July 23, 2009
Hunter Q&A
It’s not earth shattering or packed with eye opening revelations (but there are a few teasers).
Q: Where do hunters fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do we see them going from this point forward?
A: We solved a lot of perennial hunter problems in Wrath of the Lich King, from the shot clipping problems of Steady Shot, to bringing Survival back to life, and making pet choice and training a lot more meaningful and hopefully enjoyable. Going forward we have several objectives we still want to accomplish. We want to make sure hunters in PvP are as good in Arenas as they are in Battlegrounds. We think their damage is sufficient, so we want to focus on their survival and crowd control. We want to make sure their PvE utility is as good as their dps (especially making traps live up to their potential for crowd control). We want to resolve what a hunter is supposed to do in melee (Raptor Strike? Disengage?). We want to clean up some of the clunkiness that still exists around pet control (both the UI itself and what the pet does on the battlefield). We think hunters have a good niche as the only real ranged damage-dealer that focuses on (mostly) physical damage based on a weapon rather than cast-time based spells. We just want to make sure they live up to that niche.
Q: It was stated that we had intended to remove consumable ammunition from the game for patch 3.1.0, However, due to certain functionality not being ready in time, the change was put on hold. Is there any new information in regards to the functionality of non-consumable ammunition, and also a possible estimate as to when hunters may expect to see these changes implemented?
A: From a technical standpoint, what happened is that the quiver is considered a bag just like other bags on the character but also, most critically, those in the bank. In order to remove ammo we would have to move the location of all of a character’s bank slots on the database that stores all of the World of Warcraft characters, which would be a risky thing to do in the middle of an expansion, and could result in “missing stuff” issues if something went wrong. It was just one of those last-minute show-stoppers.
We still want to make ammo more of a gear choice than a consumable. We’re not sure if this would be as simple as getting the 125 dps arrows to upgrade your 120 dps arrows, or if you would do things like swap between your fire and poison arrows… but that kind of thing is definitely on the table.
I’m not sure when we can do it right. It’s not going to be for 3.2 unfortunately.
Q: On the topic of hunter ammunition, currently, it becomes quite expensive for hunters to purchase Mammoth Cutters and Saronite Razorheads, especially given how much many hunters use in a given week. Are there any plans to reduce the cost, by potentially looking into the materials required to craft both types of ammunition?
A: The problem with upgrading hunter ammo currently is how we work the progression. We don’t want to drop ammo on bosses for what I hope are obvious reasons so long as they are consumed. We need to have ammo improve as other gear improves, however, or the hunter overall starts to fall behind. Therefore there has to be some barrier that stops freshly leveled hunters from getting the best ammo while letting cutting-edge hunters procure it. In Burning Crusade, we handled this through a reputation grind, but it still wasn’t a very satisfying answer. In Wrath of the Lich King, we went with Engineer-crafted ammo and more recently changed the way ranged weapons scaled so that they would keep improving even if the ammo did not. For 3.2 we lowered the cost of the ammo quite a bit — only 4 gold for a stack to manufacture. If you were paying 50 gold a night, that should drop to say 16 gold a night. Long-term this won’t be a problem because arrows won’t be consumed.
Q: While we had previously reduced the range of the hunter’s dead zone, it’s still brought up as a concern. Is it possible to remove the dead zone completely? If this is not something under current consideration, what are the current design philosophies and balance reasons behind keeping this particular mechanic in-game?
A: It’s possible to do so technically, but something we aren’t likely to do. Personally I think calling the current implementation a dead zone is just confusing and trying to sell the problem as worse than it is. Back in the day there was an actual distance at which neither ranged nor melee attacks would work – it was a dead zone. Currently there is just a minimum range for most ranged attacks. The way we want the hunter to work is that when you get into min range with the hunter, then the hunter needs to switch to melee, or more likely escape back to ranged distance again. We certainly don’t want the hunter to unload with both melee and ranged attacks at once – that might make them operate better at melee than range. Casters by contrast don’t have to do this, though it is often in their best interest to do so since their cast can get delayed or even interrupted by melee attacks. You can argue it’s goofy to be firing bows or rifles at point-blank range, but really it gets more into how we want the hunter (and all ranged weapon attacks) to work.
