Feedback: Hunters

[Linxy]

This thread is dedicated to leaving feedback on Hunters in Midnight. Look in this thread and in the Midnight Alpha Development Notes for adjustments and bugfixes made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Apex Talents

Many Apex Talents are available for playtesting and may be selected using specialization tree points in the final specialization tree node. The current User interface (UI) is temporary for playtesting purposes and will be replaced with a final UI later in development. As with any test cycle, we will be adding more Apex Talents to the test over time and not all will be available with the start of the alpha test.

To help us refine Apex Talents, please consider the following questions as you playtest:

• How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you?
• Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article?
• Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent?
• Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree?

For feedback regarding the changes on making the combat system more approachable for players of all skill levels, leave your feedback in the Combat Approachability feedback thread.

Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback and are very excited for you to test out all the changes in Midnight!

[Linxy]

Beast Mastery

Beast Mastery Hunters have a fantasy of consistent, reliable, and powerful pet-sourced attacks, and that’s something we’re looking to lean into as we move into Midnight. We’re reducing the number of conditionals, auras, and modifiers on Barbed Shot to make it more easy to spend as its available. We’ve grown fond of Bestial Wrath’s shorter cooldown, and as such are removing Barbed Wrath’s dynamic cooldown reduction effect to instead give Bestial Wrath a flat cooldown of 30 seconds when fully talented. Multi-Shot has had an odd place in Beast Mastery’s kit, so we’re giving it an update, causing it to be replaced in the Beast Mastery spec tree with a new pet-sourced attack that deals substantial damage in AOE while also activating effects like Beast Cleave and Kill Cleave. We hope this new spell will feel powerful and contribute meaningfully to your area damage. Bloodshed and Call of the Wild felt like they were both competing for a similar role of a cooldown that summoned a few more units to fight for you. As such, we removed Call of the Wild and are focusing on Bloodshed as a cooldown to get a few extra beasts to attack your enemies. With the change to make Kill Shot a Marksmanship only ability, Dark Rangers will now learn Black Arrow as a separate ability if they choose that Hero Talent tree.

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Marksmanship

We are generally pleased with the state of Marksmanship after their Undermine(d) and Ghosts of K’aresh updates, but there were a few bigger things we’d like to address as we move into Midnight. Most notably, the introduction of Streamline as a core mechanic for Marksmanship inflated the amount of cast time reduction Marksmanship Hunters have access to while also contributing an extra aura to track. Aimed Shot is meant to be a long cast that is worth the wait. As its cast time reduces, so too must its damage, and we feel that flies in the face of what Aimed Shot should be about– as such we’ll be removing Streamline and increasing Aimed Shot’s damage. While Explosive Shot found a home as a guaranteed way to gain Lock and Load in Ghosts of K’aresh, we feel that it’s healthier for the spec as a whole to distance itself from Explosive Shot and instead focus on the more fantasy-forward spells like Volley and Kill Shot– spells that more often than not are competing with it in your rotational priorities. Speaking of Kill Shot, we are removing it from the Hunter class tree and letting Marksmanship fully own the execute niche it provides. Trueshot is gaining some cooldown reduction, cast time reduction, and focus cost reduction to compensate for the removal of Streamline.

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Survival

As we head into Midnight, we’re continuing to refine and focus Survival Hunter’s fantasy, giving clearer playstyle, gameplay, and visual direction. Over the course of Alpha, we’ll be reintroducing one-handers into Survival Hunter’s pool of available weapons, which means we’ll also be looking to distance Survival from its spear-only identity that it’s had since Legion. We’ll be doubling down on Survival’s relationship with its pet with new talents that create an interdependency between the Hunter’s damage and their pet’s damage. Additionally, we’re leaning into the rugged, crafty, and bomb-centric fantasy we explored in The War Within with a new Fire grenade called Flamefang Pitch, a new visual and fantasy identity for Fury of the Eagle called Boomstick, and a host of new Wildfire Bomb talents and synergies.

