Sept. 22, 2009
The Brood Mother returns
3.2.2! I can’t wait for Onyxia tonight. Some people might complain about “recycled content” but I always liked fighting Onyxia (it was, for me, the first raid I ever participated in) so…
- After years of lurking in her lair battling the many brave adventurers who travelled from afar to challenge her, Onyxia returns stronger than before to commemorate World of Warcraft’s five-year anniversary.
- Onyxia has been scaled to offer new challenges to level 80 players in 10- and 25-player modes. Adjusted for modern raiding, but with the fundamental experience of fighting the Brood Mother still in effect, including the horrors of her Deep Breaths!
- The Beast Within: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds. In addition, hunters with this talent will do 10% additional damage at all times.
- Bestial Wrath: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds.
- Master’s Call: This ability now correctly removes the snaring component of Infected Wounds, Frostfire Bolt, and Slow.
- Trap Mastery’s (Survival) tooltip now states the correct amount of snakes summoned.
- Players may now only queue for no more than two Battlegrounds at a time.
- Hunter Tier-9 2-Piece Set Bonus: Critical damage from Serpent Sting will now work properly with the Mortal Shots and Expose Weakness talents.
- Players may now only queue for no more than two Battlegrounds at a time.
Not making it into the patch notes, but still live is that the damage of Hunter’s Volley ability has been increased.
The AP coefficient of Volley has been increased from 0.0586 to 0.0837. Base points did not change.
Sept. 21, 2009
Like you have iron jazz hands
It’s a reasonable discussion about Deterrence. No really.
I can totally understand that there is a perception problem with Deterrence because it affects melee and spells but not ranged attacks. Because there are exceptions to what it protects against, it can earn a reputation for being unreliable or for being actually buggy. (We haven’t found any evidence that it is buggy though.)
Something we could use feedback on is if the ranged damage is really a problem or just complicates the issue by leading to players not understanding how Deterrence is supposed to work. Is it really a big deal versus other hunters? If we changed it, then it would be both a buff and a nerf to hunters in some sense.
On a philosophical level, we don’t like defensive abilities that confer an offensive advantage. We aren’t likely to take the penalty off of Deterrence, or it just becomes the thing you pop when you want to kill someone and don’t want to be stopped instead of the thing you do to survive when the other team is doing it to you.
We also didn’t want the ability to just be the same defensive cooldown that other classes have. It’s important to us that different classes have different mechanics that players need to learn instead of saying “This is your Ice Block with a different name and graphic.” I mention this not to say that Deterrence must stay as it is forever, but to steer your suggestions towards ideas we are more likely to embrace.
If dots are the thing that you think really make hunters suffer right now, then that is a fair thing to discuss. I’m not sure making Deterrence break dots is necessarily the best answer to that though.
What I’m fishing for is some discussion of whether Deterrence is a big weakness for hunters (Plops and a few others don’t seem to think it is), or if hunters have big weaknesses and Deterrence is a way to mitigate some of those, or if hunters just have weaknesses period and talking about Deterrence just muddies the waters. Those are three slightly different situations with different potential resolutions.
Saying other classes have better cooldowns doesn’t carry that much weight with us. Other classes might have better heals or better snares or better crowd control or whatever. Comparing the individual abilities can only get you so far. Prot warriors have great defensive cooldowns, but you don’t see many balance concerns about them. DKs and paladin “tanks” are another story, in part because you have to look at the whole package.
Sept. 16, 2009
Rattle some chains or something
As promised (sort of), the mana conservation aspect of The Beast Within has been changed on Test.
- The Beast Within now reduces the mana costs of all spells by 50% for 10sec.
Also, in response to questions regarding the design intent behind some Hunter mechanics:
I can’t go into detail on all of them, but for starters Intimidation could be a lot better and Kill Command could be as fun as say Lock and Load instead of a macro’d ability. We’re not going to be in a big hurry to buff Tranq Shot. It might be a better way to go to nerf all dispels to something more like that so that they didn’t trivially undo buffs, debuffs and CC.
Sept. 11, 2009
Biased towards RMP? Surely not!
Players in general make too much of Arena representation, and especially the SK-100. Those numbers can be very valuable if analyzed correctly, but they are not a measurement of Arena balance the way a thermometer measures the temperature. Besides, abilities or strategies can be annoying or overpowered even if that doesn’t translate to comp dominance.
To address the (frankly overblown) RMP “bias”, we’re seeing a lot more comps this season so far, which is cool. We just want to make sure those comps are doing something besides just blowing someone up. We certainly think the Arena can support more than RMP, which is why we have made so many changes for other classes. But the reason a lot of players like the RMP playstyle, and why some consider it the only legit team (though that is emphatically not our viewpoint) is because it requires a lot of coordination and layering of abilities. That’s not to say RMP can’t go for the blow someone up strategy on occasion, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with that strategy existing, as long as it’s not the only one. When every match feels like the same match, Arena gets a lot less interesting.
Sept. 10, 2009
Re: Beastial Wrath Change
Maybe not surprisingly, the thread about this change on the boards has been locked, but we did get a few more replies.
Since the changes seem to be causing confusion, here is the new tooltip.
“Send your pet into a rage causing 50% additional damage for 10 sec (down from 18). While enraged, the beast does not feel pity or remorse or fear and it cannot be stopped unless killed.”
The tooltip doesn’t say this, but it now breaks all forms of CC that a PvP trinket would break (including Cyclone, Sap, etc.).
“Increases all damage you deal by 10% and while your pet is under the effects of Bestial Wrath, you also go into a rage causing 10% additional damage and reducing mana costs of all spells by 20% for 10 sec (down from 18). While enraged, you do not feel pity or remorse or fear and you cannot be stopped unless killed.”
So the changes are:
Duration lowered.
Passive hunter damage buff added.
Now breaks all forms of CC (whatever a PvP trinket breaks, including Sap and Cyclone).
And, because the duration is lower, the mana conservation is also less…
It wasn’t our intent to push BM hunters into Viper more often with this change so we are discussing buffing the mana cost portion of the talent from 20% to perhaps as high as 50%.
Plus, the T9 set bonus hasn’t been working right for a while (it’s using the spell crit multiplier, yuk!) With enough poking and proding, it’s going to get changed.
[Previous] 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 57 58 59 [Next]Some of your points have been pretty convincing and have been taken into consideration. While this is more of a design change vs. a bug, I have found that it should in fact be a 100% critical damage multiplier. This will be corrected for 3.2.2, but may not be in a build until next week.