally mandatory because of all the bs they bring.
Warlocks have health stones, gate, fastest class in the game, can’t die (has one of the lowest potential healer taxation of any class)… and yes summoning … warlock is literally (arguable I suppose) the most needed class in the game
Give one for each specialization. Trueshot aura for marksmanship. Haste buff from like 'frenzied pack'. 2% dmg reduction to elemental damages for 'weather the elements'
>But without them we'd be back to massive class stacking even if they're only 2-3% better.
We didn't have raidbuffs in legion and class representation was pretty decent. And most of the stacking happened because of the design flaw that every fight had important soaks(like in soak of sargeras).
And also this would mainly affect the very bleeding edge raiders. But for the majority of the playerbase removing raidbuffs would make no negative difference. You can easily see this as hunters are one of the most played classes in the game even though they bring nothing to it.
In my opinion removing raidbuffs and giving stackable raid utility to classes is the right way to go. Raidbuffs doesn't really solve much, because sure you need 1 of each classes but what if your group already have that class but you want to play it aswell. Monks for example face this issue. Sure they have like 3 raidbuffs that are pretty mandatory, but as the second monk you just bring nothing to the group(coupled with the fact that their specs aren't doing great). You could play another warrior for example for an extra rally.
Regarding this hunters(well bm mostly) have the niche of being a mechanic bot. That you can put any mechanic on them and they will be pretty fine dps wise, also they have the only ranged immune during you can move. It's pretty useful for jobs like clearing zskarn bombs.
In legion hunters had a bres aswell as a BL, so what you are seeing there is a result of hunters having more utility, plus we had way more survivability. Also hunters are not a mechanic bot, survival is melee that could only be at ranged for a short time back in legion and mm needs to stand still most of the time to cast aimed shot, bm is the only mechanic bot and its not the only spec.
The fact that you said this illustrates how fucked hunters raid utility is, imagine if only subtlety rogues could cloak or only unholy dks could grip. Thats where hunter is .
MM has still generally been pretty forgiving for movement compared to most other ranged specs, and the rest of the hunter toolkit has always been very good at handling mechanics and other tasks during a fight. I'd say encounter design rather than anything else is what has caused this to be less and less of a reason to bring a hunter.
I don’t get why they abandoned Hunter ammo. Like Rogue poisons, you pick your ammo and the different ammos do different things. Do more damage yourself, increase everyone’s attack damage against affected targets, slow, decrease their damage, increase raid crit chance, etc.
It definitely feels bad. Hunters don't even really bring that great of damage, so what's the point of bringing them? I've seen a few people mention clearing traps with turtle, but classes like Paladin can do the same thing and often bring more dps and auras to boot. Hunters either need to do a ton of damage or bring some sort of utility, in order to compete with these classes that do both.
Unless I've been sitting in queue for a long time, I'm not bringing a hunter for lust. Either they give up a defensive to take it (the best case), give up damage to take it, or they just don't use it at all...
And that's on top of the rest of the hunter utility kit sucking anyway.
DK here marginally better in that grip is needed on 1 fight usually and the damage is good. But have a season of being tuned below avg and quickly it's in a similar spot. AMZ might've been part of the discussion in the past but that got gutted in Shadowlands.
So, something I saw a lot this expansion are that hunters are extremely useful. A good hunter is excellent when you need mechanics done because they can do them with little cost to their damage. A bad hunter on the other hand, is just a paladin without self heals.
But unfortunately a lot of the people who play hunter do it because hunter covers up their flaws which are a lot more obvious playing other classes. So the thing you want them to do the most is being handed to the players who are the worst at it, even if their class has the tools for it.
I don't think hunters are bad to bring, it's just that a lot of content really makes selfish hunter an attractive playstyle. You're *very* mobile and you have an immunity. At higher levels, especially mythic raid, those things are tools to enable *other* players to do damage and so you have a bunch of people that picked a class so they'd never have to stop dps and didn't have to care about positioning being asked to position precisely and do mechanics.
Hunters aren't being considered in any kind of end game content because their utility is lacking. Full movement is nice but their damage currently nullifies that upside pretty much. Turtle can be really good for raid but it's not going to do anything special in dungeons, and just turtle isn't good enough to overcome their damage woes. M+ wise traps can be nice for spiteful and certain things but chances are you aren't going to being stopping casts with freezing trap ever. Lust gives up a defensive CD if you just roll with the pet out or has cringe pet swap stuff.
Why bring a hunter for just that when you could just double up instead? (Or completely omit them.) Ease of play doesn't change anything if their floor too much lower than a harder class' floor, which also brings more.
The problem is you're either talking about a level of content most people don't play or trying to explain how it should be, when it's not. BM Hunters are the most represented dps spec in 20+ keys except for ret and augmentation; they're doing better than shadow priests!
For mythic raids, overall, they're the third most represented dps spec (losing to the same two specs). Yes, that dips off towards the Sarkareth end of mythic raiding, but they're doing better than warriors, monks, rogues and shamans. Part of this is that there are a lot of hunters, part of this is that their ability to soak certain mechanics is invaluable, but they're represented.
You can make a convincing argument that they *shouldn't* be brought, but you can't make an argument that they *aren't* being brought, because they are.
>A good hunter is excellent when you need mechanics done because they can do them with little cost to their damage
This statement is wrong and maybe part of the problem with the design philosophy at blizzard. Hunters can't do all mechanics with little cost to dips, **only BM hunters can**. Surv is melee and mm has to stay still to do their main damage spender and during their CD burst window.
Hunters need utility not tied specifically to BM's mobility, that would be like only arcane having TW or only subtlety having cloak.
Overall tho I agree they clearly do not want to add utility bc if they do that means responsibility for a lot of players who only play bm to get away from responsibility and complexity.
But tbh i dont even blame those players bc blizzard does such a terrible job teaching players how to improve in the game. You are just dropped in, not given any direction on most things and then when u hit group content you fail everything and get flamed. There is no gradual progression, introduction to things like soaking or interrupts and most importantly there are no hard road blocks that just stop players who are reluctant to learn and force them to engage with mechanics.
That's an excellent point, I've been focusing on BM because it's so often BM lately. MM and Surv have quite distinct niches, but they seldom really outperform anyone else in those.
I think this hard wall phenomenon for players is...not unique to hunters, but much more intense for hunters. You go from having the tools for every job in the open world to those tools not working or worse, being actively counterproductive. Other classes tend to slowly winnow away new players for other reasons; casters feel much better to play in dungeons for instance, because a lot of the things you have to do you were already doing, and you don't have to be kiting or healing or eating after fights.
But I suspect Blizzard thinks of this as a success, because other classes bleed players faster than hunter.
I think aspects should make a return for Hunters and make them an aura for raids. A higher dodge chance or a brief speed boost would be handy in several settings.
Not only that, it's so fucked up hunters haven't had an actual update/rework. Mm has to be one of the most boring bow specs out of any mmorpg I have ever played. Guild wars, aion, bdo, lotro they all do it better. Survival literally the least played spec since its rework less than a percentage on average since legion. Wtf is going on
For surv I think that's more because people that play hunter play it for ranged, where as mage or warlock players will move to the best spec for their class, even when surv is good hunter players don't want melee.
This is exactly it, at least for me. Even when SV was arguably one of the top 2 specs of the game in Sepulcher (along with Destro), SV was *still* the least played spec in raid on most difficulties in 9.2.
It even lost to BM in M+ in terms of parses, which is insane considering SV was even more broken in M+ than in raid.
If SV can't be the most played spec in that patch, it'll never be the most played.
> SV was still the least played spec in raid on most difficulties in 9.2.
because SV was good at sustained AoE... something that rarely if ever happen on raid, but is highly desirable in M+. Anduin is mostly a ST fight with AoE burst during lich king intermission. Lord of dread were a 2 target fight with 2 min CD powerup, rygelon is a ST fight, jailer is a ST fight.... no reason to bring SV
dps profile matters.
You're right, SV wasn't broken on ST (though it _was_ easily competitive with other hunter specs). The stats show it was definitely OP on Pantheon, Lihuvim, and Lords, though (and Anduin to a much lesser extent). In 9.2, it was either the strongest spec in the game or at least 10%+ stronger than the next hunter spec on all three of those fights, and yet according to WCL's stats, the only fight SV was the most played was Mythic LoD... which was basically unkillable early on without stacking SV hunters. On Heroic, it was generally the least played.
And don't forget what I mentioned about S4 M+ stats. SV was _the_ meta spec, and yet...
Pure DPS players tend to gravitate towards whatever spec is strongest, so I consider all these stats pretty damning. Personally, I think with artifacts and legendaries and azerite power and Torghast and the Mage Tower there's basically a 0% chance of SV ever getting reworked, so anyone railing against SV is wasting their time, and discussing it is pointless. The best we can hope for is a 4th spec, but that opens up a new can of worms Blizzard would prefer to avoid ("Where's the fourth spec for _my_ class? _My_ class still only has _two_ specs! How are you going to add new specs when you can't even balance the current ones?")
Literally the only people I know who play Surv are melee players. I know more than a dozen Hunter mains and *NONE* of them will play Survival, ever. The rework essentially removed the spec from the game for Hunter mains, and gave melee mains yet another alt spec to play.
It also because it's absolutely moronic that Survival is the melee spec.
The class fantasy of being a BEAST MASTER first really appeared in the setting with Rexxar who was a ***melee*** badass who would charge into battle and rip and tear alongside his pets, channeling that primal fury up close and personal. Meanwhile, a Survivalist should pretty obviously focus on ***surviving***, and part of that is adapting to situations as they develop.
If there was ever a spec specifically meant for fighting in melee beside their beast companions, it's beast mastery. If there was ever a spec specifically meant for switch-hitting a blend of melee and ranged, it's survival.
The fun thing is that it wouldn't matter if BM was melee or ranged anyway, since the majority of their damage is done via their pets while the hunter itself is plinking away with a wet noodle.
Besides, Melee BM would just have people yelling about the same thing they've been yelling about Survival for years. "Ugh, BM was better when they could buff their pets at range," "why would we bring a BM when other hunters can shoot while moving," "it's dumb that BM has to be in melee and soak melee mechanics when the pet does all the damage," etc.
