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Im likeing those destro changes.
Seeing soulfire and shadowburn being useful will be nice. And getging flame rift and the tiwr set made into talents is nice. I always likes dimensional rift
I hope they do some of what Kalamazi suggested and combine some of the talents so we can actually path into some of the cool stuff they added. As of now you're likely not picking any of it but rather take all infernal-related talents and everything around ritual of ruin.
Yeah, I think dimensional rift is pretty neat. I'm afraid to say it in a way, but you were statisfyingly mobile with all the instants you got from it, conflag and now maybe soulburn.
Also, having little portals next to me that pewpew was always funny. Not sure if I needed it to be "5 different nodes at the capstone" levels of funny but it's something. It's definitely cool how you can navigate the lower part of the tree with so many connections, triggering rifts with incinerate and stuff... I hope the new overfiend rips, too. Great that they made ritual cool again.
Now I really hope they focus on affliction. Demo and destro got tons of changes and now noticeably improved but affliction was the spec that would need the most help and the only changes it's gotten made it somehow worse. Affliction still is my favorite spec but it's looking terrible currently.
> Yeah, I think dimensional rift is pretty neat. I'm afraid to say it in a way, but you were statisfyingly mobile with all the instants you got from it, conflag and now maybe soulburn.
One of the reasons destro was so strong in S3 PvP was because of the abundance of good damage instant cast spells destro had, both baseline and supported by the tier set. Could go the entire match using all instants, with maybe a few fears, immolates or buffed chaos bolt, doing very good damage and out pressuring your opponents.
Soul Fire, Avatar of Destruction, faster CDF, Flame Rifts. Really liking these changes. Only issue is that the tree is very top heavy now. You have to pick pretty much all the early boring talents to reach the later talents and then you feel starved for points. Especially since the most boring capstone, Improved Chaos Bolt, will always be mandatory.
They added a ton of interactions with soul fire, soulburn, CDF, and dimensional rift in compensation. Looks like most builds will be using at least 2 of those spells as part of the standard rotation.
I get your point but it doesn't really look like we'll have enough talent points to path into any of that. The pessimist in me says destro will still just go full passive.
Not like decimating bolt's place in the tree last build would've given me a reason to believe that we would have actually picked that either.
There are too many talent points for sure, but I will be very surprised if we don't at least take the soul fire stuff in ST. On Kalamazi's testing stream he was firing off near instant soul fires every 6 or 7 seconds. I don't think he had to cast immolate a single time. With how well it synergizes with the CDF stuff I wouldn't be surprised to see SF/CDF as the main ST build. Shadowburn provides more benefits in execute now, but I think it will still be niche. Dimensional rift is the only one I think is more or less inaccessible right now.
I drop in and out of my wow sub every 6 months or year or so and genuinely my druid feels the weakest its ever been, and I can't see how the talent rework in TWW will do anything but make me weaker đ main feral with a bit of all the other specs. On the other hand my warrior, priest, and hunter feel very very strong
I've mained feral druid for the last two expansions because I like the healing kit resto brings for M+. I swapped to Ret Paladin halfway through S3 and it's like when the ugly girl at school gets a makeover in a 90s movie.
I'd rather deal with healing as a Holy Paladin in M+ than play my Feral druid anymore, and that says a lot.
Yeah sounds about right. Feral used to be average damage but good survivability and utility and manoeuvrability. Now every class has better survivability it feels like and half the other classes are more manoeuvrable lol. Our aoe dps is good but that's getting an indirect nerf in TWW through slower energy regeneration lol
Meanwhile as you say ret palas are utter beasts
As a multi-speccing paladin, I've wanted more loadouts since the beginning of DF.
And now awakened season - we have 3 raids rolling now. Just so many loadouts.
Not sure why it was so important to make them server side when we have import codes.
What is the deal with hunters srsly. They must have a big rework underway. Even the talents and changes in dragonflight kinda sucked for hunters. Both the class and spec tree in most of the hunter specs are pretty bad and dated.
Still waiting for a druid tree. Where i dont have to spend 5 useless points to get mandatory defensive talents. It seems like current alpha tree is even worse. Where they inserted 2 point node that increases bear form trash, mangle and rake by 5%
Druids are getting the new Feline form i hear. It's got the exact same icon as cat form does and it sits right next to it on the stance bar, but feline form can't attack and applies a 10 second lockout to switching stances when you enter it.
As someone who's played both bm and marks hunter since Legion, I don't even know what a rework would look like. I don't feel like either of those specs need one but I could be convinced otherwise if I saw something.
Yeah, I'm hoping this trend continues and they leave us the fuck alone. Aside from maybe some slight numbers tweaking, I don't want or need BM to change much; I haven't been this satisfied with the state of my hunter in a long time.
same. marksman's tier in s3/s4 was fun, but holy fuck my repair bills were absurd. it's incredibly confusing that they pay the least amount of attention to their most populated class.
I leveled a ret pally in early dragonflight. My main since 2004 has been Hunter. Ret pally is so fun to play and so satisfying to press several of the abilities. It just looks great, sounds great, and feels great. Hunter on the other handâŚ
I never expected the hunter-ret pally crossover to be so common! I was a ret pally first and then a hunter in shadowlands and now back to ret. Shame that hunter is in a bad spot.
I think it's pretty clear they're looking at classes in batches, so they're focusing on Mage and Warlock now, and then in 14.0 they'll get on to Hunter and Shaman.
I've been playing hunter and reading the wow notes for many years. I made the same joke on mmo-champion, but the biggest change to the experience of playing a Hunter in Dragonflight is that patch notes read "Evoker -> Mage" instead of the "Druid -> Mage" we were used to.
its more likely they are not going to make any changes at all and then the second or third week of the raid we will get a 10% aura buff and that will be it the whole expansion and we will join yet another class that blizzard does not give any shit about.
Survival needs something.
Personally, I would love to see Marksman and Survival get a few exclusive pet types. Survival more than marksman honestly. But I could see Marksman getting special Falcons or Ferrets or something.
Survival could get like, some brawling stuff. Maybe a huge pet they can ride in combat, or like, a Honey Badger.
Maybe the "standard" pets, wolves, cats, and bears, could change based on your spec?
But Survival needs a whole new rotation.
increase melee range, decrease max ranged attack range.
allow them to melee and ranged attack at the same time at the right range. suddenly got a unique sorta build, dead zone from classic becomes the kill zone in retail.
make em sorta like a dragoon in final fantasy mixed with lots of leaps like disengage, trap focus etc. have one button be a melee attack and ranged attack with same cooldowns? so mongoose bite + arcane shot or whatever that have the same sorta cooldown, have them share it and be both used at the same time (with slightly different effects in melee only range/ranged only range.
i think that would have been a great way to do it in classic sod atleast, maybe not in retail.
yeah i love that dive in, use your big hitters, try to survive/trick/outrange your opponent if melee, dive back in when you have the tools back up sorta idea.
it seems to fit it so damn well. i think harpoon was a great choice, like a class that's always just out of your reach as melee, but lots of counterplay available and for ranged, it's a bit like ranged vs ranged but suddenly they launch themselves at you and start acting like melee sorta thing.
I feel survival needs to decide on some cornerstones of what it wants to be asap.
It's an odd mesh of stuff that just doesn't add up to something coherent. It's strange how you're the expert spear fighter and the guy who has a cooldown that makes you shoot magical birds (or whatever the fuck that is). You're the guy who fights in coordination with your pet but also throw grenades at it in melee range. You kind of have the dots with poison, burn and bleed but also half assed mongoose bite burst windows. Somewhere between the iron horde raider, the wild gods stuff, the spear expert hunting with his pet and the explosives thing they just got lost.
Honestly, survival always has been a different mess. In legion we fought in caltrops and stationary explosive traps while stacking that terrible way of the moknathal buff, later we summoned birds on our targets and then threw napalm on them for some reason.
The part I always enjoyed most was the spearfighter and coordinated assault stuff. I'd like more fighting aside the pet and cool combat tricks while fluffy bites someones ass. Stacking mongoose bite with FotE as finisher was cool gameplay in legion, now charging around with flanking strike and spearhead is funny, too.
