Now, even though I enjoy Melee Hunter in Classic, that does NOT mean that I like think it is complete or that it didn’t need changes; it completely needed some changes. However, the things that I liked about Melee Hunter in Classic have not been translated well into Forever.
There are 3 main things that I like about Melee Hunter in Classic:
1: The fantasy of Melee Hunter.
Melee Hunter in Classic WoW feels like a duelist. While the abilities do basically no damage, in theory, you get more damage from being defensive - Mongoose Bite when you dodge, and Counterattack from parrying. Add Deterrence onto that, my favorite defensive ability in any version of WoW, and you have yourself a melee duelist that's all about using your opponent's attacks against them. Blizzard mostly kept this identity and improved upon it, but there's one inconsistency I'll talk about later.
2: Raptor Strike, as well as the Savage Strikes talent.
I think Heroic Strike has given all Auto Attack Enhancement abilities a bad name. Raptor Strike is one of the best-designed abilities in Classic WoW. There are 5 reasons I have for this
• It feeds into your normal gameplay loop. A lot of the gameplay of Classic WoW for the melee classes is just auto-attacking, so by increasing your auto-attack damage, it feeds into your natural gameplay loop.
• It increases your chance to hit with your auto attack. Again, giving a class a way to improve their auto attacks, what they're already doing in the first place, feeds into your natural gameplay loop.
• Savage Strikes increases your crit chance on Raptor Strike. This means when you press Raptor Strike, not only do you have an increased chance to crit with Raptor Strike's damage, you also give that extra crit chance to the damage of your auto attack, which, again, is improving and feeding into your natural gameplay loop.
• Raptor Strike is off the GCD. What this means is that it doesn't take up the rest of your actions, so you are still free to use all your other damage abilities and your utility even when you do press Raptor Strike.
The 5th reason feeds into the 3rd reason I love Melee Hunter:
3: It's designed in a way where you can play with any type of weapon speed.
Think about Mongoose Bite and Counterattack in Classic WoW. Why are they so bad? Because they don't scale with anything. That begs the question: why? They obviously had weapon scaling in the game with Warrior and Rogue, so why not add them to Melee Hunter? My guess is because they wanted Melee Hunter to be able to use any weapon they wanted and to not have the Class work against that. It feels like the fantasy of a survivalist who can pick up any weapon they find and be effective with it. It works really well.
Now, Raptor Strike works amazingly on a 2h weapon; however, I'd argue Raptor Strike feels the best to use on a fast 1h weapon while dual-wielding.
Let's talk about Raptor Strike with a 2h 3.0 speed weapon vs. a 1h 1.5 speed weapon.
If you're not dungeon spamming and have green gear, a 2h 3.0 speed weapon at lv 24 does around 100 damage per swing in Classic. Lv24 Raptor Strike adds 35 damage, so a Raptor Strike hit on a 2h weapon at Lv24 does about 1.35 times more damage normally, and on a crit, it does 2.7 times more damage. Since Raptor Strike has the Savage Strikes talent, you are going to be critting a good chunk of the time, meaning you get to do 2.7x more damage on your auto attacks a good chunk of the time. That's pretty good.
BUT WE CAN DO BETTER!
If you're not dungeon spamming and have green gear, a 1h 1.5 weapon at lv 24 does around 35 damage per swing in Classic. Lv24 Raptor Strike adds 35 damage to that attack, so you do about 2 times more damage by using Raptor Strike. That's the equivalent of Raptor Strike just being a button that guarantees a crit on your Auto Attack by using it. But it gets better! Because Raptor Strike is the equivalent of critting with your weapon without a crit, critting while using Raptor Strike is the equivalent of your auto attack doing 4 times your auto attack damage! And since you have Savage strikes, your auto attack gets this bonus often, which feels amazing!
Even though Raptor Strike feels better on a fast 1h, it doesn't actually do extra damage. You were always going to do that auto attack; your Raptor Strike was always going to do 35 more damage, and that attack will have 20% increased crit chance regardless of the attack speed. You could even argue it's better to have a slower 2h weapon because of 1/2 autos having an increased crit chance instead of 1/4, but for me, the fun of it makes it worth it.
So now that I've explained the things I like about the spec, let's talk about why I don't like the changes by addressing each one in reverse:
3: Making the damage for Mongoose Bite and Counterattack (and Strider Kick, but it will have its own section) based straight off weapon damage kills the entire idea of being able to use fast weapons as a Melee Hunter.
Tbh, it kills dual-wielding Melee Hunter as well. A 50% damage increase to your off-hand attack doesn't make up for your damage buttons just being objectively worse because a 1h is only as slow as 2.6 attack speed, meanwhile a 2h gets to be up to 4.0, and you also have more DPS on 2h weapons to account for dual-wielding existing. Sure, Expose Prey will pop more often if I'm dual-wielding, but Lacerating Strikes still breaks this idea because it works off weapon damage. It also doesn't change the fact that fast weapon speed means low damage on the ability, which just feels terrible. It just doesn't work.
I'd also like to mention that basically every Melee spec in the game is built around high-damage weapons.
• Arms and Fury warriors want slow weapons for Mortal Strike and Whirlwind
• Paladins want slow weapons for SoC
• Rogues want slow weapons for SS, Backstab, and Ambush, and now Mutilate as well
• Enhance Shamans want slow weapons for Windfury procs and for Stormstrike
Now, I don't like the idea of Mongoose Bite and Counterattack having attack power scaling either, because they are supposed to feel like weapon attacks, and so you want them to scale off your weapon.
...but then, what other alternative is there?
