Can we change BM and maybe survival for Shadowlands?

Classes Hunter
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I don’t have the alpha for Shadowlands so I’m gonna have to post this here.

As someone who has mained hunter (and almost exclusively hunter) since Cataclysm, BM and survival really need to get fixed. The changes in Legion completely ruined hunter, the class is no where near as fun as it used to be and as a hunter one trick with thousands of hours on the one character it completely kills the game for me. Sorry if I sound rude at times, I don’t intend to I’m just really passionate about hunter.

BM for a start feels like a wet towel to play, I don’t know a better way to describe it. Each ability feels like it hits like toilet paper. They have completely lost the chunky feeling they used to have, like your hits are hitting hard. The reason BM was so fun in MoP and WoD was because you would use steady shot to fill up your focus bar and then line up all your CDs with nearly maxed focus. It felt like you were working towards a big power spike and you would unleash a massive barrage (no pun intended) of damage. Current BM hunter completely lacks this, focus regeneration is almost completely passive and when it’s not it relies on a short cooldown to regenerate focus (survival also has this issue), it lacks that reliability that steady shot had, you don’t get focus when you want it, you get it when the cooldown of barbed shot is reset. In my opinion, steady shot is the single most important hunter ability and absolutely needs to be present on all hunter specs. You need to be able to build focus reliably or the spec is simply not fun. This is why MM works and the other specs don’t.

Survival has this exact same issue but with flanking strike, a focus regenerator with a cooldown means you just press it when it comes off cooldown. There is no thinking or planning involved, no “when should I regen focus or when should I burst”, it’s just ‘press not grey ability and get big focus’. I said it before and I’ll say it again, it simply does not work. You need that reliablilty in focus regeneration for hunter to work. The whole spec is built around choosing to build and spend focus, if you can’t build reliably the spec doesn’t feel fun, it feels like you’re just waiting around for abilities to go off CD. Melee hunter can work, they just need to remember it’s a hunter and not a rogue. Both of these issues can be fixed by adding steady shot back to each spec (maybe call it something different for survival for flavor reasons). Also it would be nice if they made survival more trap and poison based but that’s not really that important.

Steady shot is the main problem, however there are a few other issues. Stampede should really be changed to the old version. Summoning a bunch of random animals is not faithful to the hunter class fantasy, that’s something druid would do. Hunter is all about taming your pets and then training them in battle, the old stampede was far more fitting, plus it was nice to see some of your lesser used pets.

Also, it would be nice if aspects functioned more like stances again. It’s something I really miss from old hunter, it was nice to have mobility/defence on demand.

Marksman is a good example of a well made hunter spec because it has that focus builder (I mean steady shot, spamming arcane/multi shot is boring). Sadly it lacks pets (since lone wolf is typically best) which makes it lose it’s hunter identity to me.

tl;dr give all specs steady shot and remove barbed shot/flanking strike.

I didn’t realise until I started writing this that the only reason BM/survival hunter doesn’t work in retail is because it lacks steady shot. It’s a simple fix and I really hope a Blizz employee reads this. Also, sorry if this reads poorly. English isn’t my first language and I’m dyslexic to boot.

I’m happy playing Classic, but I’m really starting to miss MoP/WoD hunter. Also props for adding pet spells back, that would be included in my post if they didn’t already do this. It was something hunter was sorely missing as all pets just felt the same.

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you do know right , that BM hunter is one of the strongest specs in game for the moment, and to be honest not to much wrong whit it at all, yeah you might not have 20 buttons to press, but it is no where near as bad as you say

then only spec that realy needs a rework is MM, it is clunky and slow.

2 Likes
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I main a Hunter and play all three specs.

Sounds like you’re about that BM has no real burst, which is fine to me. It’s great sustained dps.

Marksman is great. I love having a Hunter spec that doesn’t need a pet. But it should feel more fluid.

Survival currently feels like some button smashing fest and all you’re doing is to keep focus to spam Mongoose while keeping your DoTs on the target. I’d appreciate a more DoT-focused style for this spec.
Otherwise I enjoy SV as a melee hunter.

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Survival on alpha makes no sense design-wise at all at the moment. I dont know if they plan to do anything about it or if they will just leave it half-way done like in legion (Sticky grenade, anyone?)

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"BM for a start feels like a wet towel to play, I don’t know a better way to describe it. Each ability feels like it hits like toilet paper. " Ikr, BW doesnt mean anything if im popping in and out of it every 15 secs.

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100% aggreed

I disagree atleast with BM, BM doesnt work rn becuase its far too simple. Our core rotation is essentially two buffs and two attack spells, one of which we use on CD mindlessly when ever it is available and the other we use to take the KC off CD during our BW window or as filler to stop from focus capping. In previous expansions I would have let this go and just accepted the simplicity because I felt blizz wanted hunters to be the noob friendly class, but after the introduction of DH in legion there is no excuses now. DH is clearly the noob brain dead class so that excuse doesn’t fly and all hunter specs should be able to have a deeper level of complexity then what BM has had. Im not even asking for much I just one more level of complexity in the interactions between our core rotation or one more spell that interacts with barbed shot, kc, cs and BW. I feel like Blizz has just got lazy with BM and decided that it because everything works smoothly they arent going to try and make it more fun out of risk of ruining the simple mediocrisy the spec has become.

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the problem whit hunter and why many says we do not have buttons to press, is becuse of the pet, many uses pets attacks on auto, meening, you never press them your self, and if you press them your self, you have them macroed again, so wont even notice them, that is about 3 to 3 buttons less depending on what pet you have, none thinks about this at all, but if you start to realice, it you all of an sudden realice, a hunter have far more buttons to press than some other classes.

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Current SV lacks OOOMPF. It has decent flow of combat, but visually it does not look that good.

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I started little BM project, and I can say, by playing ele shaman I am crippling myself badly. BM is just so strong, so mobile and yet does insane damage, insane AOE with minimum effort.

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whotf plays flanking strike?

thats actually true sometimes
but I suppose it happens with huge unluck or mostly with huge unskill

whotf is happy with current mm hunter? well done for falling asleep

guess what? They did it in SL. They added steady shot to survival. Survival that uses melee weapon. I am not saying its bad, but is this what u r asking for?

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