Feedback: Hunters

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
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Greetings, Hunters!

In Undermine(d), Pack Leader is receiving a complete rework, and we thought we’d take this opportunity to explain some of our decisions, thought-process, and goals with this update.

Pack Leader Fantasy
When reassessing what the fantasy of a Pack Leader is, we took inspiration from the iconic Hunter Rexxar. Rexxar doesn’t cleanly fall into any Hunter specialization, but he mostly closely aligns with Survival, with a splash of Beast Mastery given his repertoire of pets. As such, Rexxar seemed like a fantastic throughline to help guide our hand when designing Pack Leader’s second iteration.

Beast Mastery summons many random beasts with Dire Beast, and has even dipped its toes into summoning iconic beasts with talents like Huntmaster’s Call summoning Hati and Fenryr, so having a pool of special Beast summons made a lot of sense. However, summoning beasts is a largely unexplored territory for Survival Hunter. For Pack Leader, we wanted to ensure that you were summoning Beasts from a specific pool, and that each pet felt unique, like your Hunter and their Pack had a special bond. This direction felt more in-line with Survival’s fantasy of having a uniquely strong bond with a smaller suite of pets.

Three is a Crowd
While its fun to summon creatures, they can create a lot of noise in the game space, especially in melee. When designing Pack Leader, we wanted to ensure that the new summons we were designing were not sitting in melee and adding more visual noise, blocking sightlines, and taking up game space. This goal pushed our designs into less traditional territory. While the Pack Leader Bear behaves like a very traditional summoned creature, leaping into battle, using abilities, and auto attacking its target, the Boar and the Wyvern are a bit more unique in their behaviors.

In the Shadow of the Wyvern
The Wyvern’s visuals are likely the most unique of the bunch. When you summon your Wyvern via Howl of the Pack Leader, it swoops in, lets out a roar, and proceeds to circle the battlefield for the duration of its buff. Looking up and seeing your Wyvern circle the skies felt like a uniquely Pack Leader moment, and we’re happy with how we were able to package this effect.

Charging Ahead
When summoned, Pack Leader’s Boar performs a series of 3 charges from off-screen, crashing into your enemies with explosive force.Given the lower complexity of the other two summons, we felt that the Boar could have some more advanced interactions with a follow up talent “Hogstrider”. Hogstrider causes your Cobra Shot or Mongoose Bite to strike more targets and deal more damage, and this effect stacks the more enemies are damaged by your Boar. The gameplay we’re looking for is following up your Boar’s hits with your own when it rotationally makes sense, while also pushing you to not overcap on Hogstrider stacks. This “moment” also feels uniquely Pack Leader, and we’re hoping that when players are spec’ing in to Pack Leader, they’re looking forward to cool moments like this.

Defense and Utility
Given the gameplay and summons this Hero Talent tree is introducing, we wanted to keep the complexity low on Pack Leader’s defensive and utility talents, while still preserving some of the Pack Leader fantasy.

Pack Leader’s defensive talent “Shell Cover” features an adorable pet turtle that will come to your aid (atop your head) , providing some damage resistance when you are dropped below 40% health. This defensive is fully passive, and while you’ll notice it when it procs, it shouldn’t require any tracking or playing around to get full use.

Pack Leader’s utility comes on a choice node, with two talents: Slicked Shoes and Horsehair Tether. Part of the Pack Leader fantasy is an adaptive, quick-thinking, and seasoned Hunter, so a Pack Leader having some unique utility made a lot of sense. Pack Leaders are hard to slow down, and Slicked Shoes will give them more frequent access to Disengage should they get assailed by snares, slows, and other debilitations. Horsehair Tether is a very unique utility node for Pack Leaders that causes anyone stunned by Binding Shot to be dragged to Binding Shot’s center similar to spells like Ursol’s Vortex. Our goal with this talent is to help make Pack Leader’s utility immediately identifiable in function while also helping you to feel scrappy and clever with a new addition to one of Hunter’s suite of traps, snares, and stuns.

There’s still plenty to discover with this revision to Pack Leader, and we’re excited for you all to get your hands on it. Thanks for playing!

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In Undermine(d), Marksmanship Hunter is receiving a substantial update to its spec tree and fantasy, and we thought we’d take the opportunity to outline our goals with this change.

Lone Wolf, No Longer
Likely the most substantial change to Marksmanship is a reimagining of the specialization’s fantasy and how it interacts with pets.

Hunters are in large part defined by their pets and their greater relationship with the natural world of Azeroth and beyond. Marksmanship Hunter stood in somewhat stark defiance of that for much of its existence, as it was often more than willing to abandon pet access in exchange for extra throughput from Lone Wolf. Over World of Warcraft’s history, this talent was iterated, changed, and grew to be a core part of Marksmanship’s identity.

