Will BM suffer in Legion PvP?

[Transmigration]

I've been playing my hunter in PvP again after he collected dust for a while. In the beginning of WoD I used MM Lonewolf for BGs and SV for Arenas and it was great. I got a wild hunger for some Beastmastery though and decided to learn a new spec for entertainment. I'm really enjoying and and having fun with all the different pets and mechanics unique to BM. I'm glad it's viable in PvP because I'm actually considering sticking with it as my main again after playing Warrior for most of the expansion.

I was reading over the preview for Legion BM and it reads that their main focus is increasing the use of the pet and as a result we'll have less actual bow/gun abilities (arcane/kill shot?) One of the things about BM that kinda sucks is when your main hitter KC is up but your pet isn't close enough to attack the enemy yet. With all these abilities relying on our pets, do you think we're going to stay strong as a spec? I'm going to try out SV melee, but I quickly got bored with Lonewolf so I don't have much interest in MM for Legion.

What do you guys think? How will BM stand up in PvP without our core ranged shots?

[Deleted]

Hey,

same as you I love BM pop and I have my concerns about legion pvp. Now the issue with bm is not that they removed arcane and kill shots, is the utility we lost more than anything else. Currently we have to kite and let the pet do all the hard work while throwing instant shot and poole focus with cobra. We have good passive healing, 2 x deterrence, freedom, frost trap and explosive trap to keep mele away. In legion we loose all this tools unfortunately. I really don't know how this is going to impact our kiting capabilities.

I guess the good things are that we can have blink strike talent which teleports the pet at the target, thus out of rane KC not an issue anymore. Furthermore, if focus region is good we will have plenty of instant spells like dire beast, crows, chimera shot and KC we can throw at our enemies and line of site.

If they give us some more tools to keep mele away I think we will be at a good spot. Bare in mind that spells most likely will change multiple times, but the direction they are taking is good, loads of instant spells.

[Rabbit]

As it stands right now, for BM and MM, its hard to tell. The specs are losing a lot of utility and cc without really getting anything in return. Ive noticed a few melee classes are gaining new or more interesting to gap closers, where we get maybe another slow...and a meh knockback for MM. But its really early, lots of changes will happen.

[Deleted]

we pretty much lost:
explosive trap knock
frost trap
pet freedom
and 1 "deterr"

we gained:
100% damage immunity for 1.5 sec & magic dispell after using feign death
30% heal exhiliration
frost arrow for BM ( atleast i never took it over the other level 100 bm talent )
aspect of the cheetah sprint

i for one woulda prefered to get rid of frost arrow all together cause its passive perma slow that requires no brain to use and let us keep either pet freedom or some sort of knockback.

[Deleted]

we pretty much lost:
explosive trap knock
frost trap
pet freedom
and 1 "deterr"

we gained:
100% damage immunity for 1.5 sec & magic dispell after using feign death
30% heal exhiliration
frost arrow for BM ( atleast i never took it over the other level 100 bm talent )
aspect of the cheetah sprint

i for one woulda prefered to get rid of frost arrow all together cause its passive perma slow that requires no brain to use and let us keep either pet freedom or some sort of knockback.

Can live without all that. But loosing spirit bond will destroy ANY competative hunter pvp. Have 0 healing just won work in pvp (no i dont count that garbage exhil), while having by far the worst CC and defences of all classes.

[Deleted]

Spirit Bond is gone? Really? Hmm... That sucks.

[Gungnir]

Can live without all that. But loosing spirit bond will destroy ANY competative hunter pvp. Have 0 healing just won work in pvp (no i dont count that garbage exhil), while having by far the worst CC and defences of all classes.

Warlocks would like to say hi, on top of having no mobility.

[Deleted]

Warlocks would like to say hi, on top of having no mobility.

