In this thread, please discuss ongoing changes to the Hunter class in the Guardians of the Dream PTR.
Beast Mastery
Aspect of the Wild and Call of the Wild have struggled to be compelling choices during Dragonflight. Both of these cooldowns were competing for similar design space to make you and your pets feel stronger in a way that feels different than Bestial Wrath. After evaluating these abilities, we have decided to replace Aspect of the Wild entirely and convert it into passive options on the talent tree.
The removal of Aspect of the Wild allows us to double down on Call of the Wild being a strong pet summoning cooldown for the Beast Mastery spec. We’re also lowering the number of talent points in the Thrill of the Hunt and Dire Command talent nodes from 3 to 2, which should give you some extra flexibility in your talent choices.
Aspect of the Wild has been removed.
New Talent: Savagery (Passive) – Kill Command damage is increased by 10%. Barbed Shot lasts 2 seconds longer. Replaces Aspect of the Wild.
Master Handler has been redesigned – Each time Barbed Shot deals damage, the cooldown of Kill Command is reduced by 0.5 seconds.
Call of the Wild has been slightly redesigned – Cooldown reduced to 2 minutes (was 3 minutes) and the base ability now also has the added functionality: Whenever Call of the Wild summons a pet, the cooldown of Kill Command and Barbed Shot are reduced by 50%.
Choice nodes for Call of the Wild updated:
While Call of the Wild is active, all of your pets are affected by Beast Cleave. Each time Call of the Wild summons a pet, all of your pets Stomp.
While Call of the Wild is active, each time you Kill Command, your Kill Command target takes 3% more damage from all of your summons. This effect stacks.
Thrill of the Hunt is now a 2-rank talent (was 3). Each point grants 2% critical strike chance, stacking up to 2/4 times (was 3%, stacking 1/2/3 times).
Dire Command is now a 2-rank talent (was 3). Each point grants 15/30% chance to trigger (was 10/20/30%).
Snake Bite has been removed.
Marksmanship
Windrunner’s Guidance being unreliable has added too much variance to a hunter’s performance on each dungeon or raid attempt. This should keep the Wind Arrow theme strong and useful, while being predictable and reliable for how it interacts with your other abilities and the Trueshot cooldown.
Windrunner’s Guidance has been redesigned – Each Wind Arrow fired reduces the cooldown of Rapid Fire by 0.5 seconds, and every 8 wind arrows increases the duration of your next Trueshot by 1 second, up to a maximum of 10 seconds.
Survival
Wildfire Bombs now correctly states that damage is reduced when damaging more than 8 targets.
Developers’ note: This is not a functionality change for Wildfire Bomb, but rather a tooltip clarity update. This has been in effect since Shadowlands.
Wildfire Bombs now deal 40% increased damage to your primary target.
Developers’ note: The Aberrus Survival set bonus increases the value of Wildfire Bomb while in single target encounters in a way that has worked out well. We want to keep this interaction going forward for Survival, so we are removing it from the set bonus and just making all variants of Wildfire Bomb, including any periodic damage effects, deal 40% increased damage to your primary target when using Wildfire Bomb.
Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible (4) Set Bonus – No longer causes Kill Command to increase damage taken from Wildfire Bombs.
For the life of me, I cannot understand these Marksmanship changes. There are SO many things that could use some love on the hunter class that reducing the possibility of having a fun huge window of cool down is something you could only think of to kill whatever remains of this class.
Here are a few things that ACTUALLY NEED some changes:
Shorter cooldowns on defensives.
Some form of damage mitigation (Longer than a 6sec one with a 3min cd)
Some actually thought out Set bonuses that do something MORE than just passively upgrade DPS
Give us some raid utility (No, Owl doesn’t cut it), we used to have Trueshot AP passive, why remove it? Or Aspect of the fox
Make hunter’s mark useful?
Could we PLEASE be able to cleave under 3 and over 5 targets??? Everyone else can! (And no, solving this with a 45s CD doesn’t work either)
Wotlk readiness was actually a fun ability, which solves the problem you have with Windrunner’s guidance being too random.
