Hunter

Our first batch of changes were successful in making Marksmanship Hunters scale better with their gear with the introduction of Trueshot but there are more problems that were not touched on. These are:

Marksmanship’s power being unattached from its talent tree for the most part.

Survival lacking identity.

Beast Mastery’s viability in raid environments due to lacking scaling.

Pet choices being very limited due to some cutting way ahead of the rest.We’ll go into detail on these issues at their respective sections.

Baseline Changes

Hunters now have access to unlock two extra stable slots, doubling the amount of pets you store in a stable master.

Aimed Shot is now baseline, learned at level 20.

Avoidance area of effect damage reduction has been increased from 50% to 80% and it should no longer be removed when resetting your pet’s abilities.

Renamed Trueshot to Steady Shot.

Steady Shot learning levels have been adjusted due to its first rank being moved into the Marksmanship talent tree.

Rank 1 (Talent): 36 -> 20

Rank 2: 42 -> 30

Rank 3: 48 -> 40

Rank 4: 54 -> 50

Rank 5: 60 -> 60

Aspect of the Wolf now has multiple ranks that have the same mana costs, attack power and level requirements as Aspect of the Hawk, giving melee attack power instead of ranged attack power. The current Aspect of the Wolf is now the first rank of the ability. Additionally, Aspect of the Wolf no longer prevents you from using ranged attacks and abilities. The 7th rank of Aspect of the Wolf is also acquirable out in the world instead of being trained similarly to Aspect of the Hawk but we’ll leave where you acquire it a mystery.

Scorpid Sting now only has one rank, costs 10% of your base mana to cast and now does the following:

"Stings the target, reducing their physical damage done by 2% and their attack speed by 10% for 20 sec. Only one Sting per Hunter can be active on any one target." Developer Comment: This attack speed reduction does not scale with similar effects such as Thunderfury, Frostguard and Dream’s Herald.

Viper Sting mana burn amount has been reduced by 15% and now has a 6 second cooldown.

Wing Clip now has a 6 second cooldown and deals a percentage of your weapon damage instead of a flat value. Slow percentages, learning levels and mana costs remain the same.

Rank 1 (Level 12): 25% Weapon Damage, 50% Slow

Rank 2 (Level 38): 30% Weapon Damage, 55% Slow

Rank 3 (Level 60): 35% Weapon Damage, 60% Slow

Mongoose Bite no longer requires you to dodge to use it, now deals 60% Weapon Damage in addition to its current flat damage and resets your auto-attack swing timer.

Rank 1 (Level 16): 60% Weapon Damage + 25 Damage

Rank 2 (Level 30): 60% Weapon Damage + 45 Damage

Rank 3 (Level 44): 60% Weapon Damage + 75 Damage

Rank 4 (Level 58): 60% Weapon Damage + 115 Damage

Pet Changes

These changes aim to make other pet families more viable, giving Hunters a more diverse pool of pets to use. Added two new pet families with new family specific abilities: Serpents and Foxes.

Charge (Boar): Rank 4 can now be acquired out in the world.

Lightning Breath: Rank 1 can now be acquired out in the world.

Dash: Raptors can now learn Dash.

Furious Howl: Focus cost reduced from 60 to 50 and range increased from 15 yards to 40 yards.

Thunderstomp: Now has a x1.5 threat modifier and its cooldown is reduced from 1 minute to 40 seconds. Also added a new Rank 4 with higher damage values.

Scorpid Poison: Focus cost reduced from 30 to 25, cooldown reduced from 4 seconds to 3 seconds, base damage increased by 20%.

Shell Shield: Attack speed reduction reduced from 43% to 35%.

Bite: Cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 6 seconds.

Adjusted Spell Power and added Attack Power scaling for most damaging pet abilities:

Poison Spit (Serpent): 0.25 for each periodic damage tick.

Lightning Breath (Wind Serpent): 0.5

Scorpid Poison (Scorpid): 0.1 for each periodic damage tick.

Thunderstomp (Gorilla): 0.21

Bite: 1 extra damage for every 20 Attack Power.

Claw: 1 extra damage for every 42 Attack Power.

Developer Comment: This change mainly affects Beast Mastery Hunters granting their pets Spell Power and Attack Power with the revamped Spirit Bond talent, though the attack power scaling should very slightly affect other hunters' pets, increasing their Bite and Claw damage by 15 and 6-7 respectively when the pet is level 60.

