Aspects cooldowns are too high for it's benefit

[Valnaaros]

I have been playing WoW heavily since it launched, so I have experienced all of the xpacs. And currently, I have 20+ Lvl 100 alts. But anyways, there is a point to made: not every hunter is on Petopia. The vast majority of hunters are not a part of it and/or do not read it. Whilst many on here and perhaps on other forums have expressed distaste/hatred for the changes to hunters, there are also those like myself whom like the changes (to a degree). There are also those Hunters which simply do not voice their opinions on the forums. Their opinion could swing either way, but the point is as I said: those on Petopia are a sliver of the Hunter community as a whole.

That being said, I have talked to friends both in my guild and outside my guild whom are (Naturally) lvling gnome hunters. Some are BM, some are MM, or some are trying out the changes the Surv. I haven't heard any complaints about survivability or being able to do decent dps. I'm sure there are some whom may be having difficulties, but those difficulties could be due to a variety of reasons - even reasons that have nothing to do with the state of Hunters.

[Silivren]

My new main is a hunter, she is being leveled as surv from level 1. I adore everything about it, I've played in beta and love a lot of those changes too, not every expansion is going to be for everyone. So many people hated MoP, then people hated WoD. I honestly haven't hated any expansion to tell you the truth. I have played WoW since the beginning and I just roll with the punches and adapt and continue on, because this is a huge part of my life. This is my source of enjoyment, I haven't really ever unsubbed for any period other than I had to, and I missed it immensely when I did. But, you will never please everyone, no matter how hard you try. I for one don't like the lack of mounts coming with Legion for non pvpers, but I have to have faith that Blizz will make it better in the end. I don't think either side of the argument should be criticized, some people will have a blast with Legion(like me)and some won't but that doesn't make one side more right than the other.

[Valnaaros]

I completely agree, Mirana. I have loved every single xpac. Yes, there are things I wasn't fond of in Wrath, in Cata, in MoP, etc. They aren't perfect, and there can't be a perfect xpac. Not everyone will be happy with something. But you make the best of it. As you said, you just have to roll with the punches and adapt. Sitting around and waiting for change just takes away from the potential enjoyment you could have from playing the game. At the moment, I can't think of anything I don't like about Legion. Sure, there could be a few more mounts, but I like what Blizz gave us - what they didn't have to give us in the first place - and I'm sure there'll be more down the road.

[Xella]

Speaking only for myself, the artifact doesn't make BM more fun. It improves your damage a lot and once you hit 110 you can sort of have two pets of your choosing out, but you only gain one button from the artifact and it doesn't really feel super impactful in a rotational sense. If you turn off all indications of how much damage you're doing and fight a mob whose health you aren't familiar with (or a target dummy), you're not going to see much of a change between being BM at 100 and being BM at 110.

Now, if you're big on numbers and damage and stuff, that will definitely feel more fun! I actually almost feel that BM at 110 is LESS fun, but to be fair that's 10000% because I'm having Quiver Envy™ with the stupid glorious MM bow vs not liking ANY of the available artifact looks for Titanstrike. Everybody's gonna have pretty shiny weapons and I'm gonna be mogging into the same stupid Shrieking Bow I've been using since transmog went in ;_;

(I love you Shrieking Bow, don't be mad <3)

[Nachtwulf]

Some of the gun looks are decent, like the 'bigger' version of Titanstrike and the Elekk Hunter, but the Crafted gun from WoD beats out the former for cool, and the latter is beat by that similar-ish gun from Wrath. And it's just sad that a 6 year old gun model is better looking than the Shiny New Artifact.

[Teigan]

I'm rather jealous of MM's artifact bow, too. *sigh* So far my favorite gun, for looks, is the WoD crafted one. I like simpler guns, for the most part. Though Rowan's Rifle of Silver Bullets will always have a place with me. As for bows, I think Avalanche will always be my favorite. But I've decided I'll be doing survival (and yes I might have teared up a little putting my spirit beasts and other exotics at the back of the stable for the forseeable future. I fed them first, at least). Most of the staves are unsuitable for hitting things, though some are quite pointy. Currently, I'm favoring the Baleful polearm and the Banner Slicer. It is quite nice that we can use two handed axes and swords as well. I don't have much of a collection of those, but I'm excited to make one.

