Enhancing the Hunter's Mark Raid Buff: Feedback on Implementation, Potency, and AoE

In the latest 10.2 PTR build, Hunters have finally received a raid buff in the form of a reworked Hunter's Mark that provides 5% increased damage to a single target above 80% health. However, there's been a lot of questions and conversations regarding the relative strength and implementation of this new raid buff. Our Hunter Guide Writers (Azortharion, DoolB, and Tarlo) have come together to identify concerns with the new Hunter's Mark and offer additional feedback that would greatly improve the ability.

Hunter Raid Buff of Patch 10.2

After years of the Hunter Community asking in every which way for some form of uniquely useful/mandatory raid/group utility, Blizzard has finally decided to implement something of a nudge in the right direction.

To offer some background, Hunter is one of the only two classes in the game that bring no unique, mandatory utility or group buff to a raid with any of its specs. This is catastrophic for Hunter's prospects in Mythic+ above +20, especially where spots are minimal, and specs that bring a powerful group buff are vastly preferred to those who don't, such as Mages, Druids, Priests, Monks, and Demon Hunters just to name a few.

It has also been problematic for raid spots recently, but the addition of Augmentation Evoker means Hunter is now competing for even fewer spots.

This change aims to secure Hunter a raid spot in most scenarios.

• What Is it?

Hunter’s Mark now increases all damage taken by the target by 5% while the target is above 80% maximum health.

Developers’ note: We like the idea of Hunter’s Mark highlighting specific targets on the battlefield, so we have made an adjustment to Hunter’s Mark to cause it to increase all damage taken by 5% on targets above 80% health. A few quick notes about this change:

• When applying Hunter’s Mark out of combat or before a pull, it continues to have no cooldown. If you apply Hunter’s Mark while in combat, Hunter’s Mark receives a 20-second cooldown. We don’t intend for you to move this damage bonus around frequently.
• Hunter’s Mark is still on the global cooldown with this change.
• Multiple Hunters cannot stack this damage bonus on the same target.

• How Good Is It?

When compared to other forms of raid utility, it is perhaps the worst of them all. Assuming a regular 100-0 boss, doing 5% more damage for 20% of its health is the same as doing 1% extra damage to it globally.

Another way to think of it is that it effectively reduces the boss' HP to 99% of what it would otherwise have been.

A common misconception about its strength, or lack thereof, is that in the 100-80 slice of the fight, you are usually doing a ton of damage, making the buff much more potent than if it were, for example, from 60% to 40% health.

This does not make an appreciable difference.

A fight has a fixed amount of HP, and 20% of its HP will represent a static amount. Increasing this amount by 5% will always result in the same number, regardless of which slice of the fight you are taking it out of.

Sometimes, it can matter where you remove boss HP in the fight, both for good and bad.

A positive/neutral example would be fights that end before they reach 10% health, such as Sylvanas Windrunner in the Sanctum of Domination. Here, the first 20% of the fight represents ~36% of its actual HP, and the raid buff would be stronger than it looks on the tin. Of course, progression on this boss could also involve stopping DPS, making it useless again.

A negative example would be Echo of Neltharion on Mythic difficulty in this tier. The most common strategy involved intentionally stopping DPS and prolonging Phase 1 when progressing this boss, at least earlier in the tier. Since our raid buff exclusively affects damage in Phase 1 on this fight, the raid buff would be useless, and it would do nothing to earn Hunter a raid spot on this fight, where all of its specs are some of the worst in the game.

Blizzard's Goals and Outcomes

With all of that said, in a raid context, it does not matter how good the raid buff is as long as it is mandatory.

What matters to Hunters is that we have a secured, single raid spot in a raid just like every other class. It should be better to bring a Hunter than two of any other class. This is a goal that Blizzard has explicitly stated in recent interviews:

"Our goal for Mythic raiding is for the best composition, the optimal composition, the ones that we see at the high end, have one of every class out of the 20 slots available." - Ion Hazzikostas in Wowhead's Patch 10.1.5 Interview from July

"Now they're moving back to class representation, where they want the best groups to be ones which include all 12 (soon to be 13) classes - not having a single Warlock or a Hunter in a 20-player group should be a detriment even when Warlock or Hunter aren't strictly the best ranged meta class." - Ion Hazzikostas in Maximum's Shadowlands Season 4 Interview from August 2022

So Is It Mandatory?

