Jan. 4, 2009
Kachoo, achoo!
Happy New Years to everyone! The holidays have kept me a little busier than normal, so that means I’m a little behind in the news – and man there’s been a lot over the last few days, let me catch us up a bit.
Regarding the concerns about hunter changes in 3.0.8:
It bothers me that after years of testing and months on a beta no one thought about us being able to spec into readiness. I assume that readiness was moved up so that we can use it in BM as well as the other 2 specs since it is a major talent.
We did consider it, and thought it was an interesting talent build choice, but it ended up dominating. We made some changes pretty late in the cycle that ended up inflating hunter damage, especially the chunk coming from pets. We also went back and forth a little on which raid-wide buffs would affect ranged attacks. Hunter dps just ended up being higher than we thought.
As far as steady shot goes wont that hurt all 3 specs? MM and SV much more than BM?
It affects all 3 specs, but we changed Arcane and Explosive to offset that some, as well as fixing a glyph that was hurting Marks. Steady was just a huge portion of hunter damage, and not a particularly interesting ability (in that you can just sit there and mash the button without worrying about timing other abilities around it), so when we wanted to bring hunter dps down, it was an attractive target. FWIW, ammo was another one. We considered nerfing how much damage all ammo in the game contributed, but went with the SS change for the reason I stated.
Also for years hunters haven’t had a great AOE ability, hitting with the original volly was a joke, now its great maybe a bit op on trash but I don’t think anyone cares who is topping the trash meter and I have never seen a volley used on a boss.
I agree with the first part, which is why we buffed Volley quite a bit. But in retrospect, we buffed it too much. We didn’t want hunters to have the highest single-target damage and highest AE damage, as well as bringing great buffs and CC to the group. With the new Volley, I expect every PvE hunter will still be using that button on large groups, but going back to Multi on smaller ones.
I disagree with the “trash meter” comment. For one, players do care about trash. Elemental shamans and rogues for example felt like there was so much AE’ing going on that they were not attractive specs for raids. Players can say “nobody cares about trash,” but we don’t buy it. Raids wipe on trash. Raids are called when trash respawns. For speed clears, to satisfy a hard mode achievement or bear-mount style challenge, the rate at which you can clear trash very much matters. If it didn’t I’m not sure you’d mind a Volley nerf at all.
Second, you AE on an awful lot of bosses too.
More about exotic pets:
I have said most of this before, but perhaps some of you are just joining us.
- Exotic pets should be a choice. We do not want every BM (or every hunter for that matter) feeling like they have to get an exotic pet to be competitive. We spent a lot of effort to get say gorillas, crabs and spiders up to snuff so we didn’t want hunters to actually enter LK with fewer pet choices. Even a 51 BM hunter should feel like a crab (especially a crab) should be a useful pet.
- Exotic pets should be a choice, part ii. They should not be demonstrably below say cats and scorpids. That seems to be the case on live at the moment, so we adjusted it. Because of the somewhat convoluted way that pets scale, it’s not always easy to predict what the average pet will look like on live—it varies enormously depending on gear and buffs (more on this below).
- Our target is that the exotic pets are slightly better than normal pets. The key word is “slightly.” If you forego an exotic pet for whatever reason, you should not feel like you are gimping your team or group. Note that part of the value of the exotics is their unusual abilities, some of which can fill in missing debuff holes if you are lacking certain classes in your group.
- We offered the Spirit Beast as a challenge for hunters to try and tame. It would be a big mistake if we made this pet the best one in the game. For starters, it would no longer be rare. :(
- We disagree that the 4 extra pet talent points are useless. You can call them useless if you only care about your pet’s dps and can max that out without those talent points. Not all pet talents were intended to buff dps. (More on this below too.) At the end of the day, the BM 51 is just one talent point. It shouldn’t grant you a 10% dps increase. We like for the 51 point talents to be attractive but not mandatory.
- If you think that no hunter cares about the look of their pet, you are just wrong. Very optimized players might be willing to tame an untextured cube if it had the highest dps. However, a great many hunters (I would argue probably even the majority) rolled their class because they wanted to tame pets. Being able to tame exotic pets is very exciting for them.
(WTB Untextured cube pet class – just kidding. I want the cube with that guy’s face on it.) Now about Explosive Shot:
I agree it should make up its mind whether it is a physical or magical effect. We’ll look into it.
And miscellaneous other things. Tenacity pets will now be receiving the +10% baseline damage buff. The PTR does not reflect the scorpid/cat changes. And, to close:
On the actual topic, we are pretty happy with the numbers we can generate for hunters with the changes. However, I will certainly bring up with the team that many hunters have posted (some even after testing) that the nerfs were too severe, especially to BM.
Dec. 29, 2008
Oddsbodkins! Methinks that sounds like...
Ghostcrawler re-addressed the issue of how paladin buffs effect pets (how they are considered warriors in terms of the distribution of blessings). This is an old issue, last time I remember it being talked about by any CM’s (Hortus, in this case) was back in September 2007.
