Blue Response to BM in Class Development Forums (Wild Call Changes)

[randomnamegenerator16]

And I was so happy yesterday when I finally got Mantle. Fuck me.

[BreakerOfWills]

Level a DH. gets Uber nerfbat
Level a hunter. gets Uber nerfbat
im just having the worst luck this expac. Yea mantle is OP. Yea it needs balancing. but the change as blizzards looking at it right now just really seems to be a typical kneejerk overnerf.

if the change goes live, good possibility that i'll try something else. not because "omg not FOTM anymore time to reroll" but just because i dont think the changes will do the "funness" of the spec any good.

DH are still really good, they've been better than hunters all expac, why would you switch?

[Vampiregenesis]

Does this mean its useless to gather critical strike gear right now? when would that nerf take place? would we go back to mastery haste as bm then?

[randomnamegenerator16]

I am just pissed off. Both MM and BM were extremely shit to play, and now they take the only thing that made BM actually fun to play? I am not talking about damage now, just "feeling" of the spec. Idiots.

[Geran]

You're joking right? All hunter specs should be among the top because we're a pure dps class. Same applies for all other pure dps classes.

You are joking, right? how do you dare suggest a pure dps class have to be top charts? That position must be for hybrids or tanks.

[Gaboar]

Im so over these devs... What in the heck is going on at blizzard HQ??? Seriously bad customer service! Instead of trying to please us... here, go fuckurselves, hahah why?

[zoned]

Wild call procs only apply to your current charge of frenzy/dire beast, so currently even with shoulders you get a lot of wasted proc time. The only time you get full benefit from a proc with Mantle is if happens immediately after you use frenzy/beast. This change does not nerf mantle in anyway it simply buffs BM hunters playing without it. Mantle will not lose any power from this change and will remain BIS for BM. Of course I will need to test this on PTR but I can't see how this is a nerf.

[Stupud]

I don't think people understand how the shoulders work. Wild call procs only apply to your current charge of frenzy/dire beast, so currently even with shoulders you get a lot of wasted proc time. The only time you get full benefit from a proc with Mantle is if happens immediately after you use frenzy/beast. This change does not nerf mantle in anyway it simply buffs BM hunters playing without it. Mantle will not lose any power from this change and will remain BIS for BM. Of course I will need to test this on PTR but I can't see how this is a nerf.

For those running with Stomp/OwtP you don't hold back those extra charges - you just spend them asap as they directly translate into DPS, so there are no wasted procs. I could see how if you are running DF/BF there is the potential for wasted procs since you can hold onto procs, because are aiming to keep three stacks on your pet for as long as possible. The fact remains though that if the base talent changes, then the shoulders will likely change (or become meh). The base talent change also has downstream consequences of lessening the number of Bestial Fury's you cast, Big Game Hunter becomes all but useless since you will want to (need to) spec into OwtP, focus becomes an issue again, etc.

[Nythiz]

3. The 3 sec cooldown decrease actually grows with haste. So with a 20% haste it becomes 3.6 secs of reduction. Now that is a decent buff for BM without the mantle. Instead of 5, you get 7.2 seconds of reduction from wild call procs due to double chances AND an increase in base amount of reduction. Mantle is still borderline useless however, albeit to a slightly lesser degree than in the previous scenarios.

This is wrong.
Wild Call cooldown reduction will scale negatively with haste as not to double dip.

With 20% haste, the reduction will NOT become 3.6 seconds.
It will become 2.5 seconds; basically making a Wild Call proc always reduce the cooldown of your Dire Beasts by 1/4th of the cooldown.

20% haste makes DB cooldown 10 seconds instead of 12 seconds. And it will make Wild call 2.5 seconds instead of 3 seconds.
50% haste makes DB cooldown 8 seconds instead of 12 seconds. And it will make Wild Call 2.0 seconds instead of 3 seconds.
This way you keep the 1 to 4 ratio between these 2 spells.

The reason for this is to prevent haste from triple dipping. It's already double dipping regarding to Dire Beast / Wild Call since haste both increases the amount of auto attacks (and thus the amount of procs) and it lowers the cooldown on Dire Beast.
If haste would also increase the amount of cooldown reduction it would be scaling out of control and you'd get infinite procs during high haste moments.

I don't think people understand how the shoulders work. Wild call procs only apply to your current charge of frenzy/dire beast, so currently even with shoulders you get a lot of wasted proc time. The only time you get full benefit from a proc with Mantle is if happens immediately after you use frenzy/beast. This does not nerf mantle in anyway it simply buffs BM hunters playing without it. Mantle will not lose any power from this change and will remain BIS for BM. Of course I will need to test this on PTR but I can't see how this is a nerf.

I don't think YOU understand how charge mechanics work.

