Changing Survival Tactics was the last straw for me.
Yes, a 3 sec 90% dmg reduction is good if timed properly, but it doesn’t change the fact that setup/burst meta is all but dead, and hunters still take so much damage from just about anything, zero passive mitigation. You could argue that more classes should lose passive stuff like that, but still…
But more than that, that single change regressed the fun factor of the class by like, 3 steps backwards. After years of having it, we came from absurd OP (SL) to them flat out removing it for what, to make affliction more appealing? It feels so toxic, from being a counter to anything dot/bleed based in SL (again, which was OP), but to lose the effect completely and all of a sudden, it is our worst nightmare (because we will die in turtle).
Hoping to dispel a smth from yourself to get some breathing room? Maybe a nice reset into camouflage? Nope, ef you. Hunters were supposed to be slippery, a trade off for having no innate tankiness, and this was a big nerf to it.
Not that hunter kiting abilities are anything special, FFS I can kite melee better as ele shaman while still doing 90k dps while getting trained.
Hunter talents have been heavily criticized since DF alpha for the absolute point bloat and uninteresting capstones, with literally nothing new and unique, a reskin of various azerite gear effects and SL leggos. The whole tree feels like putting up a base of the class, instead of building upon it. I will be shocked if it doesn’t get heavy updates, and judging by the last blue comment, it won’t.
Just a reminder that Multi-Shot, our basic AoE from freaking Vanilla, is a talent you have to pick. So as a hunter, you basically have no aoe whatsoever until like, lvl 30. This is not picked for arena anyway, but just to illustrate the picture.
Hunter hero talents are so godawful boring and uninspired, the only thing worth of mentioning is the Smoke Screen defensive node, which should make hunters a bit less harrowing to heal.
Hunters, MM in particular used to be an enabler class, akin to mages today. Now it feels like we are a scuffed version of a fire mage, and mages in general not only got brought up to modern design as a whole, fire mage in particular seems to be a design winner going into TWW.
Only Survival has something interesting going on for it, BM and MM are both damage bots, with BM being as annoying as ever and joining the demo club of cluttering your screen, forever labeled as a noob spec and MM being a literal damage bot who relies on getting cheese kills on cloth sending them straight to forums. My god, an MM hunter trying to cast Sniper Shot with anything melee against it is really painful to watch.
MM counters mages, but have you every played MM against outlaw? At least a mage can STILL outplay a hunter, even if its an uphill battle. But a single outlaw rogue can literally stop MM from doing damage 80 percent of the time. I have never seen such a hard counter in all of WoW. Rogue doesn’t even need to think about the order, just randomly rotating stuns, disarms, evasions and vanishes removes MM out of the equation. For real, disarm is so oppressive for MM, it is borderline ridiculous. And to think we had a weapon enchant to reduce it, along other things that OP mentioned is just sad. Disarms only got shared to more classes, and now we can’t escape it from even boomkins (because Survival tactics change…)
At least with Double Tap you had some fun factor, there was some satisfaction in getting that clean CC window, making sure you won’t get disrupted and then bursting down the kill target. And they removed a core ability not midway into expansion and had to buff the damage like 10 times to stay competitive. There is a reason why Rapid Fire deals 15% more damage in PvP has become a meme at this point.
Hunters, BM and MM especially are by far the most outdated class and specs in this game, and it is absurd just how much more fun and complete the class was many years ago.