Class Wishlists for Midnight
Hunter Wishlist
For a brief breakdown of the changes coming to each specialization in Midnight, check out our Midnight Class Survival Guide.
Midnight Class Survival Guide
Hunter Wishlists for Midnight
Our Hunter Writers, Tarlo (Beast Mastery), Azortharion (Marksmanship), and DoolB (Survival), discuss the most significant issues plaguing their specs as well as the must-have changes they'd like to see prior to Midnight's launch in just a few short months.
Beast Mastery Hunter Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Fix single-target vs AoE balance
2.
Buff or replace weak and uninteresting talents
3.
Fix the conflicting ability priorities during Withering Fire
4.
Improve clarity for flags regarding pets and guardians
5.
Improve clarity for tooltips
Fix single-target vs AoE balance
One more recent thing that has caused uproar is the slight reshuffle of the beta talent tree. This has caused the balance between AoE and single-target to go a bit out of wack. Part of the issue here is that single-target focus regeneration is now more closely tied to Serpentine Strikes, a talent you wouldn't run on AoE. This means that you are painfully focus-starved if you are faced with a single-target situation while in AoE talents (like a Mythic+ boss).
Another part of the issue is that single-target builds can now skip Wild Thrash, which means that AoE builds once again require picking up 4 talents that do nothing for single-target. As they also nerfed Beast Cleave and Kill Cleave, there is a small risk of falling into a similar situation as 11.2, where some AoE talents are skipped even in Mythic+ builds.
Buff or replace weak and uninteresting talents
The next issue concerns the general design of the talents themselves. There are a lot of talents that are both weak and not very interesting, so why are they here?
Examples include:
Frenzy - Worth about 0.5% damage per talent point.
Aspect of the Beast - Worth about 0.5% damage.
Brutal Companion - Worth about 0.3% damage.
Heart of the Pack - Averages about 0.6% increased haste.
These estimates were calculated using Pack Leader. If you're playing Dark Ranger, they are all even worse.
Fix the conflicting ability priorities during Withering Fire
With the slight redesign of Withering Fire, you have a frankly insane amount of conflicting ability priorities going on, to summarize:
You want to press Black Arrow, since it gives you a Deathblow and it benefits from Withering Fire.
Bestial Wrath summons a Dark Hound (which is otherwise rare with Corpsecaller), so you want to press Kill Command to trigger Pact of the Hollow. Nature's Ally and Soul Drinker also incentivizes weaving in Kill Commands.
You want to press Barbed Shot, since Bloody Frenzy means Barbed Shot deals twice as much damage for 10 seconds, and Soul Drinker generates more Black Arrows.
You want to press Wailing Arrow, generated from Wailing Dead, which hits very hard.
On AoE, you want to press Wild Thrash, since it hits fairly hard.
What makes this even more confusing is also that:
Target counts can influence the priority.
The effects have different durations. Withering Fire, Bloody Frenzy and the Dark Hound only last for 10 seconds. This means you will likely have a different priority for the final 5 seconds of Bestial Wrath.
It is heavily influenced by RNG due to Soul Drinker, making split second decisions difficult.
Improve clarity for flags regarding pets and guardians
There are a couple of things that are very unclear when it comes to which abilities buff which pets for Beast Mastery, especially now with Midnight. The main sources of confusion here are the new Animal Companion from Nature's Ally, and the Dark Hounds of Dark Ranger.
The Animal Companion from Nature's Ally, seems like it should be identical to the regular one, but there are some notable differences. It does not benefit from Bestial Wrath and related talents and it also does not gain Beast Cleave or Kill Cleave.
There is also a wider issue with Dire Beasts, in that there are now 4 categories of them. There's the regular Dire Beast, there's the Bear from Howl of the Pack Leader (but crucially, not the Boar or Wyvern, as these are glorified visual effects), there's Fenryr and Hati from Huntmaster's Call and there's Dark Hounds. What is considered a Dire Beast and what is not? Depending on the talent, this is not consistent. Dire Frenzy will affect the former three, but not Dark Hounds. Only the regular Dire Beast will stack Huntmaster's Call and Heart of the Pack (which results in some weird anti-synergy when Corpsecaller procs). All in all this is very unclear and non-intuitive at the moment.