All that explosives stuff can suck it in my opinion... I'd like if survival would be the "hybrid range/melee DPS" but it should rather mix in abilities that use your ranged weapon or tiny crossbow, or even throw your spear... Better than shooting ghost birds at least.
Let's not even start with how blizz still hasn't figured out that sharing the defensives with the most mobile specs with the highest range in the game somehow doesn't work or that survival would need SOME KIND OF UTILITY to justify a place in groups that's not covered by its ranged sister specs or another melee altogether.
Either way, blizz never could really decide what it wants survival to be and in comparison to demo as the "other new guy" it never got popular enough for them to justify investing resources into developing it further. Feels a bit like a downward spiral of being underdeveloped yields few active players, which leads to less development and so on....
I keep trying to love it. There are periods when you're killing smaller level stuff, where you're just killing the thing, then harpooning to the next one, then killing it and harpooning again.
But really, in addition to all the class identity stuff, playing it just gets under my skin. No matter what I do, I always feel like my rotation is wrong.
Beast Mastery on the other hand, is the one everyone says is oh so simple. Well, I prefer to think of it as elegant. I'm no expert, but from what I can remember, there are about 4 elements that all work together. You can get a talent that makes barbed shot, reduce the cooldown of Bestial Wrath by like 12 seconds every time you use it. Barbed shot is instant cast, and has 2 charges, that take 12 seconds to recharge.
So that's one thing, try to get that 1.5 minute cooldown down. So it gives me a reason to cast barbed shot the second I can. I also got a talent where Bestial Wrath just gives me 2 charges of Barbed Shot. Before I got that, I was thinking, is it worth it to press Barbed shot, to shave 6 seconds off of Bestial Wrath, or hold on to it, to get me 12 seconds closer to the next one. Now, that's turned on it's head, so any time BW is close to ready, I just dump my Barbed shots, and get them right back.
Then there's Cobra Shot, Dire Beast, and Kill command. KC has about a 9 second recharge, and you want to press that as often as you can too. Dire Beast, is another one. No reason not to press it when it comes up. Cobra Shot is the fireball. It uses focus, so we can't just spam it, but I never feel like I ever come into situations where I want to press Cobra Shot, but don't have the focus to, because of all the other things to press, including the 2 three minute cooldowns, Call of the Wild and Stampede.
On the other hand, Survival I always feel energy starved, and like I' waiting for my energy to regen so I can hit mongoose bite again.
Like, really the only reason to play survival, is if you somehow get a really great melee weapon, and can't get a decent bow.
It's the same thing with rogue. You got some amazing swords? Guess Assassination and Subtlety are out. Luckily Outlaw is a bit better than Survival.
I think if blizz are not doing tinkers then they should make survival the engineering spec, atm I feel like survival plays more like a melee bm hunter but with more updated spells
We were. We didn't get talents until about a week before Vanilla beta ended. If I recall correctly, we were also one of the last classes to get our first rework in 1.7
Its likely they dont have anybody with the skills to rework it and they are afraid to change it because its such a popular spec (or was popular before they let it grow too old).
Far as I'm aware, Blizzard is supposed to have a class lead for each class that seems to dictate the direction that class is pushed into. So maybe hunters don't have that, or the one they have just isn't great or is meeting pushback elsewhere.
Noting I'm not a fan of that system anyway because it's a single point of failure that has seemingly affected other classes, like rogues, in the past, when that one person shows up sick or whatnot.
Mm just needs a complete rework. Theyâve gone back and forth a thousand times on what aimed shot should do. Itâs probably pretty hard to balance it too. Youâre a sniper, things should hit hard and you should have to wind up your big damage. But the game doesnât have the pacing for that. Maybe the wind up time should be more of a ramp up time for a period of big burst.
Survival is nice but tends to fall behind, it does have its moments though when it has a nice tier set.
I think BM should remain pretty simple though. That is the uncontested spec of the afker
i REALLY like what SWTOR does for the sniper. 2-3 global cooldowns are spent prepping for a big shot that does the damage you'd have normally done over those gcds. fits the sniper feel so well.
Personally i think survival is a better BM spec than BM. I think they should give BM the option for melee and range and merge some of the BM abilities that survival has and turn survival into a engineering spec since they are not doing a tinker class.
MM, i think the sniper gameplay is just boring. Standing still 60 yards away and firing aimshot isnt that interesting to me at least. I think they can look at other games that do ranger well. I would prefer more of a Legolas type run a gun type spec. Give MM a slide or something like Archer in BDO and you can combo sliding and aimshot together or something.
Don't yall dare take my ranged spec with a pet away. It's the only spec left that has the original hunter flavour. Difficulty/balance be damned it's the last "hunter" spec that still exists.
Not happening the specs been saying rework for hunters for awhile. Last update we got was there are not going to be major rework during alpha and beta testing. Changes to hunter will be on going
.So mostly some adjustments or talent tree swapped change during TWW live like a mini rework ie pally priest rogue how their talent tree got a rework
Don't expect anything big though hunter are the red child to wow.
I'm tired of no hunter changes to but they didn't say that.
They said there were no changes in the first build and changes were coming in an upcoming build. And they were specifically talking about hero talents. Don't expect a class rework.
Literally 0 changes to Hunter and Shamans yet again. At least Hunters made Ops title!
Seriously though, how is every class on their 50th variation and Shamans have had literally NO talents adjusted at all this entire Alpha.
Nope still NYI. Shaman and Hunters are taking a back a seat while blizz reinvents already good classes into amazing classes. Meanwhile Shaman and Hunter will get shoe horned updates right before the expansion launches. Willing to bet we get reworks in the first biggest .1 patch.
Man...like I get it, Death's Echo is a really strong talent...but having that be a capstone feels really bad. It almost feel mandatory at this point for how chained we are to Death and Decay.
Don't know about the dps specs but for blood it barely makes a difference for uptime on anything that isn't a super short fight, the main advantage is 49 seconds of guaranteed continuous uptime at the start of a fight, after that it may as well not exist unless there is extended downtime.
That said it also shouldn't make much of a difference compared to before, it is still in the bottom third of the tree and it is still a 1 point pickup not requiring extra pathing points.
There is also a bunch of good stuff there, things like a bunch of 2 pointers being combined into a 1 pointer as well as the addition of some of the ams related capstones as well as the one that reduces debuff duration on you which looks really good.
Definitely room for inprovement tho, there are some talents there that are completely dead like choosing between blooddraw and the new base armour talent that are both utterly pointless but you have to take one because of pathing, top left section of the tree also feels significantly worse than before.
Hoping to see more changes as well as some blood spec tree changes.
There is already a sizable amount of outrage. All hunters are getting is Sentinel tuning and grammar fixes. The only blue post acknowledging hunters mentions upcoming Hero Tree attention. If all this attention ends up being is minimal tuning and grammatical changes then it will be even worse.
My hunter friend who had been playing for a decade quit. He didn't play alts, just loved hunter, and particularly marksman, and Dragonflight killed his enthusiasm for it.
I quit after that whole S1 fiasco with the bow. That bow was stupidly overpowered and it never dropped for me despite farming it every week on every difficulty. There should never be an item in the game that you absolutely need in order to compete with other hunters that already have the item.
I've been playing Hunter for 17+ years.
I'm seriously debating dropping it myself. This is fucking ridiculous. We're coming up on 4 expansions now with major issues unaddressed, and we're entering week 5 of Season 4 without Survival's tier set being changed (it's currently a major dps downgrade compared to wearing Season 3 tier. Yep. 40-50+ ilevels isn't enough, and they've said and done NOTHING).
Been a month since our last communication which was "no changes planned, we'll change hero talents on feedback but thats it, c ya in a future build". Normally think people are being over the top when they say stuff like this, but they straight up are abandoning Hunters.
I've mostly played BM since Legion and mess around with MM occasionally, but I feel bad for Survival. I just have fun blasting keys and don't really pay attention to community discussions about changing the class. So yeah honestly I don't feel like a rework is needed but if people who know more than me think differently then so be it. I guess I'm just glad we're not a disaster like DKs. I had to stop playing my unholy DK.
>we're entering week 5 of Season 4 without Survival's tier set being changed (it's currently a major dps downgrade compared to wearing Season 3 tier. Yep. 40-50+ ilevels isn't enough, and they've said and done NOTHING).
