Feedback: Hunters

#1 - June 5, 2024, 7:06 p.m.

In this thread, we’ll be testing and talking about Hunters in The War Within. Look here for posts from the development team as adjustments and bugfixes are made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

The War Within Beta

All classes’ Hero Talent trees are available for testing. Please keep in mind that this is a Beta environment:

• There may be UI elements on the talent panel that are placeholder, including things like talent icons, text, or final UI art.
• Some talents may not be functioning yet, or may be marked as not yet implemented (NYI).
• Some new spell visuals and audio may still be a work in progress.
• There are some talents that are not fully tuned yet. This is expected, and we will implement tuning adjustments throughout testing.

The combat design team has two big areas of focus at this time:

• Finish work on changes to talents, especially wherever Hero Talents still need adjustments.
• Fix bugs that are blocking testing of new talents.

Working from Feedback

Alpha feedback thus far has been of great benefit to us.

Now that we are entering Beta, our focus on Hero Talent trees is shifting away from reworks and design changes and towards tuning and refining. We want to thank you so much for all the forum posts, videos, and discussions all over the internet. Your feedback and impressions have been invaluable for bringing their identities to life and making them fit into what you love about the classes you play.

We are looking forward to hearing from more of you as you get a chance to try Hero Talents for yourself. We are specifically interested in feedback or impressions on these topics:

• Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree. This could be due to damage profile, utility, defensives, or something else.
• Hero Talent trees that you feel are either too strong or too weak in power level compared to other options.
• Hero Talents whose functionality is confusing, unclear, or difficult to track during gameplay.
• Hero Talent choice nodes that you feel could offer more meaningful choices.

Again, Thank You

Feedback throughout the Alpha test was highly impactful on our design of the game, and we look forward to refining every class with you in the Beta. Thank you!

– The World of Warcraft Combat Design Team

#2 - June 5, 2024, 7:47 p.m.

Hello Hunters!

Those of you who might be looking at today’s first Beta build will notice some unannounced changes and/or additions to the Hunter class tree.

These changes are part of the Hunter class tree update, which will be included alongside spec tree updates for Beast Mastery, Marksmanship, and Survival in next week’s Beta build.

We appreciate your patience and are excited to officially reveal these changes to you soon!

#67 - June 11, 2024, 10:29 p.m.

Hello Hunters! We’re very excited to unveil the class and spec tree updates for Hunter today!

We had a few goals going into this update, and we wanted to communicate those so the Hunter community will have some more direction when giving feedback in the coming weeks.

Across the Hunter core tree and all spec trees, we had these goals:

• Improve secondary stat scaling across all Hunter specializations
• Condense existing damage effects
• Conservatively expand on the range of Hunter utility
• Solidify rotational gameplay and fantasy of each spec

Core Tree

The Hunter core tree had a substantial amount of throughput relative to other core trees, which all had to be generic given how differently each spec can utilize the Hunter class tools and spells. This led to a lot of passive damage instances and didn’t do a ton to expand on each spec’s gameplay.

We’ve culled a lot of passive damage procs in the core tree, added some more situational utility, expanded on Hunter defensives, and made sure that each Hunter spec can meaningfully utilize the spells available to them in their core tree.

Beast Mastery

Beast Mastery’s gameplay has remained solid through Dragonflight, and we weren’t interested in rocking the boat too violently with this update.

Beast Mastery and the Hunter class in general have had a host of passive damage over time effects across many abilities. To help add some more cohesion to all these disparate damage over time effects, we added some bonuses like Basilisk Collar to help push the damage over time gameplay in a very Beast Mastery direction.

Beast Mastery is not a damage over time spec, and we are aiming to keep it that way. Your pets will always be the primary source of your damage and the DoTs you apply will more often than not be completely passive or passive procs-- but we felt the sheer number of DoT effects Beast Mastery has merited some deeper support.