[Rhyela]

I think that for a lot of people, the issue isn't change itself; it's that things we used to have were taken away, then added back in to the artifact that takes at least ten levels to acquire as a sub-par version of what it used to be. I feel that it's not a good design choice to take away things players used to have, then make them work to get it back (or even pay money in some cases). That's not giving them new things, it's changing things they already had for the worse.

I'm going to try it out for myself here in the next week or so to see what I think. But I've heard enough here to know that I'm very skeptical, when I was initially excited.

[sasrei7]

Changes this drastic to classes kinda makes me interested in how the leveling experience is with them from 1. Not that I'm going to do that

I'm leveling a gnome hunter, lvl 58 i'm finding my pet is squishy and the lack of good speed boost makes it rough. I got lost in LBRS.. it sucked without my speed boost lol. Thankfully people were patient with me. Then missed a quest item.. essentially you have to wait half a dungeon to get your speed boost back. The nerf to cheetah is really bad.

[sasrei7]

Though I will say the satchel of helpful goods are not helpful at all.. lvl 62 getting items that are ilvl65 while in the dungeons the drops are ilvl 85 lol.

[Nachtwulf]

That's not new though. The baggies through the end of vanilla and into BC have never been of the right ilvl to be helpful.

[pop]

I have no complain about our dps output, though the clunkiness of making dire beast as focus regen, burst as well as shortener to beastial wrath is a bit ... troublesome.

However, our utility is severely gutted. IMHO aspects cd should be between 30-60 secs max. And Cheetah should be 90% for 5 secs, 60 secs for 5 secs and 30% speed increment for 5 secs for 45 sec cd with a talent to either reduce the cd, increase the speed or increase the speed by 25%. It's not that OP even at that.

Aspect of Turtle should be 60 sec cd with 2 charges with a talent to either wipe any debuff while turtle, or a heal dot or heal bonus while in turtle, or shorter duration or additional 1 charge.

For aspect of the wild, i think it should be an active part of the rotation, instead of a cd.

Having said, Frost should be made baseline for all SPECS but maybe 60 secs for MM and BM but 30 secs for Surv.

[Shinryu Masaki]

And Cheetah should be 90% for 5 secs,

OMG that made laugh so good in real life! Not laughing at you though, but because you're actually close to the truth! I went to check out what Icy Veins where saying about talent choices, and while normally I either agree or disagree with them, this time for hunters at least I just couldn't help but shake my head in disbelief. Let's take Barrage and Volley for example.

Beast Mastery

For multi-target situations, you should generally pick Volley as it is very slightly stronger than Barrage when dealing with a single target, and only gets stronger as you add more targets. Volley is only strong when the targets you are fighting are bunched up, however. As this is not often the case in Hellfire Citadel, you might want to pick Barrage for when you are dealing with spread out targets. You must consider your specific situation and make the choice that will be the most beneficial to your raid.

Marksmanship

Barrage is currently the strongest choice in this tier for all situations.

Volley is not worth using in any situation. It simply does not do more damage than Barrage in any situation.

Wait...what?! I know BM and MM aren't the same spec but to have such a drastic difference in what is said on both pages makes me wonder if they actually tested stuff. Which brings me to what they said about Dash on all 3 specs along with the other talents in that tier.

Your default choice should be Posthaste, as it will make you much better at covering long distances on a regular basis. You can use Farstrider if you never have to move more than the distance a single Posthaste will take you. Dash is never worth using, it just does not provide enough of a movement benefit on average to be worth it.

First off, while Posthaste is good on BM and MM, it's not that great for SV since you need a target to use Harpoon as well as being 5 yards away from it, so no target = no speed boost. And if you're trying to run away from a boss, harpooning yourself back to him might not be such a good idea.