Beast Mastery

This specialization is near perfect flavor wise, but lacks proper scaling for the focus of the specialization: Your pet. We plan on fixing this by introducing pet scaling into the individual pet buffing talents, with damage scaling being deep in the tree to avoid other specializations from acquiring them. Improved Predator Aspects: Renamed to Swift Aspects, proc chance has been increased from 1/2/3/4/5% to 10% but the attack speed increase has been reduced from 30% to 3/6/9/12/15%. The attack speed is scaled with the talent instead of the proc chance. Developer Comment: This change is done for two reasons, the first reason is smoothing the benefit of this talent, spreading its damage out for overall the same benefit in PvE scenarios meanwhile reducing the burst granted by this talent for PvP scenarios. The second reason is that this talent was often not fully taken due to the benefit of the talent not scaling and instead the trigger chance, which this change intends to fix.

Endurance Training: Now also adds 6/12/18/24/30% of your Stamina to the Stamina of your pets too.

Improved Eyes of the Beast: Text changed to: “Increases the duration of your Eyes of the Beast by 30/60 sec. While channeling Eyes of the Beast, your pet deals 5/10% additional damage and gains 10/20% increased Focus regeneration.”

Developer Comment: There is no functional change, this is done to clarify the talent description.

Improved Aspect of the Monkey: Renamed to Improved Primal Aspects. Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points, dodge granted increased from 1/2/3/4/5% to 2/4/6%, now heals you for 2/4/6% of your melee damage while Aspect of the Wolf is active.

Developer Comment: This talent should now be more flexible to acquire with the reduced point requirement, additionally it now serves as sustain for Melee Hunters as hunters normally don’t need it due to being far away from their enemies and avoiding area of effect damage effects.

Thick Hide: Now also adds 12/24/36% of your Armor value to the Armor value of your pets.

New Talent: Elusiveness (3rd Row / 2 Points): Adds 20/40% of your resistances to the resistances of your pets and increases the Dodge chance of your pets by 2/4%.

Pathfinding: Removed and integrated into Bestial Swiftness.

Bestial Swiftness: Now also increases the speed bonus of your Aspect of the Cheetah and Aspect of the Pack by 6% and increases the attack speed of your pet by 3%.

Developer Comment: The talent Pathfinding got merged into the first capstone of the Beast Mastery tree to open room for Elusiveness and give some usefulness even when outdoor movement speed increase is inactive.

Improved Mend Pet: Now also increases the amount you heal your pet with Mend Pet by 20/40%.

New Talent: Bestial Precision (5th Row / 2 Points): Increases the physical hit chance of your pets by 4/8% and spell hit chance of your pets by 6/12%.

Developer Comment: Pets generally struggle with hitting their targets in raid environments due to lacking any source of hit chance gain, this talent aims to alleviate this issue, though we might revisit the values depending on how the talent performs. Do note that the spell hit chance also applies to the Intimidation talent and the Growl threat generation ability.

Intimidation: Now grants your pet 50% increased threat generation for 8 seconds instead of applying a flat amount of threat on application. This threat generation buff is applied even if the stun component is resisted.

Developer Comment: Intimidation has issues with being unreliable due to the entire ability (both the threat and stun components) depending on whether it successfully lands on its target or not. To alleviate this we’ve guaranteed that the pet gains a threat generation buff even if the stun component is resisted or the target is immune to it. In addition to this, moving this effect to a percentage also allows the talent’s threat generation to properly scale with the pet’s power.

Bestial Discipline: Text changed to: “Increases the Focus regeneration of your pets by 2/5 each tick.”

Developer Comment: There is no functional change, this is done to clarify the talent description.

Spirit Bond: Now grants your pet melee Attack Power equal to 12/25% of your ranged Attack Power and Spell Power equal to 7/15% of your ranged attack power. The interval between the heals reduced from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. Moved from the 5th row to the 6th row.

Developer Comment: This talent serves as the main scaling component of the specialization, granting a portion of your attack power to them as melee attack power and spellpower. In addition to this, the periodic healing portion of the talent has been buffed to trigger twice as often to make it more worthwhile.

Bestial Wrath: Damage increase reduced from 50% to 30%.

Developer Comment: In the light of Spirit Bond providing a consistent damage scaling component to your pet, we’re moved some of the power provided by this ability into the aforementioned talent while still ending up as a net gain in overall damage.

