Wow Hunters

*This is very stream-of-consciousness. It's scatterbrained and mostly just me rambling. If you're reading this, please keep in mind I didn't take the time to pretty this one up, I hope to later. But I just had to get this written down while I was thinking about it.*

In a recent discussion with some friends, I was confronted with the question of what I play in wow, and what I didn't like about my class. I thought to myself “oh, this easy”. I answered that I play a hunter, and that I feel like I have way too many abilities on my bars. There’s just too much stuff there, it’s overwhelming. Then they followed up with “I think that’s fair, what would you cut?” and I stumbled.

It’s weird, ability bloat or issues with class-kits are easy problems to “feel”. I think everyone who has a high end character in wow feels, sometimes, like parts of their class are excessive or too specialized. The irony here, is that while I knew WHAT I felt about it, I hadn't really made the effort to dive in and try and identify what was making feel like my class was bloated.

So, I decided to do so. It’s one of those things that you know by feel, but without some analysis it’s just a gut thing. And when trying to really explain something to someone, saying “that’s just how I feel, I don’t have examples” just looks bad.

Anyways, in the process of going through all of the hunter abilities, what I feel their purposes are, and how useful I think they are, I came to some conclusions and drew some connections with the hunter design that I hadn’t really explored in the past. Having played a hunter for years, I’m a bit annoyed that it took some prompting to make me do this. I guess I never really dove into class design due to focusing my thoughts elsewhere. Either way, here are my thoughts on being a hunter, ability bloat, hunter systems, and what I feel like would make being a hunter more enjoyable for me.

The first thing with hunters, is that I feel we’re still plagued by some remnants of old design. By this I mean that we still have abilities around or systems running that just don’t really apply to modern wow. Look at some of the abilities we have for our pets.

Pet System Abilities:

Feed Pet: This ability made a ton of sense back when we had to worry about pet happiness, and our pets abandoning us. It allowed us to give food to our pet and keep them happy. The happiness system is now long gone. But we kept this ability, it was retooled to be a 50% heal for our pet, only usable out of combat, and it still requires the consumption of an item. This is one of those abilities where I love the fantasy of it, but the current functionality isn't really there. I logged into my hunter and realized that I don’t even have the thing on my bars, talking with my fellow guild members, neither do they. This could, essentially, be pruned. Better yet, it could be rolled into the mend pet ability. Mend pet is a nice hot that heals your pet for 2.5% a second, and is usable in combat. It seems to me it would be super easy to make it heal 5% a tick out of combat.

Beast Lore: This is another ability that is antiquated. There was a time where your pet was super important for a hunter. I mean, it’s still important for a hunter’s effectiveness, but in today’s wow all pets have the same stats. You tame a pet now-a-days not for higher damage but for which buff/debuff it gives, or a specific ability the pet has. While information like damage/health/diet/armor were all super useful in the past, they are pretty much pointless in today’s wow. This ability essentially gives a hunter two important pieces of information: Special Ability and if it’s Tamable. Both of which could simply be added directly to the hunter tooltip when selecting a beast.

Aspects:

OK, there’s two buttons we can get rid of, next I want to talk about the hunters aspects system. Again, this was a neat system at one time. It worked similar to paladin auras or warrior stances. The hunter would take on different aspects that did different things. One of which used to make us more mobile, while another would give us more mana. It forced us into adapting our aspect to the situation. It was pretty slick back then. Today, we have three aspects. Hawk gives us a passive damage boost, while cheetah makes us move faster, but with a penalty if we’re hit. Any hunter spends 95% of their time in Hawk in today’s wow. When talented it even gives you a damage reduction! So let’s talk about cheetah/pack.

I feel like cheetah served a great purpose in the past. In my experience this was a wonderful ability for rapid wipe recovery. Thinking about the old days of Vaelstraz where you had 1hr or he despawned, shaving a few seconds off your wipe recovery was mandatory. If you wanted to get another attempt in, you needed to save every second. In today’s wow, this ability is pretty much just a troll. Raids now return you to the instance much closer to where you wiped, so your runs back are minimized. Many raids allow you to mount while inside, so cheetah is useless there. Currently there really aren't any limited timed bosses anymore, so getting back 2 seconds quicker doesn't make or break your group. As a hunter, I honestly wouldn't miss this ability in the slightest.

So let’s say we cut aspect of the pack out, that leaves us with cheetah and hawk left. Cheetah is exactly the same as pack, only for just the hunter. I feel like this is MUCH more practical, as one of the hunter’s most powerful tools is the ability to kite. So let’s keep cheetah, but this leaves our aspect system with only two abilities. Which is far from exciting. I really like the aspect system personally. It makes me feel like I’m being active and reacting to my surroundings. Either way remember the aspect system, we’ll come back to it later.

