WoW Hunters get another major nerf in Season of Discovery

Hunters came flying out of the blocks in World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery, but yet another round of nerfs has severely hurt their damage output.

Hunters have always been a prevalent class for newer and exclusively solo players, with their pets able to make the harsh world of WoW Classic much more forgiving. Their ability to Tank mobs and draw aggro allows Hunters to output damage without interruption.

This was particularly true in Season of Discovery, where pet scaling has seen their companions hit new heights. This was particularly true of the Scorpid, whose poison-based attacks were enabling the class to breeze through complex content and dominate in PvP settings.

Now, the latest in a series of nerfs to the class has seen the class take a significant hit.

Despite rumors, pet scaling has not been removed from Season of Discovery

Blizzard failed to post official confirmation of the changes and hotfixes they had made to the class, sparking fears that pet scaling had been removed entirely. In a thread on Twitter/X, Senior Game Producer Josh Greenfield confirmed this is not the case.

Woke up to a lot of comments about hunter pet scaling. We did not completely remove scaling. We tried to fix a bug with scorpid poison and its interaction with kill command but there were some unintended side effects. Here's what we are going to do today:

— Josh Greenfield (@AggrendWoW) December 5, 2023

In one of those posts, Greenfield explained that three hotfixes went out as follows:

• Fixes Scorpid Poison not consuming kill command procs
• Removes all AP->Spellpower scaling from abilities like Scorpid poison
• Fixed an issue where Aspect of the Lion was being applied to non-party/raid members

Both the second and third hotfix have since been reverted as they had unintended effects. Greenfield did note that Scorpid Sting is likely scaling up too effectively, so players of the class should not be surprised if there are further nerfs to the pet ability further down the road.

All of that comes in the wake of a series of nerfs to some of the Hunter’s most significant ability boosts in Season of Discovery. Both Chimera Shot and Explosive Shot saw considerable reductions in the damage they dealt, even if the latter did become a viable choice for AOE output.

What the future holds for Hunter is unclear, but the development team’s general feeling is that the class is now more in line with other options. With more balancing to come in the next few weeks, players will soon be able to see where their class lies in the broader scheme.