Survival Hunter had a substantial number of abilities that were competing for your attention at any given time. Coordinated Assault and Flanking Strike have been combined into a new burst cooldown called Takedown that strives to take the best parts of both spells and blend them into one moment. We also made the tough decision to redesign Mongoose Bite. We feel confident that simplifying Mongoose Bite will allow us to carve out more interesting design space for Survival both now and in the future.
Lastly, in Midnight, we’d like Survival Hunter’s area damage to come from their explosives: Wildfire Bomb, Boomstick, and Flamefang Pitch, and as such we’re removing Butchery and its associated effects. We expect Raptor Swipe (Survival Hunter’s Apex Talent) to provide meaningful and exciting moments of AOE in between your chunky explosive spells.

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Dark Ranger Hero Talents

Black Arrow provides an unusually high amount of damage relative to the rest of Marksmanship and Beast Mastery’s kits. In Midnight, we’re making some adjustments to ensure that Dark Ranger’s effects don’t completely overshadow the core abilities of Marksmanship and Beast Mastery.

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Sentinel Hero Talents

Sentinel has been rebuilt and redesigned for Midnight. Our goals with this update were targeting the Keystone and Capstone, since that was where a majority of the tree’s complexity stemmed. This updated version of Sentinel should provide more active and directed gameplay, require substantially less tracking, be more deeply ingrained into the playstyles of Marksmanship and Survival, all while being less visually and audibly noisy.

[Mezzy-emerald-dream (Mezzy)]

Just wanted to provide some feedback based on the initial changes and general pain points, from a Beast Mastery main perspective. For context on what my perspective is my main content in WoW, other than being a big collector, is Mythic+ and have been in the +15-16 range these last two seasons:

Hunter’s Mark
This spell has gone through a lot of iterations over the years and now it feels like we’re repeating history in a way. I’m happy to see Hunter’s Mark becoming useful in all situations. However a lesson learned from the past needs to be reapplied now. Applying Hunter’s Mark is a giant pain in the butt. It’s on the GCD and it has a 1 target limit. In the past this was solved by having Hunter’s Mark automatically apply (if I remember on arcane shot cast) and this should be the case again. Make it so that Hunter’s Mark is the same type of automatic debuff such as the Monk’s and Demon Hunter’s debuffs.
If for whatever reason you don’t want to do that, please take Hunter’s Mark off the GCD so we can macro it into our spells like the last time we were in this section of Hunter’s Mark design cycle.

Multi Shot/Wild Thrash
I completely understand why the changes were made as they were. In endgame content Multi Shot feels like nothing more than an annoying maintenance spell you have to press every 6 (in MN 8) seconds to keep your AoE going. However the removal of Multi Shot is a really awful change for other types of content. I really really miss having a repeatable AoE spell for pulling multiple packs in outdoor content and in farming legacy content. For this last one especially also having Barrage removed really sucks.
Please keep in mind that when designing talent trees there’s more to the game than just the endgame instanced content.
Please give us Multi Shot back as a CD-less AoE spell (and preferrably Barrage for legacy content too).

As a side note, Wild Thrash, with its 8 second CD, currently can’t even be used to pull a single pack of mobs. When targetting a mob and pressing Wild Thrash, your pet does the AoE attack where it’s currently standing. It does not charge at the target and then perform the attack.

Stampede
I like the idea of moving the current Pack Leader tier set bonus into the capstone talent. However there’s one giant pain point with this version of Stampede. And that’s that the tank doesn’t see your stampede. So in Mythic+ where the tank moves around a lot to do things like chain pull the tank moves mobs out of Stampede because they can’t see it’s there. So please either change it so that others can see your Stampede or change it so that the Stampede direction changes to your target, and not a static direction from the moment you triggered Stampede.

Dire Beasts/Guardians
A quality of life change I would really appreciate is if dismissing pets outside of combat (for example to skip sneakily past some trash) would also dismiss your dire beasts/hati/fenryr so there’s 0 chance of a ninja pull or having to wait for them to run out their timer to dissapear. Of course this request is really specifically for out of combat dismissing only. Your dire beasts should not be dissapearing in combat when you dismiss pet to swap to a different pet for a different utility spell.

General Thoughts In Regard To Pruning
I think the general changes to stuff like Bestial Wrath and Barbed Shot are okay. The barbed shot changes will only really matter in the first tier of an expansion. Proper Barbed Shot management for Frenzy stacks typically becomes irrelevant once we get more Haste, which is why the first tier of every expansion has typically felt bad on BM.

I’m not a big fan of not being able to reduce the cooldown of Bestial Wrath with Barbed Shot anymore but that’s just because I’m a creature of habbit. I’m sure it’s just a matter of getting used to it and having to change the muscle memory of my combat expectations when pressing the button.

