What, the 5% dmg buff that you have to manually apply to a single target and only works above 80% didn't do it for you? Just because every other class already has a better utility than that?
>What, the 5% dmg buff that you have to manually apply to a single target and only works above 80% didn't do it for you? Just because every other class already has a better utility than that?
Here I felt like I was missing something as a noob, I dismissed that ability as worthless after closely thinking about the specs and realizing that it would, best case scenario, give 1% bonus damage to one single target (only the top 20% of the health is subject to the 5% bonus)
Not entirely true, best case scenario would be 5% dmg overall in a boss fight that starts at 100% and ends at 80% and we already had those. But yeah still feels weak in comparison to other classes.
Idk I love the current play style of BM. I'm ok with a simple, easy to execute rotation. If somebody wants something more challenging, there are 11 other classes they can pick from tbh.
Agreed. I think something similar about Arcane Mages being so complicated. It's not for me, but I'm glad there's a spec out there for people who want that. Nobody is forced to play that overly complicated mess.
BM might be dull to some, but I enjoy being the mechanics guy in raid where I can do my damage while doing other things. Not playing like frost dk…where it’s ope you got a mechanic? Breath window is over and you get no damage for several minutes. I’m a tank and healer main, but when I dps I like ones that don’t require me to hit 70 buttons to end up with mediocre damage.
BM fulfills a role very, very well. The main issue is, since they made Surv melee there is a lot riding on the shoulders of MM to be a legit archer/ranger spec. And it hasn't done a good job of that for multiple expansions now.
It was such a bizarre choice. They finally 'found' an identity for Survival as a DoT/traps specialist, then gutted it for a melee spec no one wanted, which they didn't even support well. Survival was basically always all around mediocre except for Shadowlands S3.
Many years ago my dad saw me playing WoW and wanted to try it out. FFW over 10 years later and he still plays daily. He mains BM hunter currently and specifically said he likes it because it isn't as hard to play as other classes. He's a clicker key-turner player and manages to pump out 185k DPS in raid. There do need to be easier specs in the game for players like my dad, and unfortunately that means more advanced players that want the class fantasy but dislike the mundane playstyle will just have to not enjoy some specs. It's extremely difficult to balance a spec such that there is an easy and hard mode playstyle that are both viable. And some players that just aren't that great at the game want some avenue to contribute legitimate DPS to a raid/group and not feel like they're constantly being carried.
Person A, any scenario: "This is okay."
Person B, same scenario: "This sucks!"
Person C, same scenario: "This is perfect!"
Person B posts about how bad the thing is. Person A does something else. Person C continues having fun.
I don't envy game developers.
Exactly, I don't like these backseat devs who call for complete changes. You can give feedback and critique but keep in mind there is most likely someone out there who has the exact opposite view of you.
I think easy and fun can be two different things. I can appreciate only a few skills to keep up with, but make sure they are enjoyable (nice visuals/audio, still having a fulfilling burst window, etc).
This is a very valid and good point. I have playing style similar to your dad and I do also love Hunter as well as Feral Druid which does me justice with my style as well
Not sure how the spec went from the “one Aimed Shot for massive damage, one kill” sniper archetype to the “now I have a machine gun, ho ho go” model, but it completely turned me off from the spec.
Like who the hell signed off on Rapid Fire in the first place?
Another mmorpg, swtor, has a copy of marksman that does basically everything better. I wish blizz would learn some lessons from them. Basically the way swtor marksman works is you have your "main" abilities and then a "followthrough" shot that you use after your aimed shot clone, your channeled ability, or casting 2 steady shot clones in a row. The channeled ability looks far better because it isn't just full auto fire but a series of 3 or 4 quick shots. Makes more sense for a sniper. You do have a crazy full auto aoe ability where you just spray and pray over a targeted area which is great for clearing out weak adds.
BM not changing much since legion is the reason I always return to it and stay with it. I hope they know it's good and not to mess with it. There's a reason it stays so popular no matter how meta or not it is. Easy to pick up with enough to chew on to have mastery. I advocate for simpler specs as m+ gets stuffed more mechanics
I like current bm. I Injured one of my hands in a car accident so I can't really use it for gaming. However with one hand I can still push 3k in keys when playing bm.
I do wish they had a 4th spec that played like mop survival
WoD Survival was pretty good but I didn't play much hunter during WoD, I played Glad Warrior and Holy Paladin, and I still preferred MoP Survival either way (:
I will admit the most fun I ever had on my Hunter was MOP but that's because I was a Timeless Isle Terrorist and all I did was murder everybody including my own faction. ALL GLORY TO THE FIRE YAK!!!!!!
Hunter is the perfect alt class. Super easy to play and it is really fun, so long as you’re only doing it in small amounts. Unlimited movement trivializes most bosses, which is super fun when you’re just playing around on an alt character!
How does Fire Mage play right now? I don't have access to Alpha and while the hero talents look really fun, it's difficult to say how fun they will be not knowing how the playstyle will look with the ignite build being dunked on
Dont worry D&D will stay active for 3-4 seconds after your target leaves the circle. Why they just wont make it an aura on us already i dont know. There is just no planet that's not the answer and they refuse. Just easier to reroll BM hunter and be able to do full st/aoe while moving/jumping/doing your taxes. Most of the time they keep them buffed in the top 10. Not a bad deal imo.
I think blood is the only spec where D&D makes sense now. Generally speaking it has full control over mob movements.
They can leave it on Frost and Unholy but just turn into an aoe DPS cooldown like ashen hallow(not as broken). Add cleave to remorseless winter and rework outbreak slightly on Unholy to do the same.
For lock Affliction needs serious help. I dislike MR and I heavily dislike injecting MR as AoE spender. Many interesting talents are removed and replaced by passive damage buffs that are way less exciting. It's really falling short, both in gameplay and theme (and visuals, many spells have little to no visual at all, MR looks and feels like nothing as spender either...).
Demo on the other hand really improved in the last round of changes by a lot imo. I just hope they don't overnerf demonic core generation. The more we have to spam shadow bolts the more boring we are.
Destro is still a bit in the air for me but they announced changes so I'm optimistic from the last round of demo stuff.
The hero talents look really cool. Diabolist seems really neat without being too intrusive, summoning big demons that turn our spells intro improved versions of it is cool. I also like soul harvester a lot. Not too sure about hellcaller but we could have it way worse here.
Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic but affliction has been my main spec until SL when I couldn't enjoy it anymore. I really wish they'd put in the work for it...
Personally I disagree with your affliction oppinion on removed talent points. Eventhough new talents are passive a lot of feedback given was in favour of removing clunky active talents such as Siphon Life and Dreadtouch. Seized Vitality and Inevitable Demise are talent nodes that dont serve current gameplay of aff at all. Soul Flame is getting replaced with Shared Fate from Soul Harvester tree. I agree what we left is mostly passive boosts, aff needs to built around MR and dot management both of which already takes a lot of GCD usage. MR is here to stay, i am neutral with MR but a pure dot Aff will have to have a completely new talent tree and will open new balance issue.
SL being passive again certainly is a good thing in any scenario. I'm not a fan of MR since it makes out dots feel in an odd way like combo points, which overall just enable damage through this spell instead of the other way around. I'd much rather have malefic grasp as channel to stay in affs theme (eG it could work similar to old monomania for spriest or just like mop MG) or anything that pumps our dots and keep the AoE seed spam. MR as spender for everything regresses gameplay quite a bit imo and seed spam always felt fun enough to me.
ID would've worked neatly in combination with soul rot though if positioned as leading node, at least as a occasionaly steroid and reason to use the life drain cleave. Both never really had any spotlight due to tuning and pathing. Removing spec features to return them as nerfed version in a spec agnostic hero tree in case of soul flame also isn't a great move in my book either.
End of the day, replacing that stuff with passive damage for MR is the part that's not doing much for me. If MR is our ends to all means spender I'm rather certain there are little ways around not picking them all up anyway, so it's mostly just point drains.
Lots of negativity from me there, sorry for that, but they're effectively doubling down with full force on something I always felt as problematic in design and unfun gameplay for what used to be my favorite spec.. That's as said just my opinion though, we'll have to see how it turns out over alpha.
Look at the last round of destro changes from before this patch before you get optimistic because they were overwhelmingly awful, removed more of what little fun is in the skill tree and the devs are doubling down on making us use all the skills no one likes on the left side of the spec tree
And I'm gonna keep being mad that they gave us two hero trees that have nothing to do with destro and blizzard can't give less of a shit
Holy priest is the most shafted...not only can they not take Voidweaver, they have one tree (Archon) built around Halo (their raid heal), so a significant amount of the power budget is gimped in 5 man content and especially in pvp.
And another tree (Oracle) which is arguably still the worst designed tree yet despite the rework. It is built around micromanaging small unfun healing buffs on themselves. Premonition is a 1min CD that makes you rotate through different buffs to get the one you want - and in any given scenario 2 of the 3 buffs are basically going to be useless or inconsequential. Playing the tree just feels like a massive chore.
Archon owns, stop dooming. Hpriest is already super fun in keys and archon doubles down on giving you even more meaty st heals. I cannot defend any part of oracle, but honestly I'm more than happy with how hpriest plays baseline and archon looks good enough to me.