Was the taunting shot THAT game breaking that we couldn’t keep it?
Volley should be baseline and have a focus cost instead of a huge CD.
A few points I wanted to bring forward, hopefully, you’ll pay more attention here than on the hunter forum which has been ignored for almost 2 years.
have an extraordinarily high number of small DPS-increase passive talents (especially SV)
have too many mandatory talents to make your spec work in the first place (especially MM)
Feedback about the tier sets:
BM: fantastic! This is so good, it must become baseline after the patch for sure! Having dire beasts use kill command makes them strong, interactive and no longer a temporary summon you don’t notice. Great job! This is the embodyment of what a tier set should do.
MM: 2-set is fantastic! You can use Salvo+Rapid Fire and it does huge AOE damage. 4-set - I couldn’t even understand what it does. I tried to test it but didn’t know what to look for. Very confusing.
SV: clunky and strange, because it is tied to a channeled ability. Basically what I do is use Fury of the Eagle from 40y range so it throws a bomb and gives me the 15% crit buff, then I try to cancel fury of the eagle with a macro and immediately coordinated assault. I want to have as many seconds of the 15% dmg buff during coordinated assault as possible, therefore I must cancel Fury of the Eagle early, and ideally just use it from range while closing distance.
PVP feedback:
Feign death no longer removing magical effects is an enormous nerf to hunter survivability, especially considering that the PVP talent Dragonscale armor (reduces magic dots by 20%) was also removed the previous patch. 90% damage reduction for 3 sec (up from 1.5 sec) did not feel noticeable at all, because one usually uses Feign death to absorb one single big hit, and not to have a “shield wall” type of effect.
Heya. Been testing the BM talents. They feel pretty awesome, yet I came across what I can assume as a bug with the Wild Instincts talent.
It says that it stacks and stays when Call of the Wild is active, yet when it ended, Wild Instincts persisted and I was able to keep refreshing the debuff forever, as long as I kept pressing Kill Command before it fell off.
I can only assume its a bug and probably should be fixed, but it does feel pretty good damage-wise to have it like this.
For BM hunter, the new talent Master Handler “Each time Barbed Shot deals damage, the cooldown of Kill Command is reduced by 0.5 seconds.” is gonna be so strong for m+ its gonna be mandatory to multidot with barbed shot. I hate it, i dont want to tab target and manage dots as a bm hunter, either make it so it doesnt stack with several barbed shot debuffs by capping it at 1 or rework it again.
I have to say tho if it was capped at 1 barbed shot debuff i would really like it because multidotting would not be necessary and it reduces the amount of cobra shots used during aoe. Maybe cap it at 1 and slightly buff it to 0.7-1 second? I dont know.
I play bm hunter to relax and have a chill rotation, i dont want to play high APM specs.
The new 4pc tier is amazing for m+ and the new call of the wild feels strong, just a shame theres no way to reduce the cooldown of it which we can do with beastial wrath or old BFA aspect of the wild with the multishot azerite power.
Edit: Frenzy now being 10 second duration and thrill of the hunt only 8 seconds makes thrill of the hunt talent feel like trash because you’re gonna be losing your thrill stacks constantly if you’re trying to maximize your barbed shot casts by using them last second to make sure you never ever drop frenzy before BW is back up.
Make each thrill of the hunt point increase the buff by 1 second up to 10 seconds with both talent points so it goes hand in hand with frenzy
So survivals talent tree is not gonna be addressed? That is disappointing to see. So many boring x% to y/z ability talents left, vipers vebom making serpent sting a passive and many more problems that really need fixing. You know just because the community treats surv like a joke doesn’t mean the devs should.
From an MM point of view.
2set is nice for PVE, not bad for 2set.
4set is just, LOL…
But why is 2set better the 4set? And that’s true for many classes, what is the logic behind it?
Now what about PVP? Rapid fire is now CC breaker, that is if the volley doesn’t
break the CC first. Are we now discouraged to use set bonuses for PVP, and when I say WE I mean every class and every spec? Because would it not be unfair that someone gets a buff just by having tier set and MM should not use his?
