Feedback: Hunters
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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!
Source: Feedback: Hunters, Author: Kaivax, Posted: Thursday, December 19th 2024, 11:11 pm