I’ll add that the melee attack issue for hunters themselves is something we keep discussing. While we are unlikely to go back to a melee-focused build for hunters, we might consider a model where hunters don’t run away most of the time but switch to melee attacks – perhaps even a single punishing attack on a cooldown before the hunter Disengaged or whatever. This would be one of those things that helped hunters feel more different than actual magic casters, and might make them care about melee weapons as more than stat sticks. Additional feedback from the community on this sort of thing would be appreciated.
Q: Would we consider allowing auto-shoot to work while moving? If there aren’t plans for that specific change, is there anything in the works that will assist hunter dps in fights where a great deal of movement becomes necessary?
A: Moving should feel like a penalty. We don’t want ranged attackers constantly circle strafing FPS-style because it confers a defensive advantage without giving up an offensive one. Moving is supposed to be bad and how you handle it is a test of your skill. We do give instant cast spells to some classes, but it should always be a dps loss when they have to focus on these exclusively. We would consider giving hunters another way to pull off an instant shot or beef up their dots, but we would want to make sure these would only be used in true long-distance movement situations. What I mean by that is we think we’ve possibly already gone too far towards balancing the Arena around instant attacks that can’t be countered before they go off.
Q: Are there any long term plans to possibly removing the need for hunters to rely on a different resource system then mana?
A: I hate to do this to you, but this is a great BlizzCon question. For these Q&As, we’d like to keep the focus on each class’s current status and short-term plans, but at BlizzCon we’ll be happy to go into some more detail on our long-term vision for them.
Q: Are there any plans to increase the benefit hunters gain from haste?
A: There are two ways to answer this question. The more general one, which applies to all classes, is that we want haste to be a useful stat. Rogues, warriors, and some casters like it currently, and we need to get it there for everyone. As I have said in several of the Q&As, some stats have just fallen away from some specs even though they routinely appears on your gear. Sometimes this happens because talents prop up other stats so much that instead of being more attractive, they feel mandatory, and the ones that aren’t supported go from sub-optimal to junk status. We need the ability to put a variety of stats on your gear. We don’t want there to be an uber stat for anyone that trumps everything else to the point at which you don’t even look at the other stats. Gear is supposed to be a choice. I’ll say again that I think the online community sometimes focuses too much on the best-in-slot mentality, to the extent at which they consider everything except those BiS items to be worth skipping over. Remember, if it improves your dps, it’s an upgrade, even if another item would improve it more. That sounds so obvious, but I think there is a tendency for some players to stop thinking that way.
Now for hunters specifically, we think the class is just too cooldown limited, which creates problems with haste. We’ve driven in that direction in order to give hunters a more interesting rotation, and to be fair, we feel like we’ve done that. But being cooldown limited isn’t necessarily a fun way for the class to play and we think it’s one of those things that makes hunters feel more like casters than like ranged-weapon users. (Hunters are casters in the sense that they’re ranged dps, but we still want the emphasis to be on the gun or bow.) More on this at BlizzCon, too.
Q: How do we feel about the current state of stings? Are there any improvements planned for the way stings work, such as removing them from a shared global cooldown (GCD)? Are there current plans to improve individual stings?
A: The best way to describe stings is we want them to feel like warlock curses. They should be a meaningful part of your rotation and something you should want to keep up. We understand that some of the stings are much more attractive than others (though to be fair, curses have a similar problem) and we need to make the less-popular stings more useful or just end up cutting them. We aren’t likely to remove any damage-dealing ability from the GCD and we’ve even taken a second look at whether we have removed too many defensive abilities from the GCD. It’s there for a reason, particularly in a client-server based game with inherent Internet lag.
Q: Beast Mastery falls behind Marksmanship and Survival in regards to DPS, especially when the pet dies, due to how much damage comes from the pet when specialized in the Beast Mastery talent tree. Do we have plans to bring the potential damage the Beast Mastery tree offers to be more on par with what’s currently possible with Survival and Marksmanship?
A: Ideally, we want Beast Mastery to be able to do competitive damage with Survival and Marksmanship. Realistically with dps classes, it’s a math problem, and one tree nearly always edges out the other ones in most situations. That doesn’t mean we stop trying, but it also means we have to be realistic about what it will take to really get the specs to within 1% dps of each other, which is sometimes the point I fear we’d need to hit.