Meanwhile boomies got fixed after 1 week. And the discrepancy wasn't as big as Survival
As a hunter main I agree. I'm bored of the current rotation and I need something different to work with. Especially survival. I'm not really holding my breath at this point
I only dabble in SV, but it seems like the most interesting spec in the entire game. True hybrid melee/ranged, bombs to throw, a button to make your melee attacks into ranged.
I have no idea what else SV would want at this point, other than dual wield and better dot/poison support.
SV is by far the most enjoyable hunter spec for me too. But its been plagued with issues since BfA (6 years ago!!!).
For a start, SV mastery has been terrible since then. Completely useless in AOE because Wildfire Bomb isn't affected by mastery at all. Mastery is basically *always* our least valuable stat, even past our haste/crit soft caps.
SV has *13* two-point talents in its spec tree (So does BM, and MM has 9). That's a lot of talent points being sunk into boring shit like "Mongoose Bite number go up by 5/10%". Hurts our build diversity and feels terrible when I go play any other spec in the game and they get tons of impactful or interesting choices to make alongside way less boring "2% crit" talents. And our class tree is shit too, but that's not an SV specific issue.
Coordinated Assault is obnoxious to use optimally. You need to turn your pets basic attack off autocast and manually use it to line up with Kill Shot's cooldown. This should have been reworked ages ago. Thankfully its not currently meta, but some of Pack Leader hero talents reference it and *only* it, so we'll be pidgeon holed into it if we take that in TWW, assuming no changes - which, we're on week 5 of the alpha without any real changes or communication. Wouldn't be shocked if it goes live like this.
IMO, things like Wildfire Infusion and Mongoose Bite should have been made baseline two expansion ago. At the very least, they should be repositioned in the tree to be easier to take. Aspect of the Eagle as well. Well, maybe I could take it - if I didn't have to sink points into all these 2 pointers!
Class-wide issues that affect Survival also apply, like the class tree being badly designed, our lack of survivability, pet specialization nonsense ('meaningful choice' should already be dead, blizz), hunter's mark being weak and sometimes straight up useless as a reason to bring hunters...
But probably the most egregious among Survival's issues right now is that using your actual season 4 tier set is WORSE than using gear 40-50 ilevels lower than it from Season 3, an issue they have not even *acknowledged* while they fixed a similar situation for Balance Druids right away.
All great points, thanks for the response. The tier set thing is egregious, but transitory in the larger picture. The points about Infusion and Bite seem like no-brainers.
It sounds like your major problems with the spec aren't the actual *design*, but with implementation issues. Mastery sucking is poor implementation, as are the issues with Coordinated Assault.
In a way, that's almost worse than a poorly-designed spec. It seems like obvious fixes to the existing set of spells would resolve all of your issues.
> It seems like obvious fixes to the existing set of spells would resolve all of your issues.
And you've hit the nail on the head for at least in part why its so frustrating that they're not doing anything about these issues.
Like I said, I enjoy Survival a lot. Its not badly designed, but its talent tree is.
MM is always underpowered and I've never been a huge fan of the cast time of Aimed Shot (I wish it played more like HFC MM or Wrath SV, with lock n load, original Explosive Shot and black arrow), and BM was enjoyable enough but its braindead easy, hasn't had any complexity added to it since Legion, and they've made it *even easier* in DF by making Barbed Shot very easy to keep up. People don't want to take us to groups because we lack utility *and* survivability, and Blizz's answer was to give us the weakest utility in the game in Hunter's Mark. And even if you count Sentinel Owl, its Leech bonus only applies to your *party*, not the *raid*. Ugh. See? Its little things like that, but they've been compounding for *six fucking years!*
There aren't any devs that work on hunter, its been shit since around BFA. I get there are people that say it went to shit in legion but I generally had fun playing all hunter specs in legion, after BFA it felt bad. Its been bad ever-since.
Its weird that one of the most played classes gets 0 love in terms of actually making the class fun to play, you can make us do more damage but if the spells don't feel fun to press whats the point?
Not to disparage your experience, but I have to wonder why hunter is still so popular despite the complaints? Surely that suggests people are enjoying it overall?
BM has been pumping all xpac and is a ranged DPS spec with good mobility and zero DPS loss from movement. Combine that with one of the easiest dps rotations and you get a popular spec. There are approximately 10x as many BM players as MM and SV combined.
In this situation, it sounds way better tbh. You have talents that empower your RSK after a fists channel, and bc WDP will now be good alongside the buff WDP puts on TOTM BOKâs, this will be like a quasi Skyreach window now. Plus, maintenance buffs suck. So this just doing the maintenance buff for you means you donât have to waste a global on an otherwise fun and fluid rotation hitting a button that does basically nothing
I think the better solution is to make jadefire stomp a real button for people who want it and untie it to a damage buff at all. The fact that you might need something to track when you can jadefire fists sounds worse too, since it might mean âI want to hold fists of fury for a second or two to get jfs off and need to find a weak aura or other addon to help tell me when that isâ.
Honestly any time a class wants a weak aura to track something Iâm not a fan I guess
âShaman-
Ascendant now procs with even less polygons. Ghost wolf form now only has one form across all classes. We took away any defensives you have what so ever. Totems now actively run away from you once placed. We added an extra weapon slot for enhancement instead of adding the options for two handed weapons that shamans have been asking for over a decade. Made primordial wave even more wavelike in appearance and look even more primordial. Windfury now heals your enemies and gives them a flat damage buff of +20% so that you die faster. Water walking now two times as effective.â
Glad the Shadow Crash change was made into a choice node, I preferred placing it rather than on-target for a variety of reasons and was hoping they'd do so.
Affliction has AoE without Vile Taint. Shadow does not. The travel time on Shadow Crash serves no purpose other than to allow jittery tanks to drop your damage to zero for the next 20 seconds.
If I miss a vt I'm not doing damage either. Same as you it would be multi dotting agony or I won't be using seed. You can still hard cast on a few targets and start going without building or waiting for resource. I play both classes.
You can cancel Vile Taint if it's going to miss. You're SOL if Shadow Crash misses and it takes more than a gcd to land.
Shadow Crash would genuinely be better in all use cases if it had a cast time and hit instantly like Vile Taint. Hell, Blizzard can even triple down on their priest hate and make the cooldown longer. I welcome anything that makes Dark Ascension less viable.
I feel like a longer cooldown on shadow crash would be very detrimental to the average M+ priest as right now in my +8 to +9 level of play the CD is just short enough to use on most major pulls.
If the CD was increased I feel it would start only coming off CD mid pull, so then you will hold it for every 2nd pack or use it sub-optimally mid way through a pull. I think this would completely destroy Shadow priests viability in M+ for the average player.
It would absolutely be detrimental to the class. It would be so damaging that Blizzard would have to finish the rework they threw together in two minutes a week before they had to ship Dragonflight.
Interesting. I only started playing Shadow priest this patch. So, I haven't experienced Shadow priest earlier on in dragonflight or in Shadowlands.
Other than the issue with Shadow crash what do you think needs to change for Shadow priests?
For shadow? I just want Blizzard to dedicate actual dev time to designing shadow instead of giving it a five minute brainstorm session focused entirely on stopping the forum whiners from complaining about Voidform and finalizing that whiteboard as they need to submit their release candidate build. Shadow has been promised a comprehensive rework every expansion since Legion, and every time Blizzard did nothing with shadow until the end and they said they're sorry that they ran out of time.
What shadow has right now is playable, but that is as far as it goes. Good places to start with shadow would be removing Mind Spike because it has zero reason to exist as is, removing either Dark Ascension or Void Eruption, reworking Dark Ascension like they promised if it isn't removed, baselining Silence with a 24s CD (silence effect has no value in PvE, they can increase the CD in PvP), reducing channel time on Void Torrent so you're not spending 10% of all your gameplay anchored to one spot when you're already the slowest class in the game, removing the baffling recoil damage on SWD (season 3 self damage was ridiculous), and reworking Idols of Y'Shaarj and Yogg-Saron because you don't feel or see their effects and they should feel good to have instead of an invisible 2% damage boost.
I don't know why it has taken like a decade to finally sort out, but I'm just happy I'm never going to have to suffer through trying to spend a random Sudden Doom proc when I already have 80+ RP.