[Mezzy-emerald-dream (Mezzy)]

Wanted to provide some further feedback as we’re now into the 5th Alpha build.

Talent Point Requirements

It feels like there’s portions where too many talent points must be spent to get basic rotation functionality. This causes you to not be able to go very deeply in choice nodes later down the tree. This is the case for Bestial Wrath (3 talent points to get it to the 30 seconds the dev notes state you want the CD to function) and for Beast/Kill Cleave (3 points for mandatory AoE).

Multi Shot/Wild Thrash
Going to have to repeat myself on this one. Just making the pet charge before Wild Trash doesn’t take away the huge pain points that have been introduced with this change. The removal of Multi Shot is a really awful change for the types of content that aren’t endgame instanced content. I really really miss having a repeatable AoE spell for pulling multiple packs in outdoor content and in farming legacy content. For this last one especially also having Barrage removed really sucks.
Please keep in mind that when designing talent trees there’s more to the game than just the endgame instanced content.
Please give us Multi Shot back as a CD-less AoE spell (and preferrably Barrage for legacy content too). I want it to be it’s own ability separate of wild trash but if the monkey paw must curl then make it a choice node between Wild Thrash and Multi Shot so that players can choose Multi Shot for world/legacy content

[Ossyra-silvermoon]

I see that Trick Shot talent still is only active from 3 targets and above. This is still not optimal as MM hunters still need to depend on the multi-shot after each skill. It should be changed to be active for 8 sec or something like it so we can use 2 or more skills in 1 multi-shot. Not to mention that in Mythic if 2 enemies are left you are practically useless or you have 2 bosses for e.g. Floodgate. We need to have a better use of Multi-shot than what is currently as MM is not as popular for Mythic as the BM hunter is currently.

[Huntpaws-silvermoon]

surival hunter has way to few malee attacks. for being melee spec

[Annoachi-shadowsong]

Beast Mastery hunter:

The spec feels barren for lack of a better description, and with the current talent tree set up it takes so much to get to utility spells and spells in general.

The big thing for me right now though is the removal of mutlishot. The replacement for mutlishot is honestly simple terrible in outdoor and questing content. It doesn’t have the same utility or same use.

As a general class fantasy thing, I like that at least something in beast mastery felt like they came from the hunter even if beast cleave was a component.

Others in this thread have already said what I feel in more articulate ways, but loosing mutlishot’s utility in open world content is a huge loose for the spec, as is loosing that aoe pull ability, especially something that doesn’t just send pet first.

Right now in general, the spec feels hollow and sluggish.

I’m also going to bring up possibly the elephant in the room. I don’t think the talent trees in their current form work. They still have a lot of the dependency complexity problems, as well as having what would be baseline class abilities as talents. In addition to this, as I found with levelling in remix, lower levels with these talent trees do not feel good because so much is missing and so much takes time to get deeper into the trees.

I’m not suggesting any solution right now other than bringing back multi shot for beast mastery, but this is the most basic fix for deeper problems.

[Valanos-ragnaros]

Marksmanship Feedback:

First of all Aimed Shot cast time is too long, it doesnt feel good to wait 3 seconds on a cast thats rotational. Kill Shot doesnt feel like a strong button for Sentinel hunters at all, maybe make it hit harder? The new Headshot talent also made the playstyle a lot better imo.

With the removal of Explosive Shot and having Volley ‘‘take its place’’ it needs atleast 30 sec cd baseline and not talented (we also lose the talent that reduced Explosive Shots cd even more). I also wish Volley got the @target choice that you gave Blizzard, Rain of Fire and so on. It would make it more fluid when it got shorter cd. Would it be cool to have it consume Presice Shots aswell maybe?

The new Unload talent is really cool imo so please keep it .

For Dark Ranger im overall pretty happy with where it is, Wailing Arrow back is cool and thematic and makes Trueshot feel like an Ultimate Ability rather than a stim boost. Not that big fan of the Dark Minion undead model.

For Sentinel the rework is so much better than what we have in TWW and much more reliable. The Chakram is cool, but not that visible. I also noticed that for Blood DK that specs into Deathbringer gets a new animation for Blood Boil to make it more thematic, would be cool to have Rapid Fire change color from red to something more fitting to arcane as it now deals an additional arcane damage. And lastly there was a cool animation that went with Aimed Shot with the recent TWW Sentinel tier set that was very thematic, would be cool to keep it somehow (>.> Rapid Fire).