Lastly, we were interested in pushing on the boundaries of Beast Mastery’s fantasy by adding talents like Huntmaster’s Call. We feel that it is important for Beast Mastery to be primarily about your tamed and summonable pets, but we’re also interested in more deeply expressing the “Wildcaller” part of Beast Mastery’s fantasy. We hope that calling upon beasts of legend and summoning swarms of crows should help to make you feel like the flavor of Hunter that can call upon the wilds to aid you in battle.

Marksmanship

At the beginning of the update process, we were feeling mostly pleased with the individual effects found across the Marksmanship tree. However, we had more of an issue with how these effects all worked in concert.

Precise Shots is a meaningful and expressive part of Marksmanship gameplay, but currently Aimed Shots has a hard time sharing the spotlight with all the other various effects found across the Marksmanship tree—especially during Trueshot. We are aiming to “unclog” the Marksmanship Trueshot rotation with a redesigned Eagletalon’s True Focus. With Eagletalon’s True Focus talented, firing an Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot will immediately fire another Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot that will benefit from and consume Precise Shots. This should help you to continue to get value out of Precise Shots in your Trueshot rotation, and you can focus on the more exciting parts of Trueshot, which are Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire.

The Wind Arrow suite of talents have been an exciting visual and gameplay component of Marksmanship for quite some time, but their effects and bonuses have gotten more complex over time. With this update, we wanted to dramatically simplify the effects of Legacy of the Windrunners and add some more exciting payoffs via a now-passive Wailing Arrow and an update to the Readiness capstone that should add some more skill expression and further increase the excitement of Trueshot.

Lastly, we wanted to ensure Marksmanship was owning its niche of burst AoE. Talents like Kill Zone and Rapid Fire Barrage are intended to not only be fantasy-forward and exciting talents in their own right, but encourage groups to try out a Marksmanship hunter if they want some sizeable burst every 60 seconds.

Survival

Survival has had a few different iterations over the course of WoW’s history, and with the addition of the Dragonflight talent tree, we saw a collision of many effects both old and new. With this talent tree update, we wanted to take a swing at making Survival’s kit more cohesive and taming some of the more complicated effects across the tree.

The more impactful core change to Survival is going to be Tip of the Spear’s new design. We really liked the story that this talent told and the gameplay behind it-- the Survival Hunter and their pet working in concert to deal more damage. As such, we’re expanding its effects on the talent itself and also opening it up to be augmented across the talent tree in various ways. We hope that this new core rotational concept will help to create satisfying gameplay and help to sell the Survival fantasy a bit more.

Many of Survival’s spells were either very simple (Flanking Strike) or incredibly complex (Coordinated Assault + Supporting Talents). We wanted to take some steps to smooth out the average complexity of Survival’s talents while also honing in on the core rotational gameplay and how that might be more cleanly augmented by supporting talents. More complicated talents like Deadly Duo and Wildfire Infusion have been replaced with effects that are simpler, stronger, and have more moment-to-moment implications for your gameplay.

Explosions are a core part of the Survival experience, and alongside the core rotational changes we made, we also proliferated access to Wildfire Bomb and Explosive Shot. Grenade Juggler and the new Bombardier are working in concert to make Explosive Shot a more appealing and excitement-driving rotational spell, and we hope you enjoy blowing things up in the War Within!

Lastly, we are aware that Wildfire Infusion’s previous iteration provided a great splash of color to the Survival experience that is now lost. We are interested in exploring ways we can amp up the visual excitement of Survival in the future, but we do not have anything to share at this time.

Phew, that’s a lot of changes! We are really excited to read everyone’s feedback regarding these updates and can’t wait for you to get your hands on them!

Thank you for reading!

#798 - June 27, 2024, 2:10 a.m.

Hello Survival Hunters!

We’ve been reading your feedback regarding the recent changes to Mongoose Bite, Mongoose Fury, and Flanking Strike and want to provide an update regarding those changes.