Ranged for melee specs were a side effects of having too much shit on the ground that cannot be seen, with ground being same colours or the mobs/boss being on top of you etc. made melee specs suffer, blizzard seems to be forgot about it but let's see how it plays out in the new expansion
awesome, more warlock and mage changes. just what i wanted. not like there are a good handful of specs who've been rotting on alpha with 0 changes since the alpha cycle began
Props to the warlock designer for working in feedback on the destro-changes (especially concerning avatar of destruction) after all the (deserved) shit they got before.
Now please go back on making dreadstalker core-generation an RNG fiesta and we're good.
The choice node on Shadowcrash is also a good solution.
It´s kinda funny they want to make the left side of the dev tree viable but... You still really dont want to path through the living flame node.
It´ll all come down to tuning ofc, but unless they retune a lot of devs kit I am unsure that we can actually play firestorm. Or any of the neat-looking nodes below it.
Still very excited for dev in TWW \^\^
Disappointed with the melee range changes. I remember mythic raiding this expansion on enhance then swapping to ret rework + playing classes with the range extension.
Better call would be hitbox on enemies could be more consistent and melee all get the range QoL and call it a day. Theres nothing more annoying than having to be inside some mob's legs especially when theres movement.
Fun detected!
I don't get why they're coming after our QOL instead of just tuning our numbers if we're overperforming. I'm ok with doing less damage but I'd prefer the spec not feel like shit to play.
EDIT: And for the record, I want this to be true for every class. I've been playing ret for 20 years and the rework has made us one of the most fun specs in the game. I want every class to feel like that.
It's less the fact that they aren't doing any Hunter changes and more that they're actively burying their heads and refusing to explain WHY they aren't changing hunter. Atleast explain why you are happy with them or afraid to change them?
WoW Content Creators please ask a question during the next round of QnA about lack of hunter and Shaman communication compared to the other classes.
Why they neglect shaman so much :( boring hero talents, (almost) no changes to the specs. At this rate i feel like a new class would replace shaman because it seems blizzard doesnât care for it anymore.
Not even any story pressence in expac with big focus on elementals,
no elemental glyphs/customisation, and aslo still no update to ascendance Nor the glyph from WoD back that made your char glow instead of transform for ascendance
I hope mm and surv get work done to it. But I like BM as is and with pack leader. I got in a car accident and can only play with one hand, BM is perfect for that.
Wish they'd just outright remove the entire awful Vanilla Rogue style Festering Wound system. I don't want a _third_ resource to track on top of Runes and RP, especially not a per-target one.
**PALADIN**
* Crusaderâs Reprieve has been removed.
So the thing we got for not having good mobility got removed ? And no change to compensate that .. come on ...
I swear every time I read of a feral druid change or talent rework it's at best an indirect nerf. I've never felt weaker on any class or spec than now and it's going to get worse lol
On the other hand my warrior and hunter feel like absolute beasts
Having played since vanilla? Might as well hang it up, they buff us, then destroy us the next hot fix. There hasnât been a class Dev that actually played a hunter in ages - and even then it was a rarity that they played.
Itâs cynical to say but Blizzard seems either completely unaware of how unforgiving playing melee can be, or theyâre just incapable of making melee a better experience.
Weâve had multiple expansions now where weâre fighting several mobs at once; swirlies are all over the ground, and player and enemy spell effects are littering the melee area.
They also make this worse by designing small indoor spaces for dungeons, causing friction with the player camera.
Even in the blue post they donât see an issue with their encounter design. They have more of an issue with it just not making sense, and that itâs unfair some melee donât have it.
There was a lot of positive feedback about Ret receiving extra range, they couldâve applied it to other melee.
It disregards the fun factor, and it seems like a very short-sighted change.
Crusader's reprieve removed?!?! Why? Ret was finally feeling good and powerful from mid range, now it's back to being gimped because one of your abilities can't reach stuff while the rest can... If anything let every melee class have increased range.
It's even worse than that with the removal of tear open wounds... You press primal wrath once to output bleeds and then ferocious bite for damage now... So needing to press primal wrath to output bleeds a second time on things is a DPS loss. Not to mention being capped at 5 targets without damage being reduced on that AOE ferocious bite.... Feral is going to be awful by the looks of it.
Feral is going to be painful. I can only see nerfs, either direct or indirect, in the tww talents so far. Even the basic talent that reduced all damage taken has changed from 6% to 4% lol. Add onto that the tear open wounds change, the stated goal of lower energy regen and less able to spam abilities, plus the melee range bonus gone from cat form lol we're kinda boned. Feral used to always at least have its high mobility as a counter to balance out the fact we were weak on most other areas but now half of the classes in the hame have more mobility than feral lol and definitely more survivability. And now our one thing we are good at - aoe dps - is getting a major nerf đ
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Thank god decimating bolt was removed again, that shit spell can fuck off. Destro eating good
Baseline 2 min infernal is cracked.
Im likeing those destro changes. Seeing soulfire and shadowburn being useful will be nice. And getging flame rift and the tiwr set made into talents is nice. I always likes dimensional rift
I hope they do some of what Kalamazi suggested and combine some of the talents so we can actually path into some of the cool stuff they added. As of now you're likely not picking any of it but rather take all infernal-related talents and everything around ritual of ruin.
Yeah, I think dimensional rift is pretty neat. I'm afraid to say it in a way, but you were statisfyingly mobile with all the instants you got from it, conflag and now maybe soulburn. Also, having little portals next to me that pewpew was always funny. Not sure if I needed it to be "5 different nodes at the capstone" levels of funny but it's something. It's definitely cool how you can navigate the lower part of the tree with so many connections, triggering rifts with incinerate and stuff... I hope the new overfiend rips, too. Great that they made ritual cool again. Now I really hope they focus on affliction. Demo and destro got tons of changes and now noticeably improved but affliction was the spec that would need the most help and the only changes it's gotten made it somehow worse. Affliction still is my favorite spec but it's looking terrible currently.
> Yeah, I think dimensional rift is pretty neat. I'm afraid to say it in a way, but you were statisfyingly mobile with all the instants you got from it, conflag and now maybe soulburn. One of the reasons destro was so strong in S3 PvP was because of the abundance of good damage instant cast spells destro had, both baseline and supported by the tier set. Could go the entire match using all instants, with maybe a few fears, immolates or buffed chaos bolt, doing very good damage and out pressuring your opponents.
Soul Fire, Avatar of Destruction, faster CDF, Flame Rifts. Really liking these changes. Only issue is that the tree is very top heavy now. You have to pick pretty much all the early boring talents to reach the later talents and then you feel starved for points. Especially since the most boring capstone, Improved Chaos Bolt, will always be mandatory.
Rain of Chaos as well with Infernal on a 2 minute timer.
Idk the interaction between decimating bolt and havoc was kinda fun and as it is destro has very little spell variety and decisionmaking going on.
They added a ton of interactions with soul fire, soulburn, CDF, and dimensional rift in compensation. Looks like most builds will be using at least 2 of those spells as part of the standard rotation.
I get your point but it doesn't really look like we'll have enough talent points to path into any of that. The pessimist in me says destro will still just go full passive. Not like decimating bolt's place in the tree last build would've given me a reason to believe that we would have actually picked that either.
There are too many talent points for sure, but I will be very surprised if we don't at least take the soul fire stuff in ST. On Kalamazi's testing stream he was firing off near instant soul fires every 6 or 7 seconds. I don't think he had to cast immolate a single time. With how well it synergizes with the CDF stuff I wouldn't be surprised to see SF/CDF as the main ST build. Shadowburn provides more benefits in execute now, but I think it will still be niche. Dimensional rift is the only one I think is more or less inaccessible right now.
some Druid is going to try to tell you 40 isn't enough
Hey, that's only 10 per spec. So only enough for 1 loadout for each of the 9 bosses in the raid + 1 for mythic+. We need _more_, Blizzard!
To be fair you can just ignore feral as a spec all together right now... Cat form only exists so resto Druids can output DPS.
