8.1 Hunter Community Feedback - An Open Letter

Published 19th October 2018 by Trueshot Lodge

This is a supplementary post to the 8.1 Hunter Megathread on Reddit. You can follow the ongoing discussion there.

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General

This open letter isn’t meant to act like an open letter normally does, it’s meant to supplement any thoughts expressed on the reddit thread with more numbers, calculations and speculative thinking going forward than shown in the reddit post.

Initial thoughts on 8.1 changes:

New general trait


Nature's Salve

Exhilaration heals you for an additional 11505 health, and the cooldown is reduced by 15.0 sec.

Nature’s Salve is interesting for all three specs, especially when combined with Natural Mending, which reduces the cooldown based on focus spent. How good this trait ends up being defensively depends on how much it heals, especially when you take into consideration that we currently have various absorb traits and these are objectively better than healing traits, since preventing damage is better than reacting to taking damage.

Beast Mastery

Reddit Thread

Current

Beast Mastery has become a more engaging spec compared to it’s Legion counterpart. The combination of managing your pet’s Frenzy stacks and Cobra Shot reducing the Kill Command cooldown, have definitely improved the feel of Beast Mastery. However, some talents remain buggy, some talents are badly designed and several are highly undertuned. Despite this, BM is in a fairly good state compared to its past iterations. Our damage distribution is very diverse, specializing in sustained AoE and sustained single target. This does put BM in an unfavourable scenario when compared to Legion, where it had more options in the form of burst AoE, sustain AoE and sustain ST. The burst AoE is generally only provided through Stampede which is a 3 minute cooldown, so the reliable shorter cooldown burst is lost. Certain Azerite traits such as Primal Instincts introduce burst damage capability, while others improve the quality of life of our rotation, such as Feeding Frenzy. One of the biggest problems in Legion, aside from balancing, was how squishy a Beast Mastery Hunter was. This has largely been addressed in Battle for Azeroth, through the revamp of the pet system where Tenacity pets give a DR and an increased health pool. On top of that, pets can also provide a very strong heal in the form of Spirit Mend further increasing general survivability.

Talents

Animal Companion

This talent on it’s own is currently a DPS loss without utilizing multiple Pack Alpha Azerite traits. Even more importantly, the tooltip of the talent is also missing a crucial bit of information: Your pets now deal 40% less damage when this talent is active.

Furthermore the pet that is summoned by this talent is summoned significantly later than your normal pet, leading to delays whenever you need to summon your pet.
If the Animal Companion pet dies, there is no way to resurrect the pet without just waiting for a significant amount of time, and this can greatly slow you down in content such as Mythic+.

Thrill of the Hunt

This talent currently only affects the hunters crit rate, and not the crit rate of the pet making it quite weak. This seems unintended as most stats are shared across pets to some degree, and with a specialization that is heavily reliant on pet damage, this talent falls short when it doesn’t provide any direct benefit to that.

Scent of Blood

Due to Beast Mastery not being an overly focus starved spec, this talent is pretty weak and could see some overhaul before it’d see use in any scenario.

Venomous Bite

In its current form this talent does not reduce the cooldown of Bestial Wrath enough to make it noteworthy, the difference it provides is less than a single proc of Barbed Shot over the course of a Bestial Wrath cooldown.

Spitting Cobra

This talent suffers the same issues that Spitting Cobra of Survival did in Legion. It can easily decide to stop attacking the enemy if the enemy is out of an arbitrary range that is not equal to the hunters max range, and this makes the talent very annoying to play around.

Macros

The fact that it is a noticeable DPS increase to use specific macros to force your pet to come close to casting their basic attacks on cooldown feels bad for the player, and it hinders the average player, who may not know of this, unreasonably.

Basic template for the macro:

#showtooltip

/cast SPELL

/cast Claw

/cast Bite

/cast Smack

Miscellaneous

Misdirection

Misdirection does currently not benefit from pet damage at all, making a Beast Mastery hunters misdirection extremely weak comparatively to a Marksmanship hunters.

