BfA Alpha - Hunter Changes

[rrayy]

so disapointed in hunters.. blizzard ruined pet play
this time for good, i rerolled and you should do the same

Not going to re-roll becausae you don't like hunters anymore. Don't tell others what to do.

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Not saying there is no possibility of me misunderstanding this.

but the aura (buff) got removed. It's not a buff - but it's also not a nerf, because damage numbers are basically getting redone.

Then what it comes down to is it being a wash.

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EDIT: To clarify, BM isn't losing stuff from Legion, but things that BM lost going into legion are being given back to Survival. Spirit Bond was a BM talent for a long time and was removed and then made into a worthless trait in the artifact weapon. Now Survival is getting spirit bond backed into their mastery back to how it used to be for BM, but no return for BM.

Beast (and marks) also lost serpent sting and now survival has it. Now they aren't losing things from legion, but they lost a lot through WOD and Legion to the point it is a 3 button spec and has limited utility. Traps coming back halfway through Legion was a nice step, but to see Survival get things that BM used to have and BM still feels lacking is insulting. Reading the mastery and pet/Hunter interaction of Survival screams Beast Master while BM is basically "my pets hit harder" but no real interaction with the hunter.

I don't want to play a caster hunter so BM is the only ranged option, but Blizzard has taken the idea that because it is so simple you can't play it in pvp and the template is nerfed into unplayability. I would like some things back to BM so it can be more interesting and actually usable in pvp.

Disagree as it is far more than a 3 button spec. To wit:

Kill Command
Cobra Shot
Chimera Shot
Barded Shot

+ you have traps, you got camoflauge back, and you have other CC that makes losing serpent sting a wash. Also, spirit bond wasn't really a loss as you never needed it anyway unless you were soloing elite mobs at level and even then in Legion you didn't need it because your pet could tank them so easily. As it was, you had the original BM spirit bond if you had the legendary pants. As for PvP, they are designing the classes for PvE at this point. In PvE, BM's lost nothing.

[volteh]

What're the chances they give survival the option of dual wielding?

[Ooshraxa]

What're the chances they give survival the option of dual wielding?

Slim, which is odd, since all of the abilites scale with attack power now.

A couple of the abilities specifically requires a 2-hander (screenshots from current Alpha build):



But then Wing Clip and Muzzle only requires a melee weapon:


Looks like it's two-handers for survival. I was disappointed as well

[rullarn]

Slim, which is odd, since all of the abilites scale with attack power now.

A couple of the abilities specifically requires a 2-hander (screenshots from current Alpha build):



But then Wing Clip and Muzzle only requires a melee weapon:


Looks like it's two-handers for survival. I was disappointed as well

I do agree with you, it's odd since abilities scale with AP now.

So i'm still hoping!
Id love to run around DWing axes.


I only got in the alpha this weekend, and took the chance to try my two mains, lock and hunter.
And oh my how I like the new Surv, I even enjoy the level 110 talents that alters the bomb. When I first saw the text without reading it, I just got a shiwer and thought of waylay, but lucky it wasn't like that
Id say surv is going in a good direction.

I'll be jumping on testing MM and BM, but so far, I'm loving the hunter for bfa

[Bepples]

What I find pathetic is you needed to go on Discord to borrow someone else's counterarguments, and then said counterargumens sidestepped the point of world progression with "well, affliction needs gear to scale up", which is the fucking opposite of progression since the gear to scale up comes with farm.

The reply for EN virtually said what I said, affliction was shit in EN for not being massively overtuned like it is now, and in NH it was still not used for progression (Destro was, which is what Bangerz from Method used).

What's really pathetic here is the fact that you think actually asking the people with knowledge on the subject is a form of weakness. It really goes to show how ass-backwards your priorities are: you think consulting people with a position of authority is a bad thing while just blissfully coasting off your own misguided assumptions is a good thing. I went to the Affliction discord because I wanted their input on your ridiculous assertion that DoT specs are always bad unless overtuned. They correctly pointed out that you deliberately glossed over key factors. Your aversion to consulting demonstrates to me that you take pride in ignorance.