Improve clarity for tooltips
Another thing that could be improved is the tooltip on the talents and abilities. I think there should be an effort to clarify and standardize the terminology for hunter effects, with simplification and clarity being a theme of class design this expansion. Some examples follow below.
One common issue is that the phrase "pets" is too vague by itself, such as in Training Expert. We have a lot of different types of pets, does this include all of them? (It does not). Does Piercing Fangs and Laceration being in singular mean that they only affect the main pet? (No they still affect the Animal Companion).
Animal Companion itself has a lot of issues with clarity, especially now that Nature's Ally was introduced. The differences in their tooltips makes you wonder if there are any differences in their functionality (like does the regular Animal Companion not Stomp?), when they are intended to be identical. Pet abilities also lack clarity in how they are referred to, Animal Companion talks about "family abilities", Aspect of the Beast talks about "unique abilities" and Brutal Companion talks about "special attacks". Most people would not be able to identify what these refer to without looking at a guide or spelldata. In the spellbook you will also find very different ways of referring to pet spells.
I also generally dislike how they've re-used some names from previous talents rather than make new ones, when they effects are very different. This makes it confusing for returning players who might see the names and expect a similar functionality. It also makes it difficult to discuss old talents in retrospect. Clear examples of this include Wild Instincts and Bloody Frenzy.
Beast Mastery Hunter Guide
Marksmanship Hunter Midnight Wishlist
Top 4 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Rethink Black Arrow and Precise Shots.
2.
Reconsider Aimed Shot's Cast Time
3.
Reconsider Explosive Shot's removal.
4.
Make Hunter's Mark Affect AoE/Mythic+
Black Arrow and Precise Shots
Removing the interaction between Black Arrow and Precise Shots solves the degenerate "pre-spamming" gameplay of TWW Season 3, but the solution has created a new problem: time not spent casting Aimed Shot feels anemic and weirdly bloated. Without the interaction, Black Arrow feels weak and adds clutter to the globals between Aimed Shot casts, as you are incentivized to spend all of your Black Arrow procs and spend all of your Precise Shots stacks, every single time. To solve this, I suggest making Black Arrow replace Arcane Shot (and possibly even Multi-Shot) when you have a Deathblow proc.
Aimed Shot Cast Time
The increased cast time on Aimed Shot is a major friction point. Players are generally willing to accept longer cast times if the payoff is substantial, but currently, Aimed Shot lacks the mechanical and visual impact to justify it. The damage is fine, but its downstream effects, Precise Shots and Deathblow generation, remain unbuffed in Midnight. Furthermore, the ability lacks the audiovisual "oomph" of a Pyroblast or Chaos Bolt. If we must keep the long cast time, the ability needs to feel heavier; otherwise, I think the cast time should be reverted. Streamline need not be reintroduced here, as that would make a mess of the reasonable talent tree that we have by now.
Explosive Shot's Removal
While Explosive Shot may have been a debatable thematic fit for Marksmanship, it was undeniably a mechanical success. Its removal creates a void in the spec's fun factor and rotational agency. Marksmanship needs a short-cooldown button that grants control over short-term burst, whether that is a re-flavored Explosive Shot or a new ability that triggers Deathblow or Lock and Load or both. Volley sort of achieves this in AoE-focused builds, but single-target has no equivalent. Reintroducing this mechanic or just some mechanic would give Marksmanship some much-needed rotational variability and something to look forward to. Marksmanship currently lacks "ooh, shiny!" buttons in its baseline kit, particularly with the Black Arrow issues mentioned in Point 1. But remember, if a new ability is introduced, it will inevitably be compared to the audiovisual oomph of Explosive Shot. Please don't make it boring!
Hunter's Mark and Mythic+
Hunter's Mark currently creates a paradoxical balance issue: it encourages stacking Hunters on specific raid council fights (one Mark per target) while leaving the class' raid buff far less potent in Mythic+ compared to the group buffs of several other classes. The solution is simple: standardise Hunter's Mark into a group-wide Crit or Haste buff (or anything else that would be on par with other classes' group buffs). This resolves the awkward raid-stacking incentive and instantly makes Hunters a viable competitive pick for the 5-man meta. This is not just a "Top 0.1%" issue, either; the perception of utility disparity trickles down to all key levels, punishing the entire Hunter playerbase when they try to get invited into keys. After all, why bring a Hunter if their damage is nothing special, when they don't even buff the rest of your group's damage to make up for it when compared to so many other classes?
