Tarlo
Hello!
The first change we've seen to Beast Mastery hunters is that
War Orders's chance to reset the cooldown of
Kill Command got reduced from 50/100% to 25/50%. This is a relatively impactful change for just one talent, as the talent was part of the "engine" behind the Beast Mastery Pre-Patch playstyle. This results in a ~6% loss on single-target and a ~3-4% loss to AoE, which isn't the worst thing ever considering that many other specs ended up much worse off in this tuning round. This change will however be notably larger at level 70, mostly because of the currently-unobtainable
Dire Pack talent synergizing well with
War Orders, leading to upwards of a ~10% single-target loss at max level, although this particular build was likely overperforming to begin with. The change also means a slight increase in RNG in your rotation as resets are no longer guaranteed, but this shouldn't lead to large swings in terms of output. It will just be a gameplay difference.
In the short term this does not mean any changes in terms of talents. The rotation does sees some changes, even though your ablility priority technically won't change much. The rotation becomes less about alternating
Barbed Shot and
Kill Command and now involves more
Cobra Shots as you won't has as many
Kill Commands available to you now. As much as this current "two-button" playstyle was widely enjoyed, it is understandable for Blizzard to nerf a playstyle which mostly ignores one of your main abilities. This would likely have been more of an issue at level 70 when you can learn
Dire Pack to further increase your
Kill Command generation. This would likely have locked Beast Mastery into a very similar playstyle and talent build for most of Dragonflight, which they probably wanted to avoid. This change opens up the free GCDs to use on other abilities. However, it's important that they also make these other abilities interesting to press too, namely
Kill Shot,
Call of the Wild Cobra Shot and by extension
Aspect of the Wild could use some changes or improvements. This would truly open up other talent builds and make full use of our talent tree.
The other change we saw was that hunter healing towards the pet (via
Mend Pet and
Exhilaration) no longer indirectly heals the hunter via leech. This was a relatively unknown interaction which is a shame to lose, as it had niche uses. While the extra healing from
Exhilaration would often cause overhealing (especially with
Rejuvenating Wind in the mix), using
Mend Pet was a nice last resort to have available and was quite useful in solo content, especially when soloing old raid bosses. This by extension means
Wilderness Medicine loses a potential niche as a defensive talent outside of solo content. I don't really see a reason for them to have changed this interaction but it's not going to affect most hunters too significantly in the end.
Windwalkers were apart of a large tuning pass done on Friday October the 31 that, fitting for Halloween, terrified many class and spec communities. For Windwalkers this came in the form of rather sweeping nerfs that included reducing the damage of
Fists of Fury,
Rising Sun Kick, and
Blackout Kick, tuning down the talents,
Shadowboxing Treads,
Teachings of the Monastery,
Fury of Xuen,
Whirling Dragon Punch,
Forbidden Technique,
Rushing Jade Wind, and
Xuen's Battlegear. They also reduced the duration of
Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger and the damage buff of
Storm, Earth, and Fire and
Serenity. Thankfully, they included a Developer's note that mentioned they were looking to reduce the damage of Chi spenders with the exception of
Spinning Crane Kick and
Strike of the Windlord (CHECK), reduce the power of major cooldowns (CHECK) and reduce the effect of several powerful talents (CHECK).
When looking at the changes, they were completely justified in nearly all ways. Data from the first week had Windwalkers (and several other specs) doing a very high amount of damage relative to others. Windwalkers also had, and still have, several talents that are more or less standard in all builds, and throughout Shadowlands, Windwalker had enjoyed some of the highest burst throughput of any spec, whether in single target in Nathria due to
Weapons of Order, or through Sanctum, Sepulcher, and Mythic+ due to
Bonedust Brew. Windwalkers had plenty of damage to lose before any concern, although that certainly doesn't stop the snap judgements of many in the community.
On Friday night I
napkin-mathed that the nerfs would end up being at least 13.5% to ST and roughly that, if not a little more, to AOE. In practice, it appears that may have been close to being correct. Sims show that, for the average S4 geared Windwalker, the change was around 12% in single target and slightly closer to 15% in AOE. Given the damage that Windwalker was doing, these changes appeared to have had the desired effect of brining Windwalker's single target closer to the average and reining in their AOE, without pushing the spec too far down.
Looking ahead to Dragonflight, Windwalkers should be fortunate to find that the current strength of the spec is as much due to Dragonflight systems as it was Shadowlands ones, and that losing the Shadowlands systems should not cripple the spec in any sense of the word. In fact, the current Dragonflight tier bonuses appear to be very strong for Windwalker and should help to offset much of the damage loss from these past nerfs, without risking Windwalkers pushing back into the "overpowered" category. While it was certainly a scary moment for many in the Windwalker community, especially those newer Windwalkers who haven't experienced the long history of ups and downs like some of us have, Windwalkers currently stand in a good place relative to other specs, and should remain such in Dragonflight.