The buffs to Catlike Reflexes and Wild Hunt were intended to boost Beast Mastery a little without causing every hunter in the game to swing back to Beast Mastery the way they all swung to Survival a few patches ago. We don’t necessarily like buffing Beast Mastery through the pet all the time. However, Beast Mastery also doesn’t have a signature attack like Chimera or Explosive Shot. At the same time, we don’t necessarily want to give them one because then Arcane Shot risks just vanishing from the hunter rotation. But, we can’t just buff Arcane Shot (unless it is very deep in Beast Mastery) because Survival and Marks use that too. See the problem? Ultimately the tree is supposed to be about pets, so we would rather make the pet easier to control and give the hunter ways to get the pet out of trouble so that they don’t face the profound dps loss of pet death. And even then, having a pet that is 50% or more of your dps is always going to have design problems, so we can’t go overboard. Beast Mastery and Demonology (and even the Unholy death knight) are going to be at a greater loss when their pet dies. That’s just the cost of having a more powerful pet.
Q: In regards to the survivability to hunter pets are there plans to make additional improvements? The resilience change should help somewhat in PvP, however in end-game PvE environments, the hunter’s pet can die pretty easily, especially given the specific encounter. One suggestion made by many hunters was to add a passive ability that healed the hunter’s pet when the hunter received a heal from a party or raid member.
A: Honestly, we aren’t happy with some of the current solutions to keeping pets alive. In particular, the area damage avoidance mechanics just don’t work well. They are frustrating for other players in a PvP setting when Bladestorm or Arcane Explosion can’t really hurt pets, and they don’t keep pets alive on a 5 million damage Mimiron missile. What we really need is a system where certain PvE attacks just don’t hurt the pet (maybe they can’t set off Mimiron mines for instance). We don’t want players to have to pay the price because the pet AI is in fact just an AI. This is something we’re working on. We’d rather not have to come up with additional mechanics needed to heal pets or keep them alive. We’d rather just the pet didn’t die in situations where a player that can make intelligent choices wouldn’t have died. Hunters do have abilities to heal or rez pets, and those ideally should be sufficient.
Q: As a follow-up to the previous question, do we have plans to make it easier for the hunter to bring a dead pet back to life, such as reducing the casting time of the base ability?
A: We talk about this a lot, but the trade off would be a much more fragile pet. In some ways we think a system might work better where the pets were easy to kill, especially in PvP, but the hunter (or warlock) could bring them back say every 30 seconds or so without a huge loss to personal dps. But in that situation, we would nerf pet health quite a bit so that the pets would crumple quickly when focused. The death knight (especially with an unglyphed Ghoul) works a little more like this currently – they have like 12K health without the glyph. But to make this change we would have to solve the PvE pet-gibbing mechanics referenced above.
To be clear, this is a hypothetical different model than I’ve been talking about in the rest of this Q&A. I don’t want to confuse anyone by saying pets should both be hard to kill and hard to rez, and easy to kill and easy to rez.
Q: The Cunning pet-type was originally designed to be optimal for PvP use, however, most hunters feel that the Cunning pet-type falls short. How do we feel about the current state of what Cunning pets are offering, and are there any current plans to make improvements?
A: We made an effort in 3.1 to get the Cunning pets up to speed by giving them talents like Roar of Sacrifice, and normalizing all of the pet stats so that Cunning pets had the same stats as the other two types, modified by pet talents. Crabs are still fairly popular and they probably should be a Cunning pet given their crowd control ability, but the carapace also made them feel like they should be able tanks. And selfishly, I had no problem with seeing a lot of crab pets. (No, I’m not serious.)
This is something we would love to see more feedback on. Hunters in the online community tend to focus a lot on overall PvE dps or overall PvP survival and not get too much into pet comparisons. Someone theorycrafts the best pet and then hunters just go and get it instead of discussing what the other pets would need to be more competitive. To be fair, there is some of that discussion, but it’s not always easy to find, and I have looked. It’s not super high priority given some of the other hunter design issues we’re looking at, but we do want pets to be a choice.