This is lazy work, or incompetence, sadly I think its the latter… even if the rework is coming I am not hopeful that it will bring us anything good.
GZ for the BM changes, I guess there is someone with brains there at the wheel, or at least half of it.
This is from a PvE BM perspective. Now I’ve always been hunter orientated but keep being forced away because of how hunters don’t fit in with offering any group utility worth taking over literally any other class or spec. Yet I still always want to come back to my hunter despite this because its the class that originally got me playing WoW.
I’ll be honest and say that Hunters feel neglected and useless in a progression setting. A BM can either focus on pure ST, which puts in around middle of the pack damage wise, or pure AoE, which again puts it middle of the pack. There is no viable hybrid. Do we offer anything else other than mediocre damage? No. This needs to be looked at and addressed, please make hunters useful and wanted in m+ or raids, rather than a class that gets ignored or laughed at.
Lets talk about the most current changes though. Theoretically, the changes to Call of the Wild sound great. Giving us a 2minute burst window is amazing… however… youve then gone and introduced a tier set that negates those changes. Ive experimented with the tree, and you can either go dire beast route or call of the wild route. Changes make call of the wild appealing, yet the tier set focuses purely on Dire Beast, making the call of the wild changes pretty useless for the next tier.
What I would like to see is:
A bit more cohesion between ST and AoE. A viable hybrid build that doesn’t make one or the other fall off so much that its an either or situation. Not every fight is pure ST and not every fight is pure AoE
The introduction of a group utility that makes Hunters useful. Such as an aura or buff that increases Crit strike or adds leach
The new tier set being looked at so you aren’t forced down 1 route to benefit from it. Perhaps making it so that Kill Command grants all Active and summoned pets Beast Cleave for 2-3 seconds rather than just Dire Beasts
I’d like to give feedback about the “Legacy of the Windrunners” → “Windrunner’s guidance” talent redesign.
It is more predictable, yes, but the fact remains that the Wind Arrows themselves are still very boring, hit for practically nothing and only exist for the side effects. Both talents feel math-heavy and not fun at all:
“every Aimed shot fires 2 Wind Arrows”
then “every 24 Wind Arrows” do something…
then “every 8 Wind Arrows” do something else…
This does not convey the “Sylvanas” feel these 2 talent points are trying to achieve. I’m not there to “count arrows” and calculate what happens after a certain amount of Aimed shots. I want to be a deadly sniper. End-tree talents should be fun and interesting and impactful.
This iteration of the talents, although mechanically “better” in being less RNG-based, is now even more boring and uninspired. It’s like - instead of making a dull talent fun, let’s make it better by making it even more dull and throwing in some more maths.
In the end, as a player I’d always take the AOE talent “Salvo” for all situations just because of how fun and impactful it feels to press, over the Windrunner’s pair of talents, even if they parse better.
New talent builds and tier set for BM feel really awesome to play, thumbs up to the designer.
But can you please do something with dire pack talent? This talent alone makes new rotation very clunky and it feels very bad to play around it. I wish we could just stop at Dire Frenzy and take Piercing Fangs instead and new rotation would be literally perfect.
there is little point in getting call of the wild until they fix it. Mend pet gets stuck on revive pet after the call of the wild buff fades ( you can still heal your pet but you now cant do it while moving)
It would be more interesting talent to me if there was a cooldown reduction mechanic to it like bestial wrath has from barbed shot
Create from WilD Call 2 point node : 20/40 %
Remove One with the pack
Move Master Handler over Call of the Wild, and create way to Master Handler from Savagery and Wild Call (mirror from left side talent tree)
Scent of Blood create one point node and with only one granted Barbed shot.
To talent Beast cleave add “and pet attack is increased by 2/4y”
Why ?