If you have the shoulders currently, you have 0 charges and have 5 seconds left on the cooldown to the next charge.
If you at this point get a wild charge proc, you get 1 charge ready right away, and still 5 seconds left on the cooldown to the next charge.
There is absolutely no wasted potential unless you're sitting on a stack of DB/DF.

Your post is mostly false.

The shoulders lose a major component of what made them good.

What do shoulders still offer after the patch?

1) A small buffer in case you get a proc inside the final few second. E.g. say you have 0% haste and you get a Wild Call proc at 2 seconds remaining on DB; without shoulders you'd only get 2 seconds out of the 3 seconds as benefit, with shoulders you'd get the full 3 seconds. Practically 1/4th as useful as the current shoulders.

2) The ability to give Dire Beast / Dire Frenzy a lower priority without losing out on any casts in a fight. This ability is often very much overlooked, but one of the reasons why having a charge system baseline would be a nice Quality of Life improvement. Say that Dire Beast and Kill Command come off cooldown at the same time, without the charge system you're going to lose casts over a longer duration as you have to sit on one of the 2 abilities for a bit.
With the charge system, you can simply prioritize anything other than DB/DF first and don't lose out at all since the cooldown will continue into the second charge.

3) Slightly more potential damage at the start of a fight.

In the end they'll still be a DPS increase, and having these is not worse than using a utility legendary in most cases. So they're not exactly stat sticks.
On top of that they still provide a smoother gameplay for having the charge system. The change to Wild Call makes that QoL increase less meaningful, but it's still there.
Having this charge system on some other dps as well the charge system creates a much smoother priority rotation as you're less hindered by 2 cooldowns finishing at the same time.

[zoned]

I don't think YOU understand how charge mechanics work.

If you have the shoulders currently, you have 0 charges and have 5 seconds left on the cooldown to the next charge.
If you at this point get a wild charge proc, you get 1 charge ready right away, and still 5 seconds left on the cooldown to the next charge.
There is absolutely no wasted potential unless you're sitting on a stack of DB/DF.

Yes, with 0 charges this would be considered your current charge. This is what I meant, you only get full benefit at 0 charges or right after a frenzy/beast with a charge stored. If you play frenzy you will find yourself with a charge stored most of the time leading to some wasted proc time. So this change could be good for frenzy build as you will have potentially less wasted proc time.
You make some good points as this makes some other BM legendaries look more attractive for some builds. I still think however that shoulders with frenzy build will lose nothing and remain BIS. Currently the Frenzy build is the best setup in all situations including cleave fights when you wear legendary shoulder/bracer. So if the wild call change went through today I don't see it impacting my play style or damage in anyway. This change if anything might make frenzy build run smoother making it easier to manage stacks and focus. Especially going into ToS when we have more crit/haste on gear.

[Turtel]

What do shoulders still offer after the patch?

1) A small buffer in case you get a proc inside the final few second. E.g. say you have 0% haste and you get a Wild Call proc at 2 seconds remaining on DB; without shoulders you'd only get 2 seconds out of the 3 seconds as benefit, with shoulders you'd get the full 3 seconds. Practically 1/4th as useful as the current shoulders

Nice post, I hadn't realised this. This actually means BM hunters were nerfed even if they weren't using the shoulders. Currently a Wild Call proc will on average reduce the Dire Frenzy cooldown by 6 seconds (the reduction is anywhere from 0 to 12 seconds, but averages out to 6 seconds). With the change in patch 7.2.5, the cooldown reduction will be anywhere from 0 to 3 seconds, but averages out to a 2.625 second reduction.

This means that the cooldown reduction is reduced by more than half, while the proc rate has only been doubled. This would result in less Dire Frenzies being cast on average throughout each encounter. It's possible that the more even distribution of the procs may result in the same/increased uptime on Dire Frenzy though, since there will be less overlap of the buff, but I find this unlikely (I think that the uptime on Dire Frenzy will be reduced by the change).

I've illustrated this in this diagram:

[Eapoe]

As far as I can tell, this is a direct nerf to the spec in some weird attempt to nerf the shoulders. Blizzard, instead of just making baselineor even ignoring that change, could have just turned the shoulders into an extra 5-10% chance to proc Wild Call and it would have played out better.
This change means that BM will take on some complexity as most players will have to time DF uses as well as top end raiders to make sufficient use out of it. Even with the shoulders, the spec is going to play the same now with or without them to really make them be decent outside of the opener. Opening rotation you can probably use the 2nd charge and then proceed as normal, after that it's either sit on a charge waiting for the 2nd or proceed as normal with waiting until the last second to use your next DF.
This also becomes a nerf to Thunderslash as we wait until the last second for stack 2 (without shoulders) to truly min/max the change with DF uptime. This also possibly becomes a nerf to Aspect of the Wild, as this change can cause us to sit on the CD to again, truly max out damage of the spec.
Sure, there is the possibility of using everything on CD like we could do now and be okay, but this change has the potential to actually make the spec complicated to see its full potential.
I freely admit that I could be completely wrong about this; however, I can just not understand how Blizzard would go thru with this change when there are potentially much better ways to help the spec than by changing 1 ability that has the potential to completely mess up the changes that make the spec work.

