Lacerate

@GuildWars2 Ranger Elite Specialization: The Warden

8 days ...

@Zirene LOL I see now why melee hunters can not have cleave buffed too far!! Well played sir! #justashbringerthings

I can not give you a direct answer here because "proves to be [an] insufficient option" is subjective based on what one considers to be sufficient. So I can't say yes to a condition that is subjective because our thresholds for sufficient may be different, may extend past Carve, and may differ in expectation of execution.

@Zirene awesome change here....but still can't use it when Mongoose Bite is so important for DPS. We really need Carve to be a book like 3 phases ago.

@Zirene I appreciate the reply and the insight. This 'strike' addition is a step in the right direction. Could we look forward to more tweaks directly to the rune in the future if this proves to be insufficient an option to take in cleave situations?

That is not an option for us either at the moment. There is a reason we have only swapped runes a handful of times and tried to do them all at once when we did do them. This is also why some runes stayed in bad slots for a long time. There are significant risks to swapping runes that include but are not limited to full bricking characters. So, the amount of oversight needed on changes like Runeswaps is very high with the associated risk. And doing it for one rune is too little, and doing it for a bunch of runes is out of scope right now.

@Zirene I won't pretend that I understand the complexities with regards to Carve unable to be made a book/ baseline, but it is unfortunate. What are the chances of it swapping rune locations to something like cloak?

@ChrisBarry82839 Apologies, Barry, but that is not something we can do.

@Destiny14011 @Zirene I love melee hunter to my core, but I wouldn't say it's sad. I think it's just confused and needing a day or so in the shed.

@Zirene First, I want to say to you and the team, I really appreciate your work on SOD, especially for designing new content. However, there are a few things regarding melee hunters that I'd like to address in the comments:

@Destiny14011 @Zirene This phase is going to be a good minute. 3. I'm on the fence about this. LW making Hunter a petless class is a bad design. Basically just a warrior rogue at this point. I am however a firm believer in the Hunter Tank dream.

@Destiny14011 @Zirene 1. Making Carve baseline will fix this in part. Having it be supported in some way by either talents, set bonuses, or rune interaction will bridge the gap. 2. Meh, I'm okay with this. It's a legendary, it's for the prestige. You'll still be doing top damage.

@Zirene @AggrendWoW With regards to Melee Hunters, is there a reason Carve hasn't been made baseline & share a cooldown with multi-shot? It sharing a Rune slot with Cobra Slayer makes it impossible for Melee Hunter to participate in meaningful AoE without swapping multiple runes.

@AggrendWoW (18/18)Thanks for taking the time to read all of this, and thank you for caring about the community to ask us for our input. No one could ever tell you how much that means to us. And of course: all of this is just a suggestion, but my 2c nonetheless. <3

@AggrendWoW (1/?) Hey @AggrendWoW you guys are doing great! No matter what a few loud contributors may think, SoD is a success. Keep up the awesome work! Now for some suggestions.