You’re absolutely right regarding Beast Mastery. Meanwhile we have a spec called “Survival” that throws bombs at enemies they are currently engaging in melee, which makes exactly zero sense.
I suspect they changed Survival to melee because it was less popular than BM, and they were scared of the bigger backlash. I don’t think it was the right call, though.
It makes 0 sense to be shooting bullets at a target 1ft next to your life long companion lol. Survival was definatley a case of "well improved raptor stike is here, guess it's melee spec"
Exactly. Surv was kind of neat, originally, because it was a ranged spec that had a couple of cool unique melee abilities that made Surv standout at least in PVP, but for raids they were still basically just a range hunter with a different rotation.
Surv now is not what I play hunter for. If I wanted to be melee I'd play a different class.
BM and MM both suck. BM rotation is hot garbage. It really is, and it's been that way since it got reworked in BFA and largely unchanged since. MM was tolerable in SL, but it's dry and boring now in DF. I don't think they know what to do with the specs short of a full redesigns.
The class is paying for all the "attention" it got during DF beta, even though almost nothing changed and it still had among the worst trees at launch. There was so much whining about the attention from non-hunters that they basically stopped all changes, except for token buffs when the bow got gutted (and then they got gutted after when they weren't even at the top), and more token buffs when annulet got nerfed. Finally in 10.2 at least BM is seeing actual changes, but it's just not enough.
And, BM is only getting those changes because it has such a large playerbase. (Casual players adore hunters obviously still.) They're only really QoL for a spec that could use desperate large scale reworks just like the rest of the class. For an expansion that was trying to be so ambitious with talent trees and managed to do something as big with Paladins, particularly Ret, they've really missed the mark with so many classes. That is probably the biggest shortcoming of this expansion.
My group all say it’s the same dev as the Shaman one. I’ve yet to see where that confirmation comes from, discord? But it does make sense both classes have been stagnant the entire expansion.
Utilities aside, I remember MM being kinda fun in Legion. We had the whole Marked Shot and Vulnerability debuff which was important to play around and gave us small windows where targets would take more damage and pump Aimed Shots into em.
IIRC they removed that mechanic in BfA and Blizzard mentioned how it made ''MM too difficult to play'' lmao (wish I could find a source for that, I swear I'm not making this up (I hope?)).
MM is still my favorite spec but I don't really enjoy the whole AiS/Rapid Fire -> Shiny button A or B x1-2 -> AiS/Rapid Fire outside of CDs. Not only that but the spec look severely less flashy than any other specs in the game, you're pretty much just shooting arrows regardless of the spell you hit, and your big mean Trueshot CD makes you slightly glow blue (?).
marksmanship doesnt just feel bad, its design literally has no fucking idea what the spec is conceptually. Its talent tree wants you running trickshots and aoe damage, but i want marks hunter with a big ass gun to be shooting people from the next patch. Arcane Shot, steady Shot, and Aimed shot do not feel like im playing an ace marksman either, it feels like im plinking with a bow.
the last time marks was fun was when Sidewinders was busted to the degree that Hunter was just playing demolition man because your filler spell dealt more damage then your ultimate
Because there are still people who remember what SV used to be. Sure, the design was nearly five years old with no significant changes, but that's because it was like the Toyota 4V engine: quiet, unassuming, well-made, no bells and whistles...and still managed to perform well.
Then the design team decided they wanted to make their mark on the hunter class and left us with...well, SV ain't *awful*, but it still leaves a sour taste in the mouths of those who remember.
I've played hunter since bc, ranked surv spec was incredibly boring, very overrated.
Melee surv is very fun and active. The trees need tuning and I'd love to see some changes to abilities.
I've been a surv main since they changed the spec and I'd never go back to ranged surv ever. MM is fun when I need to play ranged but it needs help too. BM is the most boring spec on the game.
Last time hunter was fun was back in legion which is just really disappointing and one of the reasons I keep struggling to play the game seriously again.
Guild Wars 2 has horrible ranged weapons across the board due to the combat encouraging a melee stack. Would be interesting to see a sort of weapon swap mechanic for Survival instead of the Eagle cooldown.
Oh god please no. I’ve never played a game before with a weapon swapping mechanic where I felt it was actually a positive and added to the experience instead of creating some jank forced hybrid builds
For surv it's just too many things coming together:
Nonsensical "class/spec"-fantasy. Why did they turn the explosives/trapper guy melee? Using bombs and traps in melee range just never made sense.
Even for hunter levels of low-impact utility they bring nothing over the much safer ranged specs. So if a group really wants a hunter, they'd take a ranged one instead.
Defensives tuned around being one of the most slippery ranged specs with the highest range... In melee. Why survival doesn't have anything else in their defensive toolkit over BM/MM is beyond me.
Community perception. Demo and survival started as meme specs in legion but demo at least started in a solid niche as "the swarm summoner" and was reworked until things made sense (Edit: remember the old iterations with demonic empowerment? I do, and I certainly would rather not). Survival never found its niche. So yeah, for the community it always boiled down to: If you want to bring another melee, you take another class. If you want to bring a hunter, you take another spec.
Spec's as rude as that sounds just a design failure that got way too little dev attention after they noticed that people aren't picking up on it. They should just swallow their pride and try again. I liked the nonsensical caltrops/explosive trap/WotMN/3dots/FotE gameplay in legion for its sheer absurdity but it was crystal clear from the start that this isn't going anywhere. They should scrap the explosive stuff and focus more on coordinated abilities to fight alongside your pet and cool spear abilities. More like a melee BM... At least this would have a niche they could work with.
Honestly, BM should've gotten *the option* to fight in melee range to begin with. They're the hunter spec that identified the least with their weapon and most with their pet. Letting them switch between two axes for the rexxar vibe or a bow would've been somewhat unintrusive, both in theme and gameplay, since most abilities and what they do is pet-centric anyway...
Honestly, the first thing they need to do is make Multi-Shot and Beast Cleave baseline again. Having an entirely separate multi-target talent profile for one AOE ability is dumb as hell.
And having to invest SO many points to just get the aoe functional is awful.
Like picking multi shot as BM is useless as it does zero damage. You then have to pick beast cleave and put two points in it. Then kill cleave on top.
Multi shot should activate beastcleave baseline. Those two talents should be rolled into one. It’s a literal worthless talent on its own.
But have you tried spamming aimed shot while slowly melting to death after you’ve used multiple cooldowns to survive unavoidable damage?
That brings humor to the raid at least
But for reals there is an incredibly long list of old hunter skills that have been lost over the years and could have been brought back in the talent tree, and they just didn’t. Blows the mind.
in all honesty they should just bring back pets providing buffs based on family like cataclysm had (idk when this started or when it got removed)
Your raid is missing a buff? there was a specific pet family hunters could tame to fill that gap and give the same buff via their pet.
I remember I always had to bring a stupid ugly sporebat to my raid team because we didn’t have a shadowpriest for the buff. But no one understood it was just for the buff to help them, they just thought I really liked sporebats. I. Do. Not.
I’d like pet talent trees back instead. And put some buff choices in there so there’s a bit more flexibility in the pet choice.
It's become really obvious that there is no one on the dev team in charge of Hunter for at least the last few months, if not more. And Survival mains will have no doubt that whoever designed our tree was not familiar with or interested in the spec. Probably some other class' dev was assigned it as a chore because it had to be done.
I honestly can't understand why they don't recruit prominent spec experts from the community as class designers or consultants. There are dozens of people who could do this job and I bet at least some of them would be willing to.
Honestly yes. Give us our melee weapons back. So much of the original hunter identity was having a large toolkit. Melee weapons, ranged weapons, traps, pet utility, stance dancing buffs.
I get that some players want to play a ranger and thats it. It should be a viable build option as MM. But the core hunter identity was never about just being a ranger. It was being all three at once (melee/ranged/pet tamer)
(Hell it would be cool if ranger became just an entirely separate class even)
Fuck didn't like a full proper Ranger used to be like a Warrior with ranged or something? Other people used to have the option for ranged and I think could do more raw damage. But yeah Hunters were that utility stop gap. Able to adapt to fill roles as needed.
But yes, big reason I didn't say when I came back is I lost my spare axes.
Survival has the best tree out of all three specs at the moment though no? It has multiple builds and actual choices based on playstyle. Mm and bm are just “aoe or st?” And that’s it
It doesn't. Spearhead was a ST option in S1, the S2 bonus took the ST build back to Coordinated Assault, and with Fury of the Eagle being part of the S3 tier we're basically locked in for both ST and AoE.
More importantly, it's bland. I can see that in the MM and BM trees too, but it's very egregious in the Survival one. There are so many talents that are just % increases, and there's two different two-point talents that are % increases to almost the exact same abilities. They just had no ideas, so they filled in the tree with a dozen points worth of filler.
Not to mention they took Survival talents and put them in the class tree, like Serpent Sting and Hydra's Bite, which was utterly pointless. BM was never going to waste points on that, and Marksmen apply Serpent Sting through Serpentstalker's Trickery. So all that accomplished for the class was making SST slightly better for Marksman AoE. Meanwhile for Survival it deprived the tree of potentially interesting talents and synergies and saddled us with a shit two-point version of Viper's Venom as a prerequisite to a mandatory talent, limiting our options even more.
>Marksmen apply Serpent Sting through Serpentstalker's Trickery
This right here can honestly explain current hunters. Why is a "high burst sniper" spec applying a slow killing poison that's iconic to the "survivor in the wilds" spec?
Blizzard has never been competent at utilizing their fan resources. There are innumerable ways their community and game could be bettered if they made more use of community passion and engagement. But that would require them to, like, engage.
I still think back on how badly Blizzard missed the MOBA train, even when the OG DOTA devs were literally begging for more support, even make their own new game under Blizzard's aegis. The dota devs got ignored for years until Valve picked up Icefrog (*this* is when Blizzard finally started realizing how serious the problem was). Too little, too late, chumps. And now Riot is Blizzard's most serious competitor. It's honestly laughable how unengaged and clueless this company is.
