Greetings, Hunters!
In Undermine(d), Pack Leader is receiving a complete rework, and we thought we’d take this opportunity to explain some of our decisions, thought-process, and goals with this update.
Pack Leader Fantasy
When reassessing what the fantasy of a Pack Leader is, we took inspiration from the iconic Hunter Rexxar. Rexxar doesn’t cleanly fall into any Hunter specialization, but he mostly closely aligns with Survival, with a splash of Beast Mastery given his repertoire of pets. As such, Rexxar seemed like a fantastic throughline to help guide our hand when designing Pack Leader’s second iteration.
Beast Mastery summons many random beasts with Dire Beast, and has even dipped its toes into summoning iconic beasts with talents like Huntmaster’s Call summoning Hati and Fenryr, so having a pool of special Beast summons made a lot of sense. However, summoning beasts is a largely unexplored territory for Survival Hunter. For Pack Leader, we wanted to ensure that you were summoning Beasts from a specific pool, and that each pet felt unique, like your Hunter and their Pack had a special bond. This direction felt more in-line with Survival’s fantasy of having a uniquely strong bond with a smaller suite of pets.
Three is a Crowd
While its fun to summon creatures, they can create a lot of noise in the game space, especially in melee. When designing Pack Leader, we wanted to ensure that the new summons we were designing were not sitting in melee and adding more visual noise, blocking sightlines, and taking up game space. This goal pushed our designs into less traditional territory. While the Pack Leader Bear behaves like a very traditional summoned creature, leaping into battle, using abilities, and auto attacking its target, the Boar and the Wyvern are a bit more unique in their behaviors.
In the Shadow of the Wyvern
The Wyvern’s visuals are likely the most unique of the bunch. When you summon your Wyvern via Howl of the Pack Leader, it swoops in, lets out a roar, and proceeds to circle the battlefield for the duration of its buff. Looking up and seeing your Wyvern circle the skies felt like a uniquely Pack Leader moment, and we’re happy with how we were able to package this effect.
Charging Ahead
When summoned, Pack Leader’s Boar performs a series of 3 charges from off-screen, crashing into your enemies with explosive force.Given the lower complexity of the other two summons, we felt that the Boar could have some more advanced interactions with a follow up talent “Hogstrider”. Hogstrider causes your Cobra Shot or Mongoose Bite to strike more targets and deal more damage, and this effect stacks the more enemies are damaged by your Boar. The gameplay we’re looking for is following up your Boar’s hits with your own when it rotationally makes sense, while also pushing you to not overcap on Hogstrider stacks. This “moment” also feels uniquely Pack Leader, and we’re hoping that when players are spec’ing in to Pack Leader, they’re looking forward to cool moments like this.
Defense and Utility
Given the gameplay and summons this Hero Talent tree is introducing, we wanted to keep the complexity low on Pack Leader’s defensive and utility talents, while still preserving some of the Pack Leader fantasy.
Pack Leader’s defensive talent “Shell Cover” features an adorable pet turtle that will come to your aid (atop your head) , providing some damage resistance when you are dropped below 40% health. This defensive is fully passive, and while you’ll notice it when it procs, it shouldn’t require any tracking or playing around to get full use.
Pack Leader’s utility comes on a choice node, with two talents: Slicked Shoes and Horsehair Tether. Part of the Pack Leader fantasy is an adaptive, quick-thinking, and seasoned Hunter, so a Pack Leader having some unique utility made a lot of sense. Pack Leaders are hard to slow down, and Slicked Shoes will give them more frequent access to Disengage should they get assailed by snares, slows, and other debilitations. Horsehair Tether is a very unique utility node for Pack Leaders that causes anyone stunned by Binding Shot to be dragged to Binding Shot’s center similar to spells like Ursol’s Vortex. Our goal with this talent is to help make Pack Leader’s utility immediately identifiable in function while also helping you to feel scrappy and clever with a new addition to one of Hunter’s suite of traps, snares, and stuns.