Hunter's Raid Buff will be mandatory in most, but not all, cases.

Fights that have irrelevant Phase 1s or multiple important targets (such as the Council of Dreams in the upcoming raid) will not be good for this raid buff and can even make it completely useless.

For comparison's sake, here is a summary of some other wholly or semi-quantifiable raid buffs present in the game now.

Hunter's new Hunter's Mark-based raid buff offers 1% damage done to the raid on a single target. It can be swapped to different targets mid-fight at the cost of half a GCD to the Hunter. 1% damage done currently translates to around 16-23K DPS on a fight like Rashok, depending on your group's raw DPS.

Warrior's Battle Shout is worth around ~4.5% for Attack Power specs. A Mage's Arcane Intellect would be worth a similar amount to Spell Power specs.

Druid's Mark of the Wild is worth around ~3% for all classes and also provides 1.5% damage taken from everything.

Retribution Paladin's Retribution Aura is highly variable with its uptime and can be worth anywhere from 0% to ~2%.

Monk's Mystic Touch and Demon Hunter's Chaos Brand also range in value depending on the composition of your group. Since practically all damage is Physical or Magical, the two buffs provide a combined 5%.

Enhancement Shaman's Windfury Totem provides variable value. If you simply take the 4 top DPS specs on Bloodmallet's Windfury Totem chart except for Enhancement Shaman, you arrive at a value of ~20K DPS on a single-target. This is very similar to the value of Hunter's buff, albeit with fewer caveats surrounding boss HP.

Priest's Power Infusion provides variable value and is highly timing-dependent. The best specs, according to Bloodmallet Charts, gain anywhere from 10-15K, albeit with different timings that may or may not suit a Shadow Priest who wants to Power Infusion around their cooldowns. Keep in mind that Power Infusion is getting a sizable nerf in Patch 10.2, so the value of this buff going forward will be significantly lower. This is on top of Priest's Stamina buff, which is immensely powerful yet hard to quantify.

Mythic+ and AoE Problems

Because this raid buff is exclusively single-target, its value is heavily diluted in multi-target scenarios, which Mythic+ is full of. Hunter currently struggles massively for representation in high-end Mythic+.

Not only is ~1% damage done to a single target in an AoE pack almost worthless, but it will cost you half a GCD to get this benefit on every single pack in the dungeon.

This is not only a matter of viability but also a matter of fun gameplay. Every other raid buff listed above is either passive or something that the affected class would be using regardless, such as Power Infusion.

Thus, Hunter spends far more effort for minimal reward, yet it will still be worth doing since Hunter's Mark can be applied pre-combat. Unless, of course, you are in combat with a previous pack and are chaining, or if it is Spiteful week, in which case you will regularly be limited not only by the GCD but also the 20-second cooldown penalty if you use Hunter's Mark in combat. Considering how weak the buff is, I think one or the other of the two restrictions (GCD and 20s combat CD) is enough, and we could do with one of them removed.

This problem is not limited to Mythic+, of course. Most raid tiers have a so-called "Council"-style fight with multiple relevant and important targets. On fights like this, the value of our raid buff gets close to 0, and Hunter's design is not friendly towards this kind of fight in general.

Wishlist

Currently, there is immense pressure to Hunter's Mark the millisecond an important target becomes available on a raid fight. If you are just a second late, the mob could already be at 90% health, wasting half of your buff. Needless to say, this feels bad and introduces a level of millisecond urgency that we do not want in a game that is ostensibly about making an action every second or so.

1. The buff is currently too weak to be considered 'mandatory' in all cases. Adding a sub-20% health component (e.g. 5% damage done below 20% health to a single target) would fix this issue.
2. Alternatively, just make it 2% damage done altogether. You have the exact same raw damage value as 100-80 + 20-0, but no weird caveats with certain bosses. The raid buff would be completely in line (in fact, worse) than almost all the others, while maintaining the single-target fantasy of Hunter's Mark. It would also fix the issue in item #1 by ensuring you still get value if you arrive to the mob at 90% HP.
3. It should be more useful in Mythic+, perhaps by using Sentinel Owl to apply it on AoE or by baking Hunter's Mark applications into AoE spells for Hunters such as Multi-Shot and Butchery. Hunters want a reason to use Sentinel Owl which is currently basically useless, and this would be a great opportunity to fix two problems at once.