Pets, buffs and more

In certain places, such as Shrine of the Storm last boss, the pet is not affected by the buff granted to the hunter. This makes the Beast Mastery hunter relatively much weaker than the rest of the party.

Previously it’s been possible to create a macro that contained the following:
/petpassive
/petassist

Spamming this macro would generally unstuck your pet, and cause it to teleport to you. With BFA this functionality was removed, forcing you to dismiss (3 second static cast) and resummon your pet to get it to unstuck and come back to your side. This is especially harmful in M+ where not only does it cost you DPS when your pet is suddenly stuck on some terrain, but it can also lead to ninjapulls when your pet isn’t moving away from patrols.

Initial thoughts on 8.1 changes:

New traits

Dire Consequences

Kill Command deals 472 additional damage, and has a chance to summon a Dire Beast.


This is basically a flat DPS trait, which makes it not overly interesting as it’s impossible to play around outside of encouraging you to press your most important button even more.
It provides the effectiveness of 1/4th of the regular Dire Beast talent (1 summon every minute on average) vs the 1 cast every 15 seconds with the talent on top of the increased Kill Command damage. The additional Dire Beast currently provides an additional 10% haste, similar to the talent. Depending on tuning, this could potentially be a very strong trait for us.

Marksmanship

Reddit Thread

Current

It's very hard to determine what exactly Marksmanship is supposed to excel at, what its "niche" is. It's definitely not 2 target cleave or mass aoe (for obvious reasons). One could say that it is strong single target, but outside of the semi-recently "discovered" degenerate build/playstyle that requires a very specific Azerite power & talent setup, it's actually mediocre. Theoretically charge-based nature of Aimed Shot could lend itself to "burst" priority damage, but a lot in the spec works counter to that:

Now, looking at Trick Shots one would think that Marksmanship should excel at 3-6 target stacked aoe. In reality though, it doesn't. It does have somewhat nice damage on 3 targets in Rapid Fire, but after that it already starts being outscaled by other specs (which don't have target caps, so they scale past the Marksmanship 6 targets cap).

What Marksmanship does have is a very unique niche of being very bad at 2 target stacked cleave, because it has none. You can't do anything on 2 targets, casting Multi-shot is a dps loss, and the single target damage the specialization can do is not there to offset this. We believe that the minimum target cap on Trick Shots has to go. It does not serve any purpose whatsoever apart from frustrating players when faced with 2 targets.

Another issue is the maximum target cap - it can possibly work, but only if the damage inside this narrow (up to 6 targets) band is really strong. Basically something along the lines of Marksmanship doing the same damage to 6 targets as the other specs do to 9 (or whatever). Not sure if it won't lead to some other degenerate situations where the spec becomes too strong for a given fight. At least Rapid Fire should scale to the same target cap as Aimed Shot so you don't lose progressively more damage as the target count increases.

Marksmanship is possibly the only spec in the game (apart from maybe feral) that does not gain any dps on 2 targets and has a very hard cap on aoe damage. The latter is especially apparent on large pulls where your dps simply "stops" at some point. Even other single target "specialists" scale with target count somehow (assassination/affliction have multi-dotting & increased resource regeneration for example).

This is all exacerbated by the talent & Azerite situation where there is an enormous difference between the performance of the best single target setup on aoe and the best multi target setup on single target. For example, we have Explosive Shot & Barrage, which somewhat "fix" our problems with aoe target caps. The problem is, Barrage is on the same row as Lethal Shots - the staple of our current (and the only viable) single target build, Explosive Shot is on the same row as Careful Aim, our execute talent and a very significant portion of what helps Marksmanship be relevant on single target. The situation is even worse for Azerite traits as not only single target & multi target traits are different, but as you can't respec them freely and the traits are so strong that you have to stack them you are basically locked to a single build depending on what Azerite you have (unless you pay up or get lucky getting all of the pieces you need).
Now, we don't think everyone should be able to run a single "jack of all trades" build that's good for any situation. But we also believe that the baseline should be strong enough on its own without any talents/Azerite at all. The latter should be used to "slightly" (for some amount of) customize the build for a given situation, ideally with the choice being the “flavor” (and not a strict aoe or st as it is now). The current case where the talents & Azerite actually feel like bandaids/fixes that make Marksmanship work either on single target or aoe feels bad and is frustrating, especially when doing content that by design requires a bit of "jack of all trade"-ness (Mythic plus).

