Ive read this whole thread, always appreciate seeing enthusiastic hunter players. Its been a year now since Ive dropped my MM as my main, bit still play it as an alt.
So I apologize for being a debbie downer.
On the paper, and as evident in this thread, hunter does seem to have a lot of defensives. And yet, they are still probably the worst in the game, or rather, the most outdated in the game. This set of defensive would be amazing back in SL with extreme burst, but lower sustain meta. Right now, we are playing “high consistent damage” meta.
In PvE it simillar, hunters are avoided in high keys becausw they just cant handle the high consisstent damage
Back to PvP, yeah, you can scatter that Eye Beam or Hunt. You can FD critical spells like Ray/Glacial shatter or Primordial wave burst go and a lot of other things. It feels good. But hunter just dies to other damage and has no way to stop it efficently.
RoS is simply not good in current meta, ever since the crit got nerfed.
FD change is neutral imho. 3 seconds of 90% DR is powerful, but at the expense of class being less slippery and less fun to play. I’ve always viewed FD dispel as a perk of the class. It is especially insulting seeing DH and ret having their own version, and tied to rotational abilities, instead of a defining defensive ability.
That talent from Dark Ranger in TWW seems super OP defensive wise, and would do wonders if we had it now, but I am almost certain it will get nerfed during beta.
I love hunter, but I think it never fully recovered from the CC nerfs. BM goes around that because it has the meta damage profile.
In the end, the whole class was benched on AWC. None of the hunter comps are meta. It will probably get better when DH and outlaw (our biggest counter) gets nerfed. But I am still hoping for a semi redesign. You do to have to go far…just check the pre BFA iterations of hunter.