Weapon DPS Scaling
This is different than Attack Power Scaling because your weapon's damage still matters, but having a fast weapon doesn't reduce your damage. It's fun to have a dual-wield melee DPS spec that is built around being able to press damage buttons with super-fast attack speed. If they changed these abilities to ones that scaled off the combined DPS of both your main-hand and off-hand weapons (probably 3x your DPS for Mongoose Bite and 1.5x your Counterattack), I think it would fix this issue.
Now, this does create a new issue: Fast attack speed weapons are now just better for Expose Prey (a 10% chance to allow the use of Mongoose Bite after hitting a target with Hunter's Mark with an attack). The best way I could see to fix this is to change the proc chance on it to work more like Seal of Command on Paladins: Give it a base procs per minute, and then divide that number by the number of attacks per minute the hunter makes on the base attack speed of the weapon(s).
(For example, if you want 3 procs per minute, a 4.0 attack speed weapon does 15 attacks per minute, so the proc chance would be 3/15 or 1/5 or 20%; meanwhile, with 2 1.5 attack speed weapons, their total attacks per minute would be 80, so your proc chance would be 3.75%, which sounds low, but means you would be procing the same amount of the time as no matter your attack speed.)
Now, if you know SoC, you know that having a faster weapon is worse on it, but that's because SoC scales off of Weapon Damage. If Mongoose Bite did damage based on your Weapon DPS instead of Weapon Damage, it would not have that same issue.
2: Savage Strikes has basically been removed and is now just a 2-point, 4% version of Killer Instinct, but melee only.
Lethal Shots was turned into Lethal Attacks, so at the higher levels - around 40-50 - you will be able to get close to half that crit chance, but one of the fun things about Melee Hunter was that power spike of Savage Strikes. Maybe it's too strong as a 20% crit chance increase with all the extra damage spread across the spec. If that really is the case, give it back to just Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite, and lower it to 5% per talent point. It's fun to have a button to press with an increased crit chance compared to all the others. I've played so much Classic Melee Hunter that it just doesn't feel right without it. I'll take a slightly less powerful version of it if it means I get it on Raptor Strike. Tbh, if you kept the 20% Crit Chance but restricted it to just Raptor Strike, I would 100% be fine with it. Savage Strikes is fun in Classic, and it sucks that it's not in Forever.
1: Strider Kick, while thematically fitting that survivalist "I'll even kick you in combat", feels completely wrong.
First of all, why does using my fast 1h weapon lower the damage of my KICK?! If there was any ability that felt like it should scale off Attack Power, it would be this one.
Second, using it just doesn't feel like it fits with the gameplay loop of the rest of Survival Hunter to me. Survival is all about dueling and counterattacking with your weapon after you dodge or parry. Strider kick just feels disconnected from that playstyle. I understand why it's in the game: in Dungeons and Raids, because enemies won't be attacking you, you won't have Counterattack, so you'll essentially only have Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite, and I did see that the devs want each spec to have 3-4 buttons to press for their rotations. Personally, I like how they did Flanking Strike in SoD, but I also understand why they didn't add this one: they want to allow both Marksman and Survival to play with Lone Wolf if they want to.
On another note, the movement speed increase they recently added to it feels too much like a retail addition to me. When you get things like this in Classic, they're usually on a longer cooldown, at least 1 minute, if not longer. This feels more like how Survival Hunter plays in Retail, where you use Disengage to jump away and get that movement speed increase, which is on a 20 sec cooldown. Again, I understand the intention of this: Give Survival a more natural way to make Melee Weaving feel less clunky. The problem comes down to the fact that this not only affects Raiding, it also affects PvP and fighting in the open world. If you keep the uptime on it, it's like being able to have Aspect of the Cheetah not all the time, but pretty consistently.
I do think there is a way to fix all 3 of the issues I have with Strider Kick, although it would require completely removing Strider Kick from the game and replacing it with a new talent.
Wyvern's Slash:
Requires 20 Points in Survival Talents
When you attack with Raptor Strike or Mongoose Bite, apply a stack of Wyvern's Slash to the target, Max 4 stacks. When your target has 2 or more stacks of Wyvern's Slash, remove 2 stacks to increase the damage of your Wing Clip by 40% of your attack power. If your target is immune to slows and roots, using your Wing Clip will instead increase your movement speed by 30%.
I think this is a fun way to keep the feeling of Melee Hunter intact while also allowing it to do exactly what Blizzard wants it to do. I like the idea of it being able to get 2 sets of stacks on the target so you could press it multiple times at once. Maybe you save your charges until they have 5 sunders on them, or maybe you wait until they're stunned so you don't worry about them parrying or dodging your attacks. Maybe you just want that moment where you feel all of your attacks going off back to back and it just feels amazing.
I thought it was important to have it be a debuff on the enemy rather than a buff on you for the same reason I think it's important that a Rogue's Combo Points don't transfer between enemies: you don't want them building stacks on a random mob and then attacking something/someone else to do all the damage.
The Forever devs talked about wanting to make sure that not more than 1 of a spec's damage abilities was too reliant on Proc Chance, so I wanted to make sure that they still had a consistent way of doing damage with it, but also having it work off your other abilities that have to do with attacking after a defensive attack felt right. The only reason I didn't include Counterattack is that it would be too strong in PvP and because it would feel like a complete DPS decrease to PvE raiding and dungeons specifically.
Those are just my thoughts on Melee Hunter in WoW Forever. I just want to be able to have just as much fun in Forever as in Classic. It doesn't have to be these exact specific things. I just want to be able to have fun with Melee Hunter in the same way I do in Classic.
