BM Hunter...wtf

[Henjitsu]

So BM Hunter lost steady shot for some reason its not on my hunter spell page anymore

 

[doumatjee]

Bm hunters lost passive focus regeneration speed talent, barbed shot does no longer increase pet att speed.
Exotic pets that heal, heal the same amount as last expansion which in other words is bad now.
Most damage comes from biting multiple targets.

It comes down to this: You'll try to not use any other abillities so/untill you have enough focus to farm damage on bites.

 

[tyr3d]

Ye, Spirit Mend now sucks and Fortitude of the Bear is now a passive 3% damage reduction. Feelsbad.

 

[icehawk]

It’s still hard for me to process what they’ve done to BM.

I really am hoping they realise how knackered it is and make some tweaks so it’s actually playable again. At least for the lower levels. I’m sure once you get to the higher levels it performs alright.

I don’t have the stomach to play it in its current form…..

 

[cletus]

It’s still hard for me to process what they’ve done to BM.

Ok, I'm going to rant so strap in.

I have a theory. Stay with me here. So when a TV show is adopted from some popular source material you will get one of 3 kinds of writers who adapts it for TV:

1. They don't know nor care about the source material. They may hate it eg The Witcher;
2. Their ego demands they change it in some way eg Game of Thrones; or
3. They know and respect the source material and try to honor it eg Lord of the Rings.

(3) is incredibly rare.

So bringing this back to class design, you kind of see a similar pattern. What happens to a class largely depends on the attitude of whoever is in charge of class design. And what's been clear to me since at least SL is that whoever is in charge of hutners doesn't know hunters and honestly doesn't give AF.

If you played SL, you will remember Choreghast. As a BM hunter this was actually miserable. Why? Because Torghast was built so you would gain weird powers and become unreasonable powerful. That was meant to be the fun. There were videos and screenshots of, say, Warlocks in TC18 who critted for 2100M+ on a Chaos Bolt against a boss.

What did BM hunters get? Nothing. Nothing fun anyway. The stupid flare in a tar trap power, small percentage increases in crit damage, that sort of thing. Nothing that 10x'ed you. Not even close. The closest to fun was the hand grenade power stacking on Fleshcraft that turne dyou into a bomb. But the most telling part was that ZERO powers affected Multi-shot.

If you played BM in SL/DF/TWW you'll know that the entire builds all revolved around Multi-shot so this has been consistent for at least 3 expansions. Blizzard event recently came out and said that Multi-shot wasn't "iconic" for BMs and didn't fit, despite BMs having Multi-shot since Vanilla.

And the TWW talent rework was complete ass. Trailblazer (out-of-combat movement boost) used to be choosable at level 10. In TWW it was a level 50+ talent. Pathfinding used to have 2 ranks for +8%. It got changed to 1 rank for 4%. Midnight moved these slightly up the tree and in general the earlier Hunter tree in Midnight is better than TWW tbf.

But the TWW Hunter tree was complete ass. Your first abilities that were basically unavoidable were things like Tar Traps and, worse, Tranq Shot. I'm sorry but there's not a less than max level Hunter in the game that ever needs to be thinking about using Tranq Shot. It just seemed like a cheap way of forcing hunters to choose powers they otherwise probably avoided, because they're mostly unnecessary.

And in all this BMs took so long to build a decent toolkit, which was made worse when in 11.2 Kill Command was no longer automatic. You had to choose it, which pushed back everything you previously got by 2 levels (up until level 50 or so when other benefits cancelled that problem out). But the point is that level 20 BMs were sad in DF, even sadder in TWW and somehow yet even sadder in Midnight for their lack of a toolkit.

Compare this to Fury Warrior who at level 11 have dual wield 2H, War Machine, Raging Blow and Whirlwind. That's most of a Fury WArrior.

My point is that someone who doesn't play hunter or understand hunters or honestly doesn't even seem to care has decided tthey need to reimagine what a BM hunter is and make it "unique". And they've done that by turning it into a Barbed Shot machine that takes forever to get there. It's just complete ass. That's my theory anyway.

