WoW SoD New Hunter Nerfs January 4, 2024 Hotfix

World of Warcraft Season of Discovery has some new changes to adjust the meta and balance of the game with Hunters seemingly being the target this time around. Following the huge success of this Classic iteration, players are seemingly enjoying questing and raiding within the bounds of Azeroth.

Given the level 25 cap, and the new runes, many players are quick to pick up on imbalanced or meta-defining builds to achieve top parses and further cement their knowledge of the game mechanics by implementing at times rather ingenious strategies.

WoW SoD Pet Hotfix January 4, 2024

The most recent change to the game brings a rather big change to pets for both Warlocks and Hunters. 

Boon of Blackfathom no longer applies to pets. 

Developer’s Note:

We are essentially removing the ability for pets to get Boon of Blackfathom for now. Now that pets scale with stats, allowing them to get certain world buffs would effectively let them “double dip” on these effects and gain far more damage than intended. We’ll continue to review this as we move through the content phases and make adjustments to how world buffs interact with pets as needed.

This is a major nerf to the DPS for Hunters as not only are they not the best DPS class in the Blackfathom Deeps raid, it seems Blizzard is intent on further lowering the damage output of the class.

Warlocks also are affected by this change as some specs might see rather drastic decreases in DPS, however, it seems that the nerf is more targeted towards Hunters given their dominance in PvP, but their PvE performance will heavily be impacted.

With pets not benefitting from world buffs, this could dramatically reduce the relevancy of Hunters in further phases of WoW SoD as the reliance on pets is a major staple of the class to effectively DPS and the current runes do not make up for the loss of a pet, should a Hunter go for a pure Marksmanship build. 

Hunters may get some substantial buffs to builds that do not include pets as a primary source of DPS but we have yet to see any leaks or information for the power creeps in the next phase of Season of Discovery.

Community Reaction

Some players were quick to provide feedback that Blizzard is once again issuing stealth nerfs, however, it seems that the current way of handling hotfixes is to first implement them and later provide clarification.

Players are also frustrated as this nerf does not seem to fix the issues it is trying to resolve.

All in all, the devs for SoD have proven to listen to community feedback so we might see some additional changes that will ensure a more balanced and fun experience for the classes.