Marksmanship

There are no performance nor flavor issues with Marksmanship, but there are issues that impact other specializations. The main culprit is the talent tree, you get most of your power by the time you reach the 4th row and get Mortal Shots, with the second and last capstone talents being largely irrelevant in raid environments, the former being useful for player combat and the latter lacking any sort of scaling, making it fall off in power as you progress throughout the raiding tiers. While the specialization does well even with these issues, this poses a problem now that we’re properly touching up the other specializations, where the lack of talent reliance for scaling would divert Marksmanship players to only take surface level talents and then go deeper into the other trees, making them even stronger than before while being only Marksmanship in definition. For this reason we've added a few more powerful talents deeper below in the talent tree to incentivize going deeper into it, and allowing their final capstone talent to remain relevant in all stages of the endgame with a scaling addition. Improved Hunter's Mark: Moved from the 2nd row to the 3rd row, now requires 3 points instead of 5 points.

Improved Serpent Sting: Renamed to Improved Stings, moved from the 4th row to the 2nd row, damage increase for Serpent Sting increased from 2/4/6/8/10% to 6/12/18/24/30%, now also increases the amount of mana drained by Viper Sting by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Developer Comment: This talent has seen a big lift in power due to the older version being quite underwhelming. Additionally it was raised up as it has a synergy with Survival’s Poison Nettle Lacing talent.

Improved Scorpid Sting: Now requires 2 points instead of 3 points, moved from the 5th row to the 3rd row and now reduces enemy attack speed by an additional 5/10% and reduces their damage done by an additional 1/2% instead of reducing Stamina by a percentage of Strength reduced.

Developer Comment: This change was done due to the Scorpid Sting rework, refer to the Baseline Changes section for more details. After taking this talent the attack speed reduction is increased to 15/20% and the physical damage reduction is increased to 3/4%.

New Talent: Steady Shot (3rd Row Capstone): A precise shot with a ranged weapon that strikes the target for 10 additional damage. (5% base mana cost, 1 second cast time, 8-35 yard range).

Developer Comment: Steady Shot works the exact same way as Trueshot currently does, but it has been moved to be the first capstone of the Marksmanship tree instead of Aimed Shot, which is now baseline.

Hawk Eye: Now requires 2 points instead of 3 points, moved from the 3rd row to the 4th row.

Improved Arcane Shot: Renamed to Swiftshot, now requires 3 points instead of 5 points and now reduces the cooldown of Aimed Shot in addition to Arcane Shot.

New Talent: Piercing Shots (5th Row / 2 Points): Your critical Aimed, Steady and Multi-Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20% of the damage dealt over 8 sec. This bleed generates no threat.

Developer Comment: The damage over time applied by critical hits functions like Warrior’s Deep Wounds talent, but should be more effective in general due to this effect being limited to abilities that hit harder and not being triggered by auto-attacks that reset the more powerful version of the bleed, hence the damage percentage being lower than Deep Wounds.

New Talent: Improved Steady Shot (5th Row / 2 Points): Increases the bonus damage of your Steady Shot by 13/25%.

New Talent: Endless Quiver (6th Row / 2 Points): Your Auto Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot and Multi-Shot have a 3/6% chance to fire an extra normal ranged attack. This attack does not spend ammo.

Developer Comment: This effect can trigger from your auto attacks, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot and Multi-Shot and does not reset your auto-shot timer.

Trueshot Aura: Now has a scaling component in addition to the flat Attack Power, the flat Attack Power has been nerfed to compensate for this.

Rank 1 (Level 40): 50 Attack Power -> 30 Attack Power + 3% Attack Power

Rank 2 (Level 50): 75 Attack Power -> 40 Attack Power + 4% Attack Power

Rank 3 (Level 60): 100 Attack Power -> 55 Attack Power + 5% Attack Power

Developer Comment: This change allows Trueshot Aura to stay relevant as its recipients get better gear, keeping it a powerful utility buff. We’ve opted to keep part of the talent a flat attack power increase as making it entirely a percentage scaling would make it weaker for less geared players. As a note, the scaling is dependent on the recipient’s gear and not based on your Attack Power.

Survival

This specialization has seen the most changes out of all other Hunter specializations, as it lacked a proper identity that differentiates it from the other two. To alleviate this, we’ve given Survival a near complete makeover, branding it as a new Melee Hunter archetype, preferring to be up close with their pet and traps in the thick of the combat.. For this reason there are quite a few new talents and adjustments to others to support this. There have also been changes to Mongoose Bite and Wing Clip to support this, which can be found in the Baseline Changes section. The player combat oriented builds that went into this tree should work the same way as they did before as the majority of these talents were untouched for this playstyle. Superior Strikes: Removed and integrated into Rapid Strikes.

New Talent: Resourcefulness (1st Row / 5 Points): Reduces the Mana cost of all traps and melee abilities by 2/4/6/8/10%.

