Yesterday
Mastery System Preview
Last week, we gave you an early look at the changes we’re making to the stat system in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and explained how these changes will ultimately provide players with more interesting gear choices and make stats easier to understand. Today we’d like to go into more detail about a brand-new feature that’s an integral part of this overhaul: the Mastery system, a set of new game mechanics designed to allow players to become better at what makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. With this system, we want to accomplish three things: give players more freedom in how they allocate talent points, simplify some of the “kitchen sinky” talents that try to do too much at once, and add a new stat to high-level gear that makes you better at your chosen role.
Here’s how the system works: As you spend points in a given talent tree, you’ll receive three different passive bonuses specific to that tree. The first bonus will increase your damage, healing, or survivability, depending on the intended role of the tree. The second bonus will be related to a stat commonly found on gear desirable to you, such as Haste or Crit. The third bonus will be the most interesting, as it will provide an effect completely unique to that tree — meaning there will be 30 different bonuses of this nature in the game. This third bonus is the one that will benefit from the Mastery rating found on high-level (level 80 to 85) gear.
One of our primary goals with Mastery is to give players more flexibility to choose fun or utility-oriented talents rather than make them feel obligated to pick up “mandatory” but uninteresting talents, such as passive damage or healing. (For examples of the kinds of powerful but boring talents we’re talking about, take a look at the talent tier just above the 51-point talent in many of the existing trees.) In a sense, Mastery makes it so every talent in (just for example) a rogue tree essentially has an invisible additional bullet point that says “???and increases your damage by X%.” This way, if you choose a talent like Elusiveness (which reduces your chance to be detected while stealthed) or Fleet Footed (which affects movement), you won’t feel like you’re giving up damage in exchange for utility.
There will still be talents that boost damage, of course, but those talents will also affect the way you play. For example, you can still expect to see talents like Improved Frostbolt, which reduces the cast time of the Frostbolt spell; it increases DPS, but it also affects the mage’s rotation. Piercing Ice, however, is just “6% more damage” and is the kind of talent we’re trying to eliminate by implementing the Mastery system.
It’s designed partially with new players in mind. It will be much harder to have a truly terrible talent spec because you won’t be able to help but be reasonably good at your chosen role.
The mastery stat itself won’t show up until high level, and even when it does, you should have more confidence that it’s a stat you want instead of say trying to figure out the percent of your damage that is physical damage to calculate if armor pen is good for you or not.
I admit that adding passive bonuses at all to talent trees complicates the talent feature slightly. We hope to make up for that by there being less paranoia about picking “the wrong” spec. The wrong spec might only be a slight loss instead of a tragic loss. As a point of comparison, dual-spec complicates talents a little, but overall we think it was good for the game.
Does mastery on gear affect both highest trees or give no benefit at all?
Mastery on gear gives you one bonus. That bonus is the third passive (the unique one) in the tree in which you’ve spent the most points.
It’s possible you will only get the benefit of the tree in which you’ve spent the most points, or will only get the benefit from say 50 points maximum with the bonus chosen from the tree with the most points in it. We’ll have to see when the talent trees are more finalized and we start to figure out build strategies.
Overall, the goal is to spend points as you want, and not feel penalized for spending into another tree or feel like you have to game things by spending more points than you want in your tree. Remember these passive bonuses are designed to give you flexibility, not lock you into anything.
March 3, 2010
Underlined for emphasis
Patch notes altered again.
- Ferocious Inspiration now also increases the damage of Steady Shot by 9%.
Yes, that does mean that it increases Arcane AND Steady Shot damage (I double checked the PTR to be safe).
Feb. 27, 2010
Not that you'll respond to simple flattery
Blizzchat, from yesterday.
Q. The Hunter class has many odd and situational abilities such as Mongoose Bite and Aspect of the Beast – are there any plans for changes to these types of abilities?
A. Mongoose Bite is most likely a goner. Let us weep. We think Aspect of the Beast could have some cool uses for Beastmaster hunters.
Q. Are hunters likely to see more stable slots for their pets in the future? With the current variety of pets, the amount they have right now seems too small.
A. Arm-waving here, but a model I would love to see is dramatically expanded slots (so you can store all those Spirit Beasts) but have a smaller number of “active” pets, like 3. You could summon an active pet from anywhere in the world, when outside of combat. You would swap a pet from active to the stable at the Stable Masters.
