hunter spec in WoD

[NoamNatan 1]

hello dear hunters

my main char is warlock and i do have a hunter ilvl 527 currently

i'm quite disappointed from the nerfs warlock about to recieve and i'm thinking

to reroll to hunter

even though my quite low gear i manage to pull a decent dps

compare to other alts i have in similar/little better ilvl

 

i always loved Beast Mastery but recently i started to play as Survival

what i want to ask, which hunter spec is going to dominate on next expansion?

 

thanks in advance :)

[Orthios 271]

hello dear hunters

my main char is warlock and i do have a hunter ilvl 527 currently

i'm quite disappointed from the nerfs warlock about to recieve and i'm thinking

to reroll to hunter

even though my quite low gear i manage to pull a decent dps

compare to other alts i have in similar/little better ilvl

 

i always loved Beast Mastery but recently i started to play as Survival

what i want to ask, which hunter spec is going to dominate on next expansion?

 

thanks in advance :)

Again, and as with all classes, we won't know which is best until number tuning happens. As it is now, BM and SV both play out fairly similarly as to how they do on live, while MM has 3 buttons outside of talents and situational use abilities.

[Niix 169]

hello dear hunters

my main char is warlock and i do have a hunter ilvl 527 currently

i'm quite disappointed from the nerfs warlock about to recieve and i'm thinking

to reroll to hunter

even though my quite low gear i manage to pull a decent dps

compare to other alts i have in similar/little better ilvl

 

i always loved Beast Mastery but recently i started to play as Survival

what i want to ask, which hunter spec is going to dominate on next expansion?

 

thanks in advance

 

I wouldn't just toss warlock off to the side in favor of another class simply because of nerfs. Warlocks will still be a very powerful class. They certainly won't be at the top of the charts, but they will always do well. 

 

But I will answer your question. Currently is it too early to tell exactly what is going to dominate. We haven't seen a very solid numbers pass and our talents have just been finished up (mostly). There are still changes possible, but unlikely at this stage in the game. I've played all 3 specs for Mythic testing and considering you are fairly new to hunter, I would recommend you stay away from MM. It has a very high skill cap now that mastery has changed. Beast Mastery is currently feeling like the best spec, and Survival is feeling like it could keep up if it had a cooldown. If you are experienced with BM, I would say stick to that because it's seeming like it will be our top spec, if not top, right on Survival's heels. 

 

BM has received no major gameplay adjustments so you will feel very at home with the spec. 

 

I'm worried about Survival because of the lack of a strong burst cooldown. Once we get deeper into farm content, the fights become shorter and shorter, thus increasing the percentage of the fight we will be in our cooldowns. If Survival doesn't get one, it will scale HORRIBLY later on into the expansion, unless they can somehow compensate our DPS in a way to not make us overpowered, but not make us horrible. I don't think they can reliably do that. 

 

I main Survival right now, but I'm switching to BM for WoD. I don't like their reasoning for not giving SV a cooldown. It's ridiculous and I can't wait for a patch halfway into the xpac that gives us a cooldown because Blizzard realized how poorly we will do without one. We're two months out from the xpac, so I don't want to jump to conclusions, but these are just my thoughts currently and I thought that you might like to hear some thoughts from a veteran hunter.

 

Any other questions you have, regarding the beta, or just hunter gameplay in general please don't hesitate to ask.

[NoamNatan 1]

well i'm not really intend to leave my warlock, it still my most beloved class

from what i have read so far both affliction (which i never liked) and demonology took a punch

leaving destruction as default which still good to me :)

 

but for active alt, i certainly thinking of taking the hunter up.

so i wanted to check according to your knowledge of the class and skills which might be the top spec

if you say beast mastery it's fine by me :)

[Niix 169]

I'm very active on here when it comes to changes to the specs, every time there are new changes I usually post a thread about it for people to discuss. So as we get some numbers closer to the release date we will know which spec is going to be the best, but just entirely based on current numbers and with more than just that taken into account, you will likely do best with BM. It's the least changed of the specs.

[Liquidsteel 279]

well i'm not really intend to leave my warlock, it still my most beloved class

from what i have read so far both affliction (which i never liked) and demonology took a punch

leaving destruction as default which still good to me

 

but for active alt, i certainly thinking of taking the hunter up.

so i wanted to check according to your knowledge of the class and skills which might be the top spec

if you say beast mastery it's fine by me

What have you been reading, may I ask?

 

Affliction *mechanically* has been hit hard. It's boring. It's dull. It has NOTHING to do.

 

On multiple targets it gets interesting again, and the damage is not something you need to care about just yet.

 

Demonology is looking VERY competitive. Warlocks got absolutely shafted in the mobility nerfs, however Demonology still retains decent mobility via Touch of Chaos, and they seem to be intending to shift a larger portion of your damage onto your pets. Again, this lends itself to mobility because pets do not suffer from having to move out of void zones.

 

Destruction hurts the most from having to move, however Chaotic Resources looks like it will scale very well with gear, so I expect it to do well once we can stack a decent amount of mastery, paired with GoSac.