Marksmanship Hunter Guide
Survival Hunter Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Revisit Focus Economy & Incentives
2.
Dual-wielding and Two-handed Weapon Balance
3.
Rework Bleed Package
4.
Gameplay Variance
5.
Cooldown Duration
Revisit Focus Economy & Incentives
In Midnight, our primary resource in Focus is more or less entirely cosmetic. With the favorable damage output and how many other buffs are tied to our primary generator ( Kill Command ) there is almost no opportunity cost to use this ability. Notably, Tip of the Spear and Strike as One work together extremely well, often making it a "waste" not to "tip" an ability. This leads to the issue that if we do "tip" every ability we'll consistently be at very high or even capped Focus levels, which feels very odd and could be confusing to new players.
Furthermore, the cost of some of our primary damage abilities (Raptor Swipe 20 Focus // Wildfire Bomb 0 Focus) are very low or even free, so We're hoping this is addressed by either increasing the cost of Raptor Swipe and Wildfire Bomb, or even revisiting Strike as One to be sourced from Focus consumption and not Tip of the Spear consumption, which helps redistribute the "payoff" of the talent combo towards focus spending rather than tip generating, which is more in line with a typical "builder-spender" specialization.
This would also give some of the focus talents some room to breathe, which correlates with our next wish on this list.
Dual-Wielding and Two-Handed Weapons
As it stands right now, our dual-wield set up is going to always be weaker than two-handed weapons. This is because the off-hand weapon DPS is not factored into our ability damage output at all, and some of effects that otherwise favour dual wield over 2h such as Lethal Barbs or Wildfire Imbuement are either nullified or negligible due class mechanics or raw tuning that leads to us mostly ignoring our focus resource.
Unfortunately, without any effects to offset the ~4.5% lower ability damage (using Ilvl 280 weapons) the only real impact that dual-wield has on our spec is that gearing up will be much more annoying. The Great Vault and any other sort of personal loot will be diluted a ton by both one-handed and two-handed weapons without any way to pick one or the other. We're really hoping that this is fixed sooner rather than later, because the later we go into Midnight and our ilvl (thus weapon DPS) goes up, the difference between the two weapon types will become larger.
Rework Bleed Package
Currently, we have 5 talent nodes devoted to Bleed effects (applying bleeds, enhancing bleeds etc). All of these nodes are very passive and very weak too, so they're not worth considering from both a "fun" perspective and optimal output perspective. We're wishing that these talents are re-examined and at the least significantly buffed to be worth considering. However, even with massive buffs this bleed package would be an incredibly passive playstyle without any real differences to gameplay. Something to consider would be reworking the entirely passive bleed suite with more gameplay altering considerations or active components.
Gameplay Variance
Moving from The War Within to Midnight has Survival losing two procs that gave moments of variance to our gameplay. Tuning aside, in the last expansion we had procs such as Explosive Shot that had its cooldown frequently reset or Kill Shot being used on any target regardless of execute threshold. In Midnight, we do not have any sort of baseline proc like this to have moment-to-moment gameplay considerations and the gameplay loop is very predictable. Generate Tip of the Spear, Spend Tip of the Spear, repeat. Our sources of cooldown reduction for things like Wildfire Bomb or Boomstick are static (this is a good thing by the way!) so there isn't much variance going on. Many players miss some sort of exciting proc to react to and it's been a very frequently requested bit of feedback in Survival circles.
Cooldown Duration
Our main cooldown in Takedown has a very, very low baseline duration of only 8 seconds for a cooldown of 90 seconds. There are ways to lower the cooldown to one minute and a hero tree can increase the duration to 10 seconds, but frankly that's still a confusingly low duration for a not-particularly impressive damage amp of 20%. The on-use damage is certainly appreciated, but even then the low duration isn't really long enough to use too many abilities. We believe this is leftover design from an old version of our Apex node that guaranteed procs during Takedown, but that's been reworked. As it stands now the duration of this cooldown is oddly short and doesn't feel particularly exciting to use for an ability required by both Hero talent trees.
Survival Hunter Guide
