Hello!
In this article I will walk you through all the changes Hunters have received to their talent trees, from a Beast Mastery perspective. All in all I would say this has been a notable improvement to our trees compared to previously, but that there are still a fair few issues to resolve. Without further ado:
Class Tree
This section will attempt to summarize and review the changes to the Class Tree to the best of my ability, from a Beast Mastery perspective.
The Positives
One of the major positives is that the class tree is a lot more flexible than it has been. First of all, we have a lot fewer two-pointers and a lot more one-pointers. Secondly, we have fewer mandatory output points. Finally, the overall pathing is improved. The flexibility means you can pick all output-related talents fairly easily and then craft your utility profile to your liking, with sensible but not overly harsh trade-offs.
Explosive Shot is now in a more readily available spot which means it'll be a rotational spell for Beast Mastery. While it doesn't really interact with our kit it's a "fun" spell and fleshes out our AoE profile somewhat.
Major Defensive Buffs
We have also received notable defensive changes.
Survival of the Fittest is now a much shorter cooldown and 2 charges, but caps out at 30% damage reduction, compared to 40% previously. This is overall a buff as you usually prefer the more frequent usages over the 10% additional damage reduction.
Natural Mending is also buffed, requiring 2 less focus per second of cooldown reduction.
Hunter's Avoidance has seen a small nerf but given all similar effects from other classes have seen similar nerfs it doesn't really swing the scale much. The usefulness of
Emergency Salve will depend largely on how many enemies apply poisons and/or diseases, which could make it either useless or a hidden star. Our movement is slightly nerfed, as
Pathfinding is weaker after its point redistribution.
Minor Utility Buffs
Finally, there have been some careful buffs to our utility.
Counter Shot is now a shorter cooldown thanks to
Lone Survivor and restores focus thanks to
Disruptive Rounds.
High Explosive Trap,
Entrapment and
Intimidation are now in more accessable spots with fewer trade-offs for picking them.
Bursting Shot is moved over from the Marksman spec tree for an additional knock-back option.
Intimidation and
Binding Shot can now be buffed via
Scrappy and
Binding Shot can be further buffed via
Tar-Coated Bindings.
Devilsaur Tranquilizer is a nice niche choice for certain dungeons with a lot of enraging enemies.
Implosive Trap is a major win for the class as it gives us a reliable AoE stop. It can even be combo-ed with
Binding Shot for a longer Crowd Control.
PvP/Niche Talents in the Class Tree
As we've been getting a lot of new talents a lot of them seem exceedingly niche and/or oriented towards PVP content. This seems odd to me as there is already an excising feature to make talents aimed towards PvP. This somewhat limits the amount of real choices we're able to make. These include:
Add this along existing niche or PVP effects such as
Roar of Sacrifice and
Scare Beast and the number of real choices you're making go down by quite a bit. This seems to run contrary to other classes having them mostly be separated. There is definitely some work to be done on these to make them more attractive. Having a few "solo content" talents (
Wilderness Medicine,
No Hard Feelings) I view as less of an issue as there isn't much space to put them elsewhere.
Other Problematic Talents in the Class Tree
- Improved Kill Shot is still quite underwhelming. While strides have been made to make Kill Shot a better button to press, it hasn't actually affected the damage of the spell directly. Therefore, this talent remains a minuscule dps increase.
- Misdirection still doesn't work on pet damage so it remains useless for the spec.
- Binding Shackles still somewhat sucks but it should at least also work on Bursting Shot, probably.
Spec Tree
The spec tree has also seen very major changes overall. Every single talent has been moved around, redesigned or re-tuned in some way. A lot of old two-point talents have had their cost reduced to one, which means that the average power of talent point have gone up notably. There are also plenty of interesting new talents.
One-Minute Cooldown Kit
To start off with,
Bloodshed is made into more of a cooldown thanks to
Venomous Bite. This gives it significant burst potential, especially when combined with other spells or even
Call of the Wild. Stronger cooldown windows might mean we want to line up things such as
Bestial Wrath more aggressively. We like more burst and larger
Kill Commands.
Plenty of Big Crits
There are also currently a lot of different talents that work well with Crit for Beast Mastery Hunters. You have
Howl of the Pack and
Wild Attacks in the
Pack Leader Hero Tree and also
Go for the Throat,
Piercing Fangs,
Laceration and
Wild Call in the Spec Tree. This is quite a few ways of benefiting from Crit and seems to navigate us towards nice scaling with Crit and big
Kill Commands, which I'm not opposed to, although it doesn't affect our gameplay much outside of
Wild Call. We also have
Keen Eyesight,
Serrated Tips and
Thrill of the Hunt giving us plenty of passive Crit by default.