For example, no: being gear-dependent does not make you useless for progression. It will make you weaker for progression...in the first raid tier. We saw this with Affliction. It wasn't as strong in EN, although having looked over logs from the time it still looks like a perfectly capable spec throughout the tier, including progression. It's a similiar situation for ToV. In pretty much every PvE situation afterwards it was anywhere from good to extremely good.

Being gear dependent is not intrinsically tied to being a sustained damage spec. Affliction is a sustained damage spec that happens to be gear dependent. This will become a recurring theme in your post: you frequently assume certain circumstances to be a) absolutely universal and b) absolutely a result of a spec being a DoT-focused spec however baseless that may be. You're clearly starting with a conclusion and concocting a narrative to support it out of some deranged and futile attempt to defend melee Survival. For example, you just cherrypicked a particular tier where one DoT spec was "good but not amazing" for cutting-edge progression to declare that ALL DoT specs are bad at ALL levels of progression ALL the time (I see you conveniently ignored the fact that MEthod brought Shadow Priests to progression throughout T19), and dismissing any examples of where Affliction does well as being "overtuned". I can just as easily dismiss all of your examples of Affliction doing not as well (I can't even say "poorly" because it was still a perfectly capable spec with a lot of people playing it) as being undertuned. Get better arguments and stop leaping to conclusions before wasting my time again.

Explain to me what good has come to feral druids, shadow priests, or affliction warlock in M+ if it were not for burst options like brutal slash or soulflame+ sow the seeds. Shadow priest stays exclusively with dots and suffers for it.

Hmm, this sounds oddly familiar and agreeable:

Plus, this is a problem that is trivially solved by having talent options that move the spec more in the direction of burst damage alongside other talents that focus on the DoT style. That's what the talent system is for.

Like, SERIOUSLY? And you tried to call me out on bad reading comprehension! You're telling me that you can have DoT-focused specs if you provide burst options for situations that aren't well-suited to multidotting gameplay? Stop the presses! It's almost like those DoT-focused specs have those burst options precisely because Blizzard saw the weaknesses of multidotting and prepared the specs for them. You're not actually arguing against DoT-focused specs here. Speaking of which: are you seriously of the opinion that every single DPS spec in the game should just be priority add burst because DoTs always suck? And to think you people are always the ones screeching to me about homogenisation.

DoTs are good for nothing except spread out long lived targets. They eat up more globals than a demonhunter rolling his face on his eybeam+rage of the illidari or a warrior mashing whirlwind or a monk doing fists of fury. And most targets die before their full damage is dealt, which is the whole point behind dots, higher damage in exchange for delay in damage delivery.

And some fights have spread-out long-lived targets and multidotting is an interesting playstyle to some people, so it's worth having some multidotting specs around. Like I said, for the fights where it isn't so good have talent options that help make up for it. You're assuming that short-lived add burst fights are way more universal than they actually are. You're also assuming that DoT specs necessarily are always tab-targetting and spending a GCD to apply a dot when there have been many specs with many different modes of applying DoTs that don't involve that... including ranged Survival, the whole original focus of this discussion. So you're pretty much just wasting more bandwidth posting this irrelevant nonsense. Add these to the list of unfounded assumptions you're rapid-firing into the thread. It's like you're aiming for a record.

You can go beg for you DoT spec but it's virtually an inferior version of MM since MM has strong burst, strong aoe, and is just as mobile. Thanks to trick shot it is also excellent at cleave.

More revisionism.

In the period after Survival Hunters got Explosive Shot the spec was far more often than not more capable and more represented than Marksmanship. Marksmanship was for the longest time an abandoned spec due to LOWER mobility (no, it was never "just as mobile" as Survival), a slower playstyle, and poorer damage output. Here's the heroic raiding representation for ranged DPS over MoP:



Also, historically MM has had absolutely god-awful AoE. What the hell are you smoking? Bombardment was perpetually undertuned to uselessness, even during MM's period of total dominance in HFC. Serpent Spread was always a highly potent AoE. I feel like at this point you're just dropping little nuggets of disinformation into a long post and hoping I won't notice. You picked the wrong person for that.

It's an even worse pvp specs since dots are subject to dispel and unlike casters who waste nothing more than mana on their spells (an infinite resource), you just dumped focus on an ability that will be trivially removed since even when survival was a ranged dot spec it had no meaningful dot protection.