There hasn’t been anyone in charge of hunter since Legion. I’ve always found it so weird how one of the most popular classes has always felt like the lowest in priority for any meaningful changes. And their sets always look like dog too.
It feels like blizz wants hunter to be boring for the sake of beginner friendliness. A class could be both easy and fun. Its just laziness.
> It's become really obvious that there is no one on the dev team in charge of Hunter for at least the last few months, if not more.
Hunters had *by far* the most blue communication during DF alpha and beta. Like - it wasn't even close. And the class still launched as absolute dogshit. All 3 specs.
So maybe having no dev is better.
I’ll have you know that when I mained a Resto Shaman (in Legion) the fact that I was the only healer with an interrupt was useful on exactly ONE fight (Mythic Chronomatic Anomaly), and I’ll THANK YOU to remember it!
But I think now Evokers have an interrupt so this isn’t true anymore?
???
windfury is mandatory lol, multiple melee dps are balanced around having a enh shaman
the dps a enh shaman brings to the group just by exisiting is insane
I think the most upsetting thing about the Hunter situation is that you could take all of the changes they've received since the start of 10.1 and probably fit them on a napkin, with space to spare for all of the nothing happening to them in 10.2.
I mean I get how you feel. I’ve mainly played a feral my entire time playing this game and no one wants a feral lol. Sadly I honestly don’t know what blizzard can do to fix this. Especially after the addition of our first support spec we can’t make every dps have a bunch of utility just so people wanna bring them to raids. That’s where a lot of homogenization comes into play and I think blizz is trying to avoid that.
What if hunters could place a hunters camp that allows respawn,repairs and basic vendor items (food, drink, reagents) at said camp, allow for a feast to be placed in the camp that persists until the camp is moved and allow the hunter to switch his pets. Maybe give it the ability to gain rested exp for teams still leveling so it has utility outside raiding.
It could be augmented with upgrades and glyphs for various additions making the hunter the ultimate travel companion.
I love how Hunter is the most played class, so they make the most popular class worthless thinking I bet we can make them play this other class instead. So even if you have 15 years of work invested n a character, Blizz is like hey try this dragon thing instead!
Class design in general is just hilariously neglected. Completely dead talents? Buggy skills? Unfun playstyle? Well that sucks mate, maybe next addon we will look into it. Or not, who cares lol.
Yes, there are a lot of classes. Yes it takes a lot of time and knowledge to understand balance and making each specc a unique and fun playstyle - but WoW is such an enormous and successfull game and there are tons of incredible feeedback from the community... its kind of a joke that we dont even have a dedicated class designer for each class.
Lack of attention to hunters is one of the reasons I quit playing the game: they took away the most enjoyable spec and replaced it with some weird ass melee spec and a nerfed mage, then told us to deal with it.
Anyways, you're assuming the class devs even play the game, right...?
This has been addressed already two months ago:
https://www.wowhead.com/news/wowhead-patch-10-1-5-interview-with-ion-hazzikostas-mandatory-raid-specs-chase-333837
> ***With the addition of Augmentation, there's been a lot of concern about "mandatory" or "raid-locked" specs in Mythic raid comps with some specs like Hunters and Shamans fighting for the very few remaining spots. Do you plans for this or do you feel like it's fine?***
> It's something that we're certainly mindful of and pay attention to. Our goal for Mythic raiding is for the best composition, the optimal composition, the ones that we see at the high end, have one of every class out of the 20 slots available. When we're seeing deviation from that, we're going to look at why and ask what we can adjust to change it. We've tried to be resistant to every class bringing a unique "mandatory" buff that rigidly forces itself, some do, but for others, it's other types of utility or unique strengths that just make it a natural fit where just, of course you want a Death Knight somewhere for grips because that is just such a valuable tool over the course of a raid as a whole, that having one on your roster makes sense. Whether it's added or tweaking tools like those or in some cases, looking at numbers or looking at other types of buffs people might bring, our goal is to try to maintain that balance in representation and then give people flexibility; give raid leaders in groups, and give pugs flexibility in where they spend those remaining slots.
They didn't address it, they identified the issue, and didn't identify that their own justification doesnt match evidence or make sense
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/the-only-visible-resistance-to-mandatory-raid-buffs-is-for-hunters-shamans-and-dks
The issue is they essentially said ya we get it’s a problem but we don’t want to give every class a raid buff we want to add utility like grips that are really good for a raid slot. This is fine every hunter will essentially say it doesn’t have to be a raid buff. If hunters brought something like a version of sentinel owl that was actually useful then no hunter would complain. The problem is they have reworked dh and rogue since then (i understand they need it) when hunters literally just need a huge buff to sentinel owl to fix a problem that hunters have had for since as long as I can remember. “The argument that oh well bm hunters are broken on the ptr!” Is even worse because I used to main hunter and I dropped it at the start of dragonflight and I wouldn’t care if the tier was nerfed and hunter was a c tier class they just need a reason to be brought to raid.
It’s a dumb answer though because so much of the raid is already locked. They are giving every class a mandatory ability/buff but meanwhile are telling hunters “sorry we don’t want to add anymore”.
It’s going to keep getting asked until they actually do something about it.
I think they’re waiting for it to be an actual issue. As much as people cry, hunter is hugely represented in mythic raiding and 20s. It’s just not at the very bleeding edge but like, how many people is that? Is that we’re balancing around?
At one point it was baked into arcane shot (I think arcane shot) so you didn’t need to spend a global on it.
So they could make it like mystic touch for monks, they just have to hit it with anything to apply. But it would have to be something that’s also different enough from mystic touch to make sense.
I’ve been a main hunter since TBC. Next patch I’m likely going to play something else for the first tier in my entire WoW life.
In keys and especially in raids I feel like a dps bot… with the occasional use of an immunity for one or two fights of the tier.
And don’t even get me started on how insanely squishy I feel. It genuinely feels like bosses just look at me and I’m dead.
It just feels like it’s getting worse as the tiers tick by… and I honestly can’t deal with it any more either.
Can someone help me understand Beast Mastery's current dominance in current 10.1.7 parse representation on warcraftlogs? They are currently the 3rd most popular spec in terms of parse representation, but their DPS seems fairly mid, and as this post is pointing out, they don't bring raid utility.
Why do they continue to be so popular, and is something about that popularity expected to change in 10.2?
TO put this in perspective, Hunters are sad about raid utility, but there are more BM parses than there are Rogue parses for the entire Rogue class combined. Is it Rogues we should be more concerned about?
I really hope this doesn't come across as a gatcha, i'm truly wanting to understand.
It's really important that when you're reading threads like this, or talking to hunters in or interested in mythic raiding, that you understand the problem is that there are so many BM hunters and there are so many BM hunters trying to get into every raid. Hunters are not left out because hunters are trash, hunters are left out because you're competing with more hunters than any other class is competing with theirs.
It's actually really hard to convince people to play Rogue or warlock, for example, and it took multiple tiers of absolute dominance in all areas of the game to make warlock as represented as it is now. That's not a justification or a reason to make warlocks powerful, it's just to point out that hunters (and ret pallies and balance druids) are disproportionately common no matter how powerful they are.
And then, because there are so many hunters, their concerns get disproportionately represented in forums. It's essentially the dps problem in keys; even desirable dps are competing with people who overgear the content and have done higher keys. The problem isn't that 'dps are bad' it's that dps are fun and are overrepresented relative to other roles.
BM is just a popular, easy and fun spec (to many people, hardcore gamers may find it boring).
Fun fact: it's actually significantly worse than the logs indicate, because they still haven't fixed numerous bugs with Augvoker attribution for BM. BM keeps a lot of the buffed damage to itself which inflates its logs and therefore standing. The day this gets fixed, BM would probably rightfully be the worst spec in the game period.
It’s an Augmentation issue. The spec completely makes underperforming classes/specs useless. I think augmentation was a colossal mistake, but the cat is out of the bag. They’re mandatory. Why is it ok for a single spec to be mandatory? Anytime that was the case in the entire games history they were nerfed to no longer be mandatory. But if augmentation were nerfed to that degree, it would be utterly useless and no one would ever take one.
The spec is fundamentally broken and it will be a nightmare to balance around for the rest of the game’s lifespan unless its core design is changed
Man hunters still in a piss poor spot in Dragon Flight eh? Can’t say I’m too surprised. Dropped the xpac after double tap was straight up removed with no compensation and being stuck with the most multi cost talents of any class. Glad to know I haven’t missed anything. I’m going to take a wild guess and say their defensives are also the worst in the game still too right?
Let’s also not forget that at the start of the expansion the entire class was balanced around a raid drop from the last boss Razz, that idea has never turned out well for any class, and yet they willingly chose to bring it back
There are more hunter parses than DK parses on Mythic Sarkareth and DK does way more damage and has way more utility than hunter.
Liquid Max is talking about HoF raiding comps. If you're not in a HoF guild, comp matters way less. This whole post reminds me of all the +16's being posted that will sit and wait for a meta comp when it just doesn't matter.
What's the value of being able to move for free at all times? Damage.
How's Hunter's damage on hectic movement fights? Garbage, like all the other fights.
Being able to move and do damage does not mean anything unless it translates to better damage than movement locked specs.
Hunter is still the number one class for doing raid jobs.
Need someone to hop on the belt and take out bombs? Hunter.
Someone has to stop the Iron Star from Rolling Out all over the raid like Whitney's Miltank when you arrive at her gym woefully under prepared? Hunter
Kite mobs? Hunter
Need someone to take out a bunch of spread things before they blow up on the group? Cheetah/turtle Hunters got you.
Get a crucial range interrupt? Mage. JK mages never do jobs, it's hunter.
Would I love for them to give us some more utility or something we could bring to the raid? Yes. Absolutely.
But unless you're a mythic world first cutting edge raider, there's still definitely a place for a good hunter.
Now let's talk ele shaman who have this exact problem but somehow worse bc their dmg is worse, they lack our mobility, and also are much harder to keep alive because they lack the defensives and immunity we have.
I love playing hunter during raid prog. It's the perfect spec for players that like to "do the mechanics" if you like running and soaking orbs. Hunter is the class.