[Gaaz]

Nice post, I hadn't realised this. This actually means BM hunters were nerfed even if they weren't using the shoulders. Currently a Wild Call proc will on average reduce the Dire Frenzy cooldown by 6 seconds (the reduction is anywhere from 0 to 12 seconds, but averages out to 6 seconds). With the change in patch 7.2.5, the cooldown reduction will be anywhere from 0 to 3 seconds, but averages out to a 2.625 second reduction.

This means that the cooldown reduction is reduced by more than half, while the proc rate has only been doubled. This would result in less Dire Frenzies being cast on average throughout each encounter. It's possible that the more even distribution of the procs may result in the same/increased uptime on Dire Frenzy though, since there will be less overlap of the buff, but I find this unlikely (I think that the uptime on Dire Frenzy will be reduced by the change).

I've illustrated this in this diagram:

That is not correct. Isn't DB cooldown being reduced by haste already? So at 20% haste our reset is worth exactly 5 seconds on live without the shoulders, and 10seconds with them. Assuming we get 2.625 sec from each proc in 7.2.5 (due to clipping), due to a fixed 3 sec based cd reduction (no decrease due to haste, which is a reasonable assumption - blizz are lazy, no one is going to invent something new in terms of mechanics and % based decrease is not in the game currently) and double the proc rate, we do get a slight buff in DB uptime after 7.2.5 without the shoulders, and a HUGE nerf to the Mantle. To the point that the legendary effect would be hardly noticable. Any additional haste (due to lust / heroism, temporary buffs, etc.) is going to make the difference even more narrow. During bloodlust / heroism we are talking fractions of a second advantage of Mantle in DB uptime
As I tried explaining earlier, this change is a small buff to BM that do not use the mantle, as well as a quality of life change for them. It is also a brutal murder of Mantle of Command (70% nerf to the effectiveness of 2nd charge). Would this buff allow BM to reach 7.2 performance levels in 7.2.5 with other legendary combinations - that remains to be seen. But Mantle users are better be prepared to swap for something else.

[munkeyinorbit]

With Dire Frenzy / legendary shoulders, even with 2 stacks you get countless DF CD wasted, since its only optimal to use the skill to refresh the pet buff, thats the whole point of this talent. I have the shoulders, i'm pulling 800k on Krosus mythic with it and i cannot count how long i've sit on 2 stacks of DF waiting for the pet buff to reach 1s so i can refresh it. DF is all about pet buff management, not how many times you can use it in a fight.

Now, if you have a 5s CD reduction, you most often will be able to use DF on cooldown without the worry of losing the stacks on pet, since the buff lasts 8s on pet, one single 5s reduction proc during that period would make it viable to just spend the DF charge at will.

OWTP might be mandatory, but the legendary shoulders wont, since you will now be able to most likely just spend that DF without caring about the pet buff... 100% chance to reduce 5s on DF? Sign me up, i'll delete my legendary shoulder in a live stream if this happen.

Will you also use item restore on a live stream?

[Kazlehoff]

DH are still really good, they've been better than hunters all expac, why would you switch?

hated the rotation after patch

- - - Updated - - -

You are joking, right? how do you dare suggest a pure dps class have to be top charts? That position must be for hybrids or tanks.

""Hybrid Tax"" hasnt been a thing since like TBC. why should someone suffer because they play a class that CAN tank or heal, even if the player has no aptitude for it, or doesnt want to?

[Nythiz]

That is not correct. Isn't DB cooldown being reduced by haste already? So at 20% haste our reset is worth exactly 5 seconds on live without the shoulders, and 10seconds with them.

Correct

Assuming we get 2.625 sec from each proc in 7.2.5 (due to clipping), due to a fixed 3 sec based cd reduction (no decrease due to haste, which is a reasonable assumption - blizz are lazy, no one is going to invent something new in terms of mechanics and % based decrease is not in the game currently) and double the proc rate, we do get a slight buff in DB uptime after 7.2.5 without the shoulders, and a HUGE nerf to the Mantle.

Blizz already said that the new Wild Call will scale with haste.

Taking the 20% haste example, the new Wild Call will reduce the cooldown by 2.5 seconds; and Dire Beast / Frenzy cooldown itself is 10 seconds.
Due to the clipping below 2.5 seconds remaining the average cooldown reduction will be 2.1875 seconds.
(( 7.5 * 2.5 ) + ( 0.5 * 2.5 * 2.5)) / 10 = 2.1875 sec

With the old Wild Call you'd have an average cooldown reduction of 5 seconds without mantle; so even with double proc rate. The new model would still be a nerf to average cooldown reduction.
That said, the new model offers quite a bit of smoother input, which is hard to take into account.