And Survival wasn't so highly dependent on DoTs for this to matter. So you dispelled Serpent Sting: so what? It's trivial to reapply it to everyone with Serpent Spread meaning you have to waste more dispels if you want to keep it off (a large part of the value of Serpent Spread came from the initial SS tick, anyway). You can't keep it away entirely. Also, Survival could still do the large majority of its damage without Serpent Spread. For a while you could dispell Black Arrow and that really did counter Survival to some extent, but you could still force a Lock and Load from your traps.

Plus, you're just objectively wrong according to the data anyway.

https://www.worldofwargraphs.com/pvp...classes/hunter

You can see here that while MM had dominance during patch 5.4, it was the underdog for literally the entirety of WoD even when Survival was utterly gutted in 6.2 in PvE. Serpent Sting at that point was automatically applied by Arcane Shot as well as Multi-Shot so good luck ever keeping it dispelled. As you can see DoT specs can still hold up in PvE if their toolkit allows them to counter dispelling. So, once again, add this to the ever-increasing list of asinine and baseless assumptions you make because you can't bear to come to terms with the fact that you are wrong on this one.

Meanwhile survival is a perfectly functional melee spec in alpha filling its own niche for the hunter. BM is a dot spec anyways, just that these dots have a pet visual.

This is just comical. It is no secret that Survival has utterly bombed since going melee. It's hardly ever taken to raids and the opinion of it from most Hunters ranges from disregard to contempt. They've had to remake it from the ground up after just one expansion... funnily enough to make it more ranged and more DoT-focused. "Niche" is a diplomatic word used to describe unpopular and abandoned specs by people who are white-knighting for the spec and don't want to admit no one likes it.

And yeah, BM is such a potent DoT spec and I can totally multidot with my pets. Yeah...no. Think before you speak. That applies pretty well to the rest of your nonsense post too. Your post is a good demonstration of the sheer extent of dishonesty melee Survival whiteknihgts will pursue to defend their circus freak of a spec.

[Blk]

Not going to re-roll becausae you don't like hunters anymore. Don't tell others what to do.

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Then what it comes down to is it being a wash.

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Disagree as it is far more than a 3 button spec. To wit:

Kill Command
Cobra Shot
Chimera Shot
Barded Shot

+ you have traps, you got camoflauge back, and you have other CC that makes losing serpent sting a wash. Also, spirit bond wasn't really a loss as you never needed it anyway unless you were soloing elite mobs at level and even then in Legion you didn't need it because your pet could tank them so easily. As it was, you had the original BM spirit bond if you had the legendary pants. As for PvP, they are designing the classes for PvE at this point. In PvE, BM's lost nothing.

Chimera is not baseline. So baseline you have 3 buttons and can play with only those three unless you talent into things that add buttons, which not every talent does. Traps don't do damage, and spirit bond is huge for raids and pvp. Any passive healing is good for both, and BM lost DPS buttons.

[kran1um]

With the amount of overstocked melee, it will be hard to get into - anything as a survival hunter. With that being said, it is by far the most fun of all specs. BM is the same ole, MM with rapid fire makes it interesting.

Survival - to me - plays like enhance, always something to push and manage.
MM - seems to be the 'aoe' and high dps spec - as should be.
BM - send pet, do damage, the focus seems to be slow.

[rullarn]

Mega-text

Awesome post tbh.
Good to see folks putting an effort in what they're "selling"

Just curious to your stand-point on the current iterration on survival at the moment?

I like survival of Legion, but it had to many issues to be a specc I could main. Current Bfa iterration is something I enjoy 100% on alpha at the moment.
I can see it would be a more played specc, as it's more straigt forward, and it's not traps galore(god I hate Caltrops).
But in the end it's all about how it pairs up against BM and MM, if they are on par with one and another, I'm going survival.
Yes, i'm one of those that loved the melee aspect of the class in vanila, but I get it's not for everyone. But it seems they are trying to strike a middle-ground now between those that love the meleeish and to those that miss the old survival.

[Jurassic]

With the amount of overstocked melee, it will be hard to get into - anything as a survival hunter. With that being said, it is by far the most fun of all specs. BM is the same ole, MM with rapid fire makes it interesting.

Survival - to me - plays like enhance, always something to push and manage.
MM - seems to be the 'aoe' and high dps spec - as should be.
BM - send pet, do damage, the focus seems to be slow.