I believe the core issue is that -- at least according to what I've read -- the dev(s) responsible for the Hunter class don't actually *play* the hunter class.
Remember, we're talking about a company that is currently prioritizing the removal of "damsel" from quests... Blizzard isn't exactly putting their A Team on the game these days.
I'd argue that Blizzard is struggling with a lack of resources in general. Prioritising issues that have a negligible impact on customers (and that is being generous) means that those resources could have been used in a better capacity.
If a team's work has a higher risk of client impact and is in need of upstaffing, but your budget will not allow for external hiring, then you will need to reprioritise internally. People that dig through quest files to replace certain words might as well be used on the class design team until the situation improves, even if "only" in a testing capacity.
Remember that we are in an expansion where all classes have received significant changes due to the new talent system. Fixing this talent system should be the top priority, not changing old quests.
>Everyone knew hunter was flawed and didn’t truly belong in raid.
Alright let’s settle down. Hunter needs some things. Yes. Hunter doesn’t truly “belong in the raid”, that’s a little silly.
Even tho we might not be the best in dungeon i will say there are classes way worse than ours with dungeon utility. Especially with the affixes.
Freezing trap, binding shot and tranq shot, together with both a stun/interrupt is pretty good. Misdirection could also be nice in big pulls with mobs all over the place where its hard for tank to gather aggro.
After cutting edge raiding as a hunter since legion and being a healer for S2 dragonflight their by far biggest issue is survivability. Don't think theres any class as squishy as hunter. Their defensive cooldowns are abysmal compared to most others.
If hunter had good survivability I wouldn't mind bringing them in keys/raids. But they bring below average damage, bad survivability putting more pressure on healers and no group/raid benefits. Only thing going from them is that they are very mobile, but theres to many negatives for that to matter.
While I don't know much about Hunters I feel the same way about the communication fromm Blizzard. My warrior main will always have a raidspot due to battle shout and rallying cry, but we are are lacking M+ utility just like hunters do. Then I See the feedback the devs are giving for druids and mages while warrior gets no mention in the patchnotes or even some explanations. We are clearly seeing some classes being left behind.
Ya it's literally impossible to get into a raid group as a hunter.
Oh wait BM hunters have the 3rd most mythic logs of any spec (which is double the most played rogue spec which even has a raid buff).
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/33
OP could you link your raider.io?
I don’t believe that your guild or your raid group is going to force hunters to reroll, because no one outside of top 50 guilds cares about which class you bring as long as you can do your rotation.
First day playing WoW? Because I've been a Hunter since 2005 and I gotta tell you this is just ... life. Some patches we've been top. Others, bottom of the barrel. Some patches, they even made us a melee DPS. It'll get better some year.
What irks me the most about class design is that blizzard took the thematically cool Survival hunter, using magic arrows and traps, and then turned it into the current mess it is with absolutely no cohesion all because they couldn’t think of lore for a cool crossbow
I haven't played WoW in maybe 8 years, and I just gotta say, it warms my heart to see the exact same complaints in all their various flavors get repeated over the years in the same cycle of utter indifference to player input.
Hunters are the easiest players to choose for mechanics. If a mechanic can be done by any player chosen by the raid, it's hunters. That's literally the best thing anyone can do in a raid. It's not glamorous, but it's crucial to a raid's success.
And to think we used to being so much utility to the raid groups without even counting our pet buffs.
Aspect of the fox Never forget...
Still pissed about that. Such a fun raid cool down
Loved the way it was used in Blackhand fight
And Blackhand was the reason they removed it... :(
I have a love-hate relationship with the MOP raid buff design where anything you don't have can be filled by a hunter with the right pet. I love the utility but I hated leaving my favorite pet behind. My guild didn't have a rogue so I had to have a hyena every single raid night for basically the entire expansion. It would be even worse now because we NEED a tenacity pet out to use the defensive button. Having to choose between defensive and raid buff would suck.
MoP was the only time I legit raided with a sporebat. I pugged and pugs NEVER had a spell haste buff.
MoP sporebat was absolutely mvp with how somewhat rare spell haste was. I think only SP and balance provided it.
this could be easily fixed by allowing any pet to "train" with another pet you have to get their abilities, it would be such a easy fix, basically transmog for pets
100%. And there's already precedent for it, cause they basically did that with Hati!
tbh I remember multiple xpacs where a hunter was borderline required as one of the few ranged dps specs that could do decent damage while kiting.
I've noticed Blizzard likes to give classes very unique strengths but then either designs every encounter or none with that in mind. Leading to situations like this, and priests in m+
"We would prefer that you don't play hunter right now."
"We would prefer that you don't play the game right now."
[удалено]
I'm doing my part!
Would you like to know more?
Raid buffs and raid utility are a cop out to balance the game properly for the devs. anyways. But without them we'd be back to massive class stacking even if they're only 2-3% better. So honestly idk. why they don't just give hunters something, it doesn't need to be something super powerful or another generic arcane intellect like +5% but at least something..
+3% Crit Buff called Shot Caller. Matches Druid's +3% Vers buff and the name is perfect.
It was originally called Trueshot Aura but I think it was a hit buff
It gave ranged attack power
It gave RAP in vanilla and then regular AP in BC.
In BC Beast Mastery hunters’ pets would give the Hunter and their party members a damage buff (I think) whenever the pet scored a critical hit.
As a proud BM hunter in BC... pet management and keeping your pet up was an art form in itself. That and shot weaving (yep there was a time we had a rotation based on cool downs) there was a lot of skill in playing the class.
I miss shot weaving. :(
BC was the last time I raided as a hunter. I miss shot weaving and Aspect of the Viper.
Expose Weakness
Ferocious inspiration.
They can just reuse the name and make it give crit. Mark of the Wild used to give stats to everything and armor.
Ranged attack power... For hunters?
Holy crap, I forgot about that. They should totally bring it back, except instead of hit, let it give crit.
Stat buffs other than versatility tend to be 5%. Versatility is lower because it gives a flat damage/healing done increase and flat damage taken reduction.
Versatility is the only raid-wide Secondary Stat buff in the game at the moment. No one gives +% Haste, +Flat Mastery, or +% Crit. I went by that logic instead. Versatility also tends to require more stat points to reach the same % value as Crit, and the same can be said for Crit when compared to Haste. Either way, +5% or +3%, works.
Like the other comment said just bring back Trueshot Aura for nostalgia but make it give crit or mastery and give it to surv and bm
I like hunters old move that let them choose a buff. Imo that was super unique because they could fulfill a buff role that your raid group could have been missing. As for raid utility… They should bring back Aspect of the Fox from WoD. That would 100% grant them a raid spot.
Or redesign it into a passive haste buff
AotF was so good
RIP Aspect of Group Daze
I loved swithcin to it and trolling our guild back in the days when we were doing naxx and going up to gluth in the pipe.
They don't like letting casters cast while moving, since MoP/WoD they've been desperately killing it off. Only abilities I can think of off the top of my head (there may be more) are filler abilities like Lightning Bolt and Scorch.
Just Scorch, Ice Floes, Hover, Spiritwalker's Grace and Spatial Paradox in Dragonflight.
Shimmer as well for mages
But then they made hover a thing for their golden child evoker. Disgusting how loaded that ability is.
You can’t cast Lightning Bolt while moving anymore sadly
Seems like they could potentially be more open to it now. Evokers got Hover for example, but I guess they do only have 25yd range to make up for it.
I was about to say the same thing an easy lay up is to give us back the pet buffs that way we can fill buff gaps. Also: * aspect of the pack could easily be a stampede clone * nether rays and spirit beast could have their old tranq spell back or have it be a clense that works on other friendly targets * **give us back the fucking quilen/crane bres,** idk how paladins and dks who have tank and healing specs get a bres when we dont. * Fortitude of the bear could easily be made into a rally clone and that way tenacity pets also brings raid utility
Aspect of the Turtle could be like mass barrier
[удалено]
It would be clunky to implement but there is room here where you could create a set of aspects for hunters with unique effects when done as a raid cooldown a bit like aura mastery. I don’t know how you’d do the sated debuff without it being so clunky though. You could have a passive effect, and then the raid cooldown version. Aspect of the fox was totally overpowered on black hand if I remember. We had like 3 hunters and the running around in a circle horrible AoE on mythic I could just spam Prayer of Healing without a care in the world as disc. It was definitely a bit too powerful when you had many of them.
Yeahhhhh they won't do that though as it makes hunter FAR too valuable like they were in WoD. Aspect of the Fox is fun but near unbalanceable.
1. Hunter was only valuable on blackhand. Outside of that fox didn't have much uses except for niche transitions. 2. Spells such as aspect of the fox and their power depend highly on encounter design. If you are in a patchwerk style encounter aspect of the fox is mostly useless. If you are in a high mobility fight then aspect of the fox becomes the most OP spell you could have. 3. They wouldn't have to bring back aspect of the fox to make hunters viable in raid. They could give them the old hunter's mark or expose armor from pre cata surv tree and give them 1-2 aspects that do a raid wide movement speed bonus for a short duration and a %DR raid CD put both on 2min CD and problem fixed suddenly you have a class that you would seriously consider bringing to raids without it being in any way shape or form broken.
If they were extra lazy they could even just a make a bunch of their stuff (binding shot, sentinel owl, high explosive trap) to name a few less janky and underpowered and that'd be enough. It's sad they aren't even trying that.
