First time poster, couple of questions about bm's balance history over the past few years and their current state

Classes Hunter
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Hi,

My name is Tobi. I’ve been semi-casually playing wow since WotLK, I’ve assisted in developing card games after becoming EU & world champion in one, have reached the rating of 2100 in 2’s & best raiding season ended in 5 or 6/8M.

I don’t really like PvP or raiding for a while now & play wow primarily for the M+ content where I usually end up around the better 1-2% on Rio (hunter only) if i consider the season “good” for my spec of choice and am active at the time.

After picking up BM hunter in BFA I felt like it was the playstyle that fitted me most, having an undervalued toolkit with a simple dps rotation and loads of freedom to move around and play that as close to perfect as I can.

Now, what helps decide if a M+ season is a good one? Well, if your dps-spec is dealing about TANK DMG the feeling of uselessness tends to overtake the feeling of achievement when you complete a M+ dungeon.

During the first season of Dragonflight BM hunter was in that position.
During the greater majority of S1 TWW BM hunter was in that position.

I’ve learned my lesson and started playing elemental shaman in TWW next to my BM Hunter, it was/is very strong and enjoyable but it was not the spec I enjoyed the most.

Now we find ourselves midway in season 2, my hunter got very lucky in the mythics I pugged and find myself at an itemlevel of 673.8, my shaman who I still casually play because M+ is fun is at an Ilvl of 671. When I compare 5 target sims the difference between the 2 is 7.1million overall on 5 targets for 5 minutes, the shaman is simulating for 10mil 5tar 5mins.

If I compare their possible growth the shaman (stormbringer) is simming ±20% higher when it comes to stat increases.

I’ve simmed marksmanship (sentinel) 5min 5tar and even with less desirable secondary stats (25%haste) it’s outsimming BM hunter (packleader) 7.1mil to 9.5mil.

I am doing ok in dungeons, I play my little heart out and can keep up with a 655unholy dk who’s playing well. I can’t lose globals on binding shot/implosive trap or the guy with 673ivl might lose on ‘the meters”.

I consider stunning a hired assassin (motherlode) on his AoE cast but I got my Call of the Wild CD running, my mistake, should’ve played the no CD build that’s doing about as good allegedly.

In 2 weeks from now we’ll be playing with ± 7 ilvls more (turbo boost May 13) and I think BM might find itself just a tad bit closer again to their season 1 status If their scaling isn’t being adjusted.

TLDR Question:
Why are we so weak at the start of the season if we don’t scale?

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In order to understand your weakness, you need to understand your strength.
(Sun Tzu, probably)

How many bosses or encounters in M+ are target dummies, meaning fights where melee doesn’t have to go out of melee and ranged doesn’t need to move?

Well, the answer is what decides how good will you be compared to those classes. And the reason for that is that you are the only spec which has 100% uptime, all the time.

You are a melee spec, having no cast times, that can keep doing max damage while moving at 40 yards range.

In order to account for that, you simmed damage will be lower.

The problem is, the game is mostly balanced around raiding, where there are a lot more mechanics and therefore a lot less uptime for melee and ranged. Your uptime, of course, is unaffected by mechanics.
In M+, however, most trash packs only need interrupts or CC, not movement. You will suffer because of that.

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Hi,

Thx for taking the time to share your views, whilst I see some solid reasoning to your argument I don’t belief they’re fully applicable to the feedback I provided about the state of BM hunter.

If I’m paraphrasing correctly, it is of your opinion that in order to balance out the 100% uptime playstyle of BM hunter, and to help strengthen your argument, the simple rotation that comes along with it, they will deal damage considering that accordingly. The amount of maximum damage you will deal in M+ compared to other DPS specs will be heavily impacted by raid tuning and the fact that downtime/movement isn’t as prevalent.

The ability to cast on the move is what I like most about BM hunter, yet do not be fooled, we too have downtime. It’s not an uncommon accurance for your pet to die, where your pets have to travel before you can use a pet gap closing cast, where your 2nd pet gets dismissed/stays behind, where your pet decides to run back to you after casting your spell instead of queueing his next attack. Where no path is available and the only option is to dismiss/resummon. We also have a somewhat “RNG” based talent tree right now when at times we could end up dealing half damage, but let’s dismiss that subtopic as it is not full downtime.

These little problems happen more often yet not exclusively in M+ compared to raiding, the place where “let the hunter do it” is often the first train of thought. Of course, not every boss has a mechanic with a hunter’s name on it but not every boss has a significant amount of hard to play around DPS downtime.

To quote Bond (very strong elemental shaman) “always think about your ABC’s” (Always Be Casting), even when you have to move out or dodge, most if not all specs can gap close and/or cast meaningful abilities while doing that, some do it better than others. I’ll go as far to believe there’s an extremely limited number of abilities this season where you can’t finish your cast after noticing a beam or circle of death is covering your hitbox. Is this easy? No. Doable? Yes.

Whilst I believe M+ still offers a very healthy number of beams and circles should one really be ±30% DPS potential behind with ±20% less growth?

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I don’t know what this means.

I can’t really defend or explain this further. It’s basically a tax on you for having nearly 100% uptime. In raid this sort of evens out and same on some dungeon bosses. Very few dungeon trash packs though.

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Honestly, some people just say, oh it’s freedom of movement tax.
(completely disregarding the fact that MM is currently busted in M+ atm and is almost as mobile as BM is)
The issue is simple, blizzard has absolutely no idea how to tune hunters properly, they never have and the lack of a proper class designer does not help either.

Tho to give blizzard some credit they have at least tried in TWW I think both BM and MM has had almost complete reworks, but the class is still riddled with bugs and inconsistencies.

BM is currently in limbo where if they buff our AOE damage, the ST damage will spike to stupid numbers as they can’t really tune both separately.

So they have just settled with this is good enough our output is not amazing, but It’s also not absolutely trash ether.

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