May 26, 2009

Just use the Superman Test

Traps disappearing when immune things run over them, sucks right? There might be some miscommunication about how they’re actually supposed to be working, although I may just be reading too much into Ghostcrawler’s response.

Partially what we wanted to do was make sure it wasn’t “wasted” on an immune target. It’s hard to figure out the ideal solution here — it seems like sometimes you’d want to trigger it anyway and sometimes you’d want to save it. I’m assuming you’d never want Freezing Trap to active on an immune target, so there’s a consistency issue too.

Reverting it back to always going off on immune targets and just not affecting that target certainly isn’t off the table.

Except there is no saving it – once it’s down, it’s down.

I’ll try to clear this up.

There are three ways Frost trap can react when an immune target triggers it:

1) Nothing happens. The trap does not go off and can go off later.

2) The trap fizzles. The trap is essentially dispelled.

3) The trap goes off. The immune target is not affected, but any of his friends still might be.

Now, which do you think would be most useful to the hunter and most fair to the enemy players?

I think all hunters would prefer 1 or 3, or some creative option 4, 5 or 6. Anything but 2 (which is how it is now).

May 25, 2009

Long ago, in the beautiful kingdom of Hyrule...

Ammo cost seems to be at the forefront of the public consciousness as of late. The suggestion that arrows drop from NPCs or objects (while we await the “ammo fix”) was answered by Ghostcrawler.

Dropping one arrow would be fine. Dropping a stack of 1000 or even 10,000 would be pretty painful, which is what we’d have to do now.

We do need to be careful how many class-specific items we drop. Yes there are librams and idols and such, but high dps ranged weapons are already of pretty limited interest to other classes.

May 20, 2009

More about the ranged weapon change

To say the hotfix to weapons came as a surprise is probably an understatement. Ghostcrawler followed up today with a little more detail regarding this change.

Hunter dps was where we wanted it to be in Naxx. Two problems arose in the Ulduar tier. First, we improved the dps of other pure classes, especially rogues. We have a small change coming up that should slightly improve hunter dps to make up for this and will apply to all level 80 hunters. (But do not assume you are going to see a 20% dps jump when we make this change.)

The second problem is that in order for hunter dps to improve, they must upgrade their bow and arrows. A rogue by contrast needs two weapons and a Ret paladin one weapon. However, a higher tier of arrows was not available anywhere. Because dropping arrows as loot feels cruddy, we handled this in the past through a rep grind. We can’t just give the arrows away to fresh level 80s or hunter dps will be too high relative to other classes. Long term, we have a different solution for arrows, but that won’t help in Ulduar. So the change we made was to let bows (and guns) scale more than other weapons to make up for the “missing” ammo. The ammo is baked in to the weapon damage.

We didn’t think this was a problem for the 10-player case because the melee and casters are not getting weapons with such large stat increases. The Ulduar 10 loot is slightly better than the Naxx 25 loot, but only slightly (it depends a lot on how many 226 items you were able to get). Since we said Naxx 25 wasn’t a problem (in our eyes), Ulduar 10 isn’t a problem either. (If you think your Naxx damage was too low I can understand how you might feel differently, but that is not our position.)

Players have a tendency to sometimes invoke “scaling problems” as a generic explanation for why they need buffs. However, in this case it was truly 100% a scaling problem. Scaling problems only happen when characters acquire better and better gear — literally as gear stats increase, some classes might not be benefiting as much as others so balance at one tier goes away at higher tiers. The weapons in Ulduar 25 with their relatively large stat increases had this problem. The weapons in Ulduar 10 with their slight or null stat increases did not (though they will in the next tier of content, as will the Ulduar 10 hard mode weapons).

I hope that clears things up.

May 19, 2009

Improving hunter dps through ranged weapons

Hunter DPS is too low, and this was the hotfix for that, that went in today.

The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board.

Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel’Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.

We don’t think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. We’ll announce that change when it gets closer. (We have some plans for other classes as well, but we ask that you please keep this thread on the topic of hunters and the ranged weapon changes.)

As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons — as you get better ranged weapons, it’s as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely.

May 18, 2009

3.1.2 live Tuesday

It’s been mentioned several times and the changes to hunters are fairly minor so I’m not going to repeat them. However, this might be of interest to you Arena fan(atics).

We think cleave teams are too dominant, especially in 2s. We don’t think they are as bad in 3s, but the community is very focused on 2s at the moment.

We don’t think it’s as simple as melee classes doing too much damage or having too much armor. We don’t even necessarily think it’s “melee” because I’m not convinced shamans and druids are affected. We think it has more to do with ranged classes not always able to bring their CC or survival tools to bear against melee.

Keep in mind when you are talking about Arena comps, the issue isn’t as simple as saying that X beats Y. Often it’s a question of who you want on your team. To take just one example, we think that last season if you were trying to decide between a hunter and warrior, the hunter brought a lot more to the table. There was no benefit to be gained from taking a warrior instead. There were a lot of reasons for this, but one of them was that physical damage just wasn’t that useful and another was that warriors could never keep on a target. Another was that DKs and paladins dominated smaller brackets. In this season you can make the argument that warriors are more attractive than hunters. One of the things that a hunter could theoretically bring — stronger CC in the form of traps — may not be useful enough compared to say the CC you could get from a mage. This has almost nothing to do with warriors beating hunters in 1v1 duel situations and everything to do with how you want to build your team.

Obviously (I hope) I am boiling down a complicated situation to a simplistic level for purposes of illustration. My point is that often, in our minds, it’s rarely as simple as “If my class did more damage, my class would be at 10% Arena representation.”

EDIT: My use of “Cleave” here confused or offended some traditionalists for whom Cleave = 2 melee + 1 healer in 3s or more in 5s. We think melee are countering casters too effectively in 2s and 3s. I’ll leave it at that.

And, why, when one is using a gun and Volley, does it still show arrows (in other words, where is the new Volley animation, and no, we don’t want the… spray back)?

It’s an arrow gun… with magical bullet/arrows.

Um… okay. Magic. Got it.

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