Marksmanship Hunter Tier Set Bonuses in The War Within Season 1
Welcome! In this post, we'll explore the Marksmanship Hunter Tier Set Bonuses for The War Within Season 1.
A bit of context for the uninitiated:
is a talent that causes
to give you 2 stacks of a buff that improves the damage of your
or
by 35/75%.
So, you cast
to improve your
/
, which in turn buffs your
s. Great.
Playstyle Changes
There are few, if any, playstyle changes associated with this tier set. We are already incentivized to spend our
stacks between
s, as we would otherwise waste valuable damage by overwriting them.
Single-Target
During
,
's cooldown is heavily reduced, so much so that there is essentially no time to cast
s without overcapping on
charges (of which you have two). The standard
rotation for single-target basically involves spamming
s and
s with reckless abandon, and mostly ignoring
. With this set bonus' current tuning (10% per
), this is not likely to change. If the damage bonus were far bigger, it would be - although that would not necessarily be good gameplay. Who wants to sit on 2 charges of their most powerful core ability (
) while spamming weak filler abilities (
) to buff them? It's better to just spam
s.
If you're thinking, "Wait, so we just have no set bonus during our main cooldown because it's not worth casting
s during it?" then
you're absolutely right. This set bonus, on single-target, has extremely low value during . The whole point of
is "your powerful, cooldown-limited abilities are now basically spammable. Have fun." And it
is fun. But this set bonus, at best, does absolutely nothing for the most fun part of the spec (
burst windows), and, at worst, ruins the gameplay loop of those moments (by making us weave
fillers between
s when really we just want to spam
s).
What they've done to try and mitigate this problem is to rework the
. The second, 30%-as-powerful
that you get when casting it during
will count for spending a
stack, thereby ensuring that a single
is enough to buff your next
by 20%. This is not enough, however, as it still does not justify us weaving in Arcanes, because a higher quantity of
beats a higher quality of them.
And besides, even if it did justify this gameplay, it wouldn't be particularly fun, unless you really enjoy having 2 charges of
all of the time.
AoE
For AoE, this changes a bit (at least once we lose our Dragonflight Season 3 bonus); we need to have
active for every
and
. The only way to achieve this, outside of
windows (6s every ~45s), is to activate
using
on 3 or more targets.
So basically, on AoE, we will always get some value out of the set bonus, because we have to cast at least one
between every single
.
That said,
having to cast s between each and is one of the worst parts of Marksmanship's rotation. The current Dragonflight Season 3 Bonus fixes this, by basically making
give you 6 seconds of
whenever it is used during an existing
. With
's cooldown being so low during
, you essentially have permanent
up by default.
This is great, and Marksmanship Hunters are extremely sad to lose it, especially for this War Within bonus.
The saving grace of the reworks is that at least
does a ton of damage, thanks to
,
, the Set Bonus, and
itself. Strong damage does not necessarily mean fun gameplay, however, and Marksmanship Hunters will have to overcap their most precious resources,
and
, on a regular basis.
In conclusion, at the current tuning, this set bonus will have
no gameplay impact. I am agnostic as to whether this is a wholly good or bad thing. After all, if the spec plays great at baseline, then a tier set bonus needs not change how it plays. Currently, Marksmanship has issues that a tier set could potentially address. The Season 3/4 Dragonflight Tier Set is one of the best since BFA, and I would argue it should be baseline—but that's another conversation.
Precise Shots Talent Reliance
You may have noticed earlier that
is a
talent. In other words, the set bonus depends entirely on this talent being picked. That doesn't have to be a problem, as the post-rework
is very strong and likely to be picked for all scenarios. That said, there's nothing about the set bonus that necessitates its tie to
. It would be more flexible if it were simply "Casting
/
increases the damage of your next
by 10%, stacking up to 2 times." This seems like a nobrainer change, as the current incarnation just unnecessarily pigeonholes Marksmanship into a talent for the whole season. Would it probably be picked anyway? Yes, but if the goal is to have a wider variety of viable, fun builds, then a set bonus need not restrict such choices.
Numerical Strength
The 2-piece set bonus is expected to be worth 2-3% on single-target, and up to 5% on AoE due to
's high damage.
The 4-piece set bonus is expected to be in the low single digits in terms of numerical value. The worst part is that it does very little for our burst DPS, which is Marksmanship's strength, and most fun element.
This is a huge step down in power from Dragonflight's S3/S4 set bonus, but that doesn't necessarily mean much. What's more interesting is how this compares numerically to the set bonuses of others. Time will tell, I just know about Hunters!
Feedback
- Detach the set bonus from . It does nothing except pigeonhole Marksmanship's talent choices for no gameplay benefit.
- The tier set is built around abilities rarely used during our main cooldown. Almost everyone agrees that is what makes Marksmanship feel great to play. This not only leads to numerical weaknesses that are difficult to tune but also results in poor gameplay.
That's it. Really. The first part is a simple change, while the second part is really a complaint about how the entire tier set works. There's no obvious fix to it other than a rework of the tier set. Honestly, most Marksmanship Hunters would probably love if they simply copy-pasted the Dragonflight Season 3 set a third time.
If they overtune the 4pc, all that does is make it worth casting
s during
to maximize the buff. While powerful, this would be horrible for gameplay, as you would spend an incredible amount of time on 2 charges of
.
