So I’ve been having fun with a ‘melee’ hunter alt but have to say that right now Flanking Strike is garbage.
It feels like it should be a spec defining ability but its 30 sec cd and low proc chance just hold it back and you end up relying on your pet for 80% of your damage. Would love to see this down to a 10 second CD, procs would still be exiting to stack and you wouldn’t feel like all you have is a 30 sec CD button in-between auto swings.
I get what you are saying but are you using a 2h? My flanking crits for 400+pet for 120 would be a bit silly to put it on a 10 sec cd with chance of raptor resetting it dont you think?
Not that I don’t believe you, but you hit for 200 in single melee hits? Because otherwise it’s impossible for flanking strike to do that much.
Honestly with decent pre-BFD stuff, flanking strike could do 200% weapon damage that still wouldn’t make it a strong skill.
I mean without buffs its hitting for 160 with the polearm. With DMF+WB its very easy for it to crit 400. Regardless any form of buff to hutners right now is ridiculous. Before they do anything they need to fix the pet dmg.
I really enjoy it though yes it feels slightly undertuned.
The buff duration is too short to ever see the 3rd without some pretty good luck, perhaps it would be reasonable to make the stacking buff slightly weaker, but in return reliably stackable/upkeepable at 3 on a prolonged fight?
With the weapon damage scaling it will inherently hit much harder with a 2h than 1h, shafting dual wielding hunters. Please consider having it scale purely/mostly with AP instead, to give both 2h and dual wield a fairly level field.
Since you only ever get to mongoose bite after a dodge, you will never really benefit from the mongoose bite damage buff. Please consider having the rune modify Mongoose Bite to be usable without dodging, or at the very least proccing from pet dodges too
Thanks! It’s been tons of fun to play melee hunter so far
Yep, totally fine with a 10 sec CD because the inherent nature of Flanking is its a WEAPON DAMAGE based attack. It can only scale so much.
At 60 I could fire off a Bloodthirst once every … 3 seconds? On average, while weaving other abilities as a Fury warr which is an AP scaler and you’re scaling off more damage = more rage.
Having a weapon scaler is strong now but its guna be a really sucky ability at 60 without either more usage or better procs etc.
Flanking Strike should make Raptor Strike an instant ability like it was in Blizzcon. Give the rune some kind of modification so that it doesn’t outweigh every other leg rune (which it does right now anyway due to them being awful), such as making it less desirable for ranged builds, or keep it as is and add the functionality in P2 runes.
Mongoose Bite needs a rune that adds % weapon damage or AP to the attack and more trigger options that just your own dodge for it to be useful in any shape or form. Same goes for Counterattack, the Survival Talent. Otherwise, those abilities will never be used except for PvP in the latter case due to the immobilization.
Let’s hope P2 runes actually fix and create a more solid melee play style.
Yes, because otherwise there is no point in continuing to play hunter if it is to play it in the strict same way as in Vanilla. That wasn’t the goal of SoD though. Already the majority of the hunter’s runes are good to throw away, if nothing is done in P2, what’s the point of continuing.
Hunter runes are in a dire state. As I posted somewhere else:
Heart of the Lion should be turned into an ability that you learn from a quest similar to shaman’s dual wield skill while also removing the 10% personal buff for the hunter as well as its rune status. It will always be the dominant rune of its slot unless there’s another hunter in the group and the alternatives are good enough.
Runes are meant to give options but the design for hunter has been absolutely flawed. Leg runes are all awful except for Flanking Strike (Mongoose Bite’s interaction being useless notwithstanding), chest runes have no options due to HotL and glove runes being all nerfed except for Beast Mastery.
Hunters need a huge rune overhaul.
They should use that opportunity to turn runes like Kill Command into active abilities in your rotation instead of another quasi-pasive that barely gives 5 DPS per use. I don’t dislike the fact that not all pets use it equally but the alternative for those pets (i. e. Wind Serpent right now since pets still need looking at so that more families are competitive) is to deal with the other terrible runes not named Flanking Strike.
Agreed, compared to say Shaman or Warrior runes, it feels like you aren’t getting much “bang for the buck”.
Since hunters are performing quite well at this low bracket, maybe Blizzard has been overly careful of adding too much extra power to the runes.
However, currently we indeed have no real meaningful options that truly change the gameplay, aside from Flanking Strike, such as rogues who have a whole arsenal of extra abilities to choose from which impact weapon choice and gameplay significantly.
Aside from flank, hunters currently have access to stat sticks and passive buffs to existing abilities, that’s it.
Just active testing test
All I see is constant criticism of the Hunter runes and it flabbergasts me that they were super quick to nerf their runes but have done barely anything to address any of the criticism of these runes.
Heart Of The Lion should absolute not be a rune, it should just be a class quest ability like dual wielding, I agree.
However here are a few more of my controversial takes:
Lone Wolf should be removed. Solo hunters do not work. I don’t even know why this ability from retail was even considered.
Beast Mastery should have it’s damage change from +30% to -20% and instead give way more threat and unlock as a proper member icon in groups so healers can target it properly, then it should be moved up to Chest. It’s now a tanking rune.
Cobra Strikes should be moved down to Hands after this change to BM. Gloves need a BM rune and Cobra Strikes always just felt really weird up in the chest rune section.
I could go over all of them but I’m working on a little document to go over all of them proper.
Also, with Lone Wolf gone that would open up a new rune slot for Chest, Blizzard.
Wink wink.
How about a rune that turns Hunters into proper casters and make our magic damage abilities scale properly with spell power or even INT?
Lone Wolf should be removed. Solo hunters do not work. I don’t even know why this ability from retail was even considered.
