Perhars I should start with where I am coming from with my thoughts. I played semi-hardcore WoW from WotKL to the end of Warlords of Draenor (Top 36 world was our guild best endboss at one time). Since then I am playing on and off just casually, leveling different classes, thying mechanics, doing old achievements etc.
So, as you can say from timeline of my experience, I hava almost 0 experience in M+, the content where AoE is basically the king. But when I raided there was no such thing as ‘‘AoE spec’’, practically speaking. BUT, even though I was executing so called ‘‘single target’’ rotation, I was never bored of my class. I played Hunter and Feral.
Nowadays different classes have different ways to deliver AoE damage, through different mechanics and talents and rotations. Sometimes it bring some problems with it, when some specs lose too much ST DPS in order to have competitive AoE, which is, obviously, not fun. And sometimes its just done in non-fun ways, like Fury Warrior having to press Whirlwind every 4 GCD’s, which does 0 damage and there just as a tool, which interfere with the flow. Same could be said about Beastmaster, actually, and of course MM Hunter.
So! I, think that in order for class to be fun, its not necessary for it to be ‘‘complicated’’. Biggest example is current iteration of Ret Paladin. One of the most satisfying melee specs (IMO of course, but everything I say is so… xd).
I think that it would be fun, if MM hunter worked differently. Give it 3 different aspects (or stances like warrior have them or presences like DK use to have) with different effects.
We have a dead talents Light\Heavy ammunition, while the idea is actually kinda fun. So in my head it looks something like this:
You have
- one aspect for single target
- one aspect for low target AoE/Cleave situations (Heavy Ammunition)
- one aspect for hight target count (Light Ammunition)
BUT, you would not need multishot/trickshots, it would just be a passive AoE while you basically performing your ST rotation.
Of course you would need to revisit a talent tree and accompany this with some new talents, where you STILL would have option to lean more into AoE or ST, but the baseline would be kinda ‘‘works everywhere’’ skeleton of a spec. (Hence the Ret Pala reference, it has it main AoE spell in tier 2 talent and can be used even in most Single Target build of all Single Target builds).
That way you still would have to choose what aspect for what pack to pick, dinamically changing it through the course of the dungeon and even one pack. It would also solve the problem of MM 2-target situation.
And of course there would need to be some tweaking, not just throw 100% passive AoE on current iteration of the spec.