Mena - Hunter Tank

@Zirene @AggrendWoW You and team did such an amazing job on SoD. You caught so much hate from misplaced frustration about Blizzard/WoW in general, but if the SoD classic team gets the freedom, you literally have the power to reshape WoW passion. Godspeed.

@Zirene The mighty Thunderfury, with its not-affected-by-player-%-dmg-increases flag, is not scaling in Naxx with the seal ranks. This is making my Thunderfury feel insecure and not very legendary. Any chance it can be a part of this Naxx power fantasy?

@Zirene @Rat3dGnar @KawneyEast I realize the ship has sailed, but gating the t3 6p behind having the Melee Spec rune on would have brought everything in line and people could just play what they want.

@Zirene @Rat3dGnar @wylderson94 @KawneyEast Not sure I follow why melee has to be pure but ranged can be weave or pure. Trickweaving was a refreshing new playstyle that was very thematic. Expose Weakness made 1 build a tad high. Melee Spec was balanced. Was looking forward to having a hybrid build to flex on Heigan dance

@Zirene Why wasn't it communicated that the melee hunter 6p breaks when you perform ranged attacks? Everyone who committed to weaving just threw away all their tokens FOR NOTHING. How will the sod team remedy this? How do I get my tier tokens back...

@Zirene @KawneyEast @wylderson94 You can still maxweave in the ranged set, but the emergent playstyle "trickweave" has been gutted. It was playing in melee but moving out to ranged only for rapid fire's trick shooter. Its a build that is viable now in pre-bis but sadly loses viability with the T3 6P changes

You can still do it if you want with the Ranged set, this was put in place because the Melee set had a larger % stacking damage bonus that we want to put Melee in a good place with, but not enable an alternative style beyond a certain limit. It's similar to what happened with Excommunication and Shockadin.

@Zirene @wylderson94 Was this tier change in respone to maxweave or the new "trickweave" build? Both of the overtuned builds were using Expose Weakness rune, but all melee build that used Melee Spec were VERY balanced. Sad to see a unique, thematic playstyle nuked.

This is a one way trade. Make it only if you are sure you wish to trade it. This is only temporary and will be going away on the 13th after we feel enough time has elapsed and the tooltip has been updated. We do not want to offer a permanent way to exchange Tier for different versions of it. So again, this is temporary and only because this was a change that was not on PTR.

@Zirene @thatguy_hob @KawneyEast @Ransacker0012 As a hunter main since 04, I think about pet builds vs lone wolf quite differently than you do. This is a snip from a discord chat I was having. Pets already help offset mistakes, so it doesn't make sense for them to be low risk high reward vs LW being high risk low reward

@thatguy_hob @KawneyEast @Ransacker0012 THIS IS ALL PERSONAL OPINION I know this isn't the current stack ranking of builds at all. Because tuning hasn't really happened at all, just playstyle changes. Tuning will come in time. But higher effort should = more reward. Because otherwise, why ever burden yourself? 4/4

@Zirene Any chance for BM hunter to get some help on PTR? Lonewolf seems to be the prevalent rune choice for all builds.

@Zirene @sneedyoboi @Archetype01 @AggrendWoW @KawneyEast Bonus: I do think the team is listening to feedback and I am hopeful that things turn out well. However, speaking for the community pure hope will never quell the fear that a beloved class could have been better if only the right feedback could have been given sooner.

@Zirene @sneedyoboi @Archetype01 @AggrendWoW @KawneyEast Trust me, I know many of us want to help move SoD in the right direction, but with the confusion on what hunter is supposed to be; bugs; and other concerns, its hard for hunters to prioritize concerns without more clear communication in the absence of changes. 7/7

Build is being updated on SoD PTR now. While you wait, have some update notes: us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/wow-c…

@Zirene @sneedyoboi @Archetype01 @AggrendWoW @KawneyEast It is hard to ask hunters not to doom when other classes are getting more gap closers and raid utility while hunters are moving backwards with long CDs and abilities that still dont work (wyvern bite, traps in combat) that will lead to more delayed adjustments per your logic 2/2

@Zirene @sneedyoboi @Archetype01 @AggrendWoW @KawneyEast Many hunter concerns are about the basic design direction of melee and survival hunters. Many concerns arent about tuning, they're worries about whether hunter will even be fun/express their fantasy. Your comments about numbers show a disconnect between Blizz and many hunters 1/2

@AggrendWoW @ReadyPapaOne Whats keeping you from seeing how enthused and invested some folks can be about Hunter tanks? Hunters have had Distracting Shot, Mongoose Bite, Aspect of the Monkey, Deterrence. Now that a melee rotation is in place why not let hunters have two roles? They just need a threat mod

I think going into SoD we thought it sounded interesting for certain things about certain tanks to be unique or for individual tanks to have drawbacks or strengths and I think in a poitential future version of classic that is a bit more grounded in # fewerchanges vanilla we might explore that design again, but I can't really see a world where we say "you can't tank this raid at all", at least not right now in SoD. One tank may be better at certain things than others (I suspect you'll still prefer a ranged/lock tank and a 2nd tank who can block on demand for twin emps, for example), but I suspect we'll tune most of the raid content at 60 to allow for pretty much any combination of tanks, especially with the smaller raid sizes. This is one of those things that looked good in the abstract, but our perception has changed a lot since we launched SoD. Our original vision for lock, shaman, and rogue tanks was "lets make more tanks to fill your 5 man spot if you are short" but seeing how enthused and invested some folks got about the new tanks, its a tough sell to say "eh sorry most of your buttons just won't work in here."

I'd like to take a minute to post and request that if you have class feedback for phase 4, go ahead and head over to the PTR forums to leave it there. Being honest, I'm a lot busier than I used to be and my twitter following is a lot larger than it used to be, and while I read every DM or tweet people send me, its not always as easy to find specific points later to link to team members (say if i happen to read tweets in the evening and am not near my work PC or something). Now more than ever I don't want good feedback to get lost in the shuffle because I'm not able to follow up on a tweet fast enough and lose track of it. We also have multiple people watching forums for this round of PTR so I think it's just a better format for this in particular. Obviously please civil even on the forums (especially on the forums!) when leaving feedback. I still love getting tweets, reading them, and replying to them (even if its not as often as I'd like), so feel free to hit me up, I just really want to make sure the feedback for phase 4 lives in a place where its easily accessible to the team. Here's the Phase 4 forum. Thank you! us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/c/in-de…

Hey @AggrendWoW. I've been deep in the PTR and Hunter runes can all be tuned to work, but the gear slot configuration is hindering many runes and playstyles. Please have someone look at my rearrangement of runes to support 8 different hunter fantasies.

@AggrendWoW This is what the full build would look like for general tanking, such as dungeons.

@AggrendWoW Hi @AggrendWoW, I "discovered" some new runes that will give Survival Hunter an identity.

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.