With the latest round of PTR updates, 3 new Hunter legendaries have been uncovered. These are the Kyrian, Night Fae, and Necrolord Hunter legendaries. Overall, the Night Fae and Kyrian legendaries are a bit underwhelming, and the Necrolord legendary is… interesting.
Fragments de la ramure ancestrale (Night Fae)
The new Night Fae Hunter legendary power is
Fragments de la ramure ancestrale, which will give your
Esprits sauvages a chance to hit twice when used on less than 5 targets. Whether or not this will be used is entirely a tuning question and depends on the proc chance. The chance currently says 200%, but this is most likely just a placeholder number. If it really is a guaranteed extra hit on less than 5 targets, this would be an extremely powerful legendary on 3-4 targets since
Esprits sauvages already makes up a huge portion of your damage at that level of cleave. Even for single target, this would be your best legendary for burst damage, and would potentially be the top choice on single target since
Esprits sauvages already does 5-7% of your damage on single target. This is potentially a strong legendary for what is already a strong covenant ability, so it will just come down to the tuning. It is worth mentioning though, this is probably a legendary you cannot run in M+ ever, since hitting 5 or more targets would make the legendary useless.
Pacte des traqueurs d’âmes (Kyrian)
Whenever you use
Flèche résonnante, you give everyone in your party 5% crit for the duration. This effectively means you are giving 5 people (yourself included) 5% crit chance for 10 seconds every minute. For your own personal damage, this is not going to be a great choice. However, with some coordinated group play in raids depending on how this works, it is possible that this could be a strong legendary with the right group composition on some encounters. Even that is unlikely though, and the use-cases for this will be extremely specific. Overall, this will probably be relatively weak and go unused in its current form for the vast majority of players.
Sac de munitions (Necrolord)
This legendary already exists in the game in the form of an anima power that Necrolord Hunters can pick up in Torghast. The short answer is that this legendary has the potential to be extremely strong on AoE/cleave encounters but will not be great on single target. If the legendary works exactly how the anima power does, there are also a plethora of bugs that accompany it, which may affect how viable it is. In Mythic+, this could potentially be an incredibly strong legendary for Hunters of all specs given how strong the AoE burst is. This legendary specifically will require tons of testing though before we really will know for sure, but does have some potential.
The larger issue with speculating on these legendary powers is that we do not yet know how some of the harder encounters in the new raid will play out. The raiding meta specifically is largely determined by the raid itself, as classes have specific niches where they might be better or worse. For instance, if single target proves to be the most important damage pattern in the new raid, the Necrolord legendary power will probably be a poor choice for raiding. To really get a better feel for these legendary powers, we will need to test them and see more of the raid before being able to make an informed recommendation about their relative power and feel.
The latest PTR build introduced three strings hinting at legendary powers for Hunters through data mining. Since they were just strings, there’s a couple of things that aren’t totally clear. I’ll talk about each legendary’s relative strength and discuss the possibilities of each.
Fragments de la ramure ancestrale (Night Fae)
Fragments of the Elder Antlers simply gives
Esprits sauvages a chance to double proc when hitting less than 5 targets. First off, the "200%" figure is a placeholder. Thus, we don’t actually know the relative strength of this Legendary yet since it’ll depend on that number. But let’s discuss what we do know for now.
This legendary clearly has strength in the 1-4 target range. Depending on the actual percent, it could win as the best single target legendary for Night Fae Hunters (Over our current best
Supercherie du traqueur de serpent). Since it only triggers on less than 5 targets, it’s worthless in mass AoE (5+), which is a slight turn-off for Mythic+. There’s also a possibility that the percent value changes based on how many targets are being hit (100% chance at 1 target, 80% at two, 60% at three, etc).
That being said, it still could be one of our better options for mid-range AoE depending on the percent values. It’ll largely be fight and encounter dependent. On a fight like Denathrius, this legendary would be insanely powerful during phase 2, or in a dungeon like Theatre if Pain with smaller pulls, I could see this pulling ahead. At this point, it’s a waiting game to see what the percent value actually turns out to be.
Pacte des traqueurs d’âmes (Kyrian)
Hunters get a raid buff?! Sort of. The new Kyrian Legendary gives us and our party members a flat Critical Strike buff for the duration of
Flèche résonnante. The actual amount is somewhat unclear at the moment. The tooltip value and data mined value states that it gives 5% critical strike, however, spell data (which is typically more accurate) it actually gives 10% critical strike. Similar to the Night Fae legendary, we’ll have to wait and see what the actual value is when it’s released.
Like any other party buff (think Necrolord Warriors, Balance Druid Kyrians, etc), we’ll have to ultimately determine whether the group benefit of everyone gaining 10% critical strike is worth us not using a legendary of our own (
Supercherie du traqueur de serpent or
Déferlante de tirs at the moment). This will largely depend on your party/raid comp as well as the encounter. If the encounter requires damage at 1 min intervals or burst on certain targets, this legendary might gain some value.
Sac de munitions (Necrolord)
Using
Chakram de mort applies
Tir explosif on up to 5 enemies. Unlike the previous two Legendaries, we were somewhat able to test this one since it’s also a Necrolord Hunter Anima power. Assuming it works similar to the Anima power, it has some potential to be extremely strong in AoE. Unfortunately, there are some bugs/issues with
Chakram de mort that are potentially holding this legendary back. First, let’s talk about the Legendary as there are some caveats to it.
Chakram de mort will only apply a single
Tir explosif to a target. This means that it will not apply multiple to a single target and cannot apply another
Tir explosif if it bounces to the same target in AoE. If the target dies from the initial hit of
Chakram de mort, it will not apply
Tir explosif. However, similar to how
Tir explosif works for Marksmanship at the moment, if the target has the
Tir explosif debuff when it dies, the
Tir explosif will still go off at the corpse's location.
Let's talk about the issues with
Chakram de mort that lessen the viability of the legendary. When using
Chakram de mort it can bounce to corpses, the range of its AoE is very small, it does not prioritize new targets when bouncing and it doesn’t update target count dynamically. Some of these things can be played around, but they will cause frustration to players using this legendary that don’t understand its nuances. These issues have existed for a while, but since no one really plays Necrolord Hunter it hasn’t been an issue. The introduction of the legendary just calls to light the already present issues with
Chakram de morts and exacerbates the issues. For a full write-up discussing the above bugs/issues check it out
here.
Finally, let’s discuss the relative strength of this legendary. In general, I don’t foresee
Sac de munitions being used in single target. A single
Tir explosif every 45 sec doesn’t amount to much. For AoE however, it’s a different story. Each spec also benefits differently from
Sac de munitions. Remember that the
Tir explosif most people are used to comes from Marksmanship. For Marksmanship specifically,
Chakram de mort and the proceeding
Tir explosifs benefit from
Maîtrise : Entraînement de sniper which increases the damage of all of our abilities. For Beast Mastery and Survival, this isn’t the case so their baseline
Tir explosifs will deal less damage (although
Courroux bestial does boost its damage so it has the potential to be very strong for BM as well). For MM and BM Necrolord Hunters, I can see this as the go-to legendary for AoE specifically. That being said, Necrolord is still pretty far behind Night Fae and Kyrian Hunters so we’ll have to wait to see whether it’s enough to change covenants or not (I doubt it will be for raid purposes, potentially for Mythic+).