[Vynlor-argent-dawn]

Just wanted to provide my feedback as well. It’s mostly about Marksman, as I main it, with some smaller notes about Beast Master and Survival.

The current flow/rotation of Marksman on live, is one of the best it’s ever been. And the current build on Beta, ruins almost all of it.

Streamline/Aimed Shot

Streamline (to improve Aimed Shot’s casting speed) has been introduced because in encounters, it felt very punishing to move as Marksman. Standing still for 2.5 seconds isn’t fun, and makes it feel punishing to dodge stuff. Aimed Shot was still a longer cast, but flowed very well and felt good to press with Streamline. Removing this brings back the issues why it was introduced in the first place. Please don’t remove it.

Explosive Shot/Lock and Load

Incredibly fun, cool, and again flows really well. Explosive Shot was a great tool in the old ranged survival toolkit, and has been clunky for a long while. This talent, together with Schrapel Shot and Magnetic Gunpowder gave Marksman another button to press, without feeling out of place in the rotation. Removing this makes the rotation feel more bland again, just revolving around Aimed Shots, Rapid Fires, and Arcane/Multi-Shot.

Headshot/Kill Shot/Black Arrow

The current iteration of this talent feels incredible, especially as Dark Ranger. Being able to “consume” your Precise Shots with a Black Arrow/Kill Shot (while also giving Trick Shots thanks to Bleak Powder/Umbral Reach), makes it feel fun, powerful, and less clunky to play. No need to shove a Kill Shot/Black Arrow between your rotation, as it was just part of your rotation now. Removing this makes it feel like a seperate button again, instead like a powerful and fun button that flows well with your rotation.

Marksman has felt clunky for a long while, and the current build on War Within is the best it’s been in years. Many players are satisfied with the current flow and rotation, and removing it all just one expansion later feels weird. Marksman on the Midnight Beta doesn’t only feel slow and clunky to play, but also punishing as it takes way too long to cast your Aimed Shots again, if we need to dodge stuff in encounters. Please consider to keep the current version of Marksman, for all the reasons stated above.

Beast Mastery

Combat in AoE scenarios feels weird without Multi-Shot, I think it’s better to bring it back.

Survival

I like being able to Dual Wield again, having Axe Toss as an ability, but mixing it with all those bombs and explosions doesn’t really feel blend well together. My suggestion is to replace it with poisons, and to bring back Serpent Sting for it. Assassination Rogue doesn’t have to be the only spec to use it, as many other specs also use fire, light, etc. (Those explosions fits better in a potential future Tinkerer class.)

[Nyraeth-emerald-dream]

I’ve managed to spend some time on the beta today despite the memory leak issues, and I have a few thoughts on the BM hunter changes:

1. Wild thrash.

While this new ability makes it much more simple to aoe as you can just press it on cooldown instead of having to actively track your beast cleave (which I had to use an addon for, so I think this is a positive change), the ability itself currently feels unsatisfying to use. This is because it takes away a fairly satisfying animation of your hunter shooting multiple arrows, and instead gives the animation to your pets - which can be great, except often you can’t see them because they’re behind enemies or simply lost in the chaos of melee. This means that it is yet another ability where it feels like your hunter is just yelling ‘hit it harder’ at their pet. In my ideal world, the ability would retain some kind of shooting animation from your hunter as well, to keep it more visually interesting and maintain the feeling of working in coordination with your pets instead of just yelling at them. Dark ranger already sets a precedent for a BM hunter with heavier focus on their shots, so multi-shot makes perfect sense for these kinds of hunters.

Additionally, the loss of multi-shot makes soloing legacy content more annoying, as your pet often doesn’t keep up very well when running through old dungeons or raids. This could easily be resolved by making it a choice node (which could also help with my visual issue, as it would let hunters choose if they want their hunter to look more pet-focused or shot-focused.)