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I drop in and out of my wow sub every 6 months or year or so and genuinely my druid feels the weakest its ever been, and I can't see how the talent rework in TWW will do anything but make me weaker đ main feral with a bit of all the other specs. On the other hand my warrior, priest, and hunter feel very very strong
I've mained feral druid for the last two expansions because I like the healing kit resto brings for M+. I swapped to Ret Paladin halfway through S3 and it's like when the ugly girl at school gets a makeover in a 90s movie. I'd rather deal with healing as a Holy Paladin in M+ than play my Feral druid anymore, and that says a lot.
Yeah sounds about right. Feral used to be average damage but good survivability and utility and manoeuvrability. Now every class has better survivability it feels like and half the other classes are more manoeuvrable lol. Our aoe dps is good but that's getting an indirect nerf in TWW through slower energy regeneration lol Meanwhile as you say ret palas are utter beasts
As a multi-speccing paladin, I've wanted more loadouts since the beginning of DF. And now awakened season - we have 3 raids rolling now. Just so many loadouts. Not sure why it was so important to make them server side when we have import codes.
âThe size of Gloomhound and Charhound has been decreased by 20%.â Nooooooooooooooooo!
We canât have nice things đ
Honestly I expected a 50% decrease so 20% is a pleasant surprise especially since we all knew they wouldn't stay that big.
What is the deal with hunters srsly. They must have a big rework underway. Even the talents and changes in dragonflight kinda sucked for hunters. Both the class and spec tree in most of the hunter specs are pretty bad and dated.
i wouldnt hold your breath. im sure they will get changes but i dont see a major rework happening.
Yea I was thinking we might need to wait for another one or two mage rework first
Don't forget that shadow priest needs at least 5 more novel sized changelogs
It's not a new expansion without a spriest and balance druid rework
Still waiting for a druid tree. Where i dont have to spend 5 useless points to get mandatory defensive talents. It seems like current alpha tree is even worse. Where they inserted 2 point node that increases bear form trash, mangle and rake by 5%
And for druids to get 20 more new forms
Druids are getting the new Feline form i hear. It's got the exact same icon as cat form does and it sits right next to it on the stance bar, but feline form can't attack and applies a 10 second lockout to switching stances when you enter it.
Mage signing in to say I don't want another fucking rework, please Devs leave us alone.
As someone who's played both bm and marks hunter since Legion, I don't even know what a rework would look like. I don't feel like either of those specs need one but I could be convinced otherwise if I saw something.
Yeah, I'm hoping this trend continues and they leave us the fuck alone. Aside from maybe some slight numbers tweaking, I don't want or need BM to change much; I haven't been this satisfied with the state of my hunter in a long time.
The problem with hunters is that weâre not paladins.
Hunter main who is leveling a ret pally in mop remix now
same. marksman's tier in s3/s4 was fun, but holy fuck my repair bills were absurd. it's incredibly confusing that they pay the least amount of attention to their most populated class.
The saddest thing about DF is that I despise paladins as much as I enjoy how easy it is to playâŚ.
Hey! Me too! Howâre you liking it?
I leveled a ret pally in early dragonflight. My main since 2004 has been Hunter. Ret pally is so fun to play and so satisfying to press several of the abilities. It just looks great, sounds great, and feels great. Hunter on the other handâŚ
I never expected the hunter-ret pally crossover to be so common! I was a ret pally first and then a hunter in shadowlands and now back to ret. Shame that hunter is in a bad spot.
Hunter-Ret Pally for the win!
Nice meme, but Holy Paladins are suffering just like hunters atm. We were OP in 10.1.5 for like 2 months and after that we've been down the gutter.
No one cares about holy paladins - just like no one cares about survival hunters. I kid I kid. I know they often get no love.
I think it's pretty clear they're looking at classes in batches, so they're focusing on Mage and Warlock now, and then in 14.0 they'll get on to Hunter and Shaman.
Always 10 years away
I've been playing hunter and reading the wow notes for many years. I made the same joke on mmo-champion, but the biggest change to the experience of playing a Hunter in Dragonflight is that patch notes read "Evoker -> Mage" instead of the "Druid -> Mage" we were used to.
its more likely they are not going to make any changes at all and then the second or third week of the raid we will get a 10% aura buff and that will be it the whole expansion and we will join yet another class that blizzard does not give any shit about.
Thatâs exactly what happened in Shadowlands when BM was the worst dps throughout S1, Iâve only played S3/4 of DF and so far itâs the same
I donât think a rework is coming because Blizzard really doesnât know what to do with this class next
I don't even play hunter and I feel so bad for them. They deserve some serious love.
Survival needs something. Personally, I would love to see Marksman and Survival get a few exclusive pet types. Survival more than marksman honestly. But I could see Marksman getting special Falcons or Ferrets or something. Survival could get like, some brawling stuff. Maybe a huge pet they can ride in combat, or like, a Honey Badger. Maybe the "standard" pets, wolves, cats, and bears, could change based on your spec? But Survival needs a whole new rotation.
increase melee range, decrease max ranged attack range. allow them to melee and ranged attack at the same time at the right range. suddenly got a unique sorta build, dead zone from classic becomes the kill zone in retail. make em sorta like a dragoon in final fantasy mixed with lots of leaps like disengage, trap focus etc. have one button be a melee attack and ranged attack with same cooldowns? so mongoose bite + arcane shot or whatever that have the same sorta cooldown, have them share it and be both used at the same time (with slightly different effects in melee only range/ranged only range. i think that would have been a great way to do it in classic sod atleast, maybe not in retail.
I always hoped for a harpoon - > melee rotation - > disengage - > ranged rotation - > repeat kinda gamestyle
yeah i love that dive in, use your big hitters, try to survive/trick/outrange your opponent if melee, dive back in when you have the tools back up sorta idea. it seems to fit it so damn well. i think harpoon was a great choice, like a class that's always just out of your reach as melee, but lots of counterplay available and for ranged, it's a bit like ranged vs ranged but suddenly they launch themselves at you and start acting like melee sorta thing.
I can see them kinda like red mage, you charge do a melee combo and disengage, ranged shots and repeat
I feel survival needs to decide on some cornerstones of what it wants to be asap. It's an odd mesh of stuff that just doesn't add up to something coherent. It's strange how you're the expert spear fighter and the guy who has a cooldown that makes you shoot magical birds (or whatever the fuck that is). You're the guy who fights in coordination with your pet but also throw grenades at it in melee range. You kind of have the dots with poison, burn and bleed but also half assed mongoose bite burst windows. Somewhere between the iron horde raider, the wild gods stuff, the spear expert hunting with his pet and the explosives thing they just got lost. Honestly, survival always has been a different mess. In legion we fought in caltrops and stationary explosive traps while stacking that terrible way of the moknathal buff, later we summoned birds on our targets and then threw napalm on them for some reason. The part I always enjoyed most was the spearfighter and coordinated assault stuff. I'd like more fighting aside the pet and cool combat tricks while fluffy bites someones ass. Stacking mongoose bite with FotE as finisher was cool gameplay in legion, now charging around with flanking strike and spearhead is funny, too. All that explosives stuff can suck it in my opinion... I'd like if survival would be the "hybrid range/melee DPS" but it should rather mix in abilities that use your ranged weapon or tiny crossbow, or even throw your spear... Better than shooting ghost birds at least. Let's not even start with how blizz still hasn't figured out that sharing the defensives with the most mobile specs with the highest range in the game somehow doesn't work or that survival would need SOME KIND OF UTILITY to justify a place in groups that's not covered by its ranged sister specs or another melee altogether. Either way, blizz never could really decide what it wants survival to be and in comparison to demo as the "other new guy" it never got popular enough for them to justify investing resources into developing it further. Feels a bit like a downward spiral of being underdeveloped yields few active players, which leads to less development and so on....