Q: Due to the number of abilities available to hunters, many level 80 players have expressed concerns in regards to placing all necessary abilities on their action bars. Are there any improvements coming that will assist hunters with this particular issue?
A: We recognize this as a problem. We need to get more buttons off of the bar. We made some progress with streamlining say tracking and aspects, but we’re not there yet.
Q: Additionally, do we plan to expand upon the number of pet action bar slots? Due to the current number of slots available for pets, hunters frequently have to swap pet abilities in and out of their spell/ability book.
A: Yes, we definitely want to do this. The whole pet bar needs a little work. There are still some bugs relating to which abilities can be moved on or off the bar and whether they default to autocast or not. We want the bar to work much more like character action bars.
Q: Are there any plans to allow Tranquilizing Shot to play a larger role in the hunter’s arsenal?
A: Consider that on the one hand this ability just used to be for Magmadar, and on the other hand I just acknowledged above that hunters have a lot of abilities to manage. Given that, we don’t really want Tranquilizing Shot to be in your rotation like Steady Shot or even Kill Shot. It’s a bit situational, and we’re fine with that. We did make some recent efforts to make Enrages feel more like a major mechanic that you’d want to dispel the way you dispel magic and other effects.
Q: Do we have plans to increase the number of stable slots available to hunters?
A:Obviously we increased it a lot in Wrath of the Lich King. We want to try and keep the pet as some kind of decision — they aren’t supposed to be like mounts or titles where you just collect as many as you want. We expanded the size so that players could have say a Tenacity pet for soloing and a Ferocity pet for raiding, but we don’t want every hunter to have every family available here. Now one potential problem are the Spirit Beasts, which are collected by hunters and not trivial to replace. We have also discussed expanding the Spirit Beast concept to have rare skins of other pet families (that otherwise don’t convey a combat bonus). If we do that, we’d probably have to expand the stable slots.
We’ve also considered a model where the hunter doesn’t even need a stable and can work more like a warlock where they can just summon their pets whenever they want — with the remote stable ability from the dual-spec feature, we’re pretty close to that already. If we went this route then maybe the stable could just become pet storage in the same way your bank has all those Invader’s Scourgestones and Zul’Gurub bijous that you don’t use often but can’t bear to part with.
There were a few follow-up questions/commends right afterwards. I’ve sort of juggled the comments around, so they make a bit more sense (but I haven’t changed WHAT was said, don’t worry) and to spare repeating every player comment since they seemed to all be saying the same general thing, anyway.
ArP MM doesn’t use Arcane Shot, that is not the same as MM doesn’t use it.
Also, buffing Arcane Shot baseline, in a matter that brings BM up to par to current MM/Surv, could easily skew MM/Surv to using Arcane Shot more then intended (i.e. at the cost of their signature shots).
That is the key, not that they won’t buff Arcane Shot, just that they probably won’t buff it baseline.
Can Survival use Arcane? Yes. It’s in their spellbook. Is there a risk Survival will use Arcane if it’s buffed too much? Of course. Is there a risk Survival will use Chimera if it’s buffed too much? No. Maybe I should have said “BM and Survival CAN use Arcane,” but really if I am going to have to offer this much clarification on everything I write, then the QAs are going to be reduced to even fewer questions. If something I say is really confusing, then I apologize and will try to offer clarification. I don’t think that’s what this is though. I think this is spending too much effort looking for evidence that nobody really understands you.
The solutions are:
1) Give BM a signature shot and try to give Arcane a situational use.
2) Buff Arcane so deep in BM that nobody else will get that talent.
3) Accept that BM needs to be buffed in ways other than shots.
There are good points and bad points to each tree having a signature shot. A bad point is that it makes e.g. set bonuses hard because you can’t boost things like Explosive Shot easily. A good point is the trees feel a little more different rather than just swapping Explosive Shot for Raccoon Shot if you were BM.
If we buff the holy heck out of Arcane, then every Survival hunter just shoots Arcane and won’t take Explosive Shot. Since a lot of the Survival tree is designed to prop up Explosive Shot, we think this would a bad thing. Hence, we have to be very careful about how much we buff Arcane. If we do it in a very deep BM talent, then it’s probably safe. If we do it baseline or through a glyph or an upper talent, then we might get into problems. By contrast, buffing Explosive or Chimera is pretty safe because no other hunter can ever use those shots. BM doesn’t have a “this is BM only” attack to buff, unless it applies to the pet.