2. Withering fire

Personally, I think the reduced duration of withering fire makes it less fun when it appears. While I like that it’s now tied to bestial wrath to make that button feel more impactful (particularly since we’ve lost my favourite CD, call of the wild, which in live rn feels pretty awesome to press because it’s pretty much a nuke), the shorter duration has really taken away a lot of the fun of withering fire and dampens the overall impact since you only really get off 1-2 black arrows with it and half the duration is taken up by your wailing arrow cast. To be completely honest, I would prefer to see call of the wild come back (but on the 1 min CD from the BM season 3 tier set bonus) and have withering fire tied to that again. However, I recognise not everyone likes CoTW as much as me.

3. Wailing arrow

Honestly, I just wanted to say that I’m very happy with its current implementation. There’s some skill expression here as you have to use it at the right time to avoid losing out on a black arrow proc from your withering fire. I have missed this ability, and attaching it to bestial wrath is a nice way to bring it back.

4. Barbed shot and bestial wrath.

I am a bit disappointed to have lost the interaction between barbed shot and bestial wrath’s cooldown. It gave a sense of control over the cooldown - e.g. When running heroic manaforge, my raid group did the standard tactic of popping hero/BL during the phase where Salhadaar drains his dragon. Sometimes I would accidentally hit my bestial wrath on CD at the wrong time during the short pre-amble before he starts draining, meaning it wasn’t going to be up in time for the bloodlust if I didn’t do something about it. However, by sacrificing a little bit of damage and switching up my rotation, I could use barbed shot to get bestial wrath ready just in time for the hero, meaning I could then do a lot more damage during that phase. It made the mistake feel recoverable, and made the process of doing so a little bit exciting. With the relationship to the cooldown removed, barbed shot just feels much less interesting to press, and tbh its made the whole rhythm of BM feel a bit more stagnant as everything can be done on a near exact timer now. However, if we don’t ever get this relationship back, I do like that bestial wrath has such a short cooldown to compensate.

5. Frenzy

Honestly, I’m glad this was removed. It was impossible to track without an addon, and frustrating when you’d lose it because of something like an unavoidable fear/stun that came out 0.2seconds before your barbed shot came off CD.

5. Cooldown manager

I just wanted to mention here that currently neither black arrow nor wild thrash are on the cooldown manager, which feels like a major oversight as these are both very much abilities you want to use as soon as available. I have an awful lot of other thoughts on the CD manager but I’m going to put them on the appropriate forum.

6. Dark hound

Incredibly small gripe here, but it makes me sad when the dark hounds die on expiration. Kinda kills the fantasy of BM being about animal mastery when you’re summoning in disposable dogs. I’d also love some glyphs to be able to change the appearance of the dark hounds, e.g. to dark cats or birds, or even shadowy versions of your own pets.

7. Class tree

Right now the class tree feels quite awkward. It’s very annoying to pick up most of our essential utility, and I feel like there’s a lot of filler nodes compared to the live version. Pathfinder being near the bottom of the tree just feels… Off, and overall it just feels like there’s too many nodes that just make small increases to percentages rather than offering anything actually interesting.

8. Bursting shot

I am begging you to bring this back, please I use it constantly. It’s useful both in group content (e.g. positioning important ads during a raid encounter) and in solo (e.g. kiting, part of a defensive toolkit that’s not just about pressing a button to reduce damage).

Anyway, thank you for coming to my rant.

[Aggorn-argent-dawn]

Sv Hunter feedback

The pruning itself is way to much. One of the better aspect of this spec is the hard to learn but feels rewarding when you succeed. All of that is gone now.

It is a ranged spec now without the fun of a ranged spec.

Boomstick, please replace this and add Fury of the eagle or spearhead back. Its clunky with terrible animation and sound affects, and simply does not fit the sv hunter theme. Add a 4th tinker/bomber spec to it if you want but this isn’t working. It fits maybe 3 or 4 races thematically or at least add a Glyph to make it look like a crossbow. Seriously the animation is alpha vanilla wow.

Flamefang Pitch, replace this as well. Its a clunky mechanic, way to loud visually as it blocks everything in sight.

Takedown is fine. Not great, not exciting, just fine. Its range feels too short.

Right now the spec is a raptor strike/kill command spam, it’s insanely boring and i don’t know if the rework was meant to get more people interested in the spec but i can almost guarantee that this spec will be played even less. Thematically it fits gnomes, Goblins and Dwarves, while the hero talents fit Night elf or with pack leader, almost race.

You went for an explosive/fire theme while taking away the Explosive traps and explosive shot. Make it make sense.