The team focused on SoD has spent a good chunk of the last few days chewing on a rather large list of class adjustments coming soon (likely actually soon, not "soon tm" soon). As always we want to prime everyone that it's not going to fix every single thing everyone wanted, but we are continuing to iterate. We've been watching discords and forums for ideas and suggestions as we go, and while that's fine and good, I figured it might be a fun exercise to probe for a few suggestions here to a few targeted questions. Disclaimer; there may be an excellent idea in here that you love that we can't execute on for whatever reason. Game dev isn't easy and sometimes you have to pass on a good idea for a myriad of reasons. It's nothing sinister and its not us being tone deaf. Many things are also too big to hotfix so we have to think about what we do now vs. next phase. So, feel free to post suggestions or links to media with good suggestions in reply. Please do keep it civil though both towards me/the team and each other. I've been increasingly having to mute/block folks with abusive or unhelpful commentary so let's all be chill humans together. Lastly, please try and frame your suggestion with both a) the issue to be addressed, and b) your suggestion--phrased as concisely as possible. We likely won't have time to read super long posts/threads to find the meat of your point, so this will help (he says, while typing a super long post himself). Anyway, here goes: 1. Shadow DPS - We'd like to increase damage while allowing them to still shine in terms of group utility, particularly because their utility/value is likely to increase even further at 60 with some new stuff coming. One thing we also keep coming back to as well is wanting to restore mind flay to having a place in the toolkit. With that in mind, how would you suggest improving Shadow DPS with those goals in mind? 2. Survival Tree for Hunters - We know a lot of melee hunters really want Survival to be a thing and we agree that it really fits that "RPG ranger" class fantasy. Currently, BM tends to outstrip it in terms of raw output. What do you think could be interesting to zhuzh this up and make a deepish survival investment interesting? 3. Holy Paladins - We did you guys a bit dirty by not giving you interesting buttons to push like every other healing class. Viewed through a level 60 vanilla lens holy is great, but in SoD it leaves a lot to be desired. One thing we've been discussing is a group heal or some sort of proactive heal mechanic for Holy, but interested to hear some concise ideas here. 4. Sword Rogues - We have some adjustments coming in the upcoming update but we are open to ideas for how to make Saber Slash and other sword gameplay compelling. Might simply be a "do moar damage" adjustment that fixes this in the end, but we are interested in "feelsy" adjustment ideas too. 5. Warriors - Rage is a problematic mechanic because more damage = more rage = more damage = more rage ad infinitum. This is going to become more problematic at 60 as well. If we had it to do over again, we'd likely have normalized rage (i.e. you don't get extra rage when you do more damage/crit) at the start of the season and focused on major changes to their gameplay to compensate. The way it works now really hamstrings the design options for Warriors as we have to worry about the historically best dps in the game becoming even better later and forcing us to do an absolutely massive nerf which everyone would hate. To you, what would be a good trade for some form of normalized rage at 60 if we had to do such a thing? To close us out--at this point, we are always open to novel ideas for any class, including things that don't just strictly borrow from future expansions. Our philosophy on this has shifted from when we started developing this season and now we'd love to experiment with totally NEW mechanics (that ideally fit somewhat plausibly into the classic ecosystem). Not to say we won't use future expansion spells, but there's a willingness to expand our horizons a bit. Anyway sorry for the length. We've had a lot of fun just trawling discords and forums recently but figured I'd just throw this into the maelstrom and see what we get here as well. Thanks! EDIT: I am not answering questions here, so sorry if you want to ask something. My thoughts are irrelevant to this discussion and we want YOUR ideas.

@AggrendWoW (17/?)The only other thing we can do is decrease Holy Shock to its 12 second cooldown from later expansions instead. As it is, it is very lackluster to wait for a 30 second cooldown compared to things like Penance and Prayer of Mending.

@AggrendWoW (16/?) And now to address Holy Shock. Speed of Light [Rune] - Your Flash of Light reduces the Cooldown of Holy Shock by 3 seconds and your Holy Light reduces the cooldown of Holy Shock by 6 seconds. This is boring but..

@AggrendWoW (15/?) War Cleric [Rune] - Increases your chance to hit with Melee attacks by % of your intellect. Your melee attacks with Seal of Light unleash a nova of healing (Holy Nova) that heals allies within 10 yards. This healing scales with a portion of your Healing Power.

@AggrendWoW (14/?) Holy Ground [Rune] - Decreases the Mana cost of Consecration by 50%. Your Consecration no longer deals damage to enemies and instead heals allies that are standing in the area. This healing can crit(= 50% of Holy Crit) and scales with a portion of your Healing Power.

@AggrendWoW (13/?) Yes it is boring, but it solves the problem. Now we can get more interesting. Can we lean into the in the fray Melee Healer?

@AggrendWoW (12/?) It is true the Holy Paladin lacks the fun buttons to press like all the other healers.. And lacks the AoE healing of… all the other healers… So we can work towards fixing this with some rune suggestions. Starting with the obvious Light of Dawn [Rune] - Same as Cataclysm

@AggrendWoW (11/?)Now weirdly enough, thanks to you guys and the increase to leveling speeds, I also happen to have a Holy Paladin and have some suggestions for this too.

@AggrendWoW (10/?) Enemies affected by your Hunter Sting Abilities take 20% more Crit damage from your Melee Hunter Abilities ^^^^ This could also just be a rune too^^^

@AggrendWoW (9/?) Serpent Sting - Instantly Deals X% AP poison damage plus an additional X damage over 15s seconds. Wyvern Sting - Increases the amount of Mana drained and returned to the hunter by 100% Scorpid Sting - Increases the total Strength and Agility sapped from the target by 100%.

@AggrendWoW (8/?)If we're looking to just change it then we could do something like this. Venomous Strikes (1/1) [Passive] - Your Hunter Sting Abilities are now Melee Abilities and gain additional benefits:

@AggrendWoW (7/?)Lacerate (1/1) - Tears a bleeding wound in the target, dealing X Physical damage over 12 sec. You and your pets Melee critical hits do 20% more damage to targets affected by Lacerate. Yes, I know. Druids have Lacerate. It was ours first in the dark ages of WoW. Time to share