First - some changes happened to the base kit of hunters. Mongoose Bite and Rapid Fire have been removed from the base kit and added back as talents. Removing Rapid Fire allows us to sacrifice throughput for the class as a whole as a tradeoff for adding more utility into their offspecs. Marksman, being the unchanged "cookie cutter" spec, gets it in their tree now. Mongoose Bite, being one of the worst abilities in the entire game, was redesigned entirely and put into the BM tree.

Marksman is the exact same as it was, but the talent tree *looks* very different. What gives? Well, we just rearranged everything. We made Aimed Shot the very last talent for the same reason we removed Rapid Fire, to allow more space to insert utility into Survival and Beast Mastery. Aimed Shot is such a huge part of Classic WoW damage rotation that it was ubiquitously taken in every single spec, forcing players to go merely halfway up the MM tree. Hunters now have to commit to "Ok, I'm a Marksman now" if they want that cornerstone ability, but doing so would mean they would sacrifice some of the new attractive goodies we've added to the other specs

Beast Mastery in Classic was in contention with one of the worst specs in the entire game due to its reliance on your nonscaling companion and the tree was mostly uninteresting numerical ways to flatly boost the pet's damage and survivability. While most custom servers default to Survival being the "melee" tree, we've instead opted for Beast Master to be "melee-ish" while not shackling them to close quarters indefinitely. The concept of "melee-weaving" is the essence of this archetype's design and they, more than any other spec in the game, are concerned with positioning. Mongoose Bite was redesigned to attack with both weapons (like Mutilate from TBC) consuming a sting on the target (like Chimera Shot from WoTLK). Its a big defining nuke on a 12 second cooldown and the fact that it wants your target to be stung means you have to go in and out of melee to play optimally. In addition, BM Hunters gain crit when they're near their pet, further incentivizing melee and general spacial awareness. Pair that with the new ability Outmaneuver, which allows the Hunter to switch places with their pet, and you've got a lot to think about if you're trying to play correctly. Do you use Outmaneuver to Mongoose Bite? Do you use it to kite more? Get your pet out of danger? This is not a beginner archetype, BM hunters will have a lot to juggle, but are both dangerous and slippery when played effectively.

Survival has always had an identity crisis. It seems like it wanted to be the trickster/trapper archetype with some melee flavor thrown in, but the biggest utility skill Hunters have in Classic, Scattershot, is weirdly stuffed in the Marksman tree, leaving it out of reach of full 31 point Survival Hunters. Wyvern Sting was clunky. It had a cast time, was not usable while in combat, had a 2 minute cooldown, and was dispellable by 3 different classes and 2 different races. We halved the cooldown on Wyvern Sting, made it usable in combat, gave Survival Hunters Readiness (which clears all other cooldowns) and gave them natural scaling spell power so that their fire traps and stings passively hit harder. We think this will bring them more in line with the rest of the playstyles.