Marksmanship will not be viable in Shadowland in term of M+ and PvP . The good new as MM hunter is Binding Shot baseline, and i kinda like the convenant systems of identity.
Just for convenant ability we got in datamining in wowhead article :
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Night Fae don’t feel attractive for Marksmanship at all , even if Binding shot was not base line, i fear that i don’t see any situation i want to use it.
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Venthyr ability for Hunter got a RNG part, i can understand for BM and Survival they already got RNG, but as Marksmanship the reason i love that spec is because they don’t got that RNG too, so an introduction of RNG system i don’t see it welcomed.
Now for baseline hunter ability :
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Trick Shot : Limit your AoE damage of 3-6 target.
To make trick shot viable in every multiple situation (since now we know that the number when multi-targetting gonna be between 2 and 6) the limitation to make Marksmanship able to correctly doing normal damage is by reducing the requirement of target from 3 to 2 to make it viable in every situation of AoE situation ( and not when the pack of 5 mobs, 3 of the mobs is dead the Marksmanship hunter is now unviable). -
Hunter mark : I’ve created that topic i already made long ago month after blizzcon. Community got some great idea like keeping Hunter mark but removing GCD on it and make only the part where you can reveal the ennemy stealth ( removing the 5% buff damage bonus on the target so more easy to swap target in arena ) :
Hunter mark is actually a magic spell that can be dispelled in arena. that mean if we got a base 100 damage from all DPS in arena, a simple dispell make the marksmanship down with -5% dmg than other classes. He need to reapply buff to stay competitive. But reapplying HM don’t deal damage, the time you gonna need to reapply it is the same time that you should be casting Aim Shot instead.
I am against hunter mark too since it block the marksmanship to easely switch target in arena instead of quickly switch burst like a warlock destruction can do with Chaos Bolt to an another target.
To solve Hunter mark there’s the first option to only set it as revealing ennemy ( so no bonus damage to the target) and undispellable. Or when a hunter mark is on a target on a base 100 damage for all DPS hunter will deal 110 damage in PvP situation to the target.
- Rapid Fire : a channel ability that need to channel for 3 seconds and got 20 seconds. when channeling, you can’t redirect to an another mob. that mean when your target die when half channeling, you loose 50% of the damage done and still got CD.
The only good thing with rapid fire is we can continue the damage behind pillar.
But there’s too many negative point like :
- that spell just 1 cc on you and the spell with 20 second CD is wasted.
- Aimed shot deal less damage with Rapid fire
- Rapid Fire make Steady shot less attractive and feeling usefull to cast.
- when a mob die when half of your channeling, half of your damage is gone and you can’t get back the remaning of the channel somewhere.
- Rapid fire feel only good to regenerate focus when combined with trick shot.
I hope it will disapear in Shadowland. I prefer a more sniper rifle in Shadowland, than a gameplay with Rapid Fire that got too many issue in the design. What we like in the Marksmanship hunter is about more a spell to cast that deal a big shot than a spell to channel that feel like “waiting”.
I prefer a long charged shot to deal huge damage that tiny dart gameplay
Now The reason why Marksmanship will not be viable in PvP :
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Rapid Fire : Same issue than M+, but here you can’t even generate focus and deal damage with rapid fire since that spell got a CD of 20 seconds (countered by anny tiny CC and kidney shot CD for example), so pretty countered by a CC. Since Rapid Fire in BFA is 40% damage in PvP, Marksmanship were easely countered in damage and we were way behind all other classes.
Because Rapid Fire was the 2Nd best source of Damage in PvE , it make in PvP Aim shot damage completly reduced because instead of 70% source damage (if Rapid Fire didn’t exist) it deal now 35% source damage ( when rapid fire is added to spellbook).
That mean 35% of our source damage can be countered with any tiny CC just because Rapid Fire exist in Marksmanship Spellbook. -
Aim shot :
That emblematic spell is why we play marksmanship : a casting spell that can’t be interrumpted and deal serious damage in physical (impacted by armor). My reference i will use to compare is from Chaos Bolt where that spell can be interrumpted, got the same cast frequency in PvP but deal magical damage (pierce armor).