[gushDH]

The thing is, with the 2 charges of Dire Beast the gameplay is much smoother. It's not about the damage numbers, that can be fixed with just tuning the skill damage numbers.
The 2 charges make the rotation smoother, more controlled, and still keeps the rng surprise of having multiple consecutive procs, which can be fun.

The planned change first removes the rng surprise element, multiple procs will happen anyway, and there won't be consecutive whole resets. On the other hand, the rotation isn't as smooth as with just 2 charges, because firstly you have no control, you still have to press the skill on cooldown, and secondly it's not smooth, we will still lose some seconds when the proc happens close to the end of the cool down.

[Deleted]

if i am a sad hunter without shoulders atm.... should i go for shoulder tokens or now immediately go for wrists?
Got in legendairies: bm (belt), MM (boots), general (prydaz, sephuz, roots, kj trinket).

been trying to get lucky with shoulders for 5k nethershards.... but so far not happend... now i wonder if i should go for the wild call wrists using 5k shards...

[Turtel]

That is not correct. Isn't DB cooldown being reduced by haste already? So at 20% haste our reset is worth exactly 5 seconds on live without the shoulders, and 10seconds with them. Assuming we get 2.625 sec from each proc in 7.2.5 (due to clipping), due to a fixed 3 sec based cd reduction (no decrease due to haste, which is a reasonable assumption - blizz are lazy, no one is going to invent something new in terms of mechanics and % based decrease is not in the game currently) and double the proc rate, we do get a slight buff in DB uptime after 7.2.5 without the shoulders, and a HUGE nerf to the Mantle. To the point that the legendary effect would be hardly noticable. Any additional haste (due to lust / heroism, temporary buffs, etc.) is going to make the difference even more narrow. During bloodlust / heroism we are talking fractions of a second advantage of Mantle in DB uptime
As I tried explaining earlier, this change is a small buff to BM that do not use the mantle, as well as a quality of life change for them. It is also a brutal murder of Mantle of Command (70% nerf to the effectiveness of 2nd charge). Would this buff allow BM to reach 7.2 performance levels in 7.2.5 with other legendary combinations - that remains to be seen. But Mantle users are better be prepared to swap for something else.

The blue post specifically said that it'd scale with haste such that the number of Dire Beasts casts throughout an encounter remained the same as in the current patch. This can only be true if the cooldown reduction reduced proportionally with the length of the Dire Frenzy cooldown, e.g. if you have 20% haste, the Dire Frenzy cooldown reduces from 12 seconds to 10 seconds, and the cooldown reduction from the proc would reduce from 3 seconds to 2.5 seconds (thus the proc removes 25% of the total cool down regardless of haste).

The values from my chart were with 0% haste, at 20% haste:
The patch 7.2 average reduction of 6 seconds would reduce to 6/1.2 = 5 seconds.
The patch 7.2.5 average reduction of 2.625 seconds would reduce to 2.625/1.2 = 2.1875 seconds.

In other words, the size of the nerf remains the same regardless of how much haste you have.

[Gaaz]

The blue post specifically said that it'd scale with haste such that the number of Dire Beasts casts throughout an encounter remained the same as in the current patch. This can only be true if the cooldown reduction reduced proportionally with the length of the Dire Frenzy cooldown, e.g. if you have 20% haste, the Dire Frenzy cooldown reduces from 12 seconds to 10 seconds, and the cooldown reduction from the proc would reduce from 3 seconds to 2.5 seconds (thus the proc removes 25% of the total cool down regardless of haste).

The values from my chart were with 0% haste, at 20% haste:
The patch 7.2 average reduction of 6 seconds would reduce to 6/1.2 = 5 seconds.
The patch 7.2.5 average reduction of 2.625 seconds would reduce to 2.625/1.2 = 2.1875 seconds.

In other words, the size of the nerf remains the same regardless of how much haste you have.

I seriously doubt that they are going to implement a new and untested mechanics instead of a simpler solution of a fixed reduction. No other class is punished for having more haste by introducing what you describe. All trinkets have a fixed time associated with cooldown reduction, not to mention abilities of the hunter class itself. I would bet all legendaries on my hunter that it would either be a fixed 3 sec time reduction from a proc, or (unlikely but still possible, Blizz acts in mysterious ways) it would be a positive change of 3sec + your haste level.
Making a new proc mechanics when 3 sec reduction is punished by having more haste will not be understood by majority of the player base. Just imagine the wording on it: your cooldown is reduced by 25% of its current maximum each time Wild Call procs. No other class in the game does that, and it is unlikely that will do that in this expansion. Remember the current theme - simplification and pruning of hunters to the extreme.