Okay, the issue is that paladin buffs are class based, which is funky with regard to pets. Got it. I’ll put it on the list.
I have a feeling that the answer for this is the same one that we got back then (that it’s the only implementation they’re able to achieve) but who knows.
Dec. 24, 2008
Santa has his own list and he checks it twice
There was a short question and answer session from Ghostcrawler regarding the new dual talents that’s set to be put into the game… sometime.
Will the current respec costs be reset or will they stay at the current 50g max?
If you mean will respec costs be changed permanently, no. If you mean will the costs be reset or will you get a free respec when this goes live, possibly.
How about the cost of our second spec? If the respec fee starts out at 10c or 1s (I forgot what it starts as) shouldn’t our “main” respec fee be reset?
A respec should be a respec.
I’m pretty sure this has been answered before but I’ll ask anyways. In regards to hunters and exotic pets. If I spec into the 51 point talent and I go to switch to survival how will I change pets? You said you wanted it to be somewhat easy to switch between specs but nothing trivial. Will we have a second pet that is automatically summoned when we switch specs? What about the extra four points our pet’s talent trees have? How will those be taken away or replaced when changing specs?
We have a solution for pets, but we’re not ready to announce it yet. You’ll like it.
Are there any plans to make switching gear sets easier? Healers, tanks and dps roles usually carry more than one set of gear. It can take up a lot of bag space and can be rather annoying at times. Is there a way to have your gear automatically switch when you change specs?
Not automatically, but we’re aware of the issue and dual spec would be a really opportune time to examine it.
How do you think dual specs will affect addons that modify the action bars? It seems like it will be a hit and miss. The addons will either become broken or no harm, no foul and the addons work as intended.
I’m sure the addon authors will figure out how to make them work with the new system. Things can sometimes be a little rocky just following a patch if you use a lot of addons.
We haven’t finalized the design, because ideally we want to be able to get it on a PTR and have players try it out.
Our thought at the moment is that swapping specs (going from A to B) will truly be free in towns and possibly during the prep phase of PvP. In an instance it may cost a nominal fee (think reagent level). We want you to be able to do it when you want to do it, but we also don’t want to slow things down if everyone is constantly flipping spec from fight to fight. But if it’s free in town, then obviously it can’t be more of a burden out of town than just hearthing and being summoned back is or nobody will use the remote option.
Dec. 19, 2008
Don't overlook those lovely intangibles
New PTR build, with some unexpected additions.
- Master’s Call now removes all root and movement impairing effects from itself and its target, and causes your pet and its target to be immune to all such effects for 4 sec.
- Arcane Shot mana cost has been reduced from 7% of base mana to 5% of base mana for higher ranks. From 10% of base mana to 7% of base mana for lower ranks.
- Explosive Shot have been greatly increased but the ability doesn’t deal AE damage anymore. (Rank 4: You fire an explosive charge into the enemy target, dealing [ 18% of RAP + 476 ] Fire damage. The charge will blast the target every second for an additional 2 sec.)
- Spore Cloud (Rank 6) range has been increased from 5 yards to 6 yards.
Dec. 16, 2008
It didn't even take a week
It didn’t even take a week for other classes to get up in arms about even the SUGGESTION that hunter’s melee might be improved as one way to help us in Arena.
Hunters are fundamentally a ranged class. I don’t think many people are arguing against that.
The melee issue came up as a potential answer to what you do when someone closes on you?
Plate-wearers can often stand there and take it.
Rogues can pop Evasion, or stun and run.
Mages can Blink… and so on.
Maybe it makes sense that hunters, as mail-wearers with some melee specials, should be a little closer to the top of that list than the bottom. We’re not saying a hunter should take out a death knight at point-blank range. But maybe if the DK is wounded or the hunter has good healing that you should think twice about always running up on the hunter.
Then, after 9 pages of more complaints about how overpowered hunters are (something that the Arena rankings have proved season after season to be false, but we’re all just terrible right?), Ghostcrawler added this:
Some of you guys make it sound as if every decision in an Arena is pre-determined. If you fight a hunter you will ALWAYS run up to melee with the hunter. If all of the decisions were that easy, we would all be walking around with Gladiator titles.
Rather, what really happens is that you make a lot of decisions on the fly. You process a lot of information quickly, and those of us who can make the right decision very, very fast tend to do really well in PvP. Maybe I can burst that guy down while he’s on cooldown. Maybe we need to switch targets right now. Maybe we need to buy some time until my ability has finished its cooldown.
Arenas are fundamentally not duels simply because there are teams involved, and that makes a world of difference.
I can totally imagine a situation where “run up on the hunter” makes sense somtimes (perhaps the hunter has no healer nearby and I’m at full health and his Disengage is on cooldown) and not at other times (perhaps I am very wounded so I know that a Raptor Strike could actually do me bodily harm instead of being something missing from many hunter bars). Nobody is suggesting “Hey, what if hunters could also be rogues?” least of all the hunters.
Not unexpectedly, the thread was eventually closed.
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