Hope your beeing sarcastic.... and for legion you might wanna look at the Lay on hand healthstone... while hunters get 13% mend pet buff... woop

[Deleted]

Blizz are crazy, they removed so much from bm like: spirit bond, masters call, no traps, detterence being on 3min cd with only 1 charge, no focus fire, its looking shambolic in pvp so far. They need to add some cc to bm to make up for trap loss.

Gameplay wise the spec looks boring as fk, relying on dire beast resets to regen you focus while you stand there like lemon using cobra shot to dump focus, they need to bring back a arcane shot type ability back to bm while reverting cobra shot back to focus regen. I dont get why they removed arcane shot it in first place, why not give something else to mm, why fix something that isnt broken??? bm was fine so i dunno why they decided to fk around with it.

Overall pve + pvp wise i dont like the look of bm in legion at all, its still early and there like 9 months till legion so i hope they look into this and sort it out.

[Deleted]

Pretty much exactly my thoughts. Spec preview series starts with "Overall, Beast Mastery is in a good spot..." and concludes with "...so we took away most of it's toys and deep-fried it."#


I really hope they addressed that after that old alpha build we know the talents from.

[Tehterokkar]

Blizz are crazy, they removed so much from bm like: spirit bond, masters call, no traps, detterence being on 3min cd with only 1 charge, no focus fire, its looking shambolic in pvp so far. They need to add some cc to bm to make up for trap loss.

Gameplay wise the spec looks boring as fk, relying on dire beast resets to regen you focus while you stand there like lemon using cobra shot to dump focus, they need to bring back a arcane shot type ability back to bm while reverting cobra shot back to focus regen. I dont get why they removed arcane shot it in first place, why not give something else to mm, why fix something that isnt broken??? bm was fine so i dunno why they decided to fk around with it.

Overall pve + pvp wise i dont like the look of bm in legion at all, its still early and there like 9 months till legion so i hope they look into this and sort it out.

The specs actually feel different now.

You can look at all 3 Hunter specs and they consist of the following abilities:

Focus-spender with CD
Focus-spender with no CD
2.0 Cast time Focus generator(assuming 0% haste)


Now with Legion, here's how it looks:

BM:
Focus Spender with CD
Focus spender with no CD
On-use focus generator that generates focus over time, with good luck you can be gaining focus at an insane rate

MM(Note: no "hit this on CD" spell):
Focus spender with no CD that amplifies other Focus spender
Heavy damage focus spender, needs amplification to work as intended
Instant focus generator that can be spammed with 1s GCD.

SV:
Essentially a Rogue, Feral Druid or Monk.
Meaning you wait for your energy(Focus) to regen slowly to use abilities.



As far as your concerns about BM goes, the spec will be fairly RNG from my initial impression. You rely on crits to get a lot of Dire Beasts rolling, in which case you can spam Cobra Shots(so looks like stacking crit like Fire Mages or Fury Warriors will be the way to go, meaning BM is not the PvP spec).

However there are also talents that interact with having a lot of pets up at once(for example, for each pet you have up, your other pets gain +% damage. Or for each pet you have, Cobra Shot damage is increased), along with an Artifact perk that extends the duration of ALL Dire Beasts active currently by 8 seconds whenever you reset Dire Beast with an Auto shot crit. Plus also a perk which has a % chance(still undefined value in current build) to summon an additional Beast with Dire Beast meaning you can get double the value from 1 Dire Beast.

BM is going to be an insanely fun spec to play unless you get terribly unlucky(which can happen at very early gear levels), the focus regen is spiky and it actually feels like you are doing something to get that focus back and that you have perks that interact with that focus regenerator ability. BM will be all about synergy between each of the Talents and the artifact perks.

We can worry about PvP balance when we get to that stage of the Beta(when we are allowed to make/level 100 characters), but a lot of other classes are losing "key" PvP abilities also, so I wouldn't worry about only us, plus they do have pretty sweet PvP talents planned for each spec that will definitely increase our survivability.

