Melee hunters never made sense. Logically, no one who could attack from range would ever get in melee range deliberately. Gameplay-wise, melee attacks were weaker than ranged. Making it as strong ranged and you compete with melee dps for slots and for people who want a ranged class it's a wasted spec/set of talents. You want to be a stealthy, melee class with poisons? Roll a rogue.
Speaking of rogues... Skilled Swordsman? That overlaps strongly with the brawler mechanically (a toe to toe melee fighter) AND with DPS warriors in both archetype and mechanics.
Both of your arguments really support my contention. Yes, we CAN force 3 specs onto the classes, but there aren't really 3 specs that naturally come to mind and that are distinct and that don't overlap with another class.
Last edited by clevin; 2013-05-17 at 12:31 AM.
Make Deterrence baseline, give MM some perks to Disengage (Speed boost, distance. something cool) and also give MM readiness. it was theirs to begin with. Let them have it. Give MM mastery an +Bleed Damage component. Scrap Black Arrow completely, and replace it with a debuff akin to Rising Sun Kick (When this debuff is on the target, this target takes X% more Nature damage from you) BM, Why no swords? There are agi swords. We were able to use them Pre-MoP! (Note that currently Hunter's cannot equip maces of any form.)
Keep Frost and Ice Traps. They are really hunter bread and butter utility (how do you argue with a 30 sec AoE snare?)
Other than that, I could get behind your idea here..
The above QQ basically proves that you are a bad player and nothing more. Here's why:
Back in Vanilla there were consumables that gave one MP5 (increased mana regeneration in combat).
Mana being the limiting factor, savvy Hunters raided dual-wielding melee weapons because we could apply 2X Mana Oil on our 1H weapons which fetched higher mana regeneration than applying mana oil to a single 2H weapon: (example)
In the above screenshot you can see my Horde Vanilla Hunter who has got the following buffs applied in preparation for the final ZG boss:
1. 2x Mana Oil on his two 1H Bone Slicing Hatchets http://www.wowwiki.com/Bone_Slicing_Hatchet.
2. Elixir of the Mongoose
3. +Mana elixir
4. +Mana Flask. The flask granted about 3k mana. My Hunter, with buffs and all, reached in this screenshot 6.3k mana. He never ran out of mana, not even in Ragnaros (MC).
Bad players (also known as "scrubs") did not use consumables, i.e. did not use mana oil, elixirs or flasks, and then complained that their mana ran out too fast. This was especially the case, apart from bad Hunters, with Shadow Priests, Elemental Shamans and Balance Druids.
As for the rest, even Lord Alexander's Battle Axe http://www.wowhead.com/item=13003/lo...ers-battle-axe could do huge 800 damage crits to Rogues. My Lok'delar, Stave of the Ancient Keepers http://www.wowhead.com/item=18715/lo...ncient-keepers Raptor strike critted poor Rogues for upt to 1.2k damage I think back when Rogues had 4.5k health pools.
I remember all this very well because I reaided extensively in Vanilla AND grinded Rank 11. It is not a shame if you didn't play Vanilla, however, if you didn't actually play Vanilla or if you were totally "new" back then, it's best if you leave discussion of Vanilla to veteran players who know what they are talking about.
Veteran vanilla player - I was 31 back in 2005 when I started playing WoW - Nostalrius raider with a top raid guild.
Couple things that would make hunters a bit more desirable. Even good hunters have a hard time finding progression guilds, because why bring a 180k hunter to a fight when you can bring a Warlock, Boomkin, or Mage doing better AOE and Single target DPS.
- Expand focus pool to around 150 (to allow better management of shots and focus, we currently have such a narrow range to optimize dps).
- Add a bit of diversity to specs (I love that we don't have a dead zone, but why call a hunter a marksman, if he's able to shoot from 5 yards away)
- Give hunters a dot type AOE (minimal focus sting) that isn't range bound like multi-shot.
- Traps that are arrow based, not thrown like a hand grenade.
- Give either hunters are raidwide CD (pet or hunter based), that makes us wanted again, for especially 25 man raiding again.
Hunters don't need to be the highest DPS class, but putting a pure dps class under many hybrid classes, is just sad.
It could be fun to give hunters melee in at least one spec; there can be arguments made for both SV and BM, I suppose. I've been musing recently on the idea of Blizzard creating a new class or spec that would benefit from moving between melee and ranged combat. Give them a couple melee abilities, and perhaps add a charge that briefly buffs melee damage. Charge in, attack, then disengage to get back to the standard ranged damage. That could also be fun in PvP.
They don't have to give them melee weapons. All the damage can be based off the ranged weapon, and visually the hunter draws a pair of axes or swords. A glyph similar to the Glyph of Felguard can let transmoggers see the weapons they really like.
I say rework MM into a PETLESS kiting spec.
Remove ability to call pets and buff all damage to compensate.
Add an entanglement shot(snare) that can have near 100% uptime (in PvE)
Replace SS with a bleed dot.
Replace ET with an AoE spike/FOK type trap
Anyways that is a start, totally doable and it would be nice to have a petless ranged physical damage spec.
Last edited by azurrei; 2013-05-18 at 07:51 PM.
I really love this guy.
His extensive raiding in Vanilla was from May/June 2006.
Where his character managed to gain the following reputation levels:
AQ - Hated with Nozdormu.
MC - Friendly with Hydraxian Waterlords
ZG - Neutral with Zandalrian tribe
In fact he started palying WoW in December of 2005, after Hunters had been through their major changes.
As you can see, he is such a veteran of Vanilla raiding!
My very very basic thoughts on a reworked BM.
Remove Focus Fire.
Make Frenzy stack from Kill Command stacking up to 5 times.
Make Lynx Rush baseline for BM
Remove (or at least seriously reduce) cooldown for Lynx Rush and BW and have Lynx Rush and Bestial Wrath interact with Frenzy stacks in some way. Either the more stacks = longer BW/Lynx Rush or more stacks = more damage per hit. Both abilities will need at least 1 stack of Frenzy though.
Bake the previous Focus Fire buff into a passive of Cobra Strikes - (each stake increases range haste by 6% up to 6 stacks).
So, BM spec becomes more of a combo-shot spec similar to rogues or feral kitten. Those are just basic shots abilities that I've thought of quickly - I'm sure there's others that can be used to build up combo points and spend them in BM (Glaive Toss - builds them, Barrage - spends them?)
For Survival - I'd drop Black Arrow and instead make this more of a 'dot' class. So, Immolation Shot (pure Dot), Poison Shot (applied weakened blows debuff), Icy Shot (weakened armor debuff) as well as Serpent Sting and Widows Venom with an extra 'envenom' type ability which consumes all dots on a target when applied for a big damage burst.
I read a few of the pages, but may have missed if someone else posted anything similar to this. I think it would be fairly easy to make hunters rotations more interesting, and to make them scale better with at least some stats.
Just make haste cause SS to tick faster ( I may be completely blanking on this, but I do not believe haste currently improves our DoTs? ) and have its crits proc a 100% crit chance for Arcane Shot for 5-6 seconds. Better scaling with haste and crit and more attention would have to be paid to Focus. The recent 10% AP buff would probably have to be reverted for balance. I realize it does nothing to reduce spec homogenization, and it would probably be not be a great solution for MM. Which wouldn't matter, I don't think Blizzard cares too much about MM currently.
Sadly that would hurt 10 mans so badly that no hunter would be allowed to run MM (unless they were the raidleader themselves in which case they are bad). Almost any 10 man relies on the pet to apply a certain buff or debuff to the raid. They'd have to somehow make the hunter able to tailor what buff/debuff they want to apply in order to compensate.