BM hunter have 5y AOE, Beast cleave have 8 target soft cap, but pet dont have chance cleave more that 5 targets. (Pet still must stay in melee range but hiting more targets)
2 barbed shot in Scent of Blood is contraproductive when you dont use BW when you need him but when you dont have stack BS. Increase Wild Call 20/40% help with geteration more BS and desrease negative effect from this change.
With this BM hunter have chance take 2 from 3 last nodes in tree.
(4) Set Bonus: Fury of the Eagle throws a free Wildfire Bomb at your current target at 100% effectiveness, generates 1 charge of Wildfire Bomb, and increases the damage Wildfire Bomb deals to your primary target by 40% for 12 seconds.
Change free Wildfire Bomb to Explosive Shot or change the entire second bonus to an additional one charge for Fury of the Eagle.
Why so?
Because I love this skill (Fury of the Eagle) and at the same time I’m tired of relying on bombs.
I hope for the return of the Legion version of Mongoose Bite, making Mongoose Fury window more like mini CD. The return of the talent trees are a golden opportunity to re-introduce abilities we were familiar with back when meele survival was born in Legion.
Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite separate abilities
Snake Hunter
Mastery: Hunting Companion
Old Flanking Strike
Lacerate
Old Fury of the Eagle
Coordinated Assult is a shame, shooting Kill Shots out of a pocket crossbow.
Welcome changes, but still not going to address the fact that hunters dont bring anything to raids that other classes already do. Just something like a +3% crit buff or a baseline CD that enables casting while moving for the group (like windfury for shaman). With the addition of augmentation evokers, we are completely bottom in terms of viability for the highest content right now.
First off, thank you for finally considering a hunter raid buff, but this version of Hunters Mark is a swing and a miss. We need a flat damage or crit buff that we can give the whole raid or party to be viable in and outside of raid. How would it feel if Mark of the Wild/Battleshout had to be cast on a target and only when you are attacking it, you get its benefit for about 25 seconds? Please think again!
Hunter’s Mark now increases all damage taken by the target by 5% while the target is above 80% maximum health.
Developers’ note: We like the idea of Hunter’s Mark highlighting specific targets on the battlefield, so we have made an adjustment to Hunter’s Mark to cause it to increase all damage taken by 5% on targets above 80% health. A few quick notes about this change:
When applying Hunter’s Mark out of combat or before a pull, it continues to have no cooldown. If you apply Hunter’s Mark while in combat, Hunter’s Mark receives a 20 second cooldown. We don’t intend for you to move this damage bonus around frequently.
Hunter’s Mark is still on the global cooldown with this change.
Multiple Hunters can not stack this damage bonus on the same target.
NO
NO
NO
A WHOLE TOPIC IN BFA FOR SHADOWLAND HAS BEEN MADE BACK THEN ALREADY :
The dev team back then understood the issue that the damage increase on a active dispellable was a complete mess to balance in PvE and PvP on all hunter spec
The dev back then understood a dispellable damage increase on 1 target will always make hunter taken away in PvP
The dev team back then understood A GDC Everytime for each pack in M+ was making -5% damage on hunter on every mob in M+ because the GCD was not worth it on every mob to press
The dev team Back then understood Any % damage increase on single target will cause serious miscalculation when doing AoE Damage with marksmanship
the dev team back then understood the main utility of Hunter Mark was to see units stealthed, not damage increase
the dev team back then understood it DIDN’T NEEDED A COOLDOWN OBVIOUSLY SINCE GCD WAS PUNISHING ENOUGHT
The dev team understood hunter mark was already punishing enought by being limited to 1 target !
And way more reason to keep hunter mark only revealing stealth !
SO REVERSE THAT CHANGE BACK LIKE HUNTER MARK WAS BETWEEN SHADOWLAND AND 10.1.7
You want a raid buff for hunter ?
Easy =
On the Hunt
40 yards
Increase Critical Strike damage % of the raid for 1 hours
Or !
Bloodlust outside the Ferocity pet ! yea the bloodlust is reason enought !
AND THAT IT , JUST ADD A NEW SPELL OR NOT
BUT DO NOT TOUCH HUNTER MARK !!!