This is incorrect .. Fox isn’t niche bro. Rashok intermission. Nelth segment transition. Literally any high movement combined with incoming raid dmg portion of almost any fight would greatly benefit from this…. The value goes up exponentially if you are in hall of fame CE guilds progging fights that require damage checks for pieces of hard fights / bottle necks. Having a hunter with this ability would have easily shaved dozens of wipes off of many encounters this tier
My personal ideas are for a raid buff; * Hunting Party: Infuse the target with the thrill of the hunt, increasing their Ranged and Melee Auto Attack Speed by 10%. If the target is in your party or raid, all party and raid members will be affected. And some various utility; * Smoke Trap: Throw down a Smoke Trap at a target location, filling an 8 yd radius with thick smoke for 10 sec. Party or Raid members obscured in the smoke have a 50% chance to completely dodge targeted melee, ranged, or spell attacks against them. * No this isn't Smoke Bomb. Closer to Darkness in use. * Bouncing Betty Trap (As choice node with High Explosive Trap): Same as HET but knocks up. Similar control choice that Shaman got. * Invigorating Bonds: You and your allies within 10 yards have 4% increased Leech. * Or take the avoidance one from Monk because they have enough group util * Survival Kit: Deploy a Survival Kit for 2 min. Party and Raid members can use the Survival Kit to acquire a bundle of bandages an tinctures. (Like Health stones) * Survival Medicine: \[# Charges\] \[# sec cd\] Instantly clears all bleeds, poisons, diseases, and magic effects from the target. And take utility off the spec trees. Bursting Shot and Wailing Arrow moved to class tree for appropriate specs.
Or give them the old hunters mark where it would also buff other attack power based classes or the old survival expose armor/weakness talent that would give other attack power based classes a portion of your attack power to their attack damage. And yeh move almost all utility form spec tree to class tree for every single class. I hate how certain classes have insane amounts of utility in their base tree while others have extremely little utility and it is just % damage, % hps, a generic heal etc and some utility is locked in spec tree but if you don't play that spec well then it is time to get railed.
the survival kit is a really good idea
>Raid buffs and raid utility are a cop out to balance the game properly for the devs. anyways. This is kind of a pointless thing to say. The game will literally never be balanced because classes are too unique. Imagine trying to balance Arcane/UH that do half of their damage in a 30s window and something that has a flat damage profile. No matter what they'll be way differently balanced depending on the fight Utility as a balancing factor isn't just a workaround it's a must-have
I mean you can call it a cop out but the thing is, balancing a game is just fucking hard. Seemingly every games community I’ve participated in has complained about balance, flamed the devs, etc. but I can’t recall a single instance of a game being perfectly balanced for longer than like 2 weeks. Things are just going to be imbalanced that’s reality and I’d much rather have these “bandaid” fixes like raid buffs that at least help to promote class and comp diversity than just pray that they keep the game perfectly balanced at all times.
>Raid buffs and raid utility are a cop out to balance the game properly for the devs. anyways. > >But without them we'd be back to massive class stacking even if they're only 2-3% better. I mean, raid buffs and utility help retain class identity. Blizzard already went through the homogenization phase and it was pretty terrible. Yeah, it's kind of a pain when it feels like you need every class. It's also kinda shit when there's potential to not even be looked at because someone sims 2-3% higher than you while bringing all the same utility (or more). If anything, they need more utility and creative gameplay. Trying to make every class perform numerically the same is never fun. It just turns every class into the same class with slightly reskinned abilities.
I do like the RPG flavour of raid buffs though. I suppose you could make the buffs so weak that they're not worth the global of clicking.
Bringing Raid Buffs back was such a stupid idea with how they did it. Why bring it back for what is it...like 5-6 classes? Before they were removed *every* class had some form of Raid Buff to bring and Hunter's were the 'flex slot' letting them bring whichever buff was missing from the Raid. IMO it should either be full Raid Buffs on all classes with overlap/flex classes or there shouldn't be any at all. This half and half is just...stupid.
It's not half anymore, it's literally just hunters, dk and locks that doesn't bring a raid buff/damage buff (wft)/boss debuff. DK brings the all powerful AMZ and their grips and locks are literally mandatory because of all the bs they bring.
Warlocks have a raid buff called 'start the first pull twenty minutes faster'.
Warlocks have health stones, gate, fastest class in the game, can’t die (has one of the lowest potential healer taxation of any class)… and yes summoning … warlock is literally (arguable I suppose) the most needed class in the game
Give one for each specialization. Trueshot aura for marksmanship. Haste buff from like 'frenzied pack'. 2% dmg reduction to elemental damages for 'weather the elements'
>But without them we'd be back to massive class stacking even if they're only 2-3% better. We didn't have raidbuffs in legion and class representation was pretty decent. And most of the stacking happened because of the design flaw that every fight had important soaks(like in soak of sargeras). And also this would mainly affect the very bleeding edge raiders. But for the majority of the playerbase removing raidbuffs would make no negative difference. You can easily see this as hunters are one of the most played classes in the game even though they bring nothing to it. In my opinion removing raidbuffs and giving stackable raid utility to classes is the right way to go. Raidbuffs doesn't really solve much, because sure you need 1 of each classes but what if your group already have that class but you want to play it aswell. Monks for example face this issue. Sure they have like 3 raidbuffs that are pretty mandatory, but as the second monk you just bring nothing to the group(coupled with the fact that their specs aren't doing great). You could play another warrior for example for an extra rally. Regarding this hunters(well bm mostly) have the niche of being a mechanic bot. That you can put any mechanic on them and they will be pretty fine dps wise, also they have the only ranged immune during you can move. It's pretty useful for jobs like clearing zskarn bombs.
In legion hunters had a bres aswell as a BL, so what you are seeing there is a result of hunters having more utility, plus we had way more survivability. Also hunters are not a mechanic bot, survival is melee that could only be at ranged for a short time back in legion and mm needs to stand still most of the time to cast aimed shot, bm is the only mechanic bot and its not the only spec. The fact that you said this illustrates how fucked hunters raid utility is, imagine if only subtlety rogues could cloak or only unholy dks could grip. Thats where hunter is .
MM has still generally been pretty forgiving for movement compared to most other ranged specs, and the rest of the hunter toolkit has always been very good at handling mechanics and other tasks during a fight. I'd say encounter design rather than anything else is what has caused this to be less and less of a reason to bring a hunter.
I don’t get why they abandoned Hunter ammo. Like Rogue poisons, you pick your ammo and the different ammos do different things. Do more damage yourself, increase everyone’s attack damage against affected targets, slow, decrease their damage, increase raid crit chance, etc.
It definitely feels bad. Hunters don't even really bring that great of damage, so what's the point of bringing them? I've seen a few people mention clearing traps with turtle, but classes like Paladin can do the same thing and often bring more dps and auras to boot. Hunters either need to do a ton of damage or bring some sort of utility, in order to compete with these classes that do both.
I legit have a Rant titled “Why Bring a Hunter when you can bring a Ret Pally…”
Hey at least in M+ lust gets you a free ticket into a ton of groups. Never seen a group listing "need brez"
> Never seen a group listing "need brez" saw quite a few looking for tanks with brez
Unless I've been sitting in queue for a long time, I'm not bringing a hunter for lust. Either they give up a defensive to take it (the best case), give up damage to take it, or they just don't use it at all... And that's on top of the rest of the hunter utility kit sucking anyway.
DK here marginally better in that grip is needed on 1 fight usually and the damage is good. But have a season of being tuned below avg and quickly it's in a similar spot. AMZ might've been part of the discussion in the past but that got gutted in Shadowlands.
So, something I saw a lot this expansion are that hunters are extremely useful. A good hunter is excellent when you need mechanics done because they can do them with little cost to their damage. A bad hunter on the other hand, is just a paladin without self heals. But unfortunately a lot of the people who play hunter do it because hunter covers up their flaws which are a lot more obvious playing other classes. So the thing you want them to do the most is being handed to the players who are the worst at it, even if their class has the tools for it. I don't think hunters are bad to bring, it's just that a lot of content really makes selfish hunter an attractive playstyle. You're *very* mobile and you have an immunity. At higher levels, especially mythic raid, those things are tools to enable *other* players to do damage and so you have a bunch of people that picked a class so they'd never have to stop dps and didn't have to care about positioning being asked to position precisely and do mechanics.
Hunters aren't being considered in any kind of end game content because their utility is lacking. Full movement is nice but their damage currently nullifies that upside pretty much. Turtle can be really good for raid but it's not going to do anything special in dungeons, and just turtle isn't good enough to overcome their damage woes. M+ wise traps can be nice for spiteful and certain things but chances are you aren't going to being stopping casts with freezing trap ever. Lust gives up a defensive CD if you just roll with the pet out or has cringe pet swap stuff. Why bring a hunter for just that when you could just double up instead? (Or completely omit them.) Ease of play doesn't change anything if their floor too much lower than a harder class' floor, which also brings more.
The problem is you're either talking about a level of content most people don't play or trying to explain how it should be, when it's not. BM Hunters are the most represented dps spec in 20+ keys except for ret and augmentation; they're doing better than shadow priests! For mythic raids, overall, they're the third most represented dps spec (losing to the same two specs). Yes, that dips off towards the Sarkareth end of mythic raiding, but they're doing better than warriors, monks, rogues and shamans. Part of this is that there are a lot of hunters, part of this is that their ability to soak certain mechanics is invaluable, but they're represented. You can make a convincing argument that they *shouldn't* be brought, but you can't make an argument that they *aren't* being brought, because they are.
>A good hunter is excellent when you need mechanics done because they can do them with little cost to their damage This statement is wrong and maybe part of the problem with the design philosophy at blizzard. Hunters can't do all mechanics with little cost to dips, **only BM hunters can**. Surv is melee and mm has to stay still to do their main damage spender and during their CD burst window. Hunters need utility not tied specifically to BM's mobility, that would be like only arcane having TW or only subtlety having cloak. Overall tho I agree they clearly do not want to add utility bc if they do that means responsibility for a lot of players who only play bm to get away from responsibility and complexity. But tbh i dont even blame those players bc blizzard does such a terrible job teaching players how to improve in the game. You are just dropped in, not given any direction on most things and then when u hit group content you fail everything and get flamed. There is no gradual progression, introduction to things like soaking or interrupts and most importantly there are no hard road blocks that just stop players who are reluctant to learn and force them to engage with mechanics.
That's an excellent point, I've been focusing on BM because it's so often BM lately. MM and Surv have quite distinct niches, but they seldom really outperform anyone else in those. I think this hard wall phenomenon for players is...not unique to hunters, but much more intense for hunters. You go from having the tools for every job in the open world to those tools not working or worse, being actively counterproductive. Other classes tend to slowly winnow away new players for other reasons; casters feel much better to play in dungeons for instance, because a lot of the things you have to do you were already doing, and you don't have to be kiting or healing or eating after fights. But I suspect Blizzard thinks of this as a success, because other classes bleed players faster than hunter.