[Hazelnøtt-silvermoon]

Survival. One Button Assistant. Does not use Raptor Strike. When bombs are used it spams Kill Command.

[Valanos-ragnaros]

Survival Feedback:

The spec feels really bare and there is only 1 melee ability in the melee spec which at that point just turn it ranged? The theme of the spec feels really unfamiliar to the World of Warcraft Universe, i cant recall a single character that pulls out a shotgun on the go…

I have some suggestions to help with the theme for people that want a more grounded and less tech focused spec.

For Boomstick it would be nice having a choice between Boomstick and Fury of the Eagle, simple and effective imo.

As for Wildfire Bomb it could also have a choice between Wildfire Bomb and Chakrams (BFA version). The Chakrams tooltip goes like this;

| Throw a pair of chakrams at your target, slicing all enemies in the chakrams’ path for X Physical damage. The chakrams will return to you, damaging enemies again.

Your primary target takes 100% increased damage.

Current Wildfire Bomb does magic damage and only 40% increased damage to its primary target. Chakrams would do better in ST, but still do aoe and functions the same, it would be a nice choice for those that really dont want bombs and it would fit the theme of Sentinel.

Beastmastery Feedback:

Beastmaster also feels like its missing a button and Cobra Shot just feels a little bad to press as its animation is really old. As Serpent Sting is gone from every hunter spec why not just use its new animation for Cobra Shot? Its fitting and it looks really good, would also make Cobra Shot feel better to press.

[Eylene-draenor]

1. Now with multishot gone from BM tree there is no multi/aoe ranged attack from hunter itself and it makes simple tagging monsters or doing ranged multi target attacks that don’t involve pets impossible. I get it we’re Beastmasters but it doesn’t mean everything has to depend on beasts. In the very core we’re still hunters imo.
2. What’s with Intimidation? I don’t like that such a baseline talent to me for a pet, a form of cc, i have to play chess to actually have it. Same with camouflage, before I just needed to sacrifice one 2/2 talent and make it 1/2 but now I have to play a game of chess to switch things around like crazy.

[Guilderglade-argent-dawn]

Some feedback on SV Hunter:

Positives:

1. Dual Wield is excellent, a welcome (re)addition
2. Wildfire Imuement is too cool to be locked behind flamefang pitch. Having a weapon imbue gives SV some cool flavour, I’d like to see it be more core to the spec and talent tree. Coating your weapon in fire, poisons etc is good fantasy for a survivalist.
3. I am surprised but happy that both Exhilaration and Survival of the Fittest survived the prune intact, so pleased to have both those defensives and the choice of a heal or a DR.
4. Strike as One rewards good Tip of the Spear usage even more, which I like.
5. Kill Command not having charges or a cooldown is a good change, means that even in total downtime there is still something to press.
6. Aspect of the Eagle remains, niche utility and core fantasy so good to see it staying.
7. The removal of the silly hand crossbow for like half the abilities. It was immersion breaking and made the spear feel useless by comparison.

However, there are some pretty enormous pain points for me, which would make me very sad to see go live for SV:

1. Boomstick is totally bizzare and out of place in this spec. It does frankly absurd damage compared to other abilities, and shoves the gun fantasy right in the middle of the melee spec. Now Blood and Night elves and whoever else pull a dwarven blunderbuss out of their backside for no apparent reason! The place in the tree and all of its enhancements could be re-replaced by Fury of the Eagle and it would fit so much better as a core ability SV players have had for years.
2. There was no conceivable reason to not just make Takedown a new version of Coordinated Assault. For continuity for players coming back in Midnight and expecting to see some cooldown they recognise, its an odd choice to just change its name and icon.
3. I can’t work out if Raptor Swipe would benefit from or add stacks of Mongoose Fury, it would be good to see that on the Tooltip for clarity. The same can be said for other abilities which buff Raptor Strike (like Wallop).
4. Tip of the Spear as a resource is cool - why not make it a class resource on the health bar like Combo Points or Chi? It would be much clearer in a world without addons for it to appear there rather than be a buff to track.
5. While Explosive Shot itself wasn’t that interesting, SV being one of the few specs to have something happen when their major cooldown ended was interesting, perhaps in a future build considering how to bring back that flavour would be appreciated.
6. The placement of Shrapnel Bomb, Sic’ Em and Bloodseeker is really strange considering they work together. Compare this tree to say Havoc DH where all the movement build is a neat talent progression down one side is strange to say the least. On this point, without butchery to apply a bleed the whole arsenal of bleeds and to make bloodseeker worth it isn’t clear and seems to lack depth. This is something else Fury of the Eagle’s return could help solve, as it could reasonably have a bleed component.
7. Small point, but hatchet toss is completely pointless, I’m not sure why its even there.