We have been doing 5 man content, and MM as the aoe high dps spec is not the case according to logs. (disclaimer) it is way too early to know (disclaimer)

[Micronetic]

With the amount of overstocked melee, it will be hard to get into - anything as a survival hunter. With that being said, it is by far the most fun of all specs. BM is the same ole, MM with rapid fire makes it interesting.

I am rerolling to a Hunter and want to play MM, do you think it will be like in Legion with over 9000 melees and hard to get in a raid as melee?

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Slim, which is odd, since all of the abilites scale with attack power now.

A couple of the abilities specifically requires a 2-hander (screenshots from current Alpha build):



But then Wing Clip and Muzzle only requires a melee weapon:


Looks like it's two-handers for survival. I was disappointed as well

Ugh that’s a shame.

[kran1um]

I am rerolling to a Hunter and want to play MM, do you think it will be like in Legion with over 9000 melees and hard to get in a raid as melee?

Yes. Ranged is always wanted, as melee you have to watch out for cleave and always crowding the tank, so any bright person leading a raid would want more ranged.

[Lucrece]

Yes. Ranged is always wanted, as melee you have to watch out for cleave and always crowding the tank, so any bright person leading a raid would want more ranged.

Cleave is trivial. Survival is hardly a worry for melee with all the survival tools they have.

The reason people want range is simply because raid encounters are designed with tons of raid mechanics that spread you away from melee, and logically ranged DPS are the optimal candidates for handling them.

Melee just zergball on a boss and cry tears of blood if they have to peel of the boss to do a mechanic for a few seconds because most of them feel entitled to tunneling the boss all encounter long while letting ranged deal with mechanics.

[Yhcti]

Bahhhhhh..... I just want Beta so I can test for myself to see if it's even worth going Survival for BfA or if I should just quite and #IRL!

Playing since Vanilla, you'd think I'd get first wave beta at some point.. So many guys in my guilds have it that literally log on 1-2hrs a week and are literally trash tier players... such a shame..

P.S. I'm still hopeful that Survival is winning.

[Keltas]

Bahhhhhh..... I just want Beta so I can test for myself to see if it's even worth going Survival for BfA or if I should just quite and #IRL!

Playing since Vanilla, you'd think I'd get first wave beta at some point.. So many guys in my guilds have it that literally log on 1-2hrs a week and are literally trash tier players... such a shame..

P.S. I'm still hopeful that Survival is winning.

Honestly survival isn't bad, it can be boring and shallow but it's still better than most other specs in the game.

Plus it offers more than quite a few other melee (such as an immunity) so it'll have a spot in any guild.

[Yhcti]

Honestly survival isn't bad, it can be boring and shallow but it's still better than most other specs in the game.

Plus it offers more than quite a few other melee (such as an immunity) so it'll have a spot in any guild.

That's good to hear. And yeah it's pretty boring with low gear but I'm hopeful with higher gear levels/stats that it'll get nicer and nicer

[Deleted]

With the amount of overstocked melee, it will be hard to get into - anything as a survival hunter. With that being said, it is by far the most fun of all specs. BM is the same ole, MM with rapid fire makes it interesting.

Survival - to me - plays like enhance, always something to push and manage.
MM - seems to be the 'aoe' and high dps spec - as should be.
BM - send pet, do damage, the focus seems to be slow.

All 3 specs should do high dps, not MM alone.

[Lucrece]

MM plays like crap in BfA, I far preferred legion. Only two aimed shots, and that garbage steady shot is back.

Rapid Fire animation is trash, your character has a seizure and jerks the arrow he's drawing back and forth as he spazzes.

[Yhcti]

I'm digging Survival, big time. It'll only get better with azurite gear and higher ilvl too.. I reckon it'll be a solid spec in BfA for sure. Definitely happy to be maining this going forward assuming they don't turn it into trash before release. It'll make a nice addition to my DH and Monk

[Lodvampire]

Somebody on alpha can explain me about the new focus generator for BM Barbed shot (old frenzy), i know its now a shot that applies a bleed dot on target, is there a way to remove this dot with a dispel or anything, and if say so, whats happen? we don't get focus regen and/or our pets don't get a frenzy stack?