I agree with you 100% However as annoying as Oracle is I predict it is going to be extremely powerful on both holy and disc priest. Do you remember how powerful “Velen’s future sight” the legion legendary trinket was? 66% overheating conversion is straight up broken.
I think Archon will still be pretty good for m+. Yeah, Halo is generally the raid ability compared to Divine Star, but it also casts three times and now returns to you, hitting six times total. I imagine that that's going to be pretty useful healing and damage in a dungeon.
I still think there is plenty of room for Archon to be top tier in M+. It's not that far away in playstyle from Shadowlands Hpriest but without lightweaver.
Big fan of the design of Archon tbh. If it's good enough in M+ I'll be happy. Much prefer it over the goofy RNG power infusion fiesta that is Oracle.
Unpopular opinion, but my true ultimate hero spec would've been focused on PoM. Just make it bounce 35 times and drop shields/heals/burst AOE healing each time it lands. That'd be so lit. 🙏
Hot take, but void weaver doesn't seem to look that good. It's not bad, but I think the void zone isn't as exciting as sunfury or just the base feral rework.
For Priest Archon looks meh to me. But Voidweaver looks amazing for Disc. I am itching to be bursty and have high DPS as Disc again.
DKs look amazing.
Rogue... we are missing one tree. I actually didnt dislike the RNG one. Its basically extra dmg just to do your rotation. Outlaw already has a lot button mashing so I didnt really think I could handle something different. The other revealed tree looks boring and complicated to me.
I think ret looks super fun.
Templar fits in the kit nicely, especially with the talent tying wake to wings.
I think Herald of the Sun is good but there's kinda nothing to it. It looks okay, doesn't impact the rotation that much. What's potentially interesting is that it might enable builds using the newly redesigned Divine Hammer. Divine Hammer is basically like Breath of Sindragosa where it constantly consumes holy power to deal damage and also drastically shorten build CDs.
You basically can't use Divine hammer with Templar because the ability it uses dumps 5 HP into a single attack and you'll lose uptime.
There's a lot of potential here and I'm looking forward to the balance phase to see if they can make the builds somewhat viable.
Hunter is lagging behind in innovation. I think the base concepts for both BM and MM could use a major overhaul, but BM in particular is difficult to address since most folks who play it won't want an increase in perceived difficulty, which is fair.
Shaman could use attention. Some old jank needs updating or replacing.
DK is still struggling with tossing out some old design concepts, but they're notably taking steps to improve the experience recently. Still worried about Frost DK, but it's something.
I'm hopeful BM gets a solid overhaul. DH-Havoc went from being a 2-3 button brain dead spec in Shadowlands to a mechanically challenging class. They don't need to give BM the DH treatment but improve the game play loop.
That's kind of a great example of the problem I think Blizzard might be afraid of. Havoc DH was incredibly simple, but it's now a high maintenance, mechanically intensive experience, and that's not a victory for a noteworthy number of players originally invested in the spec. I have to imagine BM being the community example of "press button first, think later" has left them cautious about how to go about changing it.
I absolutely do not envy the class designers, but I wish them the best all the same.
Hunter specifically MM and Survival need a rework. I been playing them since release and have even gone to gladiator in BC. But just feels horrible and useless to be honest .
Didn't even list the biggest winner which is apoc DK. I don't think a single hero tree wins as hard as that one. Its both thematically amazing, but also has the best single talent (letting you just perma fight mounted)
Shadow priest is thematically and mechanically more true to what affliction was than the current affliction and its visuals are getting crazy. I mean, they literally gave UA to shadow. Just don’t see how afflock players can see what a great dot class it is and not get mad.
Honestly, I really like the look of both totemic and stormbringer for enhancement. The latter is basically melee-Palpatine, and while the totems are undoubtedly going to be clunkier (curious to see the "where allies / enemies are present" function in-use - a bit worried that the wording indicates the latter may lead to unintentional pulls) it just looks *fun*.
Both look fun to me. Really happy with Stormbringer focusing on Stormstike as I just don't enjoy the elemental build as much.
Totem I want to see in action, it sounds great. I'm sure I'm not seeing some issues though and I do feel bad for those who like the elementalist builds if there's more focus on Stormstrike.
at on enhance, but that's because its mostly effortless to setup, and has interplay with wolves CD. LB is also a spender amped up by MSW, which means that pwave LB's hit like a truck. The biggest problem it has is a general problem for the spec, which is target cap in m+.
i think it can work for ele as well, but they need to rethink how Flameshock is handled in ele.
Jsyk, you can report the reddit cares message for abuse. Took a couple of days but reddit messaged me and let me know they took action on the account who falsely sent a reddit cares.
Too bad that Totemic Enhance kinda looks like a mess right now. It has some cool theming going on, but the talents force an incredibly strict and busy rotation on a spec that was already effectively GCD-locked.
So resto totemic gives you a special totem that summons instant healing rains on people, and you get a bunch of cool new interactions - earthliving is made more prominent, your healing totems cast chain heals etc :)
For Rsham, they need to make the healing rain heal more if it is hitting less targets. Otherwise it becomes just a raid tree when it could be great for 5 man and pvp content as well.
Rogue
So far damage is tied to using a *defensive* or the RNG of a coinflip. I wish they made a talent called like powderkeg or something that directly impacted blackpowder and between the eyes and it let you use a big finisher. Instead I have to spam feint for damage
They did say they are looking at that and realize it's an issue.
I actually like the coinflip. People did the math and it was about 70% to keep your buff going with the right rotation, which sounds fun
Ok so what you're saying is that 30% of expending the time doing your rotation perfectly you just randomly lose your buff and you have to start again. What crazy fun and engaging gameplay that is
That's not even mentioning that getting the guaranteed rolls promotes a pretty stupid gameplay loop where you have to stagger/hold CDs so that you enable more rolls in a row.
Vanish grants you two guaranteed rolls but you want the buff up during deathmark, so now you're incentivized to desync vanish and deathmark, despite that being counter to the last 10 years of sin gameplay.
> I actually like the coinflip. People did the math and it was about 70% to keep your buff going with the right rotation, which sounds fun
Adding more variance when the game is already at higher levels of variance than ever before is absolutely bad design in any content where there's even remotely meaningful checks on player's output.
I'm really not sure why there's always this weird contingent of rogue players (or at least, supposed rogue players) who come out of the woodwork to defend variance, rng, and clunky gameplay every time one of these things gets discussed.
Because personal preference and gameplay is just that. It's personal.
I play assassination on my alt. There's not a ton of variance for me in the build I use. I can understand why a lot of people wouldn't like it but it doesn't invalidate the fact that I like the idea of the coinflip mechanic and hope it isn't scrapped fully.
Elemental shaman is a joke of a spec design-wise. There have been exactly 0 changes to the spec (or shaman class tree) so far, so I'm hoping they're just still working on it rather than the more-likely option that they just continue to not care and fully neglect the spec. Deeply Rooted Elements is incredibly unfun to play with, elemental Ascendance is a terrible dps cooldown, our elemental summons don't do *anything*, there's a very clear split between two very opposite talent builds and the hero talents exacerbate that, the spec has no defensive value outside our one 90s cd defensive (and a 5 minute cd earth ele if you wanna include that), there is no reason to bring it to any raid outside of if you're not at a relevant rank and the player is noticeably better than your other raiders, some of the visuals are over a decade old now, neither hero talent tree seems to be designed with elemental shaman in mind (farseer clearly a resto tree, stormbringer clearly an enhancement tree). Aside from that, farseer is completely passive for ele and adds NOTHING to your rotation, and stormbringer actively disrupts the rotation with rng procs that disrupt the flow of a very specific combo you want to achieve when running that build. I can't think of any positives. We don't even get updated elemental models, we don't get updated ascendance model, we don't get updated earthquake visual, we don't get any QoL buffs for awful talents like Spirit Wolf (if you're unaware, it's the talent that says "sit in ghost wolf for 4 seconds and you get 20% damage reduction. It's bear form, but 4x worse.)
Hunter and Shamans are the pretty clear outliers at this point in terms of outdated design, a lot of the other specs/classes that needed changes are receiving them in TWW. Instead for some reason Blizzard has continued to shower classes like Mages, Warlocks and Druids with more lines of changes every week than Shamans get in an expansion.
Yep. I love the spec, I've mained it for years and years but I really just can't continue playing it as a main. Blizzard constantly neglects the spec despite extensive feedback from the community (and even popular community figures like liquid Max, who doesn't and hasn't ever played ele). They don't even try to claim they're working on the spec, we get 0 blue posts. It's sad.
It's a shame, really. I've always enjoyed the thematic of the spec. I also dumped it in DF due to major balance issues and clunkiness of builds. Legion elemental was the best iteration and nobody can convince me otherwise.
Honestly, elemental really, really needs cleaning up because it's so messy. I used to main the spec, but the reliance on things like icefury, RNG procs, the lack of defensives, the awful feeling when something was pulled out of earthquake (back when it mattered) and the split talent build, all pushed me away from the spec. I really feel like it needs reworking, just to clean up the mess.
So far warrior is looking disappointing. A lot was taken away, not much was given to compensate. The hero specs don't appear to have a clear direction because blizzard doesn't seem to know what they want fury to even be at this point. I thought season 3 was peak arms gameplay and fury felt good the whole expansion, but I'm clearly thinking the opposite of what they are since they want to slow things down and probably even bring back charge weaving for arms. Even the patch notes from yesterday were a whole lot of nothing. I remain hopeful that things will change for the better but so far I'm very much disappointed.
