June 22, 2009

Roar of Sacrifice

As mentioned in the 3.2 patch notes, Roar of Sacrifice is being redesigned. Here’s the whys.

The Roar of Sacrifice change we are trying in 3.2 is to give hunters back a little of the utility they lost when we changed it to be hunter only. Relating the ability to crits is to make sure hunters don’t use it to keep the MT alive. Before we made the change to its current, live version, this was happening, and we didn’t want to have to start balancing around the assumption that hunters were RoS’ing the tank. This would have led to making sure other classes had a mandatory buff, and so on.

The 3.2 change is intended to restore RoS to the PvP functionality it had before, which is something a lot of hunters said they liked since they could use it on team members and not just themselves. The cooldown is something we could iterate on, though we needed to start fairly conservatively with it to avoid having to nerf it right away. We can’t change the ability back to damage reduction for anyone or we’d be back with the same tanking problem as before. But this is intended to be a buff to utility not a nerf to the ability itself. Feel free to offer your feedback on the change in this thread.

June 18, 2009

Disclaimer

The test realm patch notes only apply to features that exist on the public test realms. We provide these patch notes to players who wish to know what features and changes exist in the test environment in order to more effectively test these features.

  • All pets now receive 40% of their master’s resilience and 100% of their master’s spell penetration. In addition, if a player is at their appropriate spell hit chance or hit chance maximum, their pet will be at the maximum for spell hit chance, hit chance, and expertise. If they are below the maximum, their pet will be proportionately below those maximums.
  • Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).
  • Silence, Strangulate, Silencing Shot, and Arcane Torrent: These abilities will also apply a 3 second interrupt effect against non-player controlled targets, making them more versatile against creatures immune to silencing effects.
  • Aspect of the Cheetah: Can now be learned at level 16.
  • Deterrence now has a new visual spell effect.
  • The time that traps will exist in the world after being put down has been reduced to 30 seconds, down from 1 minute.
  • Traps now have separate 30 second cooldown categories: Fire (Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Black Arrow), Frost (Freezing Trap, Frost Trap) and Nature (Snake Trap). A hunter can have one trap of each category placed at one time.
  • Catlike Reflexes now also reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command ability by 10/20/30 seconds.
  • Entrapment: This talent no longer works with Immolation Trap or Explosive Trap.
  • Lock and Load: Now has a 22 second cooldown. The Lock and Load effect cannot be obtained on targets immune to snare effects when Frost Trap is used.
  • Roar of Sacrifice: Redesigned. This ability can now be used on any friendly target to make that target immune to critical strikes, but the Hunter pet takes 20% of all damage taken by that friendly target. Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.
  • Blackened Dragonfin Recipe: Now only requires 1 Dragonfin Angelfish.
  • The Ultrasafe Bullet Machine and Saronite Arrow Maker schematics have been simplified to create a full stack of the appropriate ammunition. No longer requires an anvil. Reduced the materials required to make this ammunition.
  • All ranks of Sonic Blast now properly have an 80 Focus cost.
  • Black Arrow Ranks 5 and 6 training costs have been lowered significantly.
  • Lock and Load: The tooltip for this talent has been updated to indicate that it also works with Explosive Trap.
  • The tooltip for Improved Tracking has been slightly re-written to indicate that it only works on the hunter, and works on melee damage as well.
  • T.N.T. (Rank 3): Now indicates that the talent works with Black Arrow.

Here are just some additional highlights of the entire 3.2.0 notes. Not listed here (among other things) are all the tradeskill changes so again, if you want the complete patch notes, read them here.

  • Construction of the Crusaders’ Coliseum is complete. Testing not yet available. New raid normal and heroic modes for the Crusaders’ Coliseum can be toggled using the Dungeon Difficulty setting. This applies to 10 and 25 player versions. 10 player (normal), 25 player (normal), 10 player (heroic) and 25 player (heroic) all share separate raid lockout timers.
  • Isle of Conquest, the new 40 vs. 40 player siege-style battleground is now available for testing.
  • The Argent Tournament Expands. All new Argent Crusader daily quests and rewards have been added for players with the Crusader title. Rewards include a new Argent Crusader banner and tabard (which can port players to the tournament grounds), a mounted squire (can periodically run bank, mail or vendor errands for the player), a paladin-exclusive Argent Crusader Charger mount, and new heirloom items.
  • Portals from Orgrimmar and Stormwind have been added leading players to the Stair of Destiny at the Dark Portal. Once there, players can access a flight path directly from the Stair of Destiny to Shattrath.
  • The local Postal Service has grown tired of walking so far each day to collect mail and have decided to install a large number of new mailboxes to Stormwind, Undercity, Darnassus and Orgrimmar.
  • Northrend Children’s Week has arrived in Dalaran! Players can find out more by visiting the Eventide District.
  • The newest season of Arena gear can only be purchased if you meet the requirements with your 3 or 5 player team rating. Rating requirements from 2 player teams can still be used to purchase the previous season of gear.
  • Players will now be awarded experience for completing objectives and actions that yield honor in Battlegrounds (honorable kills not included). Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar – both located near the Battlemasters in either city – and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold. Disabling experience gains will prevent a player from gaining experience through any means available in the game. Behsten and Slahtz can reinstate experience gains for players, for a 10 gold fee of course. Any experience that would’ve been accumulated if experience gains were not turned off cannot be recovered.
  • Axe Specialization (Orc): The weapon bonus from this effect now applies to fist weapons in addition to axes.
  • Both the 10 and 25 player instances of the Crusaders’ Coliseum drop a new Emblem of Triumph. Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as Naxxramas or Heroic Halls of Stone, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead. Emblems of Conquest can still be converted to Valor or Heroism.
  • The cast time for summoning any ground mount is now 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds.
  • Apprentice Riding (Skill 75): Can now be learned at level 20 for 4 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 20 directing them to the riding trainer.
  • Journeyman Riding (Skill 150): Can now be learned at level 40 for 50 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 40 directing them back to the riding trainer.
  • Expert Riding (Skill 225): Can now be learned at level 60 for 600 gold from trainers in Honor Hold or Thrallmar. Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold for Alliance; Thrallmar for Horde). Flight speed at this skill level has been increased to 150% of run speed, up from 60%.
  • Artisan Riding (Skill 300): Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold or Valiance Expedition for Alliance; Thrallmar or Warsong Offensive for Horde).
  • Flying over Dalaran and Wintergrasp is now possible so long as players keep a healthy distance above the ground.
  • Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage over time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. The other effects of resilience (reducing critical chance, critical damage and mana drain effects) have not changed.
  • Casting bars under a target’s portrait will now indicate whether or not the cast can be interrupted.
  • Item Comparisons: Holding the shift key while hovering over an item will now display the stat differences with the item currently equipped in the relevant slot.
  • Quest creatures and objects will now show on the player’s world map.
  • The quest log is now double-paned for more easily viewing quest information.
  • Vendor prices will now be listed on items whether or not players are at a vendor.