I don’t like Lone Wolf but I wouldn’t ask for its removal either. Some people crave a sniper fantasy that WoW has never been able to fully deliver imho due to the fact that pets are a huge part of the identity of hunters. But since it is the only class that focuses on and can actually do ranged combat with weapons…
So it’s alright for such a play style to be possible, even if I disagree with it.
What I don’t like is how many players are praying for Lone Wolf to become the norm in order to get rid of pets completely. Lone Wolf can be an option among others but not the default.
One will always win and be used.
Lone wolf isnt used. Because the dps loss is huge.
Lone wolf is just a bad rune, it should be a gameplay enhancing rune like Way of Earth for shamans.
Just a flat % dmg increase is incredibly boring and loses to simple %stat increase.
I have suggested:
increase HP
take 3 seconds off raptor strike
allow traps usable in combat
Having a rune that would allow us to make at least some good use of spellpower mail would be great, there’s just tons of it going to waste in alliance groups without shamen.
Lone wolf is just such a trouble child concept, on one hand it’s just way undertuned for dps, yet also if they increase the damage buff just a little too much, we’re gonna have the pvp freezing → aimed shot combo go totally bonkers damage on well geared hunters, especially on squishies with their wet paper level health pools.
The problem I see is if Aimed Shot can do beefy damage now then increasing it by whatever amount of % is necessary for Lone Wolf to be useful again then people will just complain that Lone Wolf one-shotters are the new problem that needs to be nerfed. Pets also allow for far too many benefits for Lone Wolf to be good in any solo content as you have to keep enemies away to use ranged attacks. Any time I’ve suggested Lone Wolf changes that beef it up to equally useful to Lion people always say that it is now too powerful so I don’t see another option. Hunters are simply not meant to be solo. That’s not how their class or abilities functions and there’s too much rework that has to be done to fix it.
I’d rather have a caster overhaul rune that makes Hunters spell powered oriented as there’s more mechanics that ties into that than there are for Hunters to be able to solo.
But out of curiosity, what would you do to enhance Lone Wolf to make it worthwhile?
@silkz
Yeah when you’re given two options and they are both DPS and all you do is DPS then whichever does more will always be chosen unless the other one RADICALLY changes how the class is played to the point that you’re willing to take the DPS dip just to experience something new. Sadly, none of the Hunter runes offer that, so it’s all just dps this dps that.
@Yangkai
Could also boost damage by making it apply only to melee attacks. Then we wouldn’t need to worry about Aimed Shot one-shotting people potentially. There isn’t really a Survival/Melee rune explicitly on chest anyway. MM is for MM. Cobra Strikes is for BM. Lion is for everyone. Lone Wolf could be explicitly for Melee/Survival by making the damage bonus higher and apply only to melee damage. However I disagree with the traps thing. I think traps should just be usable in combat for all specs like they are in later expansions.
@Beanstalker
Yep, could also make Explosive Shot find its niche a lot better since it does fire damage. Same with Chimera Shot being enhanced by its nature damage from stings. Even Serpent Spread could suddenly become far more viable depending on how much damage is applied to each sting.
Yep, pvp is the point where Lone Wolf just becomes problematic to design around. We’re already inundated with threads about pets being OP even after like 3 nerfs (poison stacks (which was a bug and needed to be fixed), Kill Command now only affecting Bite and Claw and finally BFD boon no longer applies to pets (might be more nerfs I forgot about) so boosting Lone Wolf in the wrong direction is just a recipe for more hunter nerf threads and eventually it’ll be reduced back to being useless again.
@
But out of curiosity, what would you do to enhance Lone Wolf to make it worthwhile?
Since my main motivation to play hunters is the pet, my focus is in having pet variety and making more families competitive. The Scorpid Poison was a good opportunity to make a family that is otherwise overlooked for DPS become a good option in PvE. Sadly, after the KC change and the scaling adjustment, something went wrong there because the damage at 5 stacks, when it’s meant to be good according to the devs, is not even a fraction of what it was. It requires looking at again.
For Lone Wolf, since I don’t care about this rune or play style, I cannot say much. However, I’ve seen suggestions about having it reduce the cooldown of multi-shot or aimed shot and/or add some kind of stacking mechanic that gives you an extra auto shot after a specific amount of shot abilities.
I also want hunter and BM in particular to have an actual rotation and not everything being passives. Kill Command should be an active ability, not necessarily the retail version but definitely an attack in the rotation that orders the pet to deal damage to the target or other effects. They could give it a unique SoD version to it, or to future BM runes instead of copying everything from future expansions.
Some have reported Cobra Strikes being a bit strange when stacks are gained so it may be buggy. Additionally, it only works on ranged shots, so it should be looked at so that it can proc off any critical hit (perhaps 50% of the time) and give 1 stack up to 3 per crit or something so that melee can also benefit. I would rather they change Cobra Strikes into something more involved though.
Melee hunter also needs its rotation solidified by making raptor strike instant and adding scaling to mongoose bite and counterattack. After that core is set, they can add more to it, including in-combat traps and perhaps Improved Aspect of the Hawk to affect melee so that dual wield can be viable for those seeking the Rexxar play style.
PvP is the main issue that hunters face though. Many of their changes stem from what hunters can do at lower levels there. Aimed Shot can already deal huge chunks of damage when critting with the epic crossbow, and it combined with multi-shot and chimera can easily kill low armor/hp players.
But PvP alone cannot condemn the class to infinite nerfs, awful runes and lack of adjustments overall. Priests are extremely strong right now and it’s alright, not every class is going to shine at this level bracket. I main shaman and while we don’t have it as bad as warrior, the class will definitely be better in PvP at 40 whereas hunters will become weaker and weaker as levels go up.
My only wish is that the devs take actual feedback like these posts into account and not look only at the complaint flood. I’m still waiting on them to give us more stable slots…