"Tracking Stacks" Talents
Between
A Murder of Crows,
Explosive Venom and
Huntmaster's Call, we seemingly have a lot of new talents that benefit from tracking stacks of a buff counting to a certain number of casts. If not tracked via Weak Auras or similar they can easily be wasted on enemies that are about to die. These effects are also inconsistent in how they are implemented and how they count the "xth" (
Explosive Venom will go up to 5 stacks of the buff and then apply and reset on the 6th cast, while the other two will simply apply and reset on the 5th cast), making the stacks harder to keep track of. I'm not opposed to these types of effects but tracking three different ones at the same times seems potentially finicky, especially if they operate differently.
State of the
Dire Beast kit
The
Dire Beast kit has been reduced in points severely and now costs only a total of four points. The beasts generate focus now and provide fewer cooldown reductions and more damage amplifiers due to the pay-off talent being
Huntmaster's Call rather than
Dire Pack. This is probably healthy to reign in the amount of reset effects that were in our tree.
Huntmaster's Call currently procs relatively frequently yet plays a horn sound every single time, which is rather annoying. The pathing around these talents could be improved as we don't want to be forced into
Dire Beast to get to
Huntmaster's Call on AoE, and we don't want to be forced into
Hunter's Prey on single-target to get
Dire Beast. This all makes the tree needlessly inflexible.
AoE Changes
Our AoE kit has seen somewhat of a point reduction thanks to
Beast Cleave only being one point, and is overall easier to pick up in terms of pathing. The issue is that the rest of the tree has seen similar point reductions, so the average power level of a talent point has gone up. This means that the overall single-target tradeoff for your AoE talents is most likely pretty similar as previously, that is, fairly costly.
BarrageBarrage is set up to be an additional AoE option, being in a more reasonable spot in the spec tree and adding a refresh to
Beast Cleave to it baseline. It does run into some issues:
Firstly, it doesn't apply
Beast Cleave or
Kill Cleave unless you also have those two talented, reducing its potential utility as low-investment cleave tool for certain boss encounters. Secondly, it costs a lot of focus, which is somewhat relevant on AoE. This isn't necessarily a bad design but can somewhat limit its viability. Finally, it could be reasonable to cancel
Barrage early via a macro, which is usually not a good intuitive form of gameplay. This is because the spell only applies
Beast Cleave at the start of the cast, which means you waste time you could be spending on
Kill Command with
Kill Cleave. Of course, it's okay for spells to have downsides but these being as evident as they are the spell requires reasonable tuning for it to still be a viable choice.
Explosive VenomExplosive Venom is a brand new talent which has some interesting yet mixed implications. In a pure AoE scenario it seems relatively solid, providing plenty of additional damage from
Serpent Stings. The issue is that pure AoE scenarios are few and far between. During a normal Mythic+ Pack, going in with 0 stacks of this, you are likely to get your proc very late into the pack or not at all. The buff from this talent only lasts for 15 seconds, so even if you're left at four stacks, any RP or slowdown between packs can screw with you and make you drop the stacks you've built up. This talent therefore works the best in more organized groups where your pulls are more predictable, and might not be the best for every dungeon or every player.
Suddenly, DoTs!
Basilisk Collar is perhaps the most impactful talent of our new tree, being massively powerful. In essence, this provides a 10% pet damage boost per dot you have on the target, with some caveats. In the War Within, we have seven dots that are easily applicable these being:
- Serpent Sting (Via Hunter's Prey/Death Shade + Venom's Bite on ST or Explosive Venom on AoE) - High Uptime
- Laceration - High Uptime
- Barbed Shot - High Uptime
- A Murder of Crows - High Uptime
- Bloodshed - Available during your Burst Windows.
- Cull the Herd for Pack Leader or Black Arrow for Dark Ranger. The former is rather sporadic via Hunter's Prey and the latter has high uptime during burst windows.
- Ravenous Leap (Via Fenryr from Huntmaster's Call) - Low uptime. Could potentially be manipulated to appear more during cooldowns.
When all of these effects are active this talent gives an astounding 70% damage increase to pets, which translates to roughly a
49% overall damage increase. This has a few implications: 1) Maintaining these dots is now a high priority 2) Multi-dotting is now more relevant than ever. 3) AoE takes a naturally larger single-target damage loss since several of these are less viable AoE picks on their own or do not apply easily in AoE. This means that balancing AoE relative to single-target is potentially very difficult.