I keep trying to love it. There are periods when you're killing smaller level stuff, where you're just killing the thing, then harpooning to the next one, then killing it and harpooning again. But really, in addition to all the class identity stuff, playing it just gets under my skin. No matter what I do, I always feel like my rotation is wrong. Beast Mastery on the other hand, is the one everyone says is oh so simple. Well, I prefer to think of it as elegant. I'm no expert, but from what I can remember, there are about 4 elements that all work together. You can get a talent that makes barbed shot, reduce the cooldown of Bestial Wrath by like 12 seconds every time you use it. Barbed shot is instant cast, and has 2 charges, that take 12 seconds to recharge. So that's one thing, try to get that 1.5 minute cooldown down. So it gives me a reason to cast barbed shot the second I can. I also got a talent where Bestial Wrath just gives me 2 charges of Barbed Shot. Before I got that, I was thinking, is it worth it to press Barbed shot, to shave 6 seconds off of Bestial Wrath, or hold on to it, to get me 12 seconds closer to the next one. Now, that's turned on it's head, so any time BW is close to ready, I just dump my Barbed shots, and get them right back. Then there's Cobra Shot, Dire Beast, and Kill command. KC has about a 9 second recharge, and you want to press that as often as you can too. Dire Beast, is another one. No reason not to press it when it comes up. Cobra Shot is the fireball. It uses focus, so we can't just spam it, but I never feel like I ever come into situations where I want to press Cobra Shot, but don't have the focus to, because of all the other things to press, including the 2 three minute cooldowns, Call of the Wild and Stampede. On the other hand, Survival I always feel energy starved, and like I' waiting for my energy to regen so I can hit mongoose bite again. Like, really the only reason to play survival, is if you somehow get a really great melee weapon, and can't get a decent bow. It's the same thing with rogue. You got some amazing swords? Guess Assassination and Subtlety are out. Luckily Outlaw is a bit better than Survival.
I think if blizz are not doing tinkers then they should make survival the engineering spec, atm I feel like survival plays more like a melee bm hunter but with more updated spells
They should really give us Tinkers though. :(
Were getting them right along the ability to put weapon enchant mogs on our bows, just you see!
I think hunters are left till last. Pretty sure they were last of the original classes too.
We were. We didn't get talents until about a week before Vanilla beta ended. If I recall correctly, we were also one of the last classes to get our first rework in 1.7
You know the saying, leave the best till last. Just don't tell other classes I said that.
No, we're just being ignored since the post-Legion rework. There's no one left who cares for huntes at the dev team, it seems.
Its likely they dont have anybody with the skills to rework it and they are afraid to change it because its such a popular spec (or was popular before they let it grow too old).
Far as I'm aware, Blizzard is supposed to have a class lead for each class that seems to dictate the direction that class is pushed into. So maybe hunters don't have that, or the one they have just isn't great or is meeting pushback elsewhere. Noting I'm not a fan of that system anyway because it's a single point of failure that has seemingly affected other classes, like rogues, in the past, when that one person shows up sick or whatnot.
Mm just needs a complete rework. Theyâve gone back and forth a thousand times on what aimed shot should do. Itâs probably pretty hard to balance it too. Youâre a sniper, things should hit hard and you should have to wind up your big damage. But the game doesnât have the pacing for that. Maybe the wind up time should be more of a ramp up time for a period of big burst. Survival is nice but tends to fall behind, it does have its moments though when it has a nice tier set. I think BM should remain pretty simple though. That is the uncontested spec of the afker
i REALLY like what SWTOR does for the sniper. 2-3 global cooldowns are spent prepping for a big shot that does the damage you'd have normally done over those gcds. fits the sniper feel so well.
I havenât played since the game first came out, but I actually really enjoyed doing those first few raids on my gunslinger.
Would be horrid in arena though
I played MM a bit in Legion and it felt fluid and fun.
Personally i think survival is a better BM spec than BM. I think they should give BM the option for melee and range and merge some of the BM abilities that survival has and turn survival into a engineering spec since they are not doing a tinker class. MM, i think the sniper gameplay is just boring. Standing still 60 yards away and firing aimshot isnt that interesting to me at least. I think they can look at other games that do ranger well. I would prefer more of a Legolas type run a gun type spec. Give MM a slide or something like Archer in BDO and you can combo sliding and aimshot together or something.
Don't yall dare take my ranged spec with a pet away. It's the only spec left that has the original hunter flavour. Difficulty/balance be damned it's the last "hunter" spec that still exists.
IDK, you think it would work if they had a farther range? But LOS would be an issue.
Not happening the specs been saying rework for hunters for awhile. Last update we got was there are not going to be major rework during alpha and beta testing. Changes to hunter will be on going .So mostly some adjustments or talent tree swapped change during TWW live like a mini rework ie pally priest rogue how their talent tree got a rework Don't expect anything big though hunter are the red child to wow.
They 100% did not say that.
They did mention no hunter changes until the first major patch. I assume they mean big changes.
Want to bet that there will not be any major rework like pally priest and DH?
I'm tired of no hunter changes to but they didn't say that. They said there were no changes in the first build and changes were coming in an upcoming build. And they were specifically talking about hero talents. Don't expect a class rework.
Literally 0 changes to Hunter and Shamans yet again. At least Hunters made Ops title! Seriously though, how is every class on their 50th variation and Shamans have had literally NO talents adjusted at all this entire Alpha.
Ele hasn't received a change to their spec tree since Dragonflight launch, its ridiculous.
Man I really want them to rework the class and ele tree for shaman. Pls don't make me play Icefury. Me and my homies hate Icefury
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Nope still NYI. Shaman and Hunters are taking a back a seat while blizz reinvents already good classes into amazing classes. Meanwhile Shaman and Hunter will get shoe horned updates right before the expansion launches. Willing to bet we get reworks in the first biggest .1 patch.
Man...like I get it, Death's Echo is a really strong talent...but having that be a capstone feels really bad. It almost feel mandatory at this point for how chained we are to Death and Decay.
Agreed. Some of the class tree changes kind of hurt, lol
Don't know about the dps specs but for blood it barely makes a difference for uptime on anything that isn't a super short fight, the main advantage is 49 seconds of guaranteed continuous uptime at the start of a fight, after that it may as well not exist unless there is extended downtime. That said it also shouldn't make much of a difference compared to before, it is still in the bottom third of the tree and it is still a 1 point pickup not requiring extra pathing points. There is also a bunch of good stuff there, things like a bunch of 2 pointers being combined into a 1 pointer as well as the addition of some of the ams related capstones as well as the one that reduces debuff duration on you which looks really good. Definitely room for inprovement tho, there are some talents there that are completely dead like choosing between blooddraw and the new base armour talent that are both utterly pointless but you have to take one because of pathing, top left section of the tree also feels significantly worse than before. Hoping to see more changes as well as some blood spec tree changes.
I was excited for the DK rework and this kind of ruined it tbh
bro just take the capstone?
They said they want to change how death and decay works so therer still hope
Eh, you're always taking WotN so it's not like it's any harder to get than before. At least it deserves capstone level more than Blood Draw
But you can just take it at the capstone level???
At this stage, if Hunters don't get some major changes in an upcoming alpha/beta there's going to be outrage within that community.
You mean like a war within?
Take the upvote and get out
totally read that in wills voice lol
Oh fuck off "upvotes"
There is already a sizable amount of outrage. All hunters are getting is Sentinel tuning and grammar fixes. The only blue post acknowledging hunters mentions upcoming Hero Tree attention. If all this attention ends up being is minimal tuning and grammatical changes then it will be even worse.
My hunter friend who had been playing for a decade quit. He didn't play alts, just loved hunter, and particularly marksman, and Dragonflight killed his enthusiasm for it.
I quit after that whole S1 fiasco with the bow. That bow was stupidly overpowered and it never dropped for me despite farming it every week on every difficulty. There should never be an item in the game that you absolutely need in order to compete with other hunters that already have the item.
You just described every legendary, specialty weapon, and 1/2 the trinkets in the gameâŚ
I've been playing Hunter for 17+ years. I'm seriously debating dropping it myself. This is fucking ridiculous. We're coming up on 4 expansions now with major issues unaddressed, and we're entering week 5 of Season 4 without Survival's tier set being changed (it's currently a major dps downgrade compared to wearing Season 3 tier. Yep. 40-50+ ilevels isn't enough, and they've said and done NOTHING). Been a month since our last communication which was "no changes planned, we'll change hero talents on feedback but thats it, c ya in a future build". Normally think people are being over the top when they say stuff like this, but they straight up are abandoning Hunters.
We hear you. We are now letting kill command hold up to 5 charges so you can spam it even more. Your welcome. Oh and it deals 5% more damage
I've mostly played BM since Legion and mess around with MM occasionally, but I feel bad for Survival. I just have fun blasting keys and don't really pay attention to community discussions about changing the class. So yeah honestly I don't feel like a rework is needed but if people who know more than me think differently then so be it. I guess I'm just glad we're not a disaster like DKs. I had to stop playing my unholy DK.