Talent Issues

Volley

Volley in its current form is on a tier where the other two options outperform it easily, with one of those options also being a passive talent that is both better on Single-Target and within the 3-6 target range of Marksmanship AoE.

Piercing Shot

This talent is extremely weak compared to its legion counterpart, which means it generally never sees usage as its single-target component drags it down too much.

Initial thoughts on 8.1 changes:

Many quality of life changes are being implemented to make the spec a bit more playable. Some of the hindrances remain (such as AoE limitation between 3-6 targets), however the spec as a whole feels more complete and playable. The following thoughts and stipulations assume that the spells will work as the tooltips indicate, regardless of their actual in-game functionality as of right now.

Trueshot

Trueshot has been reworked. Currently, we gain 30% haste and an additional charge of Aimed Shot. In 8.1, Trueshot has been modified so that we no longer gain flat Haste but instead the cooldown of Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire are reduced by 60% and Aimed Shot casts 50% faster. For clarity this means that at 0% haste, Trueshot will make it so that Rapid Fire has a cooldown of 12.5 seconds and Aimed Shot has a recharge rate of 7.5 seconds.

Important to note that on the PTR, Trueshot is completely broken. At 0% haste, Trueshot currently changes the Aimed Shot recharge rate from 12 seconds to 3.7 seconds. This is the same as having 225% haste. At 0% haste, Trueshot currently changes the cooldown of Rapid Fire from 20 seconds to 5.8 seconds. This is the same as having 240% haste.

Trueshot also currently still gives a full recharge of Aimed Shot, which doesn’t seem intended and is not indicated on the tooltip.

This is a good QoL change making Trueshot actually feel like a cooldown worth pressing.

Careful Aim

Less RNG in the talent now. Not much to talk about, it’s a good quality of life change. Damage remains the same but is now more consistent.

Explosive Shot

This change fixes a lot of the issues with the current talent (the shot glitching out on any amount of terrain, disappearing in the terrain etc). It no longer requires a second detonation, but simply explodes after 3s on the target. One downside is, if this target dies before the expiration, the Explosive Shot does no damage at all. This sets up some scenarios where the talent will feel completely useless. This also means that some preemptive thinking and planning will need to happen to time Explosive Shot properly, however seeing as certain abilities in the game (such as Living Bomb) serve the same purpose, but function differently, an additional QoL could be made to the talent.

Volley

The new change is an attempt to make the previous iteration less RNG, giving more consistency with less damage. The change is an overall 16% increase to the damage output of Volley, but that is not enough to warrant using the talent in any scenario because Careful Aim and Explosive Shot (especially with the Explosive Shot QoL) outperforms it.

Lethal Shots

Lethal Shots has been reworked completely. Previously, we had a 25% chance to make our next Aimed Shot or Rapid Fire automatically crit. This lead to a very interesting... playstyle, making Critical Strike undesirable, and caused us to completely ignore Rapid Fire, which is a core aspect of the spec. Combined with Steady Focus and Steady Aim, it lead to a playstyle where you’d be spamming your generator (Steady Shot) despite being at maximum focus, just fishing for a proc of Lethal Shots.

Lethal Shots now causes your Arcane Shots or Multi-Shots to have a 20% chance to reduce the cooldown of Rapid Fire by 5 sec. With the new change to Lethal Shots, Critical Strike becomes valuable again.
There is an issue in the fact that Rapid Fire currently is rarely, if ever worth pressing, which needs to be addressed before Lethal Shots will really be able to shine.

Utility and PvP Changes

A lot of QoL changes were made primarily to PvP, as stated in this bluepost.