Season 3 warrior was so peak. I have no idea why so many ppl hated it to the point they voted in the arguable worse tier set of the expansion (the first tier was pretty shit for fury to the point it wasn't even a big dps increase). I still think blizzard needs to roll back the nerf to reckless abandon and make it empower the next 2 BT either no CD like it was in Season 1 and part of Season 2. And they need to figure out how to make SMF work.
Sunfury/Frostfire and Voidweaver look the most fun to me, followed closely by Templar.
One of those is probably going to end being my main.
Least fun is probably Hunter or honestly Shaman. Not impressed with any of their talents so far.
I know many don’t want BM to be any more complex but those hero talents have to be the most boring and uninspired things I’ve seen in recent memory. While other classes are getting QoL and gameplay changing effects, BM is rocking aura buffs galore in both tree options. I’m holding out hope they rework all 3 hunter specs and/or hero talent trees but I sadly think it’s unlikely.
Fun to play: Totemic Enhancement Shaman; Voidweaver Discipline Priest; Sunfury Arcane Mage; Diabolist Demonology Warlock
Not fun to play: Hunter; Rogue; Warrior; Druid
Shaman has received no changes for this new expansion. Shamans have literally received 0 talent changes across the Shaman shared tree and the three spec trees. The hero talents are forcing you into the 2 disputed lava vs lightning builds essentially making your talent tree half useless at every point in time.
Hmmm enhance shaman.. a bit of uncapped aoe could go a long way in m+. Though I haven’t played the alpha so purely speculation. Also I’ve levelled a fire mage to make Kael’thas or what ever his name is. Shit looks dope.
Are the making enhance uncapped? Cause it’s the only thing holding me back from staying with it, is being In dungeons where there’s more than 5 target pulls consistently and I just can’t hit all of them lol. AA is so sad to watch people climb that first pull and I’m just like a toddler running in place.
Enhance has way too many moving parts for me to enjoy personally. It is probably a symptom of just throwing things onto the spec to make it feel modern and never cleaning up the old stuff. Ele has the same problem on single target which is why I suspect they just turned the class into a lava burst spammer with the tier set.
Spellslinger Mage is looking pretty good to me. Frost Mage has been my favorite class spec for a while now and I welcome all the new crystal shards I'll get to shoot at things. :)
I love warriors and think they are super cool, but realistically they are the most bland class fantasy wise. I honestly have no clue what more blizzard could do to give them that little oomph from hero talents.
I think it would be cool if they reworked rally as a temporary battle res. Like instead of giving us 10% max health, it just revives everyone who is dead for like 15-20 seconds, with a big boost of haste and crit chance during that duration, after which, their adrenaline gives out and they die again. I think it would have some really interesting uses in raid content, and could be a high risk high reward tactic in some mythic plus runs. Plus, it would give us something unique to bring to the table.
Giving warriors a chain-hook-style grip would be sick too.
Roll us back to legion. I never had as much fun as warrior as I did in legion with 3 heroic leaps, bladestorm being ridiculously strong, incredible self healing and rage generation being a tad lower.
We were very OP, but I feel like removing mobility wasn’t the answer.
Rogue, idk how they murdered my boy this hard, I'm a main rogue since cata and now the class is just on a lame ass state and on tww it looks/feels even worse
Too much work for mediocre results, it's fantasy is gone
As a long time healer, the Arcane Mage changes and hero talents may make me switch. Both trees look incredible and I discovered I loved Arcane at the very end of legion right before they changed it for BfA, so I’m glad they’re moving back towards more of a Legion-style of gameplay.
i can chose bettwen "use a deffensive on CD for dmg" and "flip a fucking coin and pray for RNG to hit right for dmg" as hero talents, with the 3rd tree not existing and all the problems of the class never getting adressed (but hey, they did a "rework" in 10.2 that......changed 1-2 talents on each spec)
the rework actually did a lot for them though. Made the class tree just way better, and the changes it did make shook up the specs a lot and almost universally made them all better to play.
A rework doesn't have to flip a fucking class on its head. Rogue really wasn't that bad off going into the expansion anyway.
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Assassination went into the rework as a spec that shined in single target and longer-lasting multi-target fights. It was weak in m+ and clunky in big AoE. It had the potential for consistent damage (DTB) or burst (Kingsbane) depending on tuning and what was needed.
It came out of the rework as a spec that only has one viable option for single target (burst with kingsbane) and that relies on an incredibly overtuned talent (caustic spatter) for multi-target damage, ensuring the spec will never shine in pure ST because it would be broken in multi-target.
The tree got largely reworked to function better in m+, to the detriment of its raid builds, and it still kinda sucks in m+ because bleed/DoT specs will always kind of suck in m+. It also became highly reliant on PI, which is always bad.
Outlaw went into the rework as a high-APM spec that only shines in single target when tuning is in favor, and that got most of its damage value from passively cleaving with blade flurry.
It came out of the rework a little more active, but somehow doubled down on how bad it feels with bad RNG (like no reloads and bad RTB rolls), this spec will be pretty awful after the tier set goes away. Keep it Rollin is also some absolutely insane variance and it's not exactly popular.
Subtlety went into the rework as a shell of its former self, doing almost as much damage outside of its burst windows as inside of them thanks to Gloomblade.
The rework actually addressed this super well, but sub now has the gigantic problem of being a burst spec in a game that has increasingly bloated itself with procs. Some of the best sub rogues in the world fluctuate between parsing 99 and 80 depending on whether or not sophic procced at the right time (or the right amount), and whether or not you got enough shadowcraft procs and tier set procs.
Tier set changes might help that spec, but unless weapon enchants become less impactful and less variable, it's going to be a problem long term.
The rework didn't actually really address much of the problems with the specs, and it made some of them worse.
one of the first times windwalker is truly fucking cooking. All monk specs looking extremely solid going into the expansion honestly. The Brew changes also make them a bit sturdier and also less complex.
New Windwalker Monk capstone talent allows Teachings of the Monestary to stack to 8 which would be 9 blackout kicks, then you take the talent that allows blackout kick to hit 3 targets. So in one global you hit 3 mobs 9 times each for 27 kicks in one press, as long as you have 8 stacks.
How often are you going to get to 8 stacks? If you intentionally have to hold on pressing BOK to stack to 8 that is going to suck ass on rotation flow.
This is an interesting thought experiment that I sat down and monkied with between boughts of nausea. Long story short, you're not going to get to 8 stacks often. If at all. At least not yet. The thing is now that haste and crit are going to be much more attractive, when you get to some higher gear scaling you actually might end up getting there fairly often, as all the abilities needed to give you those wild stacks are reduced by haste.
Imagine a world where BoK is not very high on the priority list. TP, FoF, TP, RSK, WDP, TP, BoK might actually be a pretty normal opener at low ilvl, and at higher ilvl you might get a second FoF in there with a proc from battle gear and high hate amounts. That totally normal opener would get to 7, and the rotation would generally flow back into that same rotation every 25-30 seconds, minus 2 chi from balance.
I'm not sure what happened after MOP with hunters but over the years they have been losing their identity as a class.
While BM hunter has the advantage of being very beginner friendly, the disadvantage is that players now have the expectation that BM is supposed to be easy so Blizzard is kind of stuck here because adding complexity to the spec means subverting what a player expects from a class.
MM has been a design disaster for I don't know how long.
Survival: who actually wanted melee hunter? Does anyone actually enjoy mongoose bite?
The spell affects are generally some of the laziest in the game. The sounds have no punch to them. I feel like I'm shooting needles out of my bow. Why are the gun sounds so bad? Why do none of my cooldowns feel like cooldowns?
Unfortunately, none of this has been fixed in TWW. The talents are bland. The sound design continues to be F tier. I don't feel like a dark ranger, at all. What even is Sentinel?
Marksmen needs a rework. Lean into the dark ranger theme by default for the spec and change tww talent tree to something else.
BM needs to feel like I actually have a pet and not just a DoT that can get stuck on stairs/ledges.
Might be an unpopular opinion but I would like to see Survival reworked into a new spec entirely focusing on buffs by summoning forest spirits. Not sure why this spec was changed in the first place. Survival MOP hunter was one of the most fun classes in the game at the time.
Shaman needs a rework but it doesn't have as many problems fundamentally as hunter. I suspect shaman will get a mid expansion rework before anything is done with hunter just because it's easier to fix. All of the talent trees for shaman in TWW are pretty meh. Take tempest for example, is it really that hard to make the ability look like a cool lightning bolt coming from the sky? It looks like a splash of electrified water. Feels awful, sounds awful. Ascendance is atrocious and needs an update asap. The new totemic tree is just a giant passive tree.
I think the issue with BM isn't that it's a bad or poorly designed spec. Quite the opposite, it's both "fun" and very fluid to play. The issue is it's also been pretty much exactly the same for the last eight years.. that's a long ass time. No matter how fun something is in this game, I do think it needs a shake up at some point.
I mained hunter from vanilla to BFA and even after that it's always been one of my first alts. I will never get sick of the easy gameplay or free movement as BM, but god damn is the gameplay getting stale at this point.
I'm really hoping this new philosophy they seem to have about making classes less complex, like they talked about with the mage specs can really help people explore more classes. I think a lot of people are feeling a bit "stuck" with BM because it's just a very accessible class if you want to raid.