Hopefully these points are useful for the Hunter team. Thanks for reading!

[Alluviel-blackhand]

@Guilderglade-argent-dawn

Positives:

Yeah I was so confused when I was suddenly pulling out a shotgun, it feels so out of place. I already disliked the focus on explosives since I think Survival should be more a “trapper” fantasy, but now having 4 shotgun shots in the rotation just feels so weird

[Cordrick-silvermoon]

This is something that is not being fixed the moment you implemented the unbreakable bonds talent. Even with the talent selected, the command pet skill does not change in the the pet specific ability.

If I try to use the pet spell in the spellbook it either is greyed out or does not show at all. This really needs to be addressed. It’s going to be a full year with a broken talent.

[Aeldorias-die-aldor]

Tested just a bit survival hunter. I’m not enough versed to talk about balance, but i will give feedback on theme:

• The change to dual wield is awesome and long overdue. Animations need some work though.
• Boomstick, Flamefang Pitch and Wildfire Grenade are awful thematic choices. Especially with the two hero talents available.
• Especially Sentinal clashes with the bombs thematic.

My proposal to fix the theme:

• lean into the moonglaive theme of sentinel for the theme of survival a bit, but not too much.
• wildfire bomb should be turned into something like “hunters glaive/axe” or something along these lines, throwing a moonglaive/axe or similar weapon dealing bleeding damage instead of fire damage. The ability would stay the same, but the theme would be more appealing
• Boomstick should be turned into a more general “weapon flurry”, or similar, where we use the weapon we are wielding instead of pulling out a shotgun
• Flamefang Pitch could bring back an old trap: caltrops. better theme and could also deal bleeding damage.
• talents that refer to explosives or fire should then of course be changed to fit the more weapon and bleeding related style

If some people like the explosive theme, these would make a great set of glyphse

[Draspect-ravencrest]

Over the years there have many events (like MoP/Legion Remix), many new races and so on, resulting in having more than one hunter. I hate having to farm special hunter pets on each hunter. I would really appreciate it if hunter pets would be added to collections or something like that.

Especially with the required work to acquire certain hunter pets due to rare spawns and people spawn camping.

[Emie-sulfuron]

Survival Hunter – After Several Days of Testing, the Spec Has Become Boring and Lost Its Identity

I’ve been testing Survival seriously for the last 3–4 days, and I’m honestly concerned.
I rarely complain about class design, but here it feels necessary: the spec has become boring, hollow, and almost unrecognizable.

I understand the Midnight philosophy of simplifying rotations. That’s fine in theory.
But Survival has been simplified so aggressively that the spec no longer has any real identity. I genuinely don’t know what I’m playing anymore.

Single target is serviceable, clearly tuned for Mythic+ bosses.
But the moment you step into AoE, everything collapses. This used to be the “explosive melee” spec… chaotic, dynamic, and satisfying. Now AoE feels like a prototype:

Press Boomstick → throw grenade → spam the same button → wait.
That’s literally the entire gameplay loop.

And the worst part is: it’s just boring. There’s nothing to manage, nothing to interact with, no decision-making.
For a spec that’s meant to feel explosive and energetic, the new AoE design has zero soul. It feels like a ST spec awkwardly pretending to do AoE.

About Boomstick: I’ll be polite, but… the animation feels totally out of place.
Every time my character suddenly pulls out that shotgun, I genuinely ask myself: “What is this supposed to be in the Survival fantasy?”
It completely clashes with the theme, and visually it feels more like an Outlaw Rogue gimmick than a Hunter ability.

I’ve really tried. I’ve spent days giving the spec a fair shot.
But Survival was already played by very few people, and stripping away what little identity it had left might be the final blow.

Please consider bringing back some of its core identity actual AoE mechanics, meaningful interactions, and visuals that match the fantasy before the spec becomes a “press two buttons and wait” playstyle permanently.