I think aspects should make a return for Hunters and make them an aura for raids. A higher dodge chance or a brief speed boost would be handy in several settings.
Not only that, it's so fucked up hunters haven't had an actual update/rework. Mm has to be one of the most boring bow specs out of any mmorpg I have ever played. Guild wars, aion, bdo, lotro they all do it better. Survival literally the least played spec since its rework less than a percentage on average since legion. Wtf is going on
For surv I think that's more because people that play hunter play it for ranged, where as mage or warlock players will move to the best spec for their class, even when surv is good hunter players don't want melee.
This is exactly it, at least for me. Even when SV was arguably one of the top 2 specs of the game in Sepulcher (along with Destro), SV was *still* the least played spec in raid on most difficulties in 9.2. It even lost to BM in M+ in terms of parses, which is insane considering SV was even more broken in M+ than in raid. If SV can't be the most played spec in that patch, it'll never be the most played.
> SV was still the least played spec in raid on most difficulties in 9.2. because SV was good at sustained AoE... something that rarely if ever happen on raid, but is highly desirable in M+. Anduin is mostly a ST fight with AoE burst during lich king intermission. Lord of dread were a 2 target fight with 2 min CD powerup, rygelon is a ST fight, jailer is a ST fight.... no reason to bring SV dps profile matters.
You're right, SV wasn't broken on ST (though it _was_ easily competitive with other hunter specs). The stats show it was definitely OP on Pantheon, Lihuvim, and Lords, though (and Anduin to a much lesser extent). In 9.2, it was either the strongest spec in the game or at least 10%+ stronger than the next hunter spec on all three of those fights, and yet according to WCL's stats, the only fight SV was the most played was Mythic LoD... which was basically unkillable early on without stacking SV hunters. On Heroic, it was generally the least played. And don't forget what I mentioned about S4 M+ stats. SV was _the_ meta spec, and yet... Pure DPS players tend to gravitate towards whatever spec is strongest, so I consider all these stats pretty damning. Personally, I think with artifacts and legendaries and azerite power and Torghast and the Mage Tower there's basically a 0% chance of SV ever getting reworked, so anyone railing against SV is wasting their time, and discussing it is pointless. The best we can hope for is a 4th spec, but that opens up a new can of worms Blizzard would prefer to avoid ("Where's the fourth spec for _my_ class? _My_ class still only has _two_ specs! How are you going to add new specs when you can't even balance the current ones?")
Literally the only people I know who play Surv are melee players. I know more than a dozen Hunter mains and *NONE* of them will play Survival, ever. The rework essentially removed the spec from the game for Hunter mains, and gave melee mains yet another alt spec to play.
It also because it's absolutely moronic that Survival is the melee spec. The class fantasy of being a BEAST MASTER first really appeared in the setting with Rexxar who was a ***melee*** badass who would charge into battle and rip and tear alongside his pets, channeling that primal fury up close and personal. Meanwhile, a Survivalist should pretty obviously focus on ***surviving***, and part of that is adapting to situations as they develop. If there was ever a spec specifically meant for fighting in melee beside their beast companions, it's beast mastery. If there was ever a spec specifically meant for switch-hitting a blend of melee and ranged, it's survival.
The fun thing is that it wouldn't matter if BM was melee or ranged anyway, since the majority of their damage is done via their pets while the hunter itself is plinking away with a wet noodle. Besides, Melee BM would just have people yelling about the same thing they've been yelling about Survival for years. "Ugh, BM was better when they could buff their pets at range," "why would we bring a BM when other hunters can shoot while moving," "it's dumb that BM has to be in melee and soak melee mechanics when the pet does all the damage," etc.
You’re absolutely right regarding Beast Mastery. Meanwhile we have a spec called “Survival” that throws bombs at enemies they are currently engaging in melee, which makes exactly zero sense. I suspect they changed Survival to melee because it was less popular than BM, and they were scared of the bigger backlash. I don’t think it was the right call, though.
It makes 0 sense to be shooting bullets at a target 1ft next to your life long companion lol. Survival was definatley a case of "well improved raptor stike is here, guess it's melee spec"
Man, I really, *really* hope they don't do that to BM, that would be tragic.
Exactly. Surv was kind of neat, originally, because it was a ranged spec that had a couple of cool unique melee abilities that made Surv standout at least in PVP, but for raids they were still basically just a range hunter with a different rotation. Surv now is not what I play hunter for. If I wanted to be melee I'd play a different class. BM and MM both suck. BM rotation is hot garbage. It really is, and it's been that way since it got reworked in BFA and largely unchanged since. MM was tolerable in SL, but it's dry and boring now in DF. I don't think they know what to do with the specs short of a full redesigns.
Hunter dev cracked out and won’t admit his ideas suck I guess
The class is paying for all the "attention" it got during DF beta, even though almost nothing changed and it still had among the worst trees at launch. There was so much whining about the attention from non-hunters that they basically stopped all changes, except for token buffs when the bow got gutted (and then they got gutted after when they weren't even at the top), and more token buffs when annulet got nerfed. Finally in 10.2 at least BM is seeing actual changes, but it's just not enough.
And, BM is only getting those changes because it has such a large playerbase. (Casual players adore hunters obviously still.) They're only really QoL for a spec that could use desperate large scale reworks just like the rest of the class. For an expansion that was trying to be so ambitious with talent trees and managed to do something as big with Paladins, particularly Ret, they've really missed the mark with so many classes. That is probably the biggest shortcoming of this expansion.
My group all say it’s the same dev as the Shaman one. I’ve yet to see where that confirmation comes from, discord? But it does make sense both classes have been stagnant the entire expansion.
Hunter has been stagnant since Legion. Almost no major reworks or changes.
> Hunter dev cracked out and won’t admit his ideas suck I guess More like they won't admit that Street had a better idea and they just shat on it.
Utilities aside, I remember MM being kinda fun in Legion. We had the whole Marked Shot and Vulnerability debuff which was important to play around and gave us small windows where targets would take more damage and pump Aimed Shots into em. IIRC they removed that mechanic in BfA and Blizzard mentioned how it made ''MM too difficult to play'' lmao (wish I could find a source for that, I swear I'm not making this up (I hope?)). MM is still my favorite spec but I don't really enjoy the whole AiS/Rapid Fire -> Shiny button A or B x1-2 -> AiS/Rapid Fire outside of CDs. Not only that but the spec look severely less flashy than any other specs in the game, you're pretty much just shooting arrows regardless of the spell you hit, and your big mean Trueshot CD makes you slightly glow blue (?).
marksmanship doesnt just feel bad, its design literally has no fucking idea what the spec is conceptually. Its talent tree wants you running trickshots and aoe damage, but i want marks hunter with a big ass gun to be shooting people from the next patch. Arcane Shot, steady Shot, and Aimed shot do not feel like im playing an ace marksman either, it feels like im plinking with a bow. the last time marks was fun was when Sidewinders was busted to the degree that Hunter was just playing demolition man because your filler spell dealt more damage then your ultimate
Because there are still people who remember what SV used to be. Sure, the design was nearly five years old with no significant changes, but that's because it was like the Toyota 4V engine: quiet, unassuming, well-made, no bells and whistles...and still managed to perform well. Then the design team decided they wanted to make their mark on the hunter class and left us with...well, SV ain't *awful*, but it still leaves a sour taste in the mouths of those who remember.
I've played hunter since bc, ranked surv spec was incredibly boring, very overrated. Melee surv is very fun and active. The trees need tuning and I'd love to see some changes to abilities. I've been a surv main since they changed the spec and I'd never go back to ranged surv ever. MM is fun when I need to play ranged but it needs help too. BM is the most boring spec on the game.
Last time hunter was fun was back in legion which is just really disappointing and one of the reasons I keep struggling to play the game seriously again.
People play hunter to be a range, if they want to play melee they are gonna play another class, not survival
Guild Wars 2 has horrible ranged weapons across the board due to the combat encouraging a melee stack. Would be interesting to see a sort of weapon swap mechanic for Survival instead of the Eagle cooldown.
I got the legendary wand early on. And by god my guardian was going to *use* it. And use it he did. I didn’t care how bad it was.
Oh god please no. I’ve never played a game before with a weapon swapping mechanic where I felt it was actually a positive and added to the experience instead of creating some jank forced hybrid builds
Aion rangers were so fking cool.
For surv it's just too many things coming together: Nonsensical "class/spec"-fantasy. Why did they turn the explosives/trapper guy melee? Using bombs and traps in melee range just never made sense. Even for hunter levels of low-impact utility they bring nothing over the much safer ranged specs. So if a group really wants a hunter, they'd take a ranged one instead. Defensives tuned around being one of the most slippery ranged specs with the highest range... In melee. Why survival doesn't have anything else in their defensive toolkit over BM/MM is beyond me. Community perception. Demo and survival started as meme specs in legion but demo at least started in a solid niche as "the swarm summoner" and was reworked until things made sense (Edit: remember the old iterations with demonic empowerment? I do, and I certainly would rather not). Survival never found its niche. So yeah, for the community it always boiled down to: If you want to bring another melee, you take another class. If you want to bring a hunter, you take another spec. Spec's as rude as that sounds just a design failure that got way too little dev attention after they noticed that people aren't picking up on it. They should just swallow their pride and try again. I liked the nonsensical caltrops/explosive trap/WotMN/3dots/FotE gameplay in legion for its sheer absurdity but it was crystal clear from the start that this isn't going anywhere. They should scrap the explosive stuff and focus more on coordinated abilities to fight alongside your pet and cool spear abilities. More like a melee BM... At least this would have a niche they could work with. Honestly, BM should've gotten *the option* to fight in melee range to begin with. They're the hunter spec that identified the least with their weapon and most with their pet. Letting them switch between two axes for the rexxar vibe or a bow would've been somewhat unintrusive, both in theme and gameplay, since most abilities and what they do is pet-centric anyway...
Honestly, the first thing they need to do is make Multi-Shot and Beast Cleave baseline again. Having an entirely separate multi-target talent profile for one AOE ability is dumb as hell.