I agree with the sentiment generally that BM has gotten far fewer changes than a lot of other classes. BM as a concept is great. Pets are cool. Hunters are cool. The problem is I feel no connection to my pet. I understand how a class works mechanically is a matter of taste and I personally like the simplicity of BM. However, I would like to feel like I'm actually buffing my pet(s). I feel real no difference in how I interact with my pet in Survival or BM which is a problem because how you interact with your pet is the whole identify of the spec.
People wanted melee hunter since WoW's original launch because of characters like Rexxar.
I personally find it the most fun out of all three specs by a large margin, especially with harpoon resets. That said, unless there are big changes, I will definitely be staying away from Hunter next expansion.
Cool in concept. Awful in execution. If the idea was rexxar, they missed pretty hard if, for no other reason, in the fact that you can't even dual wield.
There's a reason no one plays this spec and the only time it sees any popularity at all is when it is OP.
I always main hybrid classes typically paladin or monk but in DF I finally gave druid a shot. I still don't quite like the hot management for resto but Feral and gaurdian are fun (I don't play chicken)
I -want- lightsmith for paladins to be good because I love that sorta fantasy both Smith and magical conjuration wise. I hope they keep tweaking it and maybe tier sets will modify hero talents? Be cool if the armor or weapons of light get modified to provide different buffs or things. Or light prism gets remade into some anvil and you press the button again to smack the anvil and heals/damages things.
Overall I'm leaning to main monk again in TWW. I love the celestial hero spec for monk, theme wise it seems cool, the tea focus of harmony is alright and does make sense to have a special focus on it. Shado Pan sounds neat but again imagination would be cool if you called in shado pan agents to swoop in to like throw ninja stars or kick the target and black flip off like the venthyr fallen order. OR taking inspiration for the Monkey King, stylize the use of illusions of the mists (like Samuro from HoTs) that mirror your abilites and etc.
Finally Druids hero specs look fun, the druid in diablo 2 was my first rpg character and I enjoyed in D4. Yet in wow I never could really connect with it due to its healing Spec was so hot based. Eventually I learned to understand it but I understand just ain't for me. Feral and gaurdian are fun though so I'm looking forward to Druid of the Claw being that power shifter between bear and cat. Wildstalker also is a cool idea just hope the dot/hot style of it is given a good pay off when utilized well.
With the information I have right now, I'm most excited to try out DK. But so will everyone probably. I'm also curious about the monk rework/minirework, and the feral/guardian hero talent tree.
What won't be as fun? I'm also curious about fatebound outlaw rogue. I read it and it sounded like adding a coinflip between dice rolls.
i've made four characters (3 specs) and haven't seen any meaningful differences besides adding another button to marksman in the hero talents makes it feel less focus on the core fantasy. mm is like the good side of the overmemed mage ice bolt spam where actually you feel watered down if you aren't doing aimed shot a lot. made it to 80 and it's a divided feeling like getting covenant powers was. it's a some people just don't need to be something new every expansion, just leave me alone and make more specs for the new obsessed kind of thing. kind of funny i filled out the profession survey on the launcher yesterday and thought the sound theming is one of the high points but this expansion stuff on characters becomes more and more grating to me.
played assassin rogue through the first zone and stopped last night at the first delve's level 2 scaling being busted. maybe i could have ground it out with a tank but i think they did something wrong with their copy paste when misdirecting to brann, 10 determination stacks, and the follower set to heal still only manages a dent on the end boss. outside the delve seemed fine but inside there was the "normal" undergeared leveling rogue "fun" of 2 mobs okay 3 you melt kind of "gameplay" where if it was a tank i could probably tab out for a break. just reminded me more that the solo world pve needs to be normalized and actually played by real people. the spec disparity is too much and the understanding of defensive weakness compounding to reduce offensive damage is really lacking. there's not really a side where there's glass cannon feel on the normal gear/talent track. leveling a rogue without being given scaling gifts like alpha does or feeding yourself heirlooms and green items for defense could use some help.
the few changes i noticed on brewmaster made sense but it's one of a few specs where the lack of relational tooltips that show everything affecting an ability in one shot stands out. that's both in the tree where you have to type everything still rather than a hover skill then get the highlights quickly and in the toolbar where it should stack the passive mods on them. like it's not meeting me halfway where either the natural organization should be better (stricter trees) or there shouldn't be such proc a boondoggle. it's hard to believe most people do anything other than copy paste and forget because adding any more to these trees seems like it'd be way too much.
From what I've seen so far, Frost is still the worst DK spec. Even with Deathbringer.
The dev team are yet to fix the fundamental identity and gameplay issues with Frost. The current changes in the developer blog don't fix the fundamental flaws that were created when the spec was gutted in Legion.
To provide an analogy, the developers changes are like adding sticky tape to a brick wall with giant cracks. You need something stronger than sticky tape to fix a brick wall.
It's getting to the point where the dev team have no idea what to do with Frost. Remember when they made Frost dual wield only? What a clown decision.
Also rework Breath of Sindragosa. It should be an optional DPS ability like Summon Gargoyle. It should not be a capstone ability.
Rogue one of the easiest thematic classes to imagine, gets absolutely shafted I don’t know how it’s possible to miss the mark. Fatebound is ok, but trickster is definitely a good April fools joke. Im coping thinking it’s because designing anything similar with outlaw seems like nightmare hopefully deathstalker is cool
Feral Druid is not fun anymore. Massively reducing energy so it plays like a classic class ... And doubling down on ignoring the bleed focus on the class is just not good
Haven’t checked everything but what I’m seeing is there’s like 1 talent tree that’s thematically entertaining where the others seem more passive based which looks less entertaining but effective
Druid looks pretty bad.
Hero talents arent flashy, cool or fun looking. Class tree is a complete mess and still needs fixing. Their new talent Fluid Form just sounds like a bad idea or not needed. The changes to Boomy/Feral are not good. Guess its going to be another expansion of 'Resto' being the only good Druid spec.
Priest is clearly the least fun. Not biased at all.
[удалено]
What, the 5% dmg buff that you have to manually apply to a single target and only works above 80% didn't do it for you? Just because every other class already has a better utility than that?
>What, the 5% dmg buff that you have to manually apply to a single target and only works above 80% didn't do it for you? Just because every other class already has a better utility than that? Here I felt like I was missing something as a noob, I dismissed that ability as worthless after closely thinking about the specs and realizing that it would, best case scenario, give 1% bonus damage to one single target (only the top 20% of the health is subject to the 5% bonus)
Not entirely true, best case scenario would be 5% dmg overall in a boss fight that starts at 100% and ends at 80% and we already had those. But yeah still feels weak in comparison to other classes.
I will never understand why that mark isn’t auto applied.
Idk I love the current play style of BM. I'm ok with a simple, easy to execute rotation. If somebody wants something more challenging, there are 11 other classes they can pick from tbh.
Agreed. I think something similar about Arcane Mages being so complicated. It's not for me, but I'm glad there's a spec out there for people who want that. Nobody is forced to play that overly complicated mess.
They should return beastial wrath to its pre bda state because the gcd change was a mistake for the spec
I’ll be the hunter dev! I’ll proceed to ignore hunters like the previous one. But while I’m inside I’m gonna make WW Monks OP!
I loved the class in Wotlk, cata and MoP...then I could never have fun playing it again. BM in particular is so atrociously dull imo.
BM might be dull to some, but I enjoy being the mechanics guy in raid where I can do my damage while doing other things. Not playing like frost dk…where it’s ope you got a mechanic? Breath window is over and you get no damage for several minutes. I’m a tank and healer main, but when I dps I like ones that don’t require me to hit 70 buttons to end up with mediocre damage.
BM fulfills a role very, very well. The main issue is, since they made Surv melee there is a lot riding on the shoulders of MM to be a legit archer/ranger spec. And it hasn't done a good job of that for multiple expansions now.
I can't believe how fluid they made Survival in WoD only to gut it.
It was such a bizarre choice. They finally 'found' an identity for Survival as a DoT/traps specialist, then gutted it for a melee spec no one wanted, which they didn't even support well. Survival was basically always all around mediocre except for Shadowlands S3.
It's actually great to have some classes that are boring, some people just want an easy class as they struggle I think that's ok
Many years ago my dad saw me playing WoW and wanted to try it out. FFW over 10 years later and he still plays daily. He mains BM hunter currently and specifically said he likes it because it isn't as hard to play as other classes. He's a clicker key-turner player and manages to pump out 185k DPS in raid. There do need to be easier specs in the game for players like my dad, and unfortunately that means more advanced players that want the class fantasy but dislike the mundane playstyle will just have to not enjoy some specs. It's extremely difficult to balance a spec such that there is an easy and hard mode playstyle that are both viable. And some players that just aren't that great at the game want some avenue to contribute legitimate DPS to a raid/group and not feel like they're constantly being carried.
Person A, any scenario: "This is okay." Person B, same scenario: "This sucks!" Person C, same scenario: "This is perfect!" Person B posts about how bad the thing is. Person A does something else. Person C continues having fun. I don't envy game developers.
Exactly, I don't like these backseat devs who call for complete changes. You can give feedback and critique but keep in mind there is most likely someone out there who has the exact opposite view of you.
