What is the actual role of this spec in WotLK Classic?
Is Marksmanship intended to be PvP spec and Survival to be PvE, just like Arms vs Fury Warrior?
This seems somewhat counterintuitive to me, I would expect it to be the other way around. Marksmanship for PvE and Survival for PvP, yet MM Hunter is close to Arms Warrior in DPS Rankings. Worse than Blood DK actually.
Will MM Hunter get any boost later or it was simply never meant to be played in PvE?
MM is mainly a spec about ArP, which is much lower in early Wrath, and for that reason they are very weak till they get ICC gear. (Same as Fury warriors or Frost DKs. Even Combat rogues.)
Which is why most hunts are Surv as that doesn’t need that much gear to be great. Basically it’s endgame’s BM hunter - this is the spec you’re kinda supposed to reroll to when hitting 80.
ArP was nerfed going into patch 3.2.2 (Onyxia, iirc? Pre ICC) on account of Blizzard not liking MM/Feral/Warriors eschewing other stats in favour of it.
This means that effectively four specs were nerfed out of the gate, but especially so now in Ulduar/ToGC where ArP was first finding its legs originally.
That combined with the numerous other casualties on account of being forced to play entire expansions on end-patch balance and you end up with MM being in the state it’s in, unfortunately.
I’ve read something about certain DPS classes performing poorly in phase 1 and scaling up with later phases, however from what I’ve learned about other classes raid performance, Fury Warrior for example is getting better in phase 3, while MM Hunter now perform close to Arms Warrior which is PvP spec.
Feral Druid and Retribution Paladin got new glyphs that boosted their performance, but what’s the case with Fury Warrior getting better?
I’m asking about this because I was never into hardcore raid log parsing and have near zero knowledge about how each class performed in each patch of the original WotLK.
If I understand this correctly, then it’s just the current situation that there is only little if any ArP on mail armor and ranged weapons, and thus Survival despite being more PvP oriented spec, outperform Marksmanship in PvE because it deals most damage as fire and shadow instead of physical, and Serpent Sting with Chimera Shot nature damage is simply not big enough to compensate for the lack of ArP.
MM Hunter performance however does change in phase 4. That is the most important information for me.
Yes, this is the main problem, though I’m not familiar with ToC loot (only raided ICC and RS really).
Exactly. If you have low ArP, you need to do elemental damage. And MM only has stings with arcane shot.
Surv is hard-on elemental dmg.
I don’t know how pets scale with arp, but they probably don’t meaning their power is relative static (which is why BM is only a leveling spec - you’re weak before max anyway, but the pet is beefy enough to keep you safe).
MM is for bringing Improved Hunter’s Mark (and Aimed Shot if a boss requires it) when your group’s Survival wants to parse.
Blizzard always struggled to balance Hunters as their core design is very different from other classes- A mana using ranged physical damage dealing class, with secondary melee abilities (& a pet!).
This led to some very strange design choices like Tranq Shot in Vanilla. Giving some bosses a frenzy affect that only Hunters could dispell, with an ability that had no other use elsewhere in the game.
Due to this it’s often hard to work out what the actual intent was for various Hunter specs.
In original Wrath BM was used for levelling, early expansion PvP, & soloing old content. Surv for early expansion PvE & some PvP, & MM for late expansion PvE & PvP.
As others have mentioned the affect from ArP was nerfed several times during original Wrath. With the final patch balance having the lowest affect from ArP, MM, as a more physical damage based spec has been severely compromised compared to original Wrath.
Surv on the other hand has become more viable by being less reliant on ArP, plus by exploiting a couple of bugs that seem to have been unknown in original Wrath, allowing them to be carried in the expansion so far by the Trap Weaving playstyle.
Trap weaving is controversial amongst Hunter players as some really don’t enjoy it. The inability to trap on Twin Valkyr has highlighed exactly how reliant Hunter viability is on this unintended mechanic with all the Hunter specs being in the bottom 5 specs for every bracket on this fight.
In theory at this point in the expansion MM Hunters should be approching where they were in original Wrath as a decent DPS, but unlike other ArP dependent classes such as Fury Warriors they are still bottom tier for unknown reasons.
With Survival not scaling as well with gear as MM, chances of other weaveless fights, & MM underperforming, ICC is not looking very promising for Hunters.
Actually, tranq shot could be used in pvp to dispel some warrior cooldowns.
In Vanilla Classic?
I don’t believe so, Tranq Shot removes Frenzy effects rather than Enrage, do Warriors have any Frenzy effects in Classic?
It’s possible it could be used to dispell Frenzy (not Beastial Wrath unfortunately) from Hunter pets, but that’s of limited use & probs not worth wasting a GCD on.
Tranq shot changed in TBC & I believe it worked differently on some unofficial servers.
MM scales super well with armour pen so when you get some of that it’ll start to rly shine, sadley most armour pen stuff is icc based there are some items with it but not enough to actually be a mm hunter with good dps in classic rn.
If the patch is the one I’m thinking of in game then it’s whecn arp got heavy nerfed in og wotlk back in the day.
I remember having to regem from prime agility to armour pen and holy hell it made a huge difference same with combat rogue and warrior specs.
That being said wrath classics a different animal pun intended so we will have to see how mass arp will stack as icc comes into play.
The have enrage but no frenzy from what I know, however I dunno if the orc racial is classes as a frenzy or not.
MM will probably do better than BiS sim for multitarget if you keep a non-ArP loadout, but making ArP about 15% worse point for point genuinely sucks.
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