Active Abilities:

There are a few buttons in here that I honestly feel like are just in the way. First and foremost is hunter’s mark. There was a time where this was the only method of “mob marking”. Getting through Garr without this ability and 4 or more hunters was not an easy task at the time. But with today’s raid markers, I feel like the “marking” aspect of this ability doesn't really apply anymore. But, lucky for us, this also gives a debuff that gives us a damage bonus. Which is awesome, and useful for sure! But the hunter’s mark is currently automatically applied when we use our core damage abilities. With the fact that it’s auto-applied, and that marking is a thing of the past, just take the button away. We don’t need to have it actively on our bars anymore.

Next ability to go, is eagle eye. This has some neat functionality in pvp and for reconnaissance work, but the fact that it breaks camouflage is just painful. You’re essentially just standing there doing nothing while it’s active. In high end pvp, there’s really not enough time to use this to spy on the other team. Now, this is one of the abilities that I love the fantasy of. The ability to see far off places is so fun in theory. But in actual game play, I think I’ve used this ability only for messing around and handful of times. I don’t think I've ever seen another hunter use it.

Let’s also prune, or at least change scare beast. This is a fantasy spell, it seems really cool in theory. The hunter has power over beasts! He can scare them away in fear! Well, so can other classes. Except they can scare anything. Hunters are already pretty notorious for their control, so I wonder if changing this to a non-beast specific fear would force us to lose some other control elsewhere, but I feel like the only time this really becomes super useful is when fighting other hunters (or the occasional warlock), or if an encounter is specifically designed for this ability. It’s simply too limited to be of major usefulness.

Widow Venom. I hate this spell. Looking at all of the other mortal strike effects, this is by far the weakest one. It has the advantage of being ranged, which does count for something, but let’s look at the other mortal wounds effects. Mortal strike, rising crane kick(ww), wound poison, warlock pet, devilsaur pet. This is the only one that doesn't have a damage component to it, or isn't completely passive. In the case of the warrior and monk, they are also part of the CORE rotation, which essentially makes the debuffs application pretty passive as well. Now, anyone who pvps a lot, or even in pve at times will tell you how powerful this debuff can be. So I wouldn't kill the debuff entirely, instead I think this is where we could go back to the aspect system. To me, this feels like it should be part of serpent sting. Give me a third aspect that makes my serpent sting do less damage, but also apply this debuff to the target. It mimics the rogue usage fairly closely at this point, but by forcing us to have a slight dps loss in the process, I feel like it’s more in-line with the rest of the mortal wounds debuffs. It also gives hunters a bit more of a reason to, at times, drop out of aspect of the hawk.

Traps! 

Traps are core to the hunter. We have invisible deployables that, if used with some thought, can be extremely powerful; doubly so with the addition of the trap launcher. The trap system gives hunters some unique gameplay that I don’t think many other classes are fully aware of. But not all traps are created equal. Personally, I feel like snake trap could be done away with, or at least changed to be more exciting. Again, this is a fantasy spell, the idea and the visual for snake trap is great. But the fact that they are easily wiped out in 1 or 2 aoes (even when glyphed) gives them limited pvp potential. They are controlled by ai which can, at times exhibit odd behavior. They don’t do any meaningful damage, and I can only think of one real use for them in modern raiding. I almost feel like these could be combined with the ice trap, make them no-longer targetable, stationary, and have them spit their venoms at anything that comes in range for 30 seconds. This would essentially do the same thing as ice trap, give a great visual, bring the hunter down to 3 traps (only one of each school, right now there’s 2 ice, 1 fire, 1 nature) and it would still serve the purpose of both traps. Of course, I think we’d need to have  a shadow or arcane trap to fill the gap, which doesn't really eliminate this ability, but tweaks it a bit instead.

Spec Specific:

I generally feel most of these are pretty spot on. Except for cobra shot, that is. Cobra shot is a total replacement for steady shot. I’m not sure why to be honest, it seems to me like it would be just as effective to simply make steady shot refresh serpent sting for survival/beast mastery. It’s nice that when specced into survival/BM that steady shot is completely removed from our spellbooks, preventing someone from using the wrong focus generator while in those specs, but I don’t really feel like having two separate abilities holds a whole lot of value. It could be rolled into the mastery, or simple have steady shot taken out and just make everyone use cobra shot.

Black Arrow is another ability I’d like to see purged. As a survival hunter myself, it fits nicely into my rotation, and prevents me from being focus positive, but it shares a cooldown with explosive trap. Now, I’m ok with it sharing the cooldown, what I don’t like is that it takes away value from the trap system for me. I think that having the trap proc explosive shot, and removing black arrow makes my gameplay more interesting. Albeit it’s a bit more complex as the trap requires placement, but I honestly have more fun using the traps than I do applying a dot on cooldown. Of course, this solves movement issues, and losing explosive traps positioning. But the lock and load proc could easily be moved elsewhere, turning explosive trap into a dps spell.