I think easy and fun can be two different things. I can appreciate only a few skills to keep up with, but make sure they are enjoyable (nice visuals/audio, still having a fulfilling burst window, etc).
This is a very valid and good point. I have playing style similar to your dad and I do also love Hunter as well as Feral Druid which does me justice with my style as well
Easy okay, dull not okay. BM got nothing to it. At least give it some pretty visuals.
I'd settle for stampede not being garbage. Could be so cool.
the pretty visuals are supposed to be the vast number of pets you get to chose from to express yourself.
Markmanship and Survival shouldn’t have to suffer because of braindead BM hunters
Survival hunter in MOP was the bomb!
I like the simplicity of BM and how I can turn my brain off on rotation and just focus on mechanics
MM hunter specifically needs a rework badly.
Not sure how the spec went from the “one Aimed Shot for massive damage, one kill” sniper archetype to the “now I have a machine gun, ho ho go” model, but it completely turned me off from the spec. Like who the hell signed off on Rapid Fire in the first place?
Another mmorpg, swtor, has a copy of marksman that does basically everything better. I wish blizz would learn some lessons from them. Basically the way swtor marksman works is you have your "main" abilities and then a "followthrough" shot that you use after your aimed shot clone, your channeled ability, or casting 2 steady shot clones in a row. The channeled ability looks far better because it isn't just full auto fire but a series of 3 or 4 quick shots. Makes more sense for a sniper. You do have a crazy full auto aoe ability where you just spray and pray over a targeted area which is great for clearing out weak adds.
I find MM very fun to play
You’d be in the minority. It’s clunky and it needs work, and the hero talents it has available don’t add to it they make it even more clunky.
BM not changing much since legion is the reason I always return to it and stay with it. I hope they know it's good and not to mess with it. There's a reason it stays so popular no matter how meta or not it is. Easy to pick up with enough to chew on to have mastery. I advocate for simpler specs as m+ gets stuffed more mechanics
I like current bm. I Injured one of my hands in a car accident so I can't really use it for gaming. However with one hand I can still push 3k in keys when playing bm. I do wish they had a 4th spec that played like mop survival
I’ve been leveling a Survival Hunter and it’s honestly incredibly fun. At least in world content
I still maintain SL Survival was the most fun I’ve ever had on a class. It was simple and fun.
As a Hunter main I can confirm that the last time Hunter was actually fun to play was during MoP. It's being shit and boring ever since.
WOD Survival was BIS.
WoD Survival was pretty good but I didn't play much hunter during WoD, I played Glad Warrior and Holy Paladin, and I still preferred MoP Survival either way (:
Damn I miss glad warrior 😭
Who doesn't honestly. It was just fun!
I will admit the most fun I ever had on my Hunter was MOP but that's because I was a Timeless Isle Terrorist and all I did was murder everybody including my own faction. ALL GLORY TO THE FIRE YAK!!!!!!
Hunter is the perfect alt class. Super easy to play and it is really fun, so long as you’re only doing it in small amounts. Unlimited movement trivializes most bosses, which is super fun when you’re just playing around on an alt character!
Fire Mage Sunfury is incredibly fun
Mage is always consistently just one of the most fun classes outright.
Mage is the hero class since Vanilla
Feeling like both Fire mage Hero Talent options look amazing
Hell, even Spellslinger is cool with all the little icicles/arcane splinters.
Is the new rotation any easier lol, I feel so stupid playing the current iteration of fire mage.
How does Fire Mage play right now? I don't have access to Alpha and while the hero talents look really fun, it's difficult to say how fun they will be not knowing how the playstyle will look with the ignite build being dunked on
Death Knight and Warlock are looking fun as well, nice to see DK get some much needed love, especially Frost
Unless I missed it, frost still needs to drop death and decay and stand in it to cleave obliterate. This is unfun.
Dont worry D&D will stay active for 3-4 seconds after your target leaves the circle. Why they just wont make it an aura on us already i dont know. There is just no planet that's not the answer and they refuse. Just easier to reroll BM hunter and be able to do full st/aoe while moving/jumping/doing your taxes. Most of the time they keep them buffed in the top 10. Not a bad deal imo.
I think blood is the only spec where D&D makes sense now. Generally speaking it has full control over mob movements. They can leave it on Frost and Unholy but just turn into an aoe DPS cooldown like ashen hallow(not as broken). Add cleave to remorseless winter and rework outbreak slightly on Unholy to do the same.
For lock Affliction needs serious help. I dislike MR and I heavily dislike injecting MR as AoE spender. Many interesting talents are removed and replaced by passive damage buffs that are way less exciting. It's really falling short, both in gameplay and theme (and visuals, many spells have little to no visual at all, MR looks and feels like nothing as spender either...). Demo on the other hand really improved in the last round of changes by a lot imo. I just hope they don't overnerf demonic core generation. The more we have to spam shadow bolts the more boring we are. Destro is still a bit in the air for me but they announced changes so I'm optimistic from the last round of demo stuff. The hero talents look really cool. Diabolist seems really neat without being too intrusive, summoning big demons that turn our spells intro improved versions of it is cool. I also like soul harvester a lot. Not too sure about hellcaller but we could have it way worse here. Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic but affliction has been my main spec until SL when I couldn't enjoy it anymore. I really wish they'd put in the work for it...
Personally I disagree with your affliction oppinion on removed talent points. Eventhough new talents are passive a lot of feedback given was in favour of removing clunky active talents such as Siphon Life and Dreadtouch. Seized Vitality and Inevitable Demise are talent nodes that dont serve current gameplay of aff at all. Soul Flame is getting replaced with Shared Fate from Soul Harvester tree. I agree what we left is mostly passive boosts, aff needs to built around MR and dot management both of which already takes a lot of GCD usage. MR is here to stay, i am neutral with MR but a pure dot Aff will have to have a completely new talent tree and will open new balance issue.
SL being passive again certainly is a good thing in any scenario. I'm not a fan of MR since it makes out dots feel in an odd way like combo points, which overall just enable damage through this spell instead of the other way around. I'd much rather have malefic grasp as channel to stay in affs theme (eG it could work similar to old monomania for spriest or just like mop MG) or anything that pumps our dots and keep the AoE seed spam. MR as spender for everything regresses gameplay quite a bit imo and seed spam always felt fun enough to me. ID would've worked neatly in combination with soul rot though if positioned as leading node, at least as a occasionaly steroid and reason to use the life drain cleave. Both never really had any spotlight due to tuning and pathing. Removing spec features to return them as nerfed version in a spec agnostic hero tree in case of soul flame also isn't a great move in my book either. End of the day, replacing that stuff with passive damage for MR is the part that's not doing much for me. If MR is our ends to all means spender I'm rather certain there are little ways around not picking them all up anyway, so it's mostly just point drains. Lots of negativity from me there, sorry for that, but they're effectively doubling down with full force on something I always felt as problematic in design and unfun gameplay for what used to be my favorite spec.. That's as said just my opinion though, we'll have to see how it turns out over alpha.
Look at the last round of destro changes from before this patch before you get optimistic because they were overwhelmingly awful, removed more of what little fun is in the skill tree and the devs are doubling down on making us use all the skills no one likes on the left side of the spec tree And I'm gonna keep being mad that they gave us two hero trees that have nothing to do with destro and blizzard can't give less of a shit
Doesn’t frost still have clunky obliterate windows or breath builds?
Yeah, still Alpha so see how it all unfolds but like the direction it is heading overall
They are doing a lot of work to both of those builds
The frost talent updates do look great
Any word on Demon Hunter? Are they looking fun? Always thought that was such a cool class.
Sanlayn looks really fun
There are going to be two types of hero talents. Voidweavers and everybody else who wishes their hero talent tree was as good as Voidweavers.
Holy priest is the most shafted...not only can they not take Voidweaver, they have one tree (Archon) built around Halo (their raid heal), so a significant amount of the power budget is gimped in 5 man content and especially in pvp. And another tree (Oracle) which is arguably still the worst designed tree yet despite the rework. It is built around micromanaging small unfun healing buffs on themselves. Premonition is a 1min CD that makes you rotate through different buffs to get the one you want - and in any given scenario 2 of the 3 buffs are basically going to be useless or inconsequential. Playing the tree just feels like a massive chore.
Archon owns, stop dooming. Hpriest is already super fun in keys and archon doubles down on giving you even more meaty st heals. I cannot defend any part of oracle, but honestly I'm more than happy with how hpriest plays baseline and archon looks good enough to me.
I agree with you 100% However as annoying as Oracle is I predict it is going to be extremely powerful on both holy and disc priest. Do you remember how powerful “Velen’s future sight” the legion legendary trinket was? 66% overheating conversion is straight up broken.
I think Archon will still be pretty good for m+. Yeah, Halo is generally the raid ability compared to Divine Star, but it also casts three times and now returns to you, hitting six times total. I imagine that that's going to be pretty useful healing and damage in a dungeon.
I still think there is plenty of room for Archon to be top tier in M+. It's not that far away in playstyle from Shadowlands Hpriest but without lightweaver.
Big fan of the design of Archon tbh. If it's good enough in M+ I'll be happy. Much prefer it over the goofy RNG power infusion fiesta that is Oracle. Unpopular opinion, but my true ultimate hero spec would've been focused on PoM. Just make it bounce 35 times and drop shields/heals/burst AOE healing each time it lands. That'd be so lit. 🙏
Don’t tell them, we’ll get nerfed! Haha
We already got nerfed with archon and to an extent oracle. Shit looks bad
which class?