There’s still plenty to discover with this revision to Pack Leader, and we’re excited for you all to get your hands on it. Thanks for playing!
In Undermine(d), Marksmanship Hunter is receiving a substantial update to its spec tree and fantasy, and we thought we’d take the opportunity to outline our goals with this change.
Lone Wolf, No Longer
Likely the most substantial change to Marksmanship is a reimagining of the specialization’s fantasy and how it interacts with pets.
Hunters are in large part defined by their pets and their greater relationship with the natural world of Azeroth and beyond. Marksmanship Hunter stood in somewhat stark defiance of that for much of its existence, as it was often more than willing to abandon pet access in exchange for extra throughput from Lone Wolf. Over World of Warcraft’s history, this talent was iterated, changed, and grew to be a core part of Marksmanship’s identity.
There were many fantasy and gameplay issues with Lone Wolf. Pets had legitimate utility behind them, such as Bloodlust, defensives, and mobility. Having to summon your pet and lose Lone Wolf to access that utility as Marksmanship often had legitimate experiential and throughput consequences. Why should a Hunter be frustrated to pull out their pet? The discord between Marksmanship Hunters and their pets felt like something that needed to be solved-- and our goal was to solve that problem in a way that not only reembraced pets as a part of Marksmanship’s identity, but also did it in a unique and fantasy-forward way.
Eyes in the Sky
In Undermine(d), Marksmanship Hunters are losing access to “traditional” pets, like Survival and Beast Mastery have, and are instead permanently joined in battle by an Eagle. Your Eagle will descend from the skies when called upon to help your allies and hinder your enemies.
Your most frequent use for the Eagle will be via Spotter’s Mark, a new baseline talent that Marksmanship Hunters will have access to starting at level 13. When spending Precise Shots, your Eagle has a chance to descend from the skies and mark your target, substantially increasing the damage your next Aimed Shot will deal to that target. This mechanic is more deeply developed, expanded, and altered in the talent tree.
Marksmanship Hunters can expect a full suite of unique Eagle-specific versions of pet utility such as a line of sight-ignoring Intimidation, a unique Bloodlust, new visuals for Master’s Call, and even the ability to change your Eagle’s specialization between Tenacity and Cunning.
Aiming Down Sights
The flow of Marksmanship’s rotation is smooth and iconic. For our updates to the Marksmanship tree, we were focused on trimming away some of the more vague parts of Marksmanship’s kit both fantasy-wise and mechanically and really focusing in on what made Marksmanship special-- all while retaining the smooth gameplay that Marksmanship players have come to know and love.
A big pillar of our Marksmanship update was to ensure that Aimed Shot was the star of the show. Aimed Shot is the core of Marksmanship-- a long channel, lightning fast projectile, and it hits like a truck. We’ve added some new mechanics, keywords, and talents that all help to build up to huge Aimed Shots, fat crits, and satisfying procs.
New and Old Tricks
While the core of Marksmanship’s rotation will feel familiar, we wanted to add some more flair to the less core parts of Marksmanship’s kit, such as Kill Shot and Explosive Shot.
Within the new tree you’ll find some familiar friends like Double Tap, Volley, and Lock and Load alongside some new talents like Precision Detonation, that makes Aimed Shot trigger Explosive Shot’s explosion earlier and increasing its damage substantially.
Kill Shot (and Black Arrow) can be turned completely on its head with a new talent, Headshot, that allows you to use Kill Shot as a Precise Shots spender just like Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot.
Room to Grow
This next step for Marksmanship is, ideally, the first of many. We are interested in continuing to flesh out Marksmanship’s Eagle as a true pet and partner for you on your journeys with unique interactions, effects, and even appearances in the future, but we don’t have specifics to share yet. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
We’re excited for you all to get your hands on Marksmanship when Undermine(d) drops, and we’ll be eagerly awaiting your feedback!