There were many fantasy and gameplay issues with Lone Wolf. Pets had legitimate utility behind them, such as Bloodlust, defensives, and mobility. Having to summon your pet and lose Lone Wolf to access that utility as Marksmanship often had legitimate experiential and throughput consequences. Why should a Hunter be frustrated to pull out their pet? The discord between Marksmanship Hunters and their pets felt like something that needed to be solved-- and our goal was to solve that problem in a way that not only reembraced pets as a part of Marksmanship’s identity, but also did it in a unique and fantasy-forward way.

Eyes in the Sky
In Undermine(d), Marksmanship Hunters are losing access to “traditional” pets, like Survival and Beast Mastery have, and are instead permanently joined in battle by an Eagle. Your Eagle will descend from the skies when called upon to help your allies and hinder your enemies.

Your most frequent use for the Eagle will be via Spotter’s Mark, a new baseline talent that Marksmanship Hunters will have access to starting at level 13. When spending Precise Shots, your Eagle has a chance to descend from the skies and mark your target, substantially increasing the damage your next Aimed Shot will deal to that target. This mechanic is more deeply developed, expanded, and altered in the talent tree.
Marksmanship Hunters can expect a full suite of unique Eagle-specific versions of pet utility such as a line of sight-ignoring Intimidation, a unique Bloodlust, new visuals for Master’s Call, and even the ability to change your Eagle’s specialization between Tenacity and Cunning.

Aiming Down Sights
The flow of Marksmanship’s rotation is smooth and iconic. For our updates to the Marksmanship tree, we were focused on trimming away some of the more vague parts of Marksmanship’s kit both fantasy-wise and mechanically and really focusing in on what made Marksmanship special-- all while retaining the smooth gameplay that Marksmanship players have come to know and love.
A big pillar of our Marksmanship update was to ensure that Aimed Shot was the star of the show. Aimed Shot is the core of Marksmanship-- a long channel, lightning fast projectile, and it hits like a truck. We’ve added some new mechanics, keywords, and talents that all help to build up to huge Aimed Shots, fat crits, and satisfying procs.

New and Old Tricks
While the core of Marksmanship’s rotation will feel familiar, we wanted to add some more flair to the less core parts of Marksmanship’s kit, such as Kill Shot and Explosive Shot.

Within the new tree you’ll find some familiar friends like Double Tap, Volley, and Lock and Load alongside some new talents like Precision Detonation, that makes Aimed Shot trigger Explosive Shot’s explosion earlier and increasing its damage substantially.
Kill Shot (and Black Arrow) can be turned completely on its head with a new talent, Headshot, that allows you to use Kill Shot as a Precise Shots spender just like Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot.

Room to Grow
This next step for Marksmanship is, ideally, the first of many. We are interested in continuing to flesh out Marksmanship’s Eagle as a true pet and partner for you on your journeys with unique interactions, effects, and even appearances in the future, but we don’t have specifics to share yet. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

We’re excited for you all to get your hands on Marksmanship when Undermine(d) drops, and we’ll be eagerly awaiting your feedback!

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I think this sounds super exciting. I main Paladin but have always wanted to play my Hunter alts more.

Reading this, I realise that Hunter might end up being a second main for me.

Love the idea of the eagle, and the possibility of customising it in the future (owls for Night Elves, falcons for Kul Tirans, crows for Worgen, etc).

Also happy to hear that you’re drawing inspiration from Rexxar. Something I feel is missing from Survival, with that in mind, is the ability to dual-wield two one-handed weapons.

That’s what Rexxar does, and it would look so sweet for a Troll, Orc, Night Elf, etc. to run around with two bloody hatchets. Or two silvery swords if you’re a Blood or Void Elf.

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Sounds great!

I will add this to the wish list if you are going the whole Falconer approach:
When not in combat for a set duration, have your companion come back to rest on you. Either by landing on your arm, or shoulder. Entering combat simply have it take flight, going swoosh up and away!

Makes it distinct from BM and yet gives it just that little more personality :dracthyr_heart:

(Also, MM really getting focus on Aimed-Shot, big dam? Love it!)

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I think the idea has a great potential and can add nice flavor and gameplay to Marksmanship.

I would only say that you should still allow MM hunters to retain their normal pets. No need for pets to give any bonuses, just their basic abilities + growl to be able to tank outdoor and maybe delve content. This will also help to placate those pet lovers who for some reason prefer to play MM instead of BM.

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Also please whatever damage redesign you do, do not do it at the expense of True Shot.

I personally loved S4 DF version of Trueshot, a powerful 28 seconds burst windows, that allowed you to obliterate packs of enemies. Current 15 seconds True Shot with full potential only lasting last 5 seconds is not nearly satisfying, eventhough cooldown is shorter. Yes my dps otherwise was mediocre and ST dps relatively weak, in S4 but maan I was willing to bear it for those 28 seconds of glory!