A downside to the new Rapid Fire changes - Rapid Fire will now cancel completely if your target dies while channeling. You can no longer swap targets mid channel like you can in the previous iteration.

New traits

Surging Shots:
Rapid Fire damage is increased by up to 280.5 per shot fired, this damage starts lower and increases per shot of Rapid Fire. Aimed Shot has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown of Rapid Fire.

As mentioned initially in this section, this trait is currently broken damage wise on the PTR. It currently applies its damage exponentially rather than linearly (which we believe is how it is intended). Applying linearly brings it in line with the Focus Fire trait. Regardless, the interaction with Aimed Shot makes the trait interesting, as it can then have an effect on your general rotation. Expect some tuning to this trait in the near future. Rapid Fire previously has generally not been worth pressing unless very specific situations arose or you had Azerite traits buffing the damage of Rapid Fire, but this may change that.

Final Thoughts

It’s still a bit early to confirm a rotation, considering Trueshot and Surging Shots are still in flux. We have definitely turned away from the single target spec that MGH build presented us with. We have reverted to what seems like the intended playstyle: avoiding focus capping, avoiding capping on Aimed Shot charges and simply using Steady Shot as a focus generator. Streamline paired with Rapid Fire traits such as Focus Fire and Surging Shots, has made Rapid Fire relevant again. However it’s still worrying that Rapid Fire is still heavily dependent on Azerite traits, which more so could be a flaw of the azerite system than of the spell, but it doesn’t feel good to have a spell that is only worthwhile casting because of a given azerite trait.

Some of our handicaps still remain (Lonewolf ramp timer, restricted AoE), however the core of the spec and our basic rotation seems to be more intuitive. While our AoE is still restricted, we now have a bit more control over it through controlled burst windows via Trueshot. Talents such as Double Tap and Explosive shot aid in our AoE making it much more viable.

Perhaps one of the biggest quality of life changes is that we are no longer constrained to pure single target or pure AoE because of our talents. With the rework, our typical talents and Azerite traits seem to be viable for both single target and AoE. This increases Marksman's viability in M+ and makes us more adaptable during raids.

Survival

Reddit Thread

Current

The second iteration of the melee hunter is significantly better than it was in Legion. It’s now a cohesive spec without a significant amount of design flaws inherently built into it. The revamp to the pets system, together with the QoL changes that was brought with BFA.

As a specialization, Survival still inherits the associated stigma from Legion’s mostly unsuccessful redesign, paired with being a melee specialization, causing a lot of players to default towards playing a ranged specialization.

This is being further enforced by the encounter design in most of the recent raids, which drastically punish you for bringing over a certain number of melee, as most fights tend to involve some sort of “spread” mechanic, which generally limit number of melee players you can bring to 4-5 for a optimal group. While this would not be too bad, the problem starts when you bring in “unique” specialization buffs that were re-introduced in BFA. You are required to bring a Demon Hunter (most of the cases Havoc, due to Vengeance under performing) - 1st slot, you are required to bring a Monk (luckily this generally gets filled up by tanks), you are effectively required to bring at least 1 Warrior (once again, tanks under performing, so generally dps) - 2nd slot. At this point you only have space for 2-3 dps from the following specs : Enh / Ret / SV / Feral / Warrior / Rogue / DK / Windwalker / Havoc, in most cases guilds will try to use at DK (strong cooldowns) / Warrior (strong cooldowns + execute) / Rogue (great defensives).

Overall, the best things that can improve melee dps diversity / representation (or specifically Survival at this point) is to :

Another mechanic that the spec lacks is that while both BM and MM have access to “execute” mechanics, Survival is left without one; this alone would make the spec more valuable from the raid perspective. Additionally, Hunters have been historically known to be able provide some of those raid buffs that were removed, and if those were returned to pets, it would also give Survival a higher chance of seeing raid participation.

Talents

Steel Trap

Steel Trap currently has no use for the spec, as the damage is far behind the other options it competes with. While it may serve some purpose as a root for enemies, it can be unreliable given that it has to be manually placed on the ground and has a small hitbox. The design itself is uninteresting and has no real connections to Survival’s current design, after losing its “expert trapper” focus from Legion -  a more interesting choice may be something like a Snake Trap that spreads Serpent Sting to enemies.