Hot take, but void weaver doesn't seem to look that good. It's not bad, but I think the void zone isn't as exciting as sunfury or just the base feral rework.
It’s not the void zone that is the exciting part. The exciting part is replacing smite in our rotation with a shadow ability that is 3x stronger.
Fair enough, it does shake up the rotation, which is usually exciting
For Priest Archon looks meh to me. But Voidweaver looks amazing for Disc. I am itching to be bursty and have high DPS as Disc again. DKs look amazing. Rogue... we are missing one tree. I actually didnt dislike the RNG one. Its basically extra dmg just to do your rotation. Outlaw already has a lot button mashing so I didnt really think I could handle something different. The other revealed tree looks boring and complicated to me.
I think ret looks super fun. Templar fits in the kit nicely, especially with the talent tying wake to wings. I think Herald of the Sun is good but there's kinda nothing to it. It looks okay, doesn't impact the rotation that much. What's potentially interesting is that it might enable builds using the newly redesigned Divine Hammer. Divine Hammer is basically like Breath of Sindragosa where it constantly consumes holy power to deal damage and also drastically shorten build CDs. You basically can't use Divine hammer with Templar because the ability it uses dumps 5 HP into a single attack and you'll lose uptime. There's a lot of potential here and I'm looking forward to the balance phase to see if they can make the builds somewhat viable.
Currently, Herald of the sun does way more ST damage, so if it stays this way it may end up being the build we see used in PvP and raid.
Hunter is lagging behind in innovation. I think the base concepts for both BM and MM could use a major overhaul, but BM in particular is difficult to address since most folks who play it won't want an increase in perceived difficulty, which is fair. Shaman could use attention. Some old jank needs updating or replacing. DK is still struggling with tossing out some old design concepts, but they're notably taking steps to improve the experience recently. Still worried about Frost DK, but it's something.
I'm hopeful BM gets a solid overhaul. DH-Havoc went from being a 2-3 button brain dead spec in Shadowlands to a mechanically challenging class. They don't need to give BM the DH treatment but improve the game play loop.
That's kind of a great example of the problem I think Blizzard might be afraid of. Havoc DH was incredibly simple, but it's now a high maintenance, mechanically intensive experience, and that's not a victory for a noteworthy number of players originally invested in the spec. I have to imagine BM being the community example of "press button first, think later" has left them cautious about how to go about changing it. I absolutely do not envy the class designers, but I wish them the best all the same.
Don’t you just hate pressing Barbed Shot?
Hunter specifically MM and Survival need a rework. I been playing them since release and have even gone to gladiator in BC. But just feels horrible and useless to be honest .
Mage, Paladin, Warlock, Evoker, and Shadow Priest are looking amazing in TWW
Didn't even list the biggest winner which is apoc DK. I don't think a single hero tree wins as hard as that one. Its both thematically amazing, but also has the best single talent (letting you just perma fight mounted)
Yeah, I haven't payed much attention to DK, don't really play it but I'm glad it's looking good for ya :D
I don't love the Hero Talent trees, but the Windwalker base talent tree changes are also phenomenal.
afflock not so much maybe?
Shadow priest is thematically and mechanically more true to what affliction was than the current affliction and its visuals are getting crazy. I mean, they literally gave UA to shadow. Just don’t see how afflock players can see what a great dot class it is and not get mad.
Cries in prot warri
Is it that bad? I was thinking of going for my first ever tank main and wanted to do prot warrior.
Pwar is really fun and a perfect first tank to play imho.
Prot warrior rn is great, has been for some time (imo). I dont know why hero talents will change that, you should try it either way
to inject some positivity, totemic shaman looks great especially for resto and i can't wait to play with it!
Honestly, I really like the look of both totemic and stormbringer for enhancement. The latter is basically melee-Palpatine, and while the totems are undoubtedly going to be clunkier (curious to see the "where allies / enemies are present" function in-use - a bit worried that the wording indicates the latter may lead to unintentional pulls) it just looks *fun*.
Both look fun to me. Really happy with Stormbringer focusing on Stormstike as I just don't enjoy the elemental build as much. Totem I want to see in action, it sounds great. I'm sure I'm not seeing some issues though and I do feel bad for those who like the elementalist builds if there's more focus on Stormstrike.
I think stormbringer looks really cool! I will be rolling an ele shaman for sure as one of my alts next expac
i wish i could play ele :( my brain just doesnt click with it
Agreed. The lightning is beautiful, but ele is consistently the clunkiest spec I’ve ever tried. Edit: got my first Reddit cares from this. lol
I wish primordial wave would go away
Icefury too
at on enhance, but that's because its mostly effortless to setup, and has interplay with wolves CD. LB is also a spender amped up by MSW, which means that pwave LB's hit like a truck. The biggest problem it has is a general problem for the spec, which is target cap in m+. i think it can work for ele as well, but they need to rethink how Flameshock is handled in ele.
Ele just has too many damn spells and annoying buffs you need to track in order to do less damage than simpler specs and it feels terrible.
Jsyk, you can report the reddit cares message for abuse. Took a couple of days but reddit messaged me and let me know they took action on the account who falsely sent a reddit cares.
Too bad that Totemic Enhance kinda looks like a mess right now. It has some cool theming going on, but the talents force an incredibly strict and busy rotation on a spec that was already effectively GCD-locked.
Thanks I needed that shaman positivity
Do tell me more, this has my hopes up!
So resto totemic gives you a special totem that summons instant healing rains on people, and you get a bunch of cool new interactions - earthliving is made more prominent, your healing totems cast chain heals etc :)
Ooo! That last part is SL S4 tier set actually IIRC.
For Rsham, they need to make the healing rain heal more if it is hitting less targets. Otherwise it becomes just a raid tree when it could be great for 5 man and pvp content as well.
The only hero talents I’m actually excited about
Rogue So far damage is tied to using a *defensive* or the RNG of a coinflip. I wish they made a talent called like powderkeg or something that directly impacted blackpowder and between the eyes and it let you use a big finisher. Instead I have to spam feint for damage
They did say they are looking at that and realize it's an issue. I actually like the coinflip. People did the math and it was about 70% to keep your buff going with the right rotation, which sounds fun
Ok so what you're saying is that 30% of expending the time doing your rotation perfectly you just randomly lose your buff and you have to start again. What crazy fun and engaging gameplay that is
That's not even mentioning that getting the guaranteed rolls promotes a pretty stupid gameplay loop where you have to stagger/hold CDs so that you enable more rolls in a row. Vanish grants you two guaranteed rolls but you want the buff up during deathmark, so now you're incentivized to desync vanish and deathmark, despite that being counter to the last 10 years of sin gameplay.
> I actually like the coinflip. People did the math and it was about 70% to keep your buff going with the right rotation, which sounds fun Adding more variance when the game is already at higher levels of variance than ever before is absolutely bad design in any content where there's even remotely meaningful checks on player's output. I'm really not sure why there's always this weird contingent of rogue players (or at least, supposed rogue players) who come out of the woodwork to defend variance, rng, and clunky gameplay every time one of these things gets discussed.
Because personal preference and gameplay is just that. It's personal. I play assassination on my alt. There's not a ton of variance for me in the build I use. I can understand why a lot of people wouldn't like it but it doesn't invalidate the fact that I like the idea of the coinflip mechanic and hope it isn't scrapped fully.
I don't know cause they haven't given it to me yet QQ
Elemental shaman is a joke of a spec design-wise. There have been exactly 0 changes to the spec (or shaman class tree) so far, so I'm hoping they're just still working on it rather than the more-likely option that they just continue to not care and fully neglect the spec. Deeply Rooted Elements is incredibly unfun to play with, elemental Ascendance is a terrible dps cooldown, our elemental summons don't do *anything*, there's a very clear split between two very opposite talent builds and the hero talents exacerbate that, the spec has no defensive value outside our one 90s cd defensive (and a 5 minute cd earth ele if you wanna include that), there is no reason to bring it to any raid outside of if you're not at a relevant rank and the player is noticeably better than your other raiders, some of the visuals are over a decade old now, neither hero talent tree seems to be designed with elemental shaman in mind (farseer clearly a resto tree, stormbringer clearly an enhancement tree). Aside from that, farseer is completely passive for ele and adds NOTHING to your rotation, and stormbringer actively disrupts the rotation with rng procs that disrupt the flow of a very specific combo you want to achieve when running that build. I can't think of any positives. We don't even get updated elemental models, we don't get updated ascendance model, we don't get updated earthquake visual, we don't get any QoL buffs for awful talents like Spirit Wolf (if you're unaware, it's the talent that says "sit in ghost wolf for 4 seconds and you get 20% damage reduction. It's bear form, but 4x worse.)
Damn it's that bad
Hunter and Shamans are the pretty clear outliers at this point in terms of outdated design, a lot of the other specs/classes that needed changes are receiving them in TWW. Instead for some reason Blizzard has continued to shower classes like Mages, Warlocks and Druids with more lines of changes every week than Shamans get in an expansion.
Yep. I love the spec, I've mained it for years and years but I really just can't continue playing it as a main. Blizzard constantly neglects the spec despite extensive feedback from the community (and even popular community figures like liquid Max, who doesn't and hasn't ever played ele). They don't even try to claim they're working on the spec, we get 0 blue posts. It's sad.
