wow Upcoming Hunter Changes on the Dragonflight Alpha: August 12th

[Staff 861]

Blizzard today posted a list of upcoming Hunter changes that will go live in the next Dragonflight Alpha build.

Marksmanship Hunters will receive a new talent called Bulletstorm.

• Extra targets your Aimed Shot or Rapid Fires ricochet to from Trick Shots grants a stacking buff to your Multi-Shot damage, stacking up to 10 times.

(Source)

Hello again Hunters,

This won’t be a specific list of everything that has changed, but some notes on changes coming to the next build.

Class Tree:

• Some minor changes have been made to some node connections.
• Lone Survivor’s cooldown reduction has been lowered from 60 to 30 seconds.
• Death Chakram should work in non-Shadowlands zones, and should increase all damage taken rather than just Physical damage taken
• Master Marksman should work with melee abilities as well.

Marksmanship

• Lots of bug fixes.
• Legacy of the Windrunners has changed into a 2-point node again, each point will add 3 wind arrows. Also any buffs to Aimed Shot now applies to these Wind Arrows.
  • To clarify the point about Legacy of the Windrunners gaining bonuses from Aimed Shot, this is any buffs to crit chance or damage to Aimed Shot. Trick Shots will not be sending Wind Arrows all over the place.
• New talent in the bottom left area: Bulletstorm. Extra targets your Aimed Shot or Rapid Fires ricochet to from Trick Shots grants a stacking buff to your Multi-Shot damage.
• Bombardment has changed to a 1 point node and is located right below Multi-Shot
  • There has been some discussion about how Bombardment should work, or perhaps that it should just work like the current 4-piece set bonus with alternate numbers. Tracking resources spent is difficult in the default UI, and most people feel it is necessary to get an addon to track how much more Focus they have to spend to get a Trick Shots effect.
  • With the current design of X Arcane/Chimaera shots required as opposed to Focus Spent, why require a Multi-Shot instead of just granting Trick Shots? Most of the purpose of this talent is to provide some limited options for Trick Shots when you don’t have 3+ targets to consistently gain Trick Shots. If the fight has one target most of the time, and occasionally some adds spawn, getting a buff that guarantees your next Multi-Shot to grant you a Trick Shots regardless of targets hit should grant you increased control over when you want to use the effect. The Bombardment buff currently lasts 2 minutes, so there is no rush to try to jam in some extra shots right as some adds spawn, you have time to prepare and use this.
• Calling the Shots has had its design adjusted to grant cooldown reduction for Trueshot from Focus Spent, rather than require specific shots.

Beast Mastery and Survival have also had some bug fixes, but no notable design changes this week. That doesn’t mean things are final.

edit: To clarify the point about Legacy of the Windrunners gaining bonuses from Aimed Shot, this is any buffs to crit chance or damage to Aimed Shot. Trick Shots will not be sending Wind Arrows all over the place.

I hope the team looks at the proc rate or damage on the Wind Arrows such that it is a competitive choice in single target talent setups.

This is the goal. It may not be there with current numbers, but these 3 points (yes, they are still 3 total points, Windrunner’s Guidance is 1-point again), is that this should be competitive. Maybe it needs to be from Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire. Maybe Arcane Shot/Chimaera shot can also cause it. There’s danger in lumping too much extra damage to Aimed Shot for PvP reasons - hypothetical numbers, if Aimed Shot normally does 1000 damage, but via procs can sometimes do 2500 damage, the damage swing is super high. A lot of bonuses were pulled out of Aimed Shot in BFA/Shadowlands and just lumped into Aimed Shot damage to try to keep its damage consistently strong.

Bulletstorm

Bulletstorm’s design is currently a buff that stacks up to 10, but doesn’t refresh duration as you gain stacks. It lets you get some big Multi-Shots in, but in a cyclical fashion.

additional talents that specifically buff Rapid Fire

There’s some potential tree restructure that has to happen if this is the case, because Rapid Fire is technically optional, and having a line of things coming off of rapid fire and not connecting anywhere else limits how you can move your points around the tree. That isn’t to say this isn’t possible, just that it’s more involved than just putting a node somewhere that buffs only Rapid Fire.

replacing Survival’s Mastery

There are no plans to redesign any of the Mastery effects for Hunters.

Post 2

I should clarify my post above a bit more.

PvP is a concern for abilities that sometimes deal big damage or heal lot. This is true for the game as a whole. We have tools available to change things in PvP compared to PvE. While these tools obviously work, it’s not intuitive that Aimed Shot does 1000 damage against a kobold, and 500 damage against a player because of a hidden multiplier.

There are also PvE concerns of your abilities swinging in damage a lot. Partly for tuning reasons, but also for how the game feels. Again using hypothetical numbers, if Aimed Shot does 1000 damage, but sometimes 2500, your damage variance from each boss attempt, or on that difficult M+ pack, or in the Mage Tower challenges, or wherever, is very unstable. Sometimes it’s OK for your damage to be very swingy, some specs inherently have a lot of randomness in how they play and that’s by design. Critical strikes are already a thing that exist that changes your damage a lot, but you don’t often pull a boss and think “oh, my aimed shot didn’t crit, lets reset and try again”. That’s obviously an extreme example, but if there’s so much randomness tied to one ability’s damage, and that ability is a significant part of your total throughput, maybe it’s a problem we should try to address.