And about the hunter set bonuses (and how lack of a signature shot for Beast Mastery impacts them).
That was the point I was making. The original hunter bonus was “Your Explosive Shot, Chimera Shot and X Shot do more damage.” The lack of an X shot (it couldn’t be Arcane or Steady) killed the whole feature. We designed the DK expressly to have an X strike for every build. We could do that with hunters too. Some players are saying that just makes the specs more and more like each other though.
At a high level, you can have a trivial choice among your specs, which means it doesn’t really matter which you pick so the decision is not terribly interesting. Or you can have significant differences among the specs, but that means one-size-fits-all balance solutions and even set bonuses are much harder.
As I have said a couple of times now, a very deep BM talent to buff Arcane Shot might work. Otherwise, most of the BM damage is tied up in the pet or at least the pet being alive. Perhaps BM could benefit from a totally new mechanic, even it wasn’t a signature shot, so that we would have more knobs to turn when we needed to buff BM (and only BM).
Are you SERIOUSLY, SERIOUSLY trying to make a comparison between PvP in this game compared to PvP in most FPS games? Are you TRYING to compare the extreme imbalance between all of the classes in this game to most FPS PvP where players are given the exact same characters, given chances to get all of the same weapons, have all of the same abilities, and where actual SKILL is the determining factor more often than not?
I am saying circle strafing is not our vision for WoW PvP. It is supposed to be about using your abilities at the right time. We don’t want to solve a balance problem by turning our PvP into a game where nobody ever stands still. I will turn this around, and say that your solutions need to account for a melee class being able to kill you even if you’re a really clever hunter. Any of these solutions that approach “and that way melee won’t ever be able to catch me” sound great if you’re a hunter and not so great if you’re a game designer. We don’t want melee to clobber you every encounter. But we don’t want you to kite them while shooting at them either. At least in the first example you are doing some damage to them. In the second, they don’t even get a hit off.
I also think you are underestimating the role of skill in WoW PvP. Yes, your class or comp choice can have a big affect on your rating. But as long as there are players doing better than you with the same class, then you have to accept the role that skill plays. Players like to deemphasize skill when they think their class needs buffed or another class needs to be nerfed. But when they win, that’s all skill. :)
One thing that can easily be done if make Avoidance baseline. Thats 3 points we automatically save. Or, an option is giving hunter pets 20 talent points and giving BM hunters 24 talent points. One big thing about ferocity is that it doesn’t have a lot of extra damage dealing that makes it a choice, they are auto put points in and you’re set. Cunning and Tenacity have that to a degree, more tanking or extra damage. Ferocity just have damage, damage, damage.
As we suggested in the QA, we are more likely to just remove Avoidance as a talent and make pets largely immune to mob AE damage. We did however add more talents to the pet trees specifically because many BM hunters said that they couldn’t get anything really useful with their extra talent points.
I don’t think we’d really be in a better place if every BM hunter used Spirit Beasts and nothing else, given that they aren’t trivial to tame.
July 13, 2009
Build a better mousetrap
Back in June, the whole “fizzling trap” issue was discussed (you know, when an NPC/player is immune and waltzes over it, causing the trap to poof = goodbye cooldown). Since then, the 3.2 patch notes have listed some trap changes. Here’s what we’ve gotten so far – consolidated.
- The time that traps will exist in the world after being put down has been reduced to 30 seconds, down from 1 minute.
- Frost Trap: Will no longer “fizzle” on targets immune to snare effects, however Lock and Load will not succeed when using Frost Trap if the target is immune to snare effects.
- Snake Trap: The Mind-numbing Poison effect has been reduced to a 30% increase in casting time, down from 50% to match similar effects.
- 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.
- 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.
Not hunter specific, but an update regarding the mount change also scheduled for the next patch – all mounts will now have a 1.5 second casting time.