PS. On another note, since Hunters will now get 10 Focus per second as baseline regen for all specs, Haste should be a LOT more appealing to all 3 specs, especially Survival and BM as they don't have a reliable way to fill all GCDs and need Focus to use their big hitters.

[Deleted]

The specs actually feel different now.

You can look at all 3 Hunter specs and they consist of the following abilities:

Focus-spender with CD
Focus-spender with no CD
2.0 Cast time Focus generator(assuming 0% haste)


Now with Legion, here's how it looks:

BM:
Focus Spender with CD
Focus spender with no CD
On-use focus generator that generates focus over time, with good luck you can be gaining focus at an insane rate

MM(Note: no "hit this on CD" spell):
Focus spender with no CD that amplifies other Focus spender
Heavy damage focus spender, needs amplification to work as intended
Instant focus generator that can be spammed with 1s GCD.

SV:
Essentially a Rogue, Feral Druid or Monk.
Meaning you wait for your energy(Focus) to regen slowly to use abilities.



As far as your concerns about BM goes, the spec will be fairly RNG from my initial impression. You rely on crits to get a lot of Dire Beasts rolling, in which case you can spam Cobra Shots(so looks like stacking crit like Fire Mages or Fury Warriors will be the way to go, meaning BM is not the PvP spec).

However there are also talents that interact with having a lot of pets up at once(for example, for each pet you have up, your other pets gain +% damage. Or for each pet you have, Cobra Shot damage is increased), along with an Artifact perk that extends the duration of ALL Dire Beasts active currently by 8 seconds whenever you reset Dire Beast with an Auto shot crit. Plus also a perk which has a % chance(still undefined value in current build) to summon an additional Beast with Dire Beast meaning you can get double the value from 1 Dire Beast.

BM is going to be an insanely fun spec to play unless you get terribly unlucky(which can happen at very early gear levels), the focus regen is spiky and it actually feels like you are doing something to get that focus back and that you have perks that interact with that focus regenerator ability. BM will be all about synergy between each of the Talents and the artifact perks.

We can worry about PvP balance when we get to that stage of the Beta(when we are allowed to make/level 100 characters), but a lot of other classes are losing "key" PvP abilities also, so I wouldn't worry about only us, plus they do have pretty sweet PvP talents planned for each spec that will definitely increase our survivability.

PS. On another note, since Hunters will now get 10 Focus per second as baseline regen for all specs, Haste should be a LOT more appealing to all 3 specs, especially Survival and BM as they don't have a reliable way to fill all GCDs and need Focus to use their big hitters.

what you wrote sounds good mate and makes sense, but what i pref thou is controlled focus regen that i can manage so i can use that focus in diffrent situations in fights, i dont like relying on rng just so i can regen focus lol, sometimes you will get insane resets and sometimes you will get hardly anything, im not a fan of the rng thing. Like you said maybe those artifact talents will sort out this mess and we will be flowing in focus but im not holding my breath thou.

[Tehterokkar]

what you wrote sounds good mate and makes sense, but what i pref thou is controlled focus regen that i can manage so i can use that focus in diffrent situations in fights, i dont like relying on rng just so i can regen focus lol, sometimes you will get insane resets and sometimes you will get hardly anything, im not a fan of the rng thing. Like you said maybe those artifact talents will sort out this mess and we will be flowing in focus but im not holding my breath thou.

Well, it's just the nature of the spec. If you don't like RNG, then you can play BM or SV. It's the same with Mages and Warriors, they have 1 RNG spec that is gear dependant. And in the later stages of the expansion, BM might receive nerfs to its focus regen capabilities just like it happened in Siege of Orgrimmar with Arcane Shot cost being increased from 20 to 30.

However BM's RNG will not be as dramatic as Fire or Fury, because we don't necessarily need to get good RNG to do good damage, it's more important that you realize beforehand that you did not get good DB resets before a big priority add appears, so you start AFKing to let focus regen.