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Really looking farward to playing the new BM Pack Leader. Cant wait and see how it plays looks like there is alot of thought put into the spec THANK YOU.
Please make sure to run it by the “numbers” team so we get a spec that can be played in both m÷ and raid.
PL in TWW has only been playable in m+ for about one or two days witch has been really really sad. Thank you once again really hoping for the best :heart:

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I’m SO VERY excited for MM redesign! It’s sounding like a long time dream that I had!!

However, please give us either a talent node which gives us a tank pet, preferably at the top of the tree, or a baseline tank pet so we can have a pet tanking for us (+ misdirect to it) leveling and/or at solo content. A pet without any utility other than growl is enough

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Survival Rapid feedback just from patch notes:
1.Most important: Lack of self-healing, Exhilaration is our healing option now this hurts us in PvP the most but also hurts us in Delves and solo content
List of changes to Survival defensives:
Nerf to leech to 4% only spec that leech was useful for its whatever but -6% is cruel
Spirit bond is only a 3% reduction we used to be a Versa class meaning getting tankier each season now we aren’t which means more DR loss
Nerf to Bandage Total Heal(and it breaks even in turtle), SotF to 25%, Feign Death DoT removal and shield duration reduced to 2
Having to play Cunning pet in PvP 90% of the times and BL pet 90% of PvE we barely use Tenacity pet and we have to keep dismissing pets dear Dev please fix
no more HP5 passive heal and no more Den Recovery, ̶ ̶W̶i̶l̶d̶e̶r̶n̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶m̶e̶d̶i̶c̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶t̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶l̶ ̶ meaning both us and our pet will receive less healing Back to when any cleave class can kill our pet something has to be done about this not just PvP but Delves and solo content too my pet was already dying in 90% of the time at high delve at start of the season and still dies btw Having to ress/mend pet every 3 global is not fun. 10% DR after losing 60% of your HP every 2 min doesn’t do anything unless you are being hit by a Rapid AoE damage and it maybe can save you once out of 10 times you btw Den Recovery literally saved me during turtle if i didn’t have it i would’ve died in turtle MANY MANY TIMES since turtle is not a real immunity Sentinel shield is 100 times better which is fine for dungeons

2.Survival rework should’ve been like the new MM hunter’s rework coming in season 2 talent wise and why do we have hero utility talents that are more useful than our actual class tree talents since Dragonflight? Hunter Class Tree needs a Paladin level utility update again it was updated now outdated again. KC damage for survival has to be adjusted now that old Pack leader is gone

3.Killshot and Serpent Sting talents are literally two unfunny jokes for Survival in TWW we need Serpent Sting as our signature spell back as a button + flayed shot level proc of Killshots back(or DF CA bleeding gash during current CA) now Killshot has no modifier just a Ranged strong Raptor Strike yes spend 2 talents to make your bleeds stronger the build from KC which is really weak, Butchery/FS which are Melee, New Pack leader bear bleed which is random
I sure do love to get a Killshot proc and save it for when i have Flanking Strike or butchery oh wait it expired and … sorry i had other globals to press and could not careless about the bleed amp

Thank you.

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Great changes to Pack Leader, it really felt bad as Survival that there was no actual pack. I love Rexxar and seeing you take inspiration from him fills me with joy, even seeing the same choice of beasts as he has in Warcraft 3 (Bear and Boar).

  • The one thing still missing in living the fantasy of being like Rexxar is lack of access to dual-wielding as Survival Hunter. Can we please finally get access to DW?

MM changes are also great, although I fear MM will lose value in solo content without access to a pet. I play my Hunter as MM and I always have a pet out when I’m not doing group content, making sure I have a way to keep enemies off of me, given that my main spender (Aimed Shot) requires me to stand still so I can’t fully kite enemies.

  • There should be an option (optional talent/choice node) to make our Eagle pet act as a regular pet when we are ungrouped (reverse Lone Wolf?)
  • With new focus on Streamline talent, maybe add option to let move at 50-70% speed while casting Streamline-buffed Aimed Shot?

Another worry is that as MM loses access to pets, we lose a bit of a Hunter identity where we are able to customize our companion to match our theme. Please add a way to change the appearance of our Eagle companion.

  • An idea is to use the “Beast Mastery special pet stable slot” for MM as the slot to place a flying pet (Bird of Prey, Carrion Bird, etc.) which will then use its looks for our Spotter Eagle.
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The changes are good and exciting, but there is an issue of aesthetic that I’m a bit worried about; the eagle looks great, but not sure it meshes at all with the dark ranger aesthetic? If there’s no option to change it manually from the off, then Dark Ranger should automatically make it some sort of shadowy version of the eagle.