We changed our minds and decided to apply the shortened cast time to flying mounts as well for convenience. The latest version of the patch notes still say that only ground mounts will have the reduced cast time. This will be updated in the next version of the 3.2.0 PTR notes.
July 10, 2009
You know our ways
The 3.2 patch notes have been updated again.
- Snake Trap: The Mind-numbing Poison effect has been reduced to a 30% increase in casting time, down from 50% to match similar effects.
July 7, 2009
Word on the Worgen
I’m sure by now many of you have seen Hunters who never finished the 'Alpha Worg’ quest in Howling Fjord running around with Garwal in his worgen form. Not surprisingly, this tame was unintenional and has been fixed. Word comes directly from Zarhym.
The worgen should not technically belong to any of the pet families and was therefore removed. This means the pet no longer has access to pet talents or abilities. Whether or not similar circumstances with hunter pets in the past have occurred isn’t really relevant. Given the nature of the creature that was tamed in this case, we feel it should not belong to any of the eligible pet families from which a hunter can choose his or her combat companion.
Of course, there are always people who get all kinds of riled up – and dragged the Ghost Wolf (and other now untameable pets) into the debate.
It’s not really a matter of consistency. There are times where unintended issues in the game will provide players with a benefit if they exploit the case. Any time this occurs we assess the individual situation and handle that situation based on the specific circumstances present. Whether or not you compare and contrast our actions in this case to any actions in the past is, as I mentioned before, quite irrelevant. There are far more variables in play than you’re accounting for in order to argue this situation with Garwal should’ve been addressed in exactly the manner we’ve addressed similar hunter taming issues in the past.
While the model remains, the wolf in that form has no access to pet abilities or the talent tree. What’s going to happen to it?
It may yet still be removed altogether. I don’t have a final decision on that to share with you.
More discussion ensues.
I am of course NOT happy with the arbitrary and unfair way in which this was handled
I’m not sure how fairness can be measured in a case where the taming of this pet was largely unfair. Taming the worgen relied on a quest and an odd commitment to timing. It wasn’t fair to anyone.
along with the ridiculous delay in communicating with your customers how you planned to handle your mess.
With all due respect, the issue gained traction and popularity over a holiday weekend. We began discussing the situation the moment we arrived in the office on Monday morning. By Monday afternoon we confirmed this to be a bug with the public, stating that Garwal would be hotfixed so as to be untamable in the future. The exact changes made in the hotfix were only tested and solidified within a very brief window of time before being pushed live to all realms.
This worgen-wolf model gave me hope that I could have a “cool pet” that would actually be raid-viable. I was excited about playing my hunter again, like I used to be when I first started playing.
It is unfortunate when a bug is found that provides players with something really cool that we feel they shouldn’t have. For that I apologize.
In closing.
In some previous cases we fixed the bugs that allowed the taming of certain pets, but felt the pets weren’t so far to an extreme that they needed to be removed. In other cases in the past, and in the case of Garwal, we’ve removed the pets as well feeling as though allowing them to remain hunter pets would be going too far.
Those of you asking for consistency, or to “pick a side” as I believe I saw one player request, are over-simplifying the nature of bugs. There’s no side to be on when it comes to fixing bugs and addressing any unintentional outcomes due to those bugs being present. We have to assess each case on an individual basis.
A humanoid who could only be tamed through the trickiest of means didn’t sit right with us, so we removed the ability to tame him and removed his status as a hunter pet.
In all the kerfuffle, the latest PTR changes might have flown under the radar!
- Animal Handler now increases your pet’s attack power by 5/10% instead of increasing its expertise by 5/10.
- Deterrence now deflect all spells.
- Rake now deals 47 to 67 bleed damage and an additional 19 to 25 damage every 3 seconds at max rank.
- Roar of Sacrifice cooldown has been reduced from 2 min to 1 min.
- Wild Hunt now increases the contribution your pet gets from your Stamina by 20% and attack power by 15%.
July 4, 2009
Tier 9 Preview
In patch 3.2, Call of the Crusade, players will be able to work toward the all-new tier-9 class sets by competing in the Crusaders’ Coliseum. To keep with the themes of the Argent Tournament, players will notice this time around that the Horde and Alliance have unique looks to distinguish them apart.
Here’s the T9 look, for Horde.
