Hunter Changes Coming To The Beta

Hey all. Please focus on continuing to give good feedback, not the style/amount of our responses to said feedback. We’re just extremely busy, not ignoring or spiteing you.

Now then… Yes, the Marksmanship and Survival rotations are simpler than they were before. The goal is to have a simpler baseline rotation, and have meaningful choices that allow you to layer more depth onto that in talents, if you choose.

Hunters have a ton of talents which grant rotational or short CD abilities, to support this design. However, they were lacking in rotational depth. The gameplay of most of them boiled down to “use on cooldown”. No need to think about preparing for when you’re going to use it, or how it interacts with your rotation, etc. So, we’re going to make some tweaks to try to add some rotational depth to several of the talent choices.

• Barrage is being changed to make it more rotational, with Focus-pooling gameplay required to min/max its benefit. You’ll want to pool 60 Focus in anticipation of it coming off cooldown.
• Barrage now has a 20sec CD (down from 30sec), costs 60 Focus (up from 30 Focus), and deals 100% additional damage.
• Murder of Crows had a cooldown-shortening effect that hardly mattered in practice; either the fight would likely be over within 1min if used on a low-healh boss, or you’d likely waste most of the damage of the crows if used on a low-health add. Instead, we’re changing that mechanic, so that it’s primarily useful on those low-health adds. You’ll want to time it well to finish off low health targets, while still being as Focus-efficient as possible.
• Murder of Crows has been changed. Its duration, cost, and cooldown have been reduced by 50%. It no longer has a shorter cooldown when used on low health targets. Instead, its cooldown is reset if the target dies.
• The gameplay of Fervor and Dire Beast were extremely similar, so we opted to replace Fervor completely. It’s rather late in the development process to be doing that, so went with something tried and true: Steady Focus. This iteration of Steady Focus purely increases Focus regeneration, and has a duration short enough to add depth.
• Fervor has been replaced with Steady Focus: Using Cobra Shot or Steady Shot twice in a row, or using Focusing Shot, increases your Focus Regeneration by 50% for 10 sec.

We think that these changes will allow Hunters of all types to customize their gameplay to their liking.

Oh, completely forgot that another relevant change hasn’t made it into one of your builds yet. Apologies.

Lock and Load is returning to the previous version of it, and Multistrikes will simply do more damage for Survival instead.

It’s changing to… 20% chance on Black Arrow tick (not multistrikes, and guaranteed to get at least 1 proc per Black Arrow cast). Effect is to reset ExS’s cooldown, and cause the next two ExSs to cost no focus and trigger no cooldown.

We don’t view specs by their baseline untalented rotations, because their baseline untalented rotations never matter. What matters is the complete package. The complete package includes some baseline abilities, some talent on rows where all affect your rotation, and some optional rotation-affecting talents to complicate things further. It makes it very customizable. Most of you are quite experienced and will enjoy significant added rotational complexity, which is available to you.

No.