Feb. 24, 2010
I agree. Go, team. Hurrah
No sooner are we promised this:
Death knights, druids, hunters, mages, rogues, warlocks, warriors, oh my! For those participating in our public testing of the upcoming minor content patch 3.3.3, look out this week for a host of fascinating new adjustments to these classes. Chains of Ice innately does what? Nature’s Grasp has how many charges? Vitalit…y boosts stamina by how much? Stay tuned to find out the answer to these and more questions!
than the official notes are updated with the following change:
- Ferocious Inspiration: This ability is now an aura and provides 1/2/3% damage to all party or raid members within 100 yards and boosts the damage of Steady Shot by 3/6/9%.
Feb. 19, 2010
Ah yes... that smell. Just like rotting flesh
Fairly sure that all hunters know Beast Mastery is (and has been) in a bad place for a while. But will it see any changes pre-Cataclysm?
In my opinion, players spend too much effort trying to compare their rotation to that of other classes or specs that they may not understand as well. Bad Arcane mages mash two buttons and bad BM hunters mash two buttons. You’re not going to top charts as Arcane if that’s all you do.
We don’t want to buff the pet damage for BM any more for a couple of reasons. One is that it puts too much dependence on the pet. If the pet does 50% of your damage (which is an exaggeration) and the pet dies, then your dps just dropped by 50%. Even if you can get the pet back quickly, you’ve suffered a lot of damage loss. Secondly, the pet doesn’t require that much babysitting. Few players are clicking their pet abilities on and off. As such, it just acts like a dot with cool art. When we talk about the risk of BM being too easy to play, we don’t want to over-reward players for just doing Steady and having the pet attack. What I’m saying is that the more damage the pet does, the less the hunter player even has to pay attention. If the pet required more micro-management, then that would change. If pets built up combo points, or Kill Command acted like a Conflag, or something where the hunter had to react, then more pet damage wouldn’t be so bad (though the risk of death doesn’t go away).
We’d like to buff BM PvE damage, but we have to be careful not to buff it too much in PvP where it still has really high burst. This means we can’t just do things like boost the Arcane Shot damage of Ferocious Inspiration or the like. The damage would have to be more of the slowly stacking / sustained variety, and that’s harder to implement. (Technically, it’s not hard to implement per se, but it’s hard to get it feeling right without causing weird things to player behavior, the talent trees or causing other problems that lead to a two hour fix taking two weeks instead.)
Beastcleave teams, you know I love you guys (and I really do, love seeing hunters in competitive Arena), but I hate reading between the lines and seeing, “PVE has no easy fix because it all would impact PVP and make hunters more dominant there.” Whaaaa?! Part of me even thinks this might not be such a bad thing, seeing how we were rock bottom for so long. But no, I get it, I just don’t agree with it (what can I say, I’m selfish, I don’t do Arena personally so don’t give a [you know what] about its impact there).
In order to incorporate more pet micromanagement you’ll have to do a lot more work on pet pathing, paticularly in boss fights.
I meant micromanagement in terms of actually using the pet buttons instead of setting them all on autocast. I didn’t mean micromanagement in the RTS sense. If you’re just pointing out that pet behavior is unreliable because it’s controlled by a dumb computer, then you’re essentially agreeing with me that buffing pet damage is a risky thing to do.
Many suggestions have been discussed to buff BM’s damage that don’t result in just upping the pet coefficients. Adding a new shot, for example, was discussed all through WotLK, even by you GC, and yet it never came about. There’s no reason for it not to, it just didn’t.
Raccoon Shot is not a panacea. If it hits for less damage than Arcane / Steady then you won’t use it. If it hits for more, then the “Beastcleave” guy will use it. It would have to be a carefully constructed mechanic so that PvP was basically trading Arcane for Raccoon (or skipping Raccoon altogether) but PvE guy derived a meaningful sustained dps buff.
Arp scaling to pet would be a good change, but I believe GC has stated previously they wont bother doing that because of Arp being removed completely in Cataclysm.
No, the actual reason is that it would both A) buff the pet at the expense of the hunter, and B) lead to more PvP burst damage, which are the two things I said we want to avoid. :(
If arpen was a dead stat, we’d stop putting it on Icecrown gear.
By the way, the entire thread is here if you want to read it.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 [Next]We want hunters and warlocks, and to a lesser extent Unholy DKs and Frost mages, to care about their pet. We don’t want the pet to ever overshadow the player. You can argue that it wouldn’t, but that’s our concern. Pet damage needs to be a smaller portion, though not trivially so, of total player damage. Thirty percent seems like a reasonable target on the high end.