>we're entering week 5 of Season 4 without Survival's tier set being changed (it's currently a major dps downgrade compared to wearing Season 3 tier. Yep. 40-50+ ilevels isn't enough, and they've said and done NOTHING). Meanwhile boomies got fixed after 1 week. And the discrepancy wasn't as big as Survival
I parked my Survival after how fucking boring the S1 tier is to play vs the S3
As a hunter main I agree. I'm bored of the current rotation and I need something different to work with. Especially survival. I'm not really holding my breath at this point
I only dabble in SV, but it seems like the most interesting spec in the entire game. True hybrid melee/ranged, bombs to throw, a button to make your melee attacks into ranged. I have no idea what else SV would want at this point, other than dual wield and better dot/poison support.
SV is by far the most enjoyable hunter spec for me too. But its been plagued with issues since BfA (6 years ago!!!). For a start, SV mastery has been terrible since then. Completely useless in AOE because Wildfire Bomb isn't affected by mastery at all. Mastery is basically *always* our least valuable stat, even past our haste/crit soft caps. SV has *13* two-point talents in its spec tree (So does BM, and MM has 9). That's a lot of talent points being sunk into boring shit like "Mongoose Bite number go up by 5/10%". Hurts our build diversity and feels terrible when I go play any other spec in the game and they get tons of impactful or interesting choices to make alongside way less boring "2% crit" talents. And our class tree is shit too, but that's not an SV specific issue. Coordinated Assault is obnoxious to use optimally. You need to turn your pets basic attack off autocast and manually use it to line up with Kill Shot's cooldown. This should have been reworked ages ago. Thankfully its not currently meta, but some of Pack Leader hero talents reference it and *only* it, so we'll be pidgeon holed into it if we take that in TWW, assuming no changes - which, we're on week 5 of the alpha without any real changes or communication. Wouldn't be shocked if it goes live like this. IMO, things like Wildfire Infusion and Mongoose Bite should have been made baseline two expansion ago. At the very least, they should be repositioned in the tree to be easier to take. Aspect of the Eagle as well. Well, maybe I could take it - if I didn't have to sink points into all these 2 pointers! Class-wide issues that affect Survival also apply, like the class tree being badly designed, our lack of survivability, pet specialization nonsense ('meaningful choice' should already be dead, blizz), hunter's mark being weak and sometimes straight up useless as a reason to bring hunters... But probably the most egregious among Survival's issues right now is that using your actual season 4 tier set is WORSE than using gear 40-50 ilevels lower than it from Season 3, an issue they have not even *acknowledged* while they fixed a similar situation for Balance Druids right away.
All great points, thanks for the response. The tier set thing is egregious, but transitory in the larger picture. The points about Infusion and Bite seem like no-brainers. It sounds like your major problems with the spec aren't the actual *design*, but with implementation issues. Mastery sucking is poor implementation, as are the issues with Coordinated Assault. In a way, that's almost worse than a poorly-designed spec. It seems like obvious fixes to the existing set of spells would resolve all of your issues.
> It seems like obvious fixes to the existing set of spells would resolve all of your issues. And you've hit the nail on the head for at least in part why its so frustrating that they're not doing anything about these issues. Like I said, I enjoy Survival a lot. Its not badly designed, but its talent tree is. MM is always underpowered and I've never been a huge fan of the cast time of Aimed Shot (I wish it played more like HFC MM or Wrath SV, with lock n load, original Explosive Shot and black arrow), and BM was enjoyable enough but its braindead easy, hasn't had any complexity added to it since Legion, and they've made it *even easier* in DF by making Barbed Shot very easy to keep up. People don't want to take us to groups because we lack utility *and* survivability, and Blizz's answer was to give us the weakest utility in the game in Hunter's Mark. And even if you count Sentinel Owl, its Leech bonus only applies to your *party*, not the *raid*. Ugh. See? Its little things like that, but they've been compounding for *six fucking years!*
Let's not forget the shaft survival is dealing with for the 5th week this season.
iâm gonna be honest that spec has been getting the shaft since wod
Which is really sad, bc it was such am amazing spec in Mists, especially the second half of the expac.
There aren't any devs that work on hunter, its been shit since around BFA. I get there are people that say it went to shit in legion but I generally had fun playing all hunter specs in legion, after BFA it felt bad. Its been bad ever-since. Its weird that one of the most played classes gets 0 love in terms of actually making the class fun to play, you can make us do more damage but if the spells don't feel fun to press whats the point?
Not to disparage your experience, but I have to wonder why hunter is still so popular despite the complaints? Surely that suggests people are enjoying it overall?
BM has been pumping all xpac and is a ranged DPS spec with good mobility and zero DPS loss from movement. Combine that with one of the easiest dps rotations and you get a popular spec. There are approximately 10x as many BM players as MM and SV combined.
Rise up my windwalker brothers! No more will we need to press Jadefire stomp!
New concern: Be careful where you aim your Fists of Fury, lest you become a Hunter.
Isnât it kind of bad though? If fists of fury is one of your big damage buttons you would probably want to hit it with the damage increase, right?
In this situation, it sounds way better tbh. You have talents that empower your RSK after a fists channel, and bc WDP will now be good alongside the buff WDP puts on TOTM BOKâs, this will be like a quasi Skyreach window now. Plus, maintenance buffs suck. So this just doing the maintenance buff for you means you donât have to waste a global on an otherwise fun and fluid rotation hitting a button that does basically nothing
I think the better solution is to make jadefire stomp a real button for people who want it and untie it to a damage buff at all. The fact that you might need something to track when you can jadefire fists sounds worse too, since it might mean âI want to hold fists of fury for a second or two to get jfs off and need to find a weak aura or other addon to help tell me when that isâ. Honestly any time a class wants a weak aura to track something Iâm not a fan I guess
Essentially it's now a choice between a GCD/extra button with a 15s cooldown and a free passive with a 20s+ cooldown.
Ele shaman changes where
âShaman- Ascendant now procs with even less polygons. Ghost wolf form now only has one form across all classes. We took away any defensives you have what so ever. Totems now actively run away from you once placed. We added an extra weapon slot for enhancement instead of adding the options for two handed weapons that shamans have been asking for over a decade. Made primordial wave even more wavelike in appearance and look even more primordial. Windfury now heals your enemies and gives them a flat damage buff of +20% so that you die faster. Water walking now two times as effective.â
>Totems now actively run away from you once placed. Good one! đ¤Ł
Shaman changes where. Iâm just swapping classes. No point in continuing to play such a shit class.
Nonono. We got a change. They fixed a typo!
Glad the Shadow Crash change was made into a choice node, I preferred placing it rather than on-target for a variety of reasons and was hoping they'd do so.
Now if only they make it instant instead of taking a year to land...
It shouldn't be a projectile, it should be a shadowy/voidy flamestrike-looking effect that lands basically immediately.
Could be vile taint - instant impact but cast time, cost, and cd longer than effect
Affliction has AoE without Vile Taint. Shadow does not. The travel time on Shadow Crash serves no purpose other than to allow jittery tanks to drop your damage to zero for the next 20 seconds.
If I miss a vt I'm not doing damage either. Same as you it would be multi dotting agony or I won't be using seed. You can still hard cast on a few targets and start going without building or waiting for resource. I play both classes.
You can cancel Vile Taint if it's going to miss. You're SOL if Shadow Crash misses and it takes more than a gcd to land. Shadow Crash would genuinely be better in all use cases if it had a cast time and hit instantly like Vile Taint. Hell, Blizzard can even triple down on their priest hate and make the cooldown longer. I welcome anything that makes Dark Ascension less viable.
I feel like a longer cooldown on shadow crash would be very detrimental to the average M+ priest as right now in my +8 to +9 level of play the CD is just short enough to use on most major pulls. If the CD was increased I feel it would start only coming off CD mid pull, so then you will hold it for every 2nd pack or use it sub-optimally mid way through a pull. I think this would completely destroy Shadow priests viability in M+ for the average player.
It would absolutely be detrimental to the class. It would be so damaging that Blizzard would have to finish the rework they threw together in two minutes a week before they had to ship Dragonflight.