Deflection: Renamed to Swift Reflexes, now requires 2 points instead of 5 points but now grants 2% melee and ranged attack speed and 2% parry instead of 5% parry.

Savage Strikes: Reduced the critical strike chance increase from 10/20% to 3/6% and now affects all melee abilities instead of just Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite.

Developer Comment: This talent had to be tuned down considerably due to there being more viable weapon strikes and the increase being absurdly high, it should now be equal to similar talents that increase your critical chance by up to 5%.

Savage Strikes affect Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, Carve and Wing Clip.

Improved Wing Clip: Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points.

Clever Traps: Removed and integrated into Trap Mastery.

New Talent: Planning Ahead (3rd Row / 2 Points): The duration of your Frost trap effects and the damage of your Fire trap effects are increased by 13/25% if the traps are not triggered for the first 5 seconds after being placed.

Developer Comment: This talent rewards placing your traps ahead of time before you engage a creature. It might not make sense at a glance as you need to be out of combat to place a trap, but it becomes relevant with Feign Death trapping and the new Untamed Trapper capstone.

New Talent: Carve (3rd Row Keystone): A sweeping attack that strikes up to 5 enemies in an 10 yard cone in front of you for 60% weapon damage.

This ability shares a cooldown with Multi-Shot. (6 second cooldown, 8% base mana cost, instant cast.) Developer Comment: Carve is the main area attack of Survival Hunters, it works quite differently than other melee area attacks in the fact it checks a cone in front of you instead of chaining from a target or being an area around you, being more akin to Cone of Cold. As a note, Deterrence is still in this row as an extra defensive capstone in addition to Carve.

New Talent: Stinging Nettle Lacing (4th Row / 2 Points): Your Mongoose Bite and triggered Fire traps now apply your highest rank of Serpent Sting with 80/60% reduced duration.

Developer Comment: The duration of Serpent Sting applied is equal to 3/6 seconds of it, giving you two ticks of damage and allowing you to keep up your sting without having to go into range to apply it.

Explosive Trap applies the sting to all targets hit on activation, further boosting your area damage capabilities.

Killer Instinct: Now also increases your melee critical strike damage bonus by 7/14/20%.

Trap Mastery: Now requires 3 points instead of 2 points, also increases the duration of Frost trap effects and the damage of Fire trap effects by 10/20/30%.

Counterattack: Removed.

New Talent: Rapid Strikes (5th Row Keystone): Your Rapid Fire ability now also increases your melee attack speed by the same amount and the cooldown of your Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite abilities is reduced by 1 sec. Developer Comment: This talent integrates the old Superior Strikes talent, reducing the cooldown of the strikes from 6 seconds to 5 seconds. Additionally now you gain 40% melee attack speed from your Rapid Fire, giving Survival Hunters a proper damage cooldown.

New Talent: Vicious Bite (6th Row / 2 Points): Your Mongoose Bite now deals 15/30% additional weapon damage.

Developer Comment: The additional increase means that the Mongoose Bite damage is increased from 60% weapon damage to 75/90% weapon damage. Developer Comment: The damage of Mongoose Bite had to be split between baseline and Vicious Bite to prevent ranged hunters from gaining too much close range burst especially for Player vs Player scenarios while keeping melee hunter abilities impactful if they go deep enough in the tree.

Lightning Reflexes: Agility bonus reduced from 3/6/9/12/15% to 2/4/6/8/10% and now also increases your melee attack power by 20/40/60/80/100% of your Agility.

Developer Comment: Normally Hunters gain only 1 Attack Power for every point of Agility, this talent allows them to scale akin to other melee damage specializations.

New Talent: Untamed Trapper (7th Row Capstone): Your Fire traps' damage is now increased by your melee Attack Power and allows you to use traps while in combat.

Developer Comment: The damage scaling values are the following:

Immolation Trap DoT: 1 extra tick damage for every 10 Attack Power

Explosive Trap Initial Damage: 1 extra damage for every 6.5 Attack Power

Explosive Trap DoT: 1 extra tick damage for every 30 Attack Power

Wyvern Sting: Removed.

UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024Wing Clip: Cooldown reduced from 6 seconds to 3 seconds.

Improved Wing Clip: Proc chance increased from 7/14/20% to 14/28/40%.

Piercing Shots: No longer generate threat to avoid breaking Feign Death with uncontrolled application.

UPDATES | Dated: November 1 2024Swapped the talent tree locations of Hawk Eye and Improved Hunter's Mark, moving Hawk Eye to the 3rd row and Improved Hunter's Mark to the 4th row.