But what they said in their little description of the Dash talent threw me off.

Dash increases the duration of Aspect of the Cheetah by 3 seconds, increasing the total duration to 15 seconds.

Which is a flat out lie and makes me really believe they didn't test stuff at all.

See, the tooltip for Cheetah says "Increases your movement speed by 90% for 3 sec, and then by 30% for another 9 sec." so how does that work actually? Blizzard used a little trick that gives us the illusion that we are gaining a speed boost by using Cheetah while in reality we are gaining two speed boosts, and both are named the same to trick us into believing it's just one.

Aspect of the Cheetah number 1 which gives the 90% speed boost for 3 seconds.

Aspect of the Cheetah number 2 which gives the 30% speed boost for 9 seconds.

As soon as we lose the first one, we gain the second one, so the illusion seems perfect. However, what does Dash affect then? It's both buffs! So when you use Cheetah your 90% speed boost will last 6 seconds (you where off by just 1 sec Pop!), and your 30% speed boost will last 12 seconds, making it 18 seconds long in total.

I know, it's still a far cry from what it used to be before the patch. I will always prefer the original Cheetah, but we have to make do with what we have now. And I know how people hate the "artifact will fix it" thing, same as how they often said "resilience will fix it" for PvP, and frankly I don't like it either. But for SV and BM they do have traits that lower the cooldown on Cheetah (2 mins 24 secs for SV and 2 mins for BM), and I honestly think that there's more to the movement speed talent tier along with artifact traits than to just go and blurt out "Posthaste is the best! Farstrider isn't too bad either! And Dash is a piece of shit!"

For me personally, after looking at the artifact traits, I believe for MM that Posthaste and Farstrider are better than Dash due to Survival of the Fittest (Activating Disengage reduces all damage you take by 10% for 4 sec.) and Bullseye (When your abilities damage a target below 20% health, you gain 3% increased critical strike chance for 6 sec, stacking up to 30 times.), which makes using Disengage a lot more appealing than Cheetah.

For SV, Posthaste, as I said above, requires a target to use as well as being 5 yards away from the target so gaining the speed boost can either be tricky or completely useless. Farstrider could be good depending on if you're playing solo or in a dungeon/raid. In solo it's pretty much worthless due to Terms of Engagement (The remaining cooldown on Harpoon is reset when you kill an enemy.) since you'll be doing that all the time anyway. In a dungeon/raid it could be more useful. As for Dash, it can be a more interesting choice when you get Embrace of the Aspects (Reduces the cooldown of your Aspects by 20%) due to it's lower cooldown and not having the need of a target and being 5 yards away from it to use.

For BM all 3 are good, but Pathfinder (Reduces the cooldown of Aspect of the Cheetah by 60 sec.) makes Dash a little more appealing. That 90% speed boost for 6 seconds is quite nice honestly.

[Valnaaros]

Shinryu, there are various reasons why they list difference between them. There are the differences in stat priorities between the specs. There are the changes that Artifacts will bring. There are the differences in playstyles between the specs. Raid and dungeon encounters are taken into consider and, as of Legion, they even have a talent guide for questing.

But to say that they are flat-out lying or aren't even testing is just absurb, especially when you have no proof of that. Icy Veins wouldn't have become immensely popular as they are if this was true. Just look at Noxxic - a website that once was largely respected, but now doesn't even test half of what they claim. The "guides" they have are just wrong, as Blizz has stated a few times.

Could Icy Veins go indepth and explain their reasoning for all their decisions? Sure, they could. They could list paragraps talking about al the math, encounters, playstyle differences, etc for each talent/talent row. But how many people would actually read that? Icy Veins is meant to be a place where you can quickly look up your rotation and which talent is best, then move on. They have indepth guides for those whom want to master their spec. Shoot, they even added talent guides for questing. But typing up paragraps and posting them under every talent decision of theirs would just be a waste of time, since most wouldn't even read them.

[Shinryu Masaki]

I'm well aware of that. But I think that this time, as far as hunters are concerned, they missed the mark.

