Survival and marksmanship are in need of some help in the damage department, and it’s coming soon.
Theorycrafters! Just finished implementing our first round of DPS tuning (primarily focused on single target). Should be in the next build.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) August 13, 2014
This is both good news and bad news. Good news because numbers will start to become balanced. Bad news because it means most of the actual design is done. I’m personally most concerned about survival right now, but marksmanship has problems too depending on who you ask. The other specs have both a cooldown and execute. Survival feels strange without either. There is, however, some good news about Black Arrow.
@gameshunter Biggest buff: Black Arrow damage increased by ~200%. (And yes, PvPers, we’re discussing dispel protection for it. Relax.) — Celestalon (@Celestalon) August 13, 2014
The Black Arrow buff isn’t surprising (admittedly, 200% kind of huge) because in its current state survival basically does less damage than tanks. This is partially because of number tuning, and partially because of an Explosive Shot bug (which should also be fixed next build according to Celestalon) where damage is being clipped. Just like the old days when you had to wait for each Explosive Shot to fall off before applying the new one. The damage was so lackluster that I ended up stopping my survival 90-100 leveling attempt at level 94 when stuff was just taking too long to kill.
The best news here is that they’re seriously considering dispel protection for it. As I talked about before with Survival PvP concerns, Lock and Load is survival’s bread and butter for dealing any semblance of burst damage, and it can easily be nullified with a healer’s dispel. I offered up some suggestions in that post but we don’t know what direction they’ll take with this. As long as it’s something, I’m happy. Survival just lost its previous edge in PvP with the removal of Improved Camouflage, so it’s going to need all the help it can get.
As for survival’s other button, I previously talked about that here, but I wouldn’t hold out any hope. Celestalon later tweeted there were no plans.
Beast mastery really is shaping up to be the best overall spec, at least in PvE. It has good single target, good AoE, and just plays well. All that is missing compared to live is Serpent Sting and Rapid Fire, which I don’t even miss to be honest. To me, it’s an example of successful ability pruning. They took it too far with survival in my opinion. I don’t think there’s enough gameplay there with pooling LnL procs. Perhaps number tuning could change this? I’ll keep an open mind.
I wouldn’t expect the new build before next week. Blizzard is pretty busy this week with Gamescom and the release date / cinematic reveal which happens in just a couple of hours from this writing.
For you Lone Wolf fans out there…
Lone Wolf isn’t my cup of tea. I love my pets! But I know some of you are really looking forward to this talent, so you’ll probably enjoy this tidbit:
@CraftyTurnip It’s still something that’s on our radar, that we’re considering, but no changes planned for now.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) August 12, 2014
No guarantees, but it’s something.
I am amused because I recall them saying that survival fans were passionate about how the spec played. I think I would be alright with the way it is if they got their heads out of their asses and gave us a cooldown. And for me, stampede every 5 minutes vs having blinkstrikes all the time isn’t worth it.
I’m in all honesty depressed by the beta, they’ve pruned too many abilities. I’ve 9 years under
my Dwarven belt, but I’m not sure it’s worth more right now.
i hope that they make those talents different for lone wolf. not just they work without a pet because we are a pet class, if you want to go petless, fine but you dont get the talents that work because of the pet. you get something different.
i will miss stampede but when i go back to the full 5 min wait when i dont have the cd reduction from the trinket, its just painful. it was nice every 3 minutes. waiting 5 mins for it again like i do in pvp just makes me hate it.
in the end, number tuning will go up and down, not every1 will be happy. thats the breaks i guess.
interesting thought that crossed my mind.
for pure dps classes, is 3 specs too hard to balance. should we only have 2??
Our class have mechanic problems at the moment, no number pass will fix that.
MM have almost no iteraction between its abilities, aimed shot and steady shot makes the spec feels too slow, chimarea shot have only a cleave, that’s nothing special, and on top of that we have Sniper training, with force us to stand still, we can’t move for more than 3 secs or we will lose uptime, in my opinion it’s worse that Mage’s Rune of Power.
Then we have SV, a spec with no burst and no execute, everything about this spec seens to revolve around Lock ‘n Load charges, and there’s no reliable way to get these charges, Frost mages have Fingers of frost, but they can force procs of fingers of frost, we can’t do that with lock ‘n load.
I’m not saying that hunters will be weak in WoD, they can balance the specs only with numbers, but our class have no depth, i see no reason at all to play a hunter in WoD
How can we have fun in an game where the very core of our class is just boring?
Lone Wolf was the WoD change that I was most excited about and I actually wouldnt mind if Blizz wasnt adjusting the talent tree. I can live with picking alternative non-pet talents like Iron Hawk, Binding Shot/Wyvern Sting or Murder of Crows (which could use a focus cost reduction). But they should do something about Master’s Call, which is a PvP-must without alternative.