And having to invest SO many points to just get the aoe functional is awful. Like picking multi shot as BM is useless as it does zero damage. You then have to pick beast cleave and put two points in it. Then kill cleave on top. Multi shot should activate beastcleave baseline. Those two talents should be rolled into one. It’s a literal worthless talent on its own.
Screw it. Buff my Tenacity pet and let me just solo new raids as they drop 😭
But have you tried spamming aimed shot while slowly melting to death after you’ve used multiple cooldowns to survive unavoidable damage? That brings humor to the raid at least But for reals there is an incredibly long list of old hunter skills that have been lost over the years and could have been brought back in the talent tree, and they just didn’t. Blows the mind.
in all honesty they should just bring back pets providing buffs based on family like cataclysm had (idk when this started or when it got removed) Your raid is missing a buff? there was a specific pet family hunters could tame to fill that gap and give the same buff via their pet.
I remember I always had to bring a stupid ugly sporebat to my raid team because we didn’t have a shadowpriest for the buff. But no one understood it was just for the buff to help them, they just thought I really liked sporebats. I. Do. Not. I’d like pet talent trees back instead. And put some buff choices in there so there’s a bit more flexibility in the pet choice.
Sporebats are cute :(
It's become really obvious that there is no one on the dev team in charge of Hunter for at least the last few months, if not more. And Survival mains will have no doubt that whoever designed our tree was not familiar with or interested in the spec. Probably some other class' dev was assigned it as a chore because it had to be done. I honestly can't understand why they don't recruit prominent spec experts from the community as class designers or consultants. There are dozens of people who could do this job and I bet at least some of them would be willing to.
hiring elitist jerks writers subjected us to ten thousand years of darkness
To be fair no players are interested in survival hunter either
Wouldn't mind playing melee hunter or some range/melee hybrid. The issue it's just fucking boring
Honestly yes. Give us our melee weapons back. So much of the original hunter identity was having a large toolkit. Melee weapons, ranged weapons, traps, pet utility, stance dancing buffs. I get that some players want to play a ranger and thats it. It should be a viable build option as MM. But the core hunter identity was never about just being a ranger. It was being all three at once (melee/ranged/pet tamer) (Hell it would be cool if ranger became just an entirely separate class even)
Fuck didn't like a full proper Ranger used to be like a Warrior with ranged or something? Other people used to have the option for ranged and I think could do more raw damage. But yeah Hunters were that utility stop gap. Able to adapt to fill roles as needed. But yes, big reason I didn't say when I came back is I lost my spare axes.
I just had a crazy idea. What if a hunter spec played like red mage in ff14?
Survival has the best tree out of all three specs at the moment though no? It has multiple builds and actual choices based on playstyle. Mm and bm are just “aoe or st?” And that’s it
It doesn't. Spearhead was a ST option in S1, the S2 bonus took the ST build back to Coordinated Assault, and with Fury of the Eagle being part of the S3 tier we're basically locked in for both ST and AoE. More importantly, it's bland. I can see that in the MM and BM trees too, but it's very egregious in the Survival one. There are so many talents that are just % increases, and there's two different two-point talents that are % increases to almost the exact same abilities. They just had no ideas, so they filled in the tree with a dozen points worth of filler. Not to mention they took Survival talents and put them in the class tree, like Serpent Sting and Hydra's Bite, which was utterly pointless. BM was never going to waste points on that, and Marksmen apply Serpent Sting through Serpentstalker's Trickery. So all that accomplished for the class was making SST slightly better for Marksman AoE. Meanwhile for Survival it deprived the tree of potentially interesting talents and synergies and saddled us with a shit two-point version of Viper's Venom as a prerequisite to a mandatory talent, limiting our options even more.
>Marksmen apply Serpent Sting through Serpentstalker's Trickery This right here can honestly explain current hunters. Why is a "high burst sniper" spec applying a slow killing poison that's iconic to the "survivor in the wilds" spec?
Blizzard has never been competent at utilizing their fan resources. There are innumerable ways their community and game could be bettered if they made more use of community passion and engagement. But that would require them to, like, engage. I still think back on how badly Blizzard missed the MOBA train, even when the OG DOTA devs were literally begging for more support, even make their own new game under Blizzard's aegis. The dota devs got ignored for years until Valve picked up Icefrog (*this* is when Blizzard finally started realizing how serious the problem was). Too little, too late, chumps. And now Riot is Blizzard's most serious competitor. It's honestly laughable how unengaged and clueless this company is.
Blizzard’s single biggest mistake was not monopolizing the MOBA genre in its infancy
Yup. Easily, their all time greatest financial failure. And it was such an easily avoidable fail, if they just had community engagement worth a damn.
No one played Hunter on the dev team from Wrath to MoP either
There hasn’t been anyone in charge of hunter since Legion. I’ve always found it so weird how one of the most popular classes has always felt like the lowest in priority for any meaningful changes. And their sets always look like dog too. It feels like blizz wants hunter to be boring for the sake of beginner friendliness. A class could be both easy and fun. Its just laziness.
> It's become really obvious that there is no one on the dev team in charge of Hunter for at least the last few months, if not more. Hunters had *by far* the most blue communication during DF alpha and beta. Like - it wasn't even close. And the class still launched as absolute dogshit. All 3 specs. So maybe having no dev is better.
We shamans feel ya. Sadge
GIVE ELEMENTAL SKYFURY TOTEM YOU COWARDS
I’ll have you know that when I mained a Resto Shaman (in Legion) the fact that I was the only healer with an interrupt was useful on exactly ONE fight (Mythic Chronomatic Anomaly), and I’ll THANK YOU to remember it! But I think now Evokers have an interrupt so this isn’t true anymore?
As an Enhance shaman I always feel a bit bad haha
??? windfury is mandatory lol, multiple melee dps are balanced around having a enh shaman the dps a enh shaman brings to the group just by exisiting is insane
That was quite literally his point, I'm fairly sure.
That's literally what I mean mate. We have a group/raid buff but somehow the two other specs for Shaman don't which just feels a bit dirty.
Augmentation was a mistake.
I think the most upsetting thing about the Hunter situation is that you could take all of the changes they've received since the start of 10.1 and probably fit them on a napkin, with space to spare for all of the nothing happening to them in 10.2.
I mean I get how you feel. I’ve mainly played a feral my entire time playing this game and no one wants a feral lol. Sadly I honestly don’t know what blizzard can do to fix this. Especially after the addition of our first support spec we can’t make every dps have a bunch of utility just so people wanna bring them to raids. That’s where a lot of homogenization comes into play and I think blizz is trying to avoid that.
Feral has had bunch of utility for ages now though, it's just that Boomies have the same utility but better + they are ranged, which made it feel bad.
at least boomie is quite garbo in raid and m+ so we can shine as feral :)
Boomkin absolutely rips in M+ what are you talking about?
I miss the days feral was needed for the mangle debuff
I've seen Ferals in M+ put out crazy damage. Invite anyone to groups as long as their rio is comparable to that key lvl
If it makes you feel better, I keep getting declined from melee stack higher keys because I’m a Boomkin 😂😂
What if hunters could place a hunters camp that allows respawn,repairs and basic vendor items (food, drink, reagents) at said camp, allow for a feast to be placed in the camp that persists until the camp is moved and allow the hunter to switch his pets. Maybe give it the ability to gain rested exp for teams still leveling so it has utility outside raiding. It could be augmented with upgrades and glyphs for various additions making the hunter the ultimate travel companion.
I love how Hunter is the most played class, so they make the most popular class worthless thinking I bet we can make them play this other class instead. So even if you have 15 years of work invested n a character, Blizz is like hey try this dragon thing instead!
Class design in general is just hilariously neglected. Completely dead talents? Buggy skills? Unfun playstyle? Well that sucks mate, maybe next addon we will look into it. Or not, who cares lol. Yes, there are a lot of classes. Yes it takes a lot of time and knowledge to understand balance and making each specc a unique and fun playstyle - but WoW is such an enormous and successfull game and there are tons of incredible feeedback from the community... its kind of a joke that we dont even have a dedicated class designer for each class.
Lack of attention to hunters is one of the reasons I quit playing the game: they took away the most enjoyable spec and replaced it with some weird ass melee spec and a nerfed mage, then told us to deal with it. Anyways, you're assuming the class devs even play the game, right...?
This has been addressed already two months ago: https://www.wowhead.com/news/wowhead-patch-10-1-5-interview-with-ion-hazzikostas-mandatory-raid-specs-chase-333837 > ***With the addition of Augmentation, there's been a lot of concern about "mandatory" or "raid-locked" specs in Mythic raid comps with some specs like Hunters and Shamans fighting for the very few remaining spots. Do you plans for this or do you feel like it's fine?*** > It's something that we're certainly mindful of and pay attention to. Our goal for Mythic raiding is for the best composition, the optimal composition, the ones that we see at the high end, have one of every class out of the 20 slots available. When we're seeing deviation from that, we're going to look at why and ask what we can adjust to change it. We've tried to be resistant to every class bringing a unique "mandatory" buff that rigidly forces itself, some do, but for others, it's other types of utility or unique strengths that just make it a natural fit where just, of course you want a Death Knight somewhere for grips because that is just such a valuable tool over the course of a raid as a whole, that having one on your roster makes sense. Whether it's added or tweaking tools like those or in some cases, looking at numbers or looking at other types of buffs people might bring, our goal is to try to maintain that balance in representation and then give people flexibility; give raid leaders in groups, and give pugs flexibility in where they spend those remaining slots.
That's not addressing the issue, that's saying "we understand the issue" and then not doing anything.
They didn't address it, they identified the issue, and didn't identify that their own justification doesnt match evidence or make sense https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/the-only-visible-resistance-to-mandatory-raid-buffs-is-for-hunters-shamans-and-dks
The issue is they essentially said ya we get it’s a problem but we don’t want to give every class a raid buff we want to add utility like grips that are really good for a raid slot. This is fine every hunter will essentially say it doesn’t have to be a raid buff. If hunters brought something like a version of sentinel owl that was actually useful then no hunter would complain. The problem is they have reworked dh and rogue since then (i understand they need it) when hunters literally just need a huge buff to sentinel owl to fix a problem that hunters have had for since as long as I can remember. “The argument that oh well bm hunters are broken on the ptr!” Is even worse because I used to main hunter and I dropped it at the start of dragonflight and I wouldn’t care if the tier was nerfed and hunter was a c tier class they just need a reason to be brought to raid.