Similarly, please bear in mind people have certain aesthetics for their hunters - goblins and gnomes using solely mechanicals for example. Glyph of the Dire Stable is a lifesaver for that kind of thing, but now with these changes, there’s no way for a hunter with a certain aesthetic to satisfyingly play Pack Hunter or Marksmanship as they’re locked in to a certain visual identity.

On a personal level, I was excited to play Undermine(d) as my goblin hunter with a stable full of mechanicals; but with these changes, I’m locked into a visual identity that doesn’t make sense no matter what Hero spec I choose, as sentinel also has a very specific aesthetic.

So yeah the changes are good and needed, but hunters are such a versatile class to play, so please please don’t lock us into strict random visuals. Let us edit the eagle to be shadowy/mechanical axebeak/bats for trolls etc, and let us adjust the models of beast summoned as Pack Leader so that we can play as we want to.

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It’s funny how different are players on EU and NA ,was reading comments on NA server under this post and every single one of them was crying about new changes and losing traditional pets, haha. and here on EU ppl are really waiting for new changes. For me personally this changes looks amazing,before always had a feeling that something it’s missing, Except one thing only,roar of sacrifice it’s very situational since it lost 10% dmg reduction ( was the only defensive CD that hunters could use under a stun, to not die in 1 stun from rogue or palladin, wait even with it good rogue kills us anyway xD )

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they said,later will add new looks for MM pet

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if you guys now are thinking about MM fantasy,then let’s keep going and and make it look more like a hunter, because by fantasy hunter sounds more like an antistealth class but in reality by blizzard fantasy stealth specs are anti hunters. why not to make some ability that let’s our pet to react to danger(when we r stuned) and help us for example to stun the terget or something else

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Rexxar doesn’t cleanly fall into any Hunter specialization because Blizzard messed it up bigly. Beastmastery should have always been the melee class, not Survival! I still cant figure out how you guys managed to not see the obvious. Survival should have been the traps spec and Beastmastery fighting melee along the trusty beasts, like Rexxar.

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Like others have suggested, I’m really excited about the intentions behind the hunter changes more than anything else. I’m a bit surprised, however, that the MM pet rework is not leaning more into the Sentinel Owl fantasy (and previous talent iterations).

Surely we all know that

Eagles is for Survival Hunters, Big Red Kitties is for Beast Mastery Hunters, and Screechy Squawky Flappy Owls is for Marksmanship Hunters.

I have multiple Hunters and play every spec and Hero talent tree in both PVE and PVP, and can’t wait to play around with new builds (& mogs, naturally). Thank you

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Making Eagle Eye an MM exclusive ability?

GOOD GOD NO THANK YOU.

Please stop conflating spec fantasy with class utility. Eagle Eye has far superior utility to the vastly inferior, and class-fantasy ability, Eyes of the Beast, which equally mistakenly in some sort of horrendous trade off, is being made exclusive to SV and BM.

I don’t want to have to switch specs to MM every time I want to use Eagle Eye.

Please, for the love of god, revert this horrible change.

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The MM changes sound like an interesting take to explore and I’m glad to see that we’re finally getting some real attention given that, since Legion, most classes an specs got 2-4 times more attention than we did.
Getting back to focusing on large numbers is definitely nice and I’ve often missed the time when Aimed shot was one of the hardest-hitting ability in the game (second only to Chaos Bolt).

That said, a minor element: I hope there’s some space for customization for the eagle companion. Visuals have been a major part of WoW pretty much since Dragon Soul when mog was introduced and thus it’s pretty much necessary to have several models for the eagle to choose from so that we can fit match the visual with our transmog. Also, I hope the “fetch” glyph ability works with the new version of MM.

The longer gap between auto shots but boosting their damage is interesting take but it might end up hindering the chances to trigger on-hit trinkets. Or that it doesn’t simply feel way too weird.

That said, there’s one thing that confuses me a bit: The talent that adds tenacity or cunnin spec to the eagle - it blocks access to Trueshot, which seems strange, if it has default specialization at Ferocity, this means that to access Trueshot, it’s necessary to “spec” the companion to tank or PvP.

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LOVE this. Been thoroughly enjoying the Survival hunter rotation and playstyle. Having a pet - or better yet, having my pet(s) be a meaningful part of the gameplay is a crucially important part of class fantasy for me personally. The Pack Leader hero talents sounded like the perfect fit, but was quite underwhelming in more ways than one. I think this is exactly what the spec was missing to complete its class fantasy. Hats off to the people who thought of and worked on this change! (Please tune it in a way so it wouldn’t feel like a compromise taking it instead of Sentinel <3)

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Is there any way to make it so the extra summons from the new Pack Leader interactions (or some of them) are from your own stables? Now that’s what I would call leading YOUR pack!