[Valnaaros]

I don't see how. Yes, Dash increases the duration of Aspect of the Cheetah by 3 secs, but that is every 3 mins. Disengage can be used much more often, thus making it better than Dash. I can't see how Dash can possibly be better. You'd be right if Cheetah could be used more often, but atm it can't. Besides, as I said (which you said you understood), Icy Veins is top-notch. They have various theorycrafters and raiders from the world's best guilds test the specs and write the guides. Is it possible they're wrong? Sure, of course. But if they were I am sure that it would've been changed by now. Icy Veins has their own forums and they listen to them, like with what happened with the Ret guide.

[Shinryu Masaki]

Dash increases the duration of Cheetah by 6 seconds, not 3. The total time is 18 seconds, not 15 like they say. I also said it depends on the spec too, as for MM of course Dash isn't good compared to the other two talents. SV they just straight up copy & pasted what they wrote for BM/MM without a second thought about how different Harpoon is from Disengage, and how it requiring a target and a 5 yards minimum range to work makes it clunky and possibly not even worth it to get the Posthaste speed boost, because you can't even use that boost if you don't have a freaking target to begin with. BM can't go wrong with any of them.

I get it that right now without the artifacts some stuff aren't working as good as they should. I'm just saying that for that particular talent tier for hunters that they just read the tooltips and immediately wraped it up without testing any of them. And if they did test them it was not as SV and it was without taking to time to analyze what Dash actually did compared to what the misleading tooltip says.

[Nachtwulf]

If it were me, I'd package up the discrepancies and email it to IV. I'm sure that in the last days of pre-7.0, they were under a lot of pressure to get everything done, so it wouldn't surprise me if some errors slid through (and I'm DEAD sure the pages are built by spawning duplicates of one spec and then tweaking the details because it'd be dumb to do it any other way). Don't be confrontational about it but I'd say definitely point out the particular synergy with SV and ask that they look at it again. It may simply be a case of 'someone duplicated the page and forgot to swap out a block of text' since you said it was identical to another spec's description.

[Valnaaros]

Six seconds or three, it really doesn't matter when Cheetah has a 3 min CD. If it was much lower - enough to compete with Disengage, then I'm sure it'd be a better choice or at least an option. And as I said, Icy Veins receives huge amounts of feedback. On the 13th, when the patch dropped, there was a ton of negative feedback about the Ret guide. So much that they even closed down the guide and posted a notice they they are re-reviewing it and making changes to it. My point is, is that more than a couple people found error with their decisions or writing-style for the third row of the Hunter specs, then it would've been changed by now. And largely, it doesn't really matter. The third row doesn't really affect dps in a positive or negative way. It adds some mobility, but does not directly affect dps. I can guarantee that if it was the first, second, fourth, sixth or seventh rows that there would've been changes, due to these directly affecting dps.

[Xota]

In pvp, survival has a pvp talent at honor level 8 that makes aspect of the cheetah + dash shine even more. The CD is reduced by 50%, and nearby party members get the 90% boost for 3 seconds.

For BM, it will probably be a player preference thing. A super fast burst sprint with a long CD vs a less controlled, moderate speed sprint with relatively high uptime. Sometimes being able to hightail it out of danger (or towards a fleeing enemy) is worth a long CD.
Farstrider looks like its for just getting out of "the fire" a lot, or for survival a distance closer when you're throwing axes at someone who is kiting you.

[Rikaku]

I would also keep in mind that Icy Veins is a guide, not a set of regulations you must follow. While it may be the closest thing to min-max'ing, if you find there is a talent choice whose synergy works better for you and keeps you going through your rotation better, then you should use that talent. Especially if its a crowd-control or movement talent.

And in regards to IV guides, I know that the same author works on both the BM and SV guides - Azortharion. They have their own twitter and number-crunching information on their own sites and google documents as opposed to putting it all on IV. So if you really wanted to see or ask what made him choose those particular talents, you could always try contacting the author.