One of our goals with the Survival Hunter spec tree update was to better define niches for each of Survival’s tandem pet-and-hunter attack abilities. Since then, we’ve made changes to Coordinated Assault and Spearhead to better define their use cases as well as the narrative sell of their effects, and last week we felt that it was Flanking Strike’s turn for an update.

We don’t feel that our previous iteration of Flanking Strike fits perfectly within Survival’s kit, but given your feedback, we also don’t think that it being an occasional replacement for Kill Command is a better direction. We plan on reverting Flanking Strike to its previous iteration, where it will remain a separate ability that doubly benefits from Tip of the Spear. We’ll put more thought into Flanking Strike’s place in Survival’s kit in the meantime, but we don’t expect to have a new iteration on this ability’s direction any time soon.

Similarly, we don’t love how Mongoose Fury and Tip of the Spear can pull you in a separate direction rotationally (as previously stated). It’s clear that this new direction for Mongoose Bite invalidates an iconic part of the Survival Hunter experience. For now, we plan to return Mongoose Bite and Mongoose Fury to their previous iterations. We’ll spend time finding a more elegant way to meld the two rotational styles that simultaneously preserves their gameplay.

That’s all for today. We appreciate your continued feedback! Thank you!

#1489 - July 30, 2024, 10:27 p.m.

We’d like to call your attention to adjustments we’re making in the next Beta build.

• HUNTER
  • An issue with Ghillie Suit not activating when uncovered by Flare effect has been resolved.
  • Hero Talents
    • Dark Ranger (Marksmanship/Beast Mastery)
      • Dark Chain visual now only appears on the effected target and is removed at the end of the effect.
      • Black Arrow is now displayed as a square.
      • Black Arrow damage increased by 100%.
      • Withering Fire damage increased by 100%.
    • Pack Leader (Beast Mastery/Survival)
      • An issue with Den Recovery refreshing duration while below 50% health has been resolved.
      • Den Recovery now adds the extra duration to targets below 50% health on cast.
      • An issue with Beast of Opportunity not summoning a pet when no target is selected on Bestial Wrath cast has been resolved.
      • Beast Mastery
        • Vicious Hunt damage reduced by 15%.
        • Howl of the Pack’s critical strike damage bonus reduced to 3% per stack (was 5%).
      • Survival
        • Vicious Hunt damage increased by 50%.
        • Howl of the Pack critical strike damage bonus increased to 7% (was 5%).
        • Scattered Prey’s Butchery damage increase increased to 40% (was 25%).
        • Scattered Prey’s damage buff is applied every cast (was every other cast).
  • Beast Mastery
    • Laceration damage reduced to 5% (was 15%).
    • Kill Command damage reduced by 20%.
    • Huntmaster’s Call Hati and Fenryr attack damage reduced by 33%.
    • Dire Beast damage reduced by 10%.
    • Pet Melee, Smack, and Stomp damage reduced by 10%.
    • Barbed Shot damage reduced by 25%.
    • An issue with Territorial Instincts summoning an extra pet when talented into Animal Companion has been fixed.
  • Survival
    • Flanking Strike Hunter damage reduced by 10%.
    • Flanking Strike pet damage reduced by 75%.
    • Flanking Strike and Harpoon now pull you to the edge of your target’s hitbox, rather than the center.
    • Wildfire Bomb initial damage dealt to primary target increased to 80% (was 40%).
    • Wildfire Bomb damage reduced by 25%.
    • Raptor Strike damage increased by 5%.
    • Mongoose Bite damage increased by 5%.
    • Flanking Strike damage increased by 10%.
    • Explosive Shot damage reduced by 5%.
    • Fixed an issue preventing Flanking Strike’s pet damage from scaling with the Hunter’s attack power.
    • Fixed an issue preventing Flanking Strike and Kill Command from scaling with Hunter’s Mastery.
      • Developer’s note: These fixes resulted in Flanking Strike pet damage dealing ~6x as much damage as it did previously.