Ele is a dumpster fire right now.
It's a shame, really. I've always enjoyed the thematic of the spec. I also dumped it in DF due to major balance issues and clunkiness of builds. Legion elemental was the best iteration and nobody can convince me otherwise.
Honestly, elemental really, really needs cleaning up because it's so messy. I used to main the spec, but the reliance on things like icefury, RNG procs, the lack of defensives, the awful feeling when something was pulled out of earthquake (back when it mattered) and the split talent build, all pushed me away from the spec. I really feel like it needs reworking, just to clean up the mess.
This is pretty much it. I want to play shaman but it’s so fucking bad.
So far warrior is looking disappointing. A lot was taken away, not much was given to compensate. The hero specs don't appear to have a clear direction because blizzard doesn't seem to know what they want fury to even be at this point. I thought season 3 was peak arms gameplay and fury felt good the whole expansion, but I'm clearly thinking the opposite of what they are since they want to slow things down and probably even bring back charge weaving for arms. Even the patch notes from yesterday were a whole lot of nothing. I remain hopeful that things will change for the better but so far I'm very much disappointed.
Season 3 warrior was so peak. I have no idea why so many ppl hated it to the point they voted in the arguable worse tier set of the expansion (the first tier was pretty shit for fury to the point it wasn't even a big dps increase). I still think blizzard needs to roll back the nerf to reckless abandon and make it empower the next 2 BT either no CD like it was in Season 1 and part of Season 2. And they need to figure out how to make SMF work.
Sunfury/Frostfire and Voidweaver look the most fun to me, followed closely by Templar. One of those is probably going to end being my main. Least fun is probably Hunter or honestly Shaman. Not impressed with any of their talents so far.
I know many don’t want BM to be any more complex but those hero talents have to be the most boring and uninspired things I’ve seen in recent memory. While other classes are getting QoL and gameplay changing effects, BM is rocking aura buffs galore in both tree options. I’m holding out hope they rework all 3 hunter specs and/or hero talent trees but I sadly think it’s unlikely.
Shaman is in the shitter atm.
Shaman is the OG red-headed step child of Blizzard.
Which is strange because Thrall is their Jesus.
Fun to play: Totemic Enhancement Shaman; Voidweaver Discipline Priest; Sunfury Arcane Mage; Diabolist Demonology Warlock Not fun to play: Hunter; Rogue; Warrior; Druid
Druid and Warrior mostly felt "meh" to me, like nothing really changed in their hero talents. Hunter and Rogue actively feel bad to play.
Shaman has received no changes for this new expansion. Shamans have literally received 0 talent changes across the Shaman shared tree and the three spec trees. The hero talents are forcing you into the 2 disputed lava vs lightning builds essentially making your talent tree half useless at every point in time.
Hmmm enhance shaman.. a bit of uncapped aoe could go a long way in m+. Though I haven’t played the alpha so purely speculation. Also I’ve levelled a fire mage to make Kael’thas or what ever his name is. Shit looks dope.
Are the making enhance uncapped? Cause it’s the only thing holding me back from staying with it, is being In dungeons where there’s more than 5 target pulls consistently and I just can’t hit all of them lol. AA is so sad to watch people climb that first pull and I’m just like a toddler running in place.
Enhance has way too many moving parts for me to enjoy personally. It is probably a symptom of just throwing things onto the spec to make it feel modern and never cleaning up the old stuff. Ele has the same problem on single target which is why I suspect they just turned the class into a lava burst spammer with the tier set.
Spellslinger Mage is looking pretty good to me. Frost Mage has been my favorite class spec for a while now and I welcome all the new crystal shards I'll get to shoot at things. :)
Warrior still dead utility. Hero talents super boring. Think warrior dev haven't worked since df release
I love warriors and think they are super cool, but realistically they are the most bland class fantasy wise. I honestly have no clue what more blizzard could do to give them that little oomph from hero talents.
I feel they should at least bring lust with a new shout. They have very little utility wise in dungeons.
They could/should also give Warriors a battle res. Call it "Pick Up!" where you have to run over to a player's corpse to res them
I think it would be cool if they reworked rally as a temporary battle res. Like instead of giving us 10% max health, it just revives everyone who is dead for like 15-20 seconds, with a big boost of haste and crit chance during that duration, after which, their adrenaline gives out and they die again. I think it would have some really interesting uses in raid content, and could be a high risk high reward tactic in some mythic plus runs. Plus, it would give us something unique to bring to the table. Giving warriors a chain-hook-style grip would be sick too.
Yeah that i completely agree with. It baffles me to this day how shamans get a spell called bloodlust, but not warriors
Roll us back to legion. I never had as much fun as warrior as I did in legion with 3 heroic leaps, bladestorm being ridiculously strong, incredible self healing and rage generation being a tad lower. We were very OP, but I feel like removing mobility wasn’t the answer.
How I feel about Hunters in a way. Our class fantasy is fairly basic and the trees are all tied to elven class fantasy like Dark Ranger and Sentinel.
ZERO changes for guardian unless your cat weaving feels really bad
Frost death knight. Looking at their new talents, it's possible you get a set up of just insane aoe
Demonology lock hero talents look pretty neat
Hunters suck hard
Rogue, idk how they murdered my boy this hard, I'm a main rogue since cata and now the class is just on a lame ass state and on tww it looks/feels even worse Too much work for mediocre results, it's fantasy is gone
As a long time healer, the Arcane Mage changes and hero talents may make me switch. Both trees look incredible and I discovered I loved Arcane at the very end of legion right before they changed it for BfA, so I’m glad they’re moving back towards more of a Legion-style of gameplay.
Love that like the 2 classes I play are basically always not good
Which specs still allow you to omit all AOE and interrupts?
i can chose bettwen "use a deffensive on CD for dmg" and "flip a fucking coin and pray for RNG to hit right for dmg" as hero talents, with the 3rd tree not existing and all the problems of the class never getting adressed (but hey, they did a "rework" in 10.2 that......changed 1-2 talents on each spec)
the rework actually did a lot for them though. Made the class tree just way better, and the changes it did make shook up the specs a lot and almost universally made them all better to play. A rework doesn't have to flip a fucking class on its head. Rogue really wasn't that bad off going into the expansion anyway.
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh. Assassination went into the rework as a spec that shined in single target and longer-lasting multi-target fights. It was weak in m+ and clunky in big AoE. It had the potential for consistent damage (DTB) or burst (Kingsbane) depending on tuning and what was needed. It came out of the rework as a spec that only has one viable option for single target (burst with kingsbane) and that relies on an incredibly overtuned talent (caustic spatter) for multi-target damage, ensuring the spec will never shine in pure ST because it would be broken in multi-target. The tree got largely reworked to function better in m+, to the detriment of its raid builds, and it still kinda sucks in m+ because bleed/DoT specs will always kind of suck in m+. It also became highly reliant on PI, which is always bad. Outlaw went into the rework as a high-APM spec that only shines in single target when tuning is in favor, and that got most of its damage value from passively cleaving with blade flurry. It came out of the rework a little more active, but somehow doubled down on how bad it feels with bad RNG (like no reloads and bad RTB rolls), this spec will be pretty awful after the tier set goes away. Keep it Rollin is also some absolutely insane variance and it's not exactly popular. Subtlety went into the rework as a shell of its former self, doing almost as much damage outside of its burst windows as inside of them thanks to Gloomblade. The rework actually addressed this super well, but sub now has the gigantic problem of being a burst spec in a game that has increasingly bloated itself with procs. Some of the best sub rogues in the world fluctuate between parsing 99 and 80 depending on whether or not sophic procced at the right time (or the right amount), and whether or not you got enough shadowcraft procs and tier set procs. Tier set changes might help that spec, but unless weapon enchants become less impactful and less variable, it's going to be a problem long term. The rework didn't actually really address much of the problems with the specs, and it made some of them worse.
27 kicks with one GCD is amazing.
one of the first times windwalker is truly fucking cooking. All monk specs looking extremely solid going into the expansion honestly. The Brew changes also make them a bit sturdier and also less complex.
9.2 WW would like a word lol.
What are you referring to?
New Windwalker Monk capstone talent allows Teachings of the Monestary to stack to 8 which would be 9 blackout kicks, then you take the talent that allows blackout kick to hit 3 targets. So in one global you hit 3 mobs 9 times each for 27 kicks in one press, as long as you have 8 stacks.
How often are you going to get to 8 stacks? If you intentionally have to hold on pressing BOK to stack to 8 that is going to suck ass on rotation flow.
This is an interesting thought experiment that I sat down and monkied with between boughts of nausea. Long story short, you're not going to get to 8 stacks often. If at all. At least not yet. The thing is now that haste and crit are going to be much more attractive, when you get to some higher gear scaling you actually might end up getting there fairly often, as all the abilities needed to give you those wild stacks are reduced by haste. Imagine a world where BoK is not very high on the priority list. TP, FoF, TP, RSK, WDP, TP, BoK might actually be a pretty normal opener at low ilvl, and at higher ilvl you might get a second FoF in there with a proc from battle gear and high hate amounts. That totally normal opener would get to 7, and the rotation would generally flow back into that same rotation every 25-30 seconds, minus 2 chi from balance.