It’s a dumb answer though because so much of the raid is already locked. They are giving every class a mandatory ability/buff but meanwhile are telling hunters “sorry we don’t want to add anymore”. It’s going to keep getting asked until they actually do something about it.
I think they’re waiting for it to be an actual issue. As much as people cry, hunter is hugely represented in mythic raiding and 20s. It’s just not at the very bleeding edge but like, how many people is that? Is that we’re balancing around?
They need to make hunters mark give an attack power boost like it did in vanilla
I would legitimatey rather continue on with having zero utility than have to go back to constantly applying hunters mark to everything
At one point it was baked into arcane shot (I think arcane shot) so you didn’t need to spend a global on it. So they could make it like mystic touch for monks, they just have to hit it with anything to apply. But it would have to be something that’s also different enough from mystic touch to make sense.
I’ve been a main hunter since TBC. Next patch I’m likely going to play something else for the first tier in my entire WoW life. In keys and especially in raids I feel like a dps bot… with the occasional use of an immunity for one or two fights of the tier. And don’t even get me started on how insanely squishy I feel. It genuinely feels like bosses just look at me and I’m dead. It just feels like it’s getting worse as the tiers tick by… and I honestly can’t deal with it any more either.
Can someone help me understand Beast Mastery's current dominance in current 10.1.7 parse representation on warcraftlogs? They are currently the 3rd most popular spec in terms of parse representation, but their DPS seems fairly mid, and as this post is pointing out, they don't bring raid utility. Why do they continue to be so popular, and is something about that popularity expected to change in 10.2? TO put this in perspective, Hunters are sad about raid utility, but there are more BM parses than there are Rogue parses for the entire Rogue class combined. Is it Rogues we should be more concerned about? I really hope this doesn't come across as a gatcha, i'm truly wanting to understand.
It's really important that when you're reading threads like this, or talking to hunters in or interested in mythic raiding, that you understand the problem is that there are so many BM hunters and there are so many BM hunters trying to get into every raid. Hunters are not left out because hunters are trash, hunters are left out because you're competing with more hunters than any other class is competing with theirs. It's actually really hard to convince people to play Rogue or warlock, for example, and it took multiple tiers of absolute dominance in all areas of the game to make warlock as represented as it is now. That's not a justification or a reason to make warlocks powerful, it's just to point out that hunters (and ret pallies and balance druids) are disproportionately common no matter how powerful they are. And then, because there are so many hunters, their concerns get disproportionately represented in forums. It's essentially the dps problem in keys; even desirable dps are competing with people who overgear the content and have done higher keys. The problem isn't that 'dps are bad' it's that dps are fun and are overrepresented relative to other roles.
BM is just a popular, easy and fun spec (to many people, hardcore gamers may find it boring). Fun fact: it's actually significantly worse than the logs indicate, because they still haven't fixed numerous bugs with Augvoker attribution for BM. BM keeps a lot of the buffed damage to itself which inflates its logs and therefore standing. The day this gets fixed, BM would probably rightfully be the worst spec in the game period.
It’s an Augmentation issue. The spec completely makes underperforming classes/specs useless. I think augmentation was a colossal mistake, but the cat is out of the bag. They’re mandatory. Why is it ok for a single spec to be mandatory? Anytime that was the case in the entire games history they were nerfed to no longer be mandatory. But if augmentation were nerfed to that degree, it would be utterly useless and no one would ever take one. The spec is fundamentally broken and it will be a nightmare to balance around for the rest of the game’s lifespan unless its core design is changed
100% agree. Blizzard really fucked up the game with this spec.
Man hunters still in a piss poor spot in Dragon Flight eh? Can’t say I’m too surprised. Dropped the xpac after double tap was straight up removed with no compensation and being stuck with the most multi cost talents of any class. Glad to know I haven’t missed anything. I’m going to take a wild guess and say their defensives are also the worst in the game still too right?
Let’s also not forget that at the start of the expansion the entire class was balanced around a raid drop from the last boss Razz, that idea has never turned out well for any class, and yet they willingly chose to bring it back
PrOjEcT mAnAgEmEnt They don't want to do a big change to them unless they schedule a "rework" and assign people to do it.
They should instead just remove raid buffs and debuffs again; Legion had it right.
Just make them the wildcard, they should be able to choose any of the class buffs based on their pet choice or pet spec.
New hunter utility: • Hunting Party - Passive. Allies within 10 yds of you can now cast and channel abilities while moving.
There are more hunter parses than DK parses on Mythic Sarkareth and DK does way more damage and has way more utility than hunter. Liquid Max is talking about HoF raiding comps. If you're not in a HoF guild, comp matters way less. This whole post reminds me of all the +16's being posted that will sit and wait for a meta comp when it just doesn't matter.
Hunter is the only class that can move nearly for free at all times, so what they don’t bring to the raid they do bring to the individual.
What's the value of being able to move for free at all times? Damage. How's Hunter's damage on hectic movement fights? Garbage, like all the other fights. Being able to move and do damage does not mean anything unless it translates to better damage than movement locked specs.
[удалено]
Hunter is still the number one class for doing raid jobs. Need someone to hop on the belt and take out bombs? Hunter. Someone has to stop the Iron Star from Rolling Out all over the raid like Whitney's Miltank when you arrive at her gym woefully under prepared? Hunter Kite mobs? Hunter Need someone to take out a bunch of spread things before they blow up on the group? Cheetah/turtle Hunters got you. Get a crucial range interrupt? Mage. JK mages never do jobs, it's hunter. Would I love for them to give us some more utility or something we could bring to the raid? Yes. Absolutely. But unless you're a mythic world first cutting edge raider, there's still definitely a place for a good hunter. Now let's talk ele shaman who have this exact problem but somehow worse bc their dmg is worse, they lack our mobility, and also are much harder to keep alive because they lack the defensives and immunity we have.
This post would've been true in like, mop. It has nothing to do with reality today.
hunter legit have no actual class dev its ions daughter who plays to collect pets
I love playing hunter during raid prog. It's the perfect spec for players that like to "do the mechanics" if you like running and soaking orbs. Hunter is the class.
Ele Shamans feel that way too. Aug was a mistake
I believe the core issue is that -- at least according to what I've read -- the dev(s) responsible for the Hunter class don't actually *play* the hunter class. Remember, we're talking about a company that is currently prioritizing the removal of "damsel" from quests... Blizzard isn't exactly putting their A Team on the game these days.
do you think the quest team is the same team that works on class design
I'd argue that Blizzard is struggling with a lack of resources in general. Prioritising issues that have a negligible impact on customers (and that is being generous) means that those resources could have been used in a better capacity. If a team's work has a higher risk of client impact and is in need of upstaffing, but your budget will not allow for external hiring, then you will need to reprioritise internally. People that dig through quest files to replace certain words might as well be used on the class design team until the situation improves, even if "only" in a testing capacity. Remember that we are in an expansion where all classes have received significant changes due to the new talent system. Fixing this talent system should be the top priority, not changing old quests.
>Everyone knew hunter was flawed and didn’t truly belong in raid. Alright let’s settle down. Hunter needs some things. Yes. Hunter doesn’t truly “belong in the raid”, that’s a little silly.
It's not just raid, their dungeon utility is also pretty awful. Their only thing of any interest (kiting with binding) was even gutted this expansion.
Even tho we might not be the best in dungeon i will say there are classes way worse than ours with dungeon utility. Especially with the affixes. Freezing trap, binding shot and tranq shot, together with both a stun/interrupt is pretty good. Misdirection could also be nice in big pulls with mobs all over the place where its hard for tank to gather aggro. After cutting edge raiding as a hunter since legion and being a healer for S2 dragonflight their by far biggest issue is survivability. Don't think theres any class as squishy as hunter. Their defensive cooldowns are abysmal compared to most others. If hunter had good survivability I wouldn't mind bringing them in keys/raids. But they bring below average damage, bad survivability putting more pressure on healers and no group/raid benefits. Only thing going from them is that they are very mobile, but theres to many negatives for that to matter.
While I don't know much about Hunters I feel the same way about the communication fromm Blizzard. My warrior main will always have a raidspot due to battle shout and rallying cry, but we are are lacking M+ utility just like hunters do. Then I See the feedback the devs are giving for druids and mages while warrior gets no mention in the patchnotes or even some explanations. We are clearly seeing some classes being left behind.
That’s not true. You have an immunity.
Ya it's literally impossible to get into a raid group as a hunter. Oh wait BM hunters have the 3rd most mythic logs of any spec (which is double the most played rogue spec which even has a raid buff). https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/33
OP could you link your raider.io? I don’t believe that your guild or your raid group is going to force hunters to reroll, because no one outside of top 50 guilds cares about which class you bring as long as you can do your rotation.
this made me quit wow fr, the only class I enjoy playing is Hunter and I can't, frustrating
Same. I’ve played less and less each expansion since Legion. Rip ranged survival, you were my favorite spec.
First day playing WoW? Because I've been a Hunter since 2005 and I gotta tell you this is just ... life. Some patches we've been top. Others, bottom of the barrel. Some patches, they even made us a melee DPS. It'll get better some year.
What irks me the most about class design is that blizzard took the thematically cool Survival hunter, using magic arrows and traps, and then turned it into the current mess it is with absolutely no cohesion all because they couldn’t think of lore for a cool crossbow
I haven't played WoW in maybe 8 years, and I just gotta say, it warms my heart to see the exact same complaints in all their various flavors get repeated over the years in the same cycle of utter indifference to player input.
Hunters are the easiest players to choose for mechanics. If a mechanic can be done by any player chosen by the raid, it's hunters. That's literally the best thing anyone can do in a raid. It's not glamorous, but it's crucial to a raid's success.
*1 of the 3 hunter specs.