Badly that spell as we see is the same than the Aim shot of BFA and so i can tell my feedback from PvP experience why we struggled hard. It’s beacause that spell is impacted from too much by armor. I have seen in BFA against mage or shadowpriest my aimed shot doing 48 k damage ( instead of 56k damage) but where it came to face above leather aim shot began to be not viable ( mail : 27k damage, Plate : 19k damage) where originally it should deal 56 k damage. And in 8.1 We got a patch that make distant damage that can be blocked, and here a big issue : shield wielder already got a lot of armor. With any of our physical damage it’s now hopeless to try to kill a class that got a shield and a lot of armor already like Holy paladin or Resto Shaman since they can reduce our Aim shot damage by 60% + attack being blocked without using any defensive, and it feel for the hunter that he’s useless when Chaos bolt can deal proprely his designed damage (170k damage) on these classes beacause he deal magical damage.
How to solve that issue : since we are a distant but not melee ( so our interrumpt is 24 instead of 14 seconds) Marksmanship hunter should not be that much affected by armor, so Aim shot can keep his value of damage but it need to pierce armor so at least it feel Marksmanship with other caster ( like mage and warlock) in term of damage because he cast distant spell and must stand by to cast Aim shot.
If i must resume my feedback of BFA since the gameplay in shadowland look greatly the same : when we are using aim shot, Mail and Plate armor targeted by Aim shot will receive a very tiny amount of damage than it should deal and Mail /Plate class consider marksmanship Hunter as more a NPC that deal NPC damage than when they face warlock with Chaos Bolt they feel the danger.
Ion asked us too what spell we want to see off the GCD, here my list and why :
Remove GCD of Trueshot and Double Tap (talent)
The main reason is it’s only buff ability that you often need at the second it launch you need to cast a spell, When they are on GCD that make their “balanced efficiency” way less effective since we loose time beacause of GCD so for exemple instead of 15 second of Trueshot we gonna get more 13 seconds, and that not so cool in term of efficiency of the spell and it’s fustrating to see we loose 2 seconds of Trueshot when we cast it to see we loose time on it .
And for Double Tap the main reason is because of the GCD instead of getting 2 aim shot in the row for example when double tap is activated, it’s almost the same feeling than casting 2 aim shot when Double Tap is desactivated.
It soo fustrating when the design of the spell is designed for burst but the GCD of it ruin teh burst effect beacause the time you have to activate it because of the GCD and then doing a aim shot it’s almost 4 seconds predictable you gonna make a double aim shot when the cast time of aim shot is 2 seconds of it you got the feeling that it’s better to cast 2 aim shot in the row than Aim Shot with Doube tap on.
If you can understand our pain .We suffered soo much in BFA in PvP i just hope Shadowland will make me forget how BFA was a pain for Marksmanship player since we were not viable in the meta and we were rolled on the floor by class like Demon hunter / rogue / DK / Holy Paladin / Elem&Resto Shaman because of our weaknesses of our Spell Design.
My wish for Shadowlands:
I wish a more Sniper Rifle gameplay, with a added spell that consumme all the focus ressuce of the Marksmanship to deal a big shot. I don’t wish a Machine Gun gameplay like we got at BFA with rapid fire spell and a trueshot that don’t feel like a burst cooldown but more like a haste buff.
For what i mean for Sniper Rifle is Spell that spend Focus deal a INSANE amount of damage while we need to stand by to cast BUT when in term of regenerating our focus we pass “into a 2Nd phase” where we deal totally way less amount of damage with our steady shot in order to regenerate focus and we come back as mobile as a hunter.
It’s still Alpha of shadowland and this change is still possible. I hope the team can make this change for Shadowlands.
Thank for reading my feedback, I love the dev team. And thank holinka too for the Player versus Player vendor.
Destrarion
Main Marksmanship Hunter in BFA
Experience : 2K1 Season 2&3 BFA / +19 key in BFA