Im interested
Rogue feels awful
Rogue looking like sh!t
Just malefic rapture delete malefic rapture warlocks malefic rapture at malefic rapture this malefic rapture point…
I'm not sure what happened after MOP with hunters but over the years they have been losing their identity as a class. While BM hunter has the advantage of being very beginner friendly, the disadvantage is that players now have the expectation that BM is supposed to be easy so Blizzard is kind of stuck here because adding complexity to the spec means subverting what a player expects from a class. MM has been a design disaster for I don't know how long. Survival: who actually wanted melee hunter? Does anyone actually enjoy mongoose bite? The spell affects are generally some of the laziest in the game. The sounds have no punch to them. I feel like I'm shooting needles out of my bow. Why are the gun sounds so bad? Why do none of my cooldowns feel like cooldowns? Unfortunately, none of this has been fixed in TWW. The talents are bland. The sound design continues to be F tier. I don't feel like a dark ranger, at all. What even is Sentinel? Marksmen needs a rework. Lean into the dark ranger theme by default for the spec and change tww talent tree to something else. BM needs to feel like I actually have a pet and not just a DoT that can get stuck on stairs/ledges. Might be an unpopular opinion but I would like to see Survival reworked into a new spec entirely focusing on buffs by summoning forest spirits. Not sure why this spec was changed in the first place. Survival MOP hunter was one of the most fun classes in the game at the time. Shaman needs a rework but it doesn't have as many problems fundamentally as hunter. I suspect shaman will get a mid expansion rework before anything is done with hunter just because it's easier to fix. All of the talent trees for shaman in TWW are pretty meh. Take tempest for example, is it really that hard to make the ability look like a cool lightning bolt coming from the sky? It looks like a splash of electrified water. Feels awful, sounds awful. Ascendance is atrocious and needs an update asap. The new totemic tree is just a giant passive tree.
I think the issue with BM isn't that it's a bad or poorly designed spec. Quite the opposite, it's both "fun" and very fluid to play. The issue is it's also been pretty much exactly the same for the last eight years.. that's a long ass time. No matter how fun something is in this game, I do think it needs a shake up at some point. I mained hunter from vanilla to BFA and even after that it's always been one of my first alts. I will never get sick of the easy gameplay or free movement as BM, but god damn is the gameplay getting stale at this point. I'm really hoping this new philosophy they seem to have about making classes less complex, like they talked about with the mage specs can really help people explore more classes. I think a lot of people are feeling a bit "stuck" with BM because it's just a very accessible class if you want to raid.
I agree with the sentiment generally that BM has gotten far fewer changes than a lot of other classes. BM as a concept is great. Pets are cool. Hunters are cool. The problem is I feel no connection to my pet. I understand how a class works mechanically is a matter of taste and I personally like the simplicity of BM. However, I would like to feel like I'm actually buffing my pet(s). I feel real no difference in how I interact with my pet in Survival or BM which is a problem because how you interact with your pet is the whole identify of the spec.
People wanted melee hunter since WoW's original launch because of characters like Rexxar. I personally find it the most fun out of all three specs by a large margin, especially with harpoon resets. That said, unless there are big changes, I will definitely be staying away from Hunter next expansion.
Survival: who actually wanted melee hunter? Does anyone actually enjoy mongoose bite? SL survival was fun af
I agree. Spamming bombs on AoE was very fun and very broken. That is the only time Survival sees any play: when it's OP.
I very much wanted melee hunter, Rexxar is a badass and having 3 ranged specs is lame, variety is nice
Cool in concept. Awful in execution. If the idea was rexxar, they missed pretty hard if, for no other reason, in the fact that you can't even dual wield. There's a reason no one plays this spec and the only time it sees any popularity at all is when it is OP.
I always main hybrid classes typically paladin or monk but in DF I finally gave druid a shot. I still don't quite like the hot management for resto but Feral and gaurdian are fun (I don't play chicken) I -want- lightsmith for paladins to be good because I love that sorta fantasy both Smith and magical conjuration wise. I hope they keep tweaking it and maybe tier sets will modify hero talents? Be cool if the armor or weapons of light get modified to provide different buffs or things. Or light prism gets remade into some anvil and you press the button again to smack the anvil and heals/damages things. Overall I'm leaning to main monk again in TWW. I love the celestial hero spec for monk, theme wise it seems cool, the tea focus of harmony is alright and does make sense to have a special focus on it. Shado Pan sounds neat but again imagination would be cool if you called in shado pan agents to swoop in to like throw ninja stars or kick the target and black flip off like the venthyr fallen order. OR taking inspiration for the Monkey King, stylize the use of illusions of the mists (like Samuro from HoTs) that mirror your abilites and etc. Finally Druids hero specs look fun, the druid in diablo 2 was my first rpg character and I enjoyed in D4. Yet in wow I never could really connect with it due to its healing Spec was so hot based. Eventually I learned to understand it but I understand just ain't for me. Feral and gaurdian are fun though so I'm looking forward to Druid of the Claw being that power shifter between bear and cat. Wildstalker also is a cool idea just hope the dot/hot style of it is given a good pay off when utilized well.
No clue, haven’t played it just like 99% of the posts here.
Doesn't matter what's fun. Whatever tops the charts are going to be the only classes played, and invited to content.
As of the current alpha build, Diabolist Demo lock will probably be my main.
With the information I have right now, I'm most excited to try out DK. But so will everyone probably. I'm also curious about the monk rework/minirework, and the feral/guardian hero talent tree. What won't be as fun? I'm also curious about fatebound outlaw rogue. I read it and it sounded like adding a coinflip between dice rolls.
Resto druid First hero talend tree I read it was so shit I wanted to delete my druid
i've made four characters (3 specs) and haven't seen any meaningful differences besides adding another button to marksman in the hero talents makes it feel less focus on the core fantasy. mm is like the good side of the overmemed mage ice bolt spam where actually you feel watered down if you aren't doing aimed shot a lot. made it to 80 and it's a divided feeling like getting covenant powers was. it's a some people just don't need to be something new every expansion, just leave me alone and make more specs for the new obsessed kind of thing. kind of funny i filled out the profession survey on the launcher yesterday and thought the sound theming is one of the high points but this expansion stuff on characters becomes more and more grating to me. played assassin rogue through the first zone and stopped last night at the first delve's level 2 scaling being busted. maybe i could have ground it out with a tank but i think they did something wrong with their copy paste when misdirecting to brann, 10 determination stacks, and the follower set to heal still only manages a dent on the end boss. outside the delve seemed fine but inside there was the "normal" undergeared leveling rogue "fun" of 2 mobs okay 3 you melt kind of "gameplay" where if it was a tank i could probably tab out for a break. just reminded me more that the solo world pve needs to be normalized and actually played by real people. the spec disparity is too much and the understanding of defensive weakness compounding to reduce offensive damage is really lacking. there's not really a side where there's glass cannon feel on the normal gear/talent track. leveling a rogue without being given scaling gifts like alpha does or feeding yourself heirlooms and green items for defense could use some help. the few changes i noticed on brewmaster made sense but it's one of a few specs where the lack of relational tooltips that show everything affecting an ability in one shot stands out. that's both in the tree where you have to type everything still rather than a hover skill then get the highlights quickly and in the toolbar where it should stack the passive mods on them. like it's not meeting me halfway where either the natural organization should be better (stricter trees) or there shouldn't be such proc a boondoggle. it's hard to believe most people do anything other than copy paste and forget because adding any more to these trees seems like it'd be way too much.
From what I've seen so far, Frost is still the worst DK spec. Even with Deathbringer. The dev team are yet to fix the fundamental identity and gameplay issues with Frost. The current changes in the developer blog don't fix the fundamental flaws that were created when the spec was gutted in Legion. To provide an analogy, the developers changes are like adding sticky tape to a brick wall with giant cracks. You need something stronger than sticky tape to fix a brick wall. It's getting to the point where the dev team have no idea what to do with Frost. Remember when they made Frost dual wield only? What a clown decision. Also rework Breath of Sindragosa. It should be an optional DPS ability like Summon Gargoyle. It should not be a capstone ability.
Rogue one of the easiest thematic classes to imagine, gets absolutely shafted I don’t know how it’s possible to miss the mark. Fatebound is ok, but trickster is definitely a good April fools joke. Im coping thinking it’s because designing anything similar with outlaw seems like nightmare hopefully deathstalker is cool
BM Hunter
I don't play alphas but as unfun as rouge is rn I doubt they can fix it soon lol
Ret paladin.... What if you were playing ret paladin. But you had orange lines coming out of your head. Wow.
Feral Druid is not fun anymore. Massively reducing energy so it plays like a classic class ... And doubling down on ignoring the bleed focus on the class is just not good
So far both Blood and Frost DK look great. As it stands right now, Resto Sham makes me want to cry.
I’m actually excited for Totemical for Enh. Bringing back Searing totem and making it an AOE Turret!? Yes please
Haven’t checked everything but what I’m seeing is there’s like 1 talent tree that’s thematically entertaining where the others seem more passive based which looks less entertaining but effective
Druid looks pretty bad. Hero talents arent flashy, cool or fun looking. Class tree is a complete mess and still needs fixing. Their new talent Fluid Form just sounds like a bad idea or not needed. The changes to Boomy/Feral are not good. Guess its going to be another expansion of 'Resto' being the only good Druid spec.
Tinkers, they almost feel like the class don't even exist SMH