There is also
Unnatural Causes to further amplify the DoT playstyle a little bit more, although this doesn't currently work with
Laceration,
Bloodshed,
Ravenous Leap or
Cull the Herd.
Cull the Herd is also supposed to provide a decent damage increase, although it is not functional at the moment.
Other Problematic Talents in the Spec Tree
Kindred Spirits is a very very bad talent that has somehow snuck itself into the tree, it being a mere 0.1% dps increase per point. To add to its awfulness it's in a very central spot, blocking one of only two paths to
Bestial Wrath, and as a two-pointer! This one talent severely limits the amount of pathing options available as it always forces us into the right side path in single-target. In the previous iteration of this tree it was somewhat ignorable but the current version puts it in a very awkward spot.
Training Expert is similarly sort of weak for a two-pointer.
It is relatively difficult to imagine practical usage cases for
Shower of Blood. For Mythic +, the random targeting makes it difficult to assure the extra applications hit the target you want them to and not smaller non-elites. For raiding the talent most likely requires relatively specific encounter designs (which would be council-style bosses), which might not necessarily be available. The talent is also somewhat contradictory in its nature, as it's an AoE talent down a mostly single-target focused path, so overall I would call its design a bit confused.
Scent of Blood is in a weird spot. The second point has always been somewhat low value given how likely you are to cap on
Barbed Shot regardless. Given we now have multiple paths towards
Piercing Fangs, it seems quite unlikely that we'd ever pick the second point of this.
Cobra Senses and
Killer Cobra are still in an awkward spot. For one they're relatively low value and
Cobra Shot are relatively rare with how many other filler spells and resets we have in our kit. Secondly, they're anti-synergistic with each other.
While we have certainly asked for a fix to
Kill Shot for some time the way they have gone about it is perhaps questionable. Combining
Hunter's Prey /
Death Shade,
Venom's Bite and
Basilisk Collar means you now have a relatively high priority proc of it. This has a couple of issues. For one, the spell itself does very little damage which means
Improved Kill Shot is still very very weak. Secondly, you are essentially making the execute spell more powerful by making it no longer be an execute spell, and while we get other forms of execute, this still seems questionable.
Let's not forget our Hero Trees!
With all this in mind, it's reasonable to give our hero trees another look-over:
For
Dark Ranger, there is some nice synergy with some of the DoT kit, notably
Death Shade alongside
Venom's Bite and with the main ability itself,
Black Arrow. The reduced cooldown on
Survival of the Fittest and
Exhilaration also go excellently with
Smoke Screen.
Dark Empowerment could also help open up builds without
Pack Tactics.
For
Pack Leader, there are the aforementioned Crit synergy talents
Wild Attacks and
Howl of the Pack.
Brutal Companion has been moved to a much better position in our spec tree and synergize well with
Frenzied Tear,
Wild Attacks and
Howl of the Pack.
Den Recovery also enjoys the lowered cooldown of
Survival of the Fittest.
Cull the Herd works decently alongside our DoT kit.
Call of the Wild has ended up in a bit of an awkward spot. It's relatively far down in one corner of the spec tree, behind the somewhat weak
Killer Instinct, and might have been a reasonable talent to drop given the strength of our other talents. However, there are Hero Talents interacting with it in both Dark Ranger and Pack Leader,
Shadow Lash and
Pack Assault. This makes it somewhat unclear what role it is supposed to serve, is it our "main" cooldown or is it an optional side path. You're either stuck down a certain path of your tree or you're left with Hero Talents that do nothing.
Final Thoughts
All in all this rework has been mostly a success, in spite of all the little things I poke hole in here. Some things here definitely require more work, but all in all it's a strong step in the right direction. The class tree is mostly there with the only real issue being the abundance of niche low-impact talents. On the positive side of things, it introduces plenty of flexibility and buffs our survivability significantly, while mostly patching up our utility issue.
The spec tree has a more mixed bag of issues which are harder to summarize, but they mostly revolve around some pathing issues, some individual talent design, balancing issues stemming from
Basilisk Collar, and remaining issues with our AoE kit. They introduce plenty enough new stuff to keep the spec interesting for the coming expansion. A lot of these things require a little bit more thinking, some polish or some ironing out of potential issues. Hopefully this will be sorted before The War Within releases. We've mentioned a few bugs throughout the article,
Here is a sheet where they are currently being tracked. Thank you for reading!