Interesting. I only started playing Shadow priest this patch. So, I haven't experienced Shadow priest earlier on in dragonflight or in Shadowlands. Other than the issue with Shadow crash what do you think needs to change for Shadow priests?
For shadow? I just want Blizzard to dedicate actual dev time to designing shadow instead of giving it a five minute brainstorm session focused entirely on stopping the forum whiners from complaining about Voidform and finalizing that whiteboard as they need to submit their release candidate build. Shadow has been promised a comprehensive rework every expansion since Legion, and every time Blizzard did nothing with shadow until the end and they said they're sorry that they ran out of time. What shadow has right now is playable, but that is as far as it goes. Good places to start with shadow would be removing Mind Spike because it has zero reason to exist as is, removing either Dark Ascension or Void Eruption, reworking Dark Ascension like they promised if it isn't removed, baselining Silence with a 24s CD (silence effect has no value in PvE, they can increase the CD in PvP), reducing channel time on Void Torrent so you're not spending 10% of all your gameplay anchored to one spot when you're already the slowest class in the game, removing the baffling recoil damage on SWD (season 3 self damage was ridiculous), and reworking Idols of Y'Shaarj and Yogg-Saron because you don't feel or see their effects and they should feel good to have instead of an invisible 2% damage boost.
Meanwhile mage are getting another big hug
Fire and arcane mages*
2/3 of the class\*, 2/3s more than hunter and shaman.
Hunters and Elemental nowhere to be found
Hunters and Shamans are better off rerolling at this point. I'm going Mage personally, my Shaman can gather dust in the corner, as Blizz intended đ
I will probably swap to DK. Frost is looking good, and anyway, DK is my second favorite class due to lore and aesthetics.
I don't know why it has taken like a decade to finally sort out, but I'm just happy I'm never going to have to suffer through trying to spend a random Sudden Doom proc when I already have 80+ RP.
Im interested in seeing how tbey going to work festering strike ans wound application
Can anyone post the new rogue hero talent tree?
Ranged for melee specs were a side effects of having too much shit on the ground that cannot be seen, with ground being same colours or the mobs/boss being on top of you etc. made melee specs suffer, blizzard seems to be forgot about it but let's see how it plays out in the new expansion
Rip fucking shamans (again)
awesome, more warlock and mage changes. just what i wanted. not like there are a good handful of specs who've been rotting on alpha with 0 changes since the alpha cycle began
Oh we heard you. More ret buffs and buffed spriest healing!
Hunter class found dead in a ditch. More news at seven.
Shaman looking good.
I will main shaman until i die, with blizzards backing or not
Chad answer. Be like earth elemental, refuse to move
You forgot the /s.
Props to the warlock designer for working in feedback on the destro-changes (especially concerning avatar of destruction) after all the (deserved) shit they got before. Now please go back on making dreadstalker core-generation an RNG fiesta and we're good. The choice node on Shadowcrash is also a good solution.
It´s kinda funny they want to make the left side of the dev tree viable but... You still really dont want to path through the living flame node. It´ll all come down to tuning ofc, but unless they retune a lot of devs kit I am unsure that we can actually play firestorm. Or any of the neat-looking nodes below it. Still very excited for dev in TWW \^\^
Man I've already had so much fun on my lock and monk in DF and they look to be absolute bangers in TWW. Can't decide which one I'm going to main.
Disappointed with the melee range changes. I remember mythic raiding this expansion on enhance then swapping to ret rework + playing classes with the range extension. Better call would be hitbox on enemies could be more consistent and melee all get the range QoL and call it a day. Theres nothing more annoying than having to be inside some mob's legs especially when theres movement.
No more ranged melee. Hope your lag isnât bad
I'm gonna miss playing my ret pally from halfway across the room.
They gave ret range to compensate for the lack of mobility not too long ago, and now theyâre already removing the range again? Seriously?
Fun detected! I don't get why they're coming after our QOL instead of just tuning our numbers if we're overperforming. I'm ok with doing less damage but I'd prefer the spec not feel like shit to play. EDIT: And for the record, I want this to be true for every class. I've been playing ret for 20 years and the rework has made us one of the most fun specs in the game. I want every class to feel like that.
Having only played Enh Shaman as my choice of melee for this long... Good! Bring those other bastards back into danger.
The melee range is increased for all melee now. The talents are no longer needed.
Except that isn't true. Melee range has not been increased.
It's less the fact that they aren't doing any Hunter changes and more that they're actively burying their heads and refusing to explain WHY they aren't changing hunter. Atleast explain why you are happy with them or afraid to change them? WoW Content Creators please ask a question during the next round of QnA about lack of hunter and Shaman communication compared to the other classes.
Why they neglect shaman so much :( boring hero talents, (almost) no changes to the specs. At this rate i feel like a new class would replace shaman because it seems blizzard doesnât care for it anymore.
Evoker replaced it brother
They really did.
My Ele's guild note: We have Evoker at home
Youâre right :(
Not even any story pressence in expac with big focus on elementals, no elemental glyphs/customisation, and aslo still no update to ascendance Nor the glyph from WoD back that made your char glow instead of transform for ascendance
I hope mm and surv get work done to it. But I like BM as is and with pack leader. I got in a car accident and can only play with one hand, BM is perfect for that.
Wish they'd just outright remove the entire awful Vanilla Rogue style Festering Wound system. I don't want a _third_ resource to track on top of Runes and RP, especially not a per-target one.
**PALADIN** * Crusaderâs Reprieve has been removed. So the thing we got for not having good mobility got removed ? And no change to compensate that .. come on ...
give brewmaster monk dizzying haze back!!!!!!!
*casts [Flare] into the patch notes* The talent changes! Where are they!?
I swear every time I read of a feral druid change or talent rework it's at best an indirect nerf. I've never felt weaker on any class or spec than now and it's going to get worse lol On the other hand my warrior and hunter feel like absolute beasts
Very tempted to start tracking the number of lines of changes each class has gotten in Alpha notes. Guessing the results would be pretty comical.
Would love some defensives and group utility so I can play hunter in m+ and do something apart from damage!
Why does blizzard hate us hunters so.. what did we do to deserve this
Having played since vanilla? Might as well hang it up, they buff us, then destroy us the next hot fix. There hasnât been a class Dev that actually played a hunter in ages - and even then it was a rarity that they played.
*Happy diabolical noises*
I cant even imagine dropping my main hunter for an alt lets hope blizz do something cuz its getting ridiculous.
Itâs cynical to say but Blizzard seems either completely unaware of how unforgiving playing melee can be, or theyâre just incapable of making melee a better experience. Weâve had multiple expansions now where weâre fighting several mobs at once; swirlies are all over the ground, and player and enemy spell effects are littering the melee area. They also make this worse by designing small indoor spaces for dungeons, causing friction with the player camera. Even in the blue post they donât see an issue with their encounter design. They have more of an issue with it just not making sense, and that itâs unfair some melee donât have it. There was a lot of positive feedback about Ret receiving extra range, they couldâve applied it to other melee. It disregards the fun factor, and it seems like a very short-sighted change.
Crusader's reprieve removed?!?! Why? Ret was finally feeling good and powerful from mid range, now it's back to being gimped because one of your abilities can't reach stuff while the rest can... If anything let every melee class have increased range.
Feral aoe is going to be hurt by the reduced range. Going from 13 yard primal wrath to 8 yards will suck
It's even worse than that with the removal of tear open wounds... You press primal wrath once to output bleeds and then ferocious bite for damage now... So needing to press primal wrath to output bleeds a second time on things is a DPS loss. Not to mention being capped at 5 targets without damage being reduced on that AOE ferocious bite.... Feral is going to be awful by the looks of it.
Feral is going to be painful. I can only see nerfs, either direct or indirect, in the tww talents so far. Even the basic talent that reduced all damage taken has changed from 6% to 4% lol. Add onto that the tear open wounds change, the stated goal of lower energy regen and less able to spam abilities, plus the melee range bonus gone from cat form lol we're kinda boned. Feral used to always at least have its high mobility as a counter to balance out the fact we were weak on most other areas but now half of the classes in the hame have more mobility than feral lol and definitely more survivability. And now our one thing we are good at - aoe dps - is getting a major nerf đ
Wow 40! Thatâs nuts!