June 18, 2009

1, 2, 3

I’m sparing you some of the official board digression in the latest hunter posts, so keep that in mind when I repeat the latest from Ghostcrawler.

First off, let’s drop the political debate. It’s not appropriate in these forums.

Second, the fizzling traps were something we put in place because of immune bosses. We think we have a solution to prevent traps from fizzling when immune players cross them. As I suggested earlier, traps are supposed to be a main component of the hunter class and we want to keep them potent. We have a few trap buffs in 3.2.

Third, I want to discuss a little ability called Roar of Sacrifice. We added it to make the new pet talent trees cooler. However in order to prevent players from chain use of the ability to keep tanks alive on raid encounters, we had to change it to only work on the hunter. This was unfortunate because we liked the way it was used in PvP and gave hunters a useful tool that they could use on other teammates. We would very much like to get Roar back into PvP and let you use it on anyone again. The way we would do this would be to have it somehow linked to critical hits instead of just pure damage (making it useless to ever use on a PvE tank).

June 16, 2009

Improvise, adapt and overcome

Not the official Hunter Q&A but it touches on some issues that I’d be willing to bet are going to be covered in it, eventually.

We agree with the comments that ammo costs have gotten too high. It was acceptable when hunters realistically did not die as often, and thus didn’t have high repair bills. But it has gotten too high now.

Pets need to scale better. As soon as you have a hunter choosing say AP over crit because one helps the pet and the other doesn’t then that’s a problem.

And Hunter versus Healer.

I’m not sure if the healer can out-heal your damage or not. That’s a longer discussion about how much damage a healer should have to heal through and if the only healer counter should be CC. But we did design the hunter around having potent CC, and we don’t think their CC feels scary any longer. Traps are probably in most need of some attention here. We’ll try and go into more detail in the class Q&A if it isn’t too far away.

Also, old news by now but with the next big patch there are some mount changes going in as well. This will also effect Aspect of the Cheetah.

  • Aspect of the Cheetah: Requires level 16 (down from level 20)

And what IS the problem in PVP right now? (Bolded for emphasis)

I’ll be very brief, but here are the problems we see in PvP right now.

1) Too much emphasis on Arenas and not enough on BGs.
2) Too much emphasis on 2s and not enough on 3s and 5s.
3) Not enough class / spec representation in Arena. Warlock, hunter and shaman numbers in particular are too low, but they’re not the only ones.
4) Too fast-paced.

Let me explain this last one in more detail. Some people in the community think that burst dps is too high. We disagree, and the reason we do is that healing is also very powerful in Arenas, to the point at which not having a Mortal Strike debuff may be a huge liability. If you can’t burst someone down when wounded, they just aren’t going to die unless the healer is mana-drained or chain crowd-controlled, neither of which are overly fun in the extreme case. You can have too much damage, too much healing or too much crowd control.

But when you consider specific matches, particularly of the highest rated teams, those guys are using their full toolbox. The problem is that the windows in which to use those tools can be very small. When you are injured, you might have a global cooldown in which to respond. If you make it, you might very well be fully healed in the next cooldown and “reset” the match. If you fail, you’re dead and the match may be over. We’d like to add an extra GCD or two to many of these situations.

Now there still are extreme cases of burst in some specs that need to be chilled out. However, if we just lower burst damage across the board we’re concerned people just wouldn’t ever die and only specs with multiple forms of crowd-control would be considered viable.

June 8, 2009

Irresistible force paradox

Chaos Bolt cannot be resisted, and pierces through all absorption effects (Deterrence too).

Deterrence is an unusual ability — it grants spell deflection. Chaos Bolt always hits, so technically it is working correctly by ignoring Deterrence. We don’t see any reason to change this behavior at this time.

And in response to a comment regarding this, and hunters in Arena:

You think the reason hunters are under-represented is because of Chaos Bolt? Or is your strategy more of they’re low, so just buff them a bunch and hope something sticks?

If you missed your window on taming the Carrion Fleshripper in Icecrown by completing those quests and causing them to go out of phase, hope is not lost (as there are identical spiders in Icecrown, just not tameable, currently). The cat in Storm Peaks by Bouldercrag’s Refuge is another story though.

There is no reason those other spiders couldn’t be tamed. Blackmaw and the polar cub are another story.

Guess we’ll see if that comes to fruition in the next patch.

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