A Murder of Crows

While A Murder of Crows has generally been a strong hunter ability, and is used currently for Beast Master and Marksmanship, the ability is not worth the potential damage due to the high focus cost. Unlike the other two specializations, Survival relies entirely on focus for dealing damage, and Crows is not worth the cost for the slight damage gain.

Flanking Strike

Although possibly useful as a niche engage and damage button, or a way to gain some extra focus outside of Kill Command, Flanking Strike’s cooldown hurts it greatly from being useful. On a row of talents that primarily focuses on dealing damage to one target, it has some potential as a focus gain for aoe moments, but the lack of damage compared to other options even then is not worth use.

Along with these issues, Flanking Strike lacks from the fact that it does not scale at all with haste, while the entire base Survival kit does in some way. With this, the talent would likely be a strong option.

Chakrams

While it was strong during the Alpha and Beta, Chakrams has unfortunately become an option not worth considering for any scenario. Between the long cooldown and high focus cost, it competes with Survival’s base kit and fall behind in any situations that currently use the other two options. While it may scale better with Survival’s mastery, that falls flat due to the issues of how weak Survival’s mastery actually is.

Similar to Flanking Strike, Chakrams suffers from having no benefit whatsoever from haste, Survival’s strongest stat and the part that makes the rest of the class run smoothly. Along with the damage taking a look-over, something like cooldown reduction with haste would go a long way for the talent’s strength.

Bugs and other weird interactions

Mongoose Bite

Currently Mongoose Bite functions with two different buff application events. When you cast a Mongoose Bite with 0 stacks of Mongoose Fury, it’ll apply the buff after the damage is calculated as it was during Legion. However once the initial stack has been applied, it will apply the next buff in line before damage is calculated. This effectively means that a 1 stack Mongoose Bite doesn’t exist and that Mongoose Bite for the first 4 Mongoose Bite after the initial Mongoose Bite are 1 stack ahead of where they should be. This is better visualised like so:

Hydra’s Bite mouseover

When you’re talent into Hydra’s Bite, your serpent sting is meant to hit nearby targets. The AoE range of this is pretty small as is shown here:

This picture was taken whilst targeting the leftmost dummy, so as can be seen, you’re not hitting the rightmost dummy, due to lack of range.

However if you create the following macro:
#showtooltip
/target mouseover

/cast Serpent Sting

/targetlasttarget

You can achieve Serpent Stings like these:

It’s done by having 1 of the mobs targeted then mouse hovering over another mob. If one listens closely it sounds like two casts of Serpent Sting goes off when press the macro, enabling some really wide applications of Serpent Sting.

Latent Poison & Wildfire Infusion - Shrapnel Bomb

Both of these traits/talents currently only allows one Survival hunter to benefit from the given talents/trait. This feels extremely bad if you’re in a group/raid with more than one survival hunter running these traits/talents. A similar bug was affecting the Azerite Trait Steady AIm, which was fixed a few weeks ago, but still is happening to this trait and talent.

Initial thoughts on 8.1 changes:

New Azerite traits

Primeval Intuition

Your maximum Focus is increased to 120, and Mongoose Bite and Raptor Strike increases your Critical Strike by X for 12 sec, stacking up to 10 times.

This seems like a different variation of Blur of Talons which increases Agility by a significant amount per Mongoose Bite or Raptor Strike during Coordinated Assault. The positive thing about this trait is that it also increases focus baseline, and the fact that it isn’t coupled to Coordinated Assault which makes it not be as heavily synergized with Birds of Prey as Blur of Talons currently is. This trait will generally be having a 100% uptime, making your DPS more sustained and less burst oriented than Blur of Talons, which may be what will be distinguishing the two. The trait itself is extremely bland, it won’t change how you play, and it’ll just act like a passive buff you have active throughout the fight - and if some mechanic forces it to drop, it’ll just feel bad.