Outside of Remix I levelled ONE 10-80 toon in the entire TWW expansion and that was an Earthen. And 10-70 was from exploration XP so it doesn't even really count. I used to level for fun. Low level hunters were pretty fun (for me). Now? There's zero chance I'm levelling anything outside of Remix.

For context I levelled at least 80 new level 80s in Remix and some of thoese I deleted to make room for other 80s.

So this turned into a long rant. Maybe I'm just jaded and/or burnt out but, to me, the game (and my preferred class) feels the worst its been in a decade and that says a lot because SHADOWLANDS happened in that decade.

I really am hoping they realise how knackered it is and make some tweaks so it’s actually playable again. At least for the lower levels. I’m sure once you get to the higher levels it performs alright.

Classes seem to now get major tweaks about every 1-2 major patches. It's not necessarily on the major patch release. It might be on a .5 patch. But that's about the cadence. So expect 1-2 in Midngith. These don't tend to be major redesigns but sometimes certain parts are completely revamped (eg Black ARrow in TWW)

These twekas are a mixed bag. It's good in some ways but in others you have to constantly rework you rtalent trees and action bars and there's no good way of sharing those if you run alts like I do. I mean I'm at the point of not even looking and just one-buttoning my way through life because who cares? It's going to change in a few months anyway.

To me they seem so committed to this boring ass version of BM that I don't think it'll see a significant change from that vision until at least the next expansion. That's my prediction.

I don’t have the stomach to play it in its current form…..

Me neither.

I though TWW was a crap expansion, one of the worst actually. All the open world content sucked. Hard. The grinds in Undermine in particular were ridiculous. Delves, for me, were the one saving grace.

But TW went through about 7 significant changes from TWW prepatch until now and all of those changes were bad, strictly worse even.

First we had the sudden, unannounced tank nerfs in the TWW prepatch that just made everything feel horrible. Then the 70-79 scaling was complete ass such that 70s were gods and 75-79s were wet noodles.. The XP requirements were HUGE compared to DF even with the mentor bonus. I think I calculated that DF took 13-14 TW dungeons to do 60-70. TWW took ~28. This was prior to the 11.2.5 XP nerfs. That was actually a welcome change to do it that early rather than in prepatch. I appreciated that.

Many, myself included, warned Blizzard that opening up TW to twinks was going to horribly unbalanced. They didn't listen and they were. This was fun for awhile but got hit with the nerf hammer. Hard. To the point that I don't even bother anymore.

The worst part was in changing TW dungeons to scaling to you rather than you to their base level, they completely killed the TW community, which allowed anyone to collect TW specific gear that was nice. Nothing really horribly broken. TW wasn't hard so it wasn't necessary. It was just... nice. Whereas in the new regime, only twinks could be OP.

And then they decided that that TW dungeons needed to be "harder" so they made them take twice as long for no more rewards. Oh and the TW weekly quest was nerfed for alts (500 badges first toon, 200 thereafter) while they hugely inflated the badge cost of everything new they added so everything was 1500-2000.

Classic, BFA and SL TW is ass, basically. So that too.

And Midnight scaling of old content is complete ass. I mean this week you can do BFA TW with Midnight scaling. It's... horrible.

For me, DF was a good expansion. The game was in a good state. TWW was awful. Had I known in DF what I do now I wouldn't have preordered TWW. For that reason I didn't preorder Midnight (housing... who cares?) and I'm not buying it.

Oh yeah, and let's not forget just nerfing movement speed all around. Longstrider, nerfed. Azerite gear in TW, gone. Move gems, nerfed. The effect of +Speed, nerfed (+1000 Speed in TWW was like +1-1.5% movement speed). And now? Sl gems nerfed into uselessness. Fun detected.

So retail is in a horrible state. I won't be playing the new expansion. F2P seems to be in a horrible state and I don't think that'll improve anytime soon. Blizzard seems intent on destroying twinking and, honestly, they're winning. At least for me. We'll see how 80 twinks do in Midnght.

Ok, this turned into a giant rant nobody will read. But I have NFI what they're doing.

I honestly think WoW is a 12.2 Remix waiting room for me at this point.

 

[GnPTurtle]

So BM Hunter lost steady shot for some reason its not on my hunter spell page anymore

Get rid of Barbed Shot. It replaces (poorly) Steady Shot