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.
May 15, 2009
Survival... survives
You know that long thread about hunters going on the Blizzard boards? It’s not done with, yet.
Just to clarify, we have no plans to nerf Survival. We would like to solve some of Marks’ mana problems, though some predictions remain that Marks will overtake Survival with the best possible gear. BM is probably a little behind, which is something we also want to address.
I will add my standard caveat not to try and overinterpret Ulduar data. The bosses were designed to be very different from each other. We didn’t go boss by boss and say “Okay, this is the one where warlocks will be highest.” Put another way, when we make single boss raids, we don’t expect to see a 10-way tie for dps. I’m not saying the PvE damage is perfect (though compared to where it’s been historically it’s honestly not bad). You just have to examine things on a case by case basis and not just link wowmetersonline as conclusive proof that things are off. Take a fight like XT — it’s an almost perfect situation for rogues, while hunters are often asked to help deal with adds. It shouldn’t be too surprising that rogue numbers come out very high for that fight. Kologarn and Mimiron are rough on pets.
May 13, 2009
So how am I gonna compete with that
The Test Realm patch notes have been updated again (3.1.2) and the changes for hunters remain dismally small (mostly bug fixes).
- Equipment Manager: When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank).
- All Lake Wintergrasp daily quests have been changed to a weekly format. The honor and Stone Keeper’s Shards rewarded for completing these quests have been increased to compensate.
- Exorcism: Can no longer be used on player-controlled creatures.
- Arena weapons with an item level of 239 have had their rating requirements increased to 2350.
- Furious Gladiator’s Staff and Furious Gladiator’s Greatstaff: The agility values on these two items were too high. They have been reduced by 50%.
- Increased the health and mana restored from Northrend food and drinks.
- Most scopes now have a level requirement and will bind the item to which they are applied.
- Disengage: Cooldown reduced by 5 seconds.
- Go For The Throat: Explosive Shot critical strikes now trigger this talent.
- Lock and Load: The tooltip has been corrected to display its actual chance to occur.
- Rabid: This Hunter pet talent no longer lists a percentage chance to be triggered, as that chance varies by the attack speed of the pet.
- Swordguard Embroidery: Now correctly increases ranged attack power.
May 11, 2009
I'm losing the plot, honey
This thread is getting pretty long.
I wish Blizz did remove the ability to “buff” pets by raid buffs and simply let them scale with all the Hunters stats. Crit rating, Armor Penetration, Agility, Attack Power, Haste. That way it would open up ALOT more gear possibilities.
Yes, we agree with all of that (more or less). The barrier in this case is technical — it’s just not set up to work that way, so it’s not a quick change. But we would like to eventually get that fixed.
I don’t think anyone was after that – just some answers to the actual questions stated. You gave us neither. I don’t get what the unwillingness is to answer direct, unobtrusive questions.
I answered a lot of questions. I didn’t (and can’t) answer them all. If there was one you really wanted to see discussed, then feel free to mention it again. Another way to get the same effect is to ask fewer questions so I can tell which ones are the most important to you.
Which you’ve already admitted won’t be forthcoming…
I didn’t actually say that. I said you shouldn’t expect to see them [buffs] in threads like this. When you think about it, most of the kinds of answers you’re going to get in threads like this are philosophical ones.
I’m fairly sure the number of posts about our representation on here would have been more than enough posts about the result of the magnitude of the changes. Do we need more?
Yes. The only reason I read these forums is because I am interested in the discussion. I know what the representation numbers are. Posts that just provide Blizzard with links aren’t really contributing to the discussion. The better posts in this thread are the ones that describe situations where hunters have trouble. To give two examples: warriors are always up in my stuff in PvP, and my pet is dead on Mimiron in PvE.
Now, if you’re somehow trying to extrapolate that number of posts should be taken as an indication of the accuracy or severity of a problem, we totally disagree. The thing that will convince us, always, is the strength of your arguments. Period. You can accomplish that with a single post (and players have done so). You can also spend a great deal of forum space on something that goes nowhere.
So what does that mean for the ammo changes? The trap launcher? Pets not breaking freezing trap if it had a set amount of damage? We’re getting close to Ulduar being finished by your definition (People are already attempting Algalon), and stuff that you guys talked about from nearly beta to 2 months ago have yet to even make way into it.
Those are all still in the plan. We are always very reluctant to provide timelines unless we have some confidence that we can deliver. The community tends to be a tad unforgiving unless we offer a lot of caveats on everything we “promise.” I can understand how it can be difficult to be patient, but just realize the alternative is not that they get done faster but that we keep our ideas really close to the chest until they are about to go in the game. Some players would prefer this method of communication, which is understandable.
Well, you have to assume that Blizzard nerfed ferocity pet damage precisely because they thought pets were doing too much damage (presumably across the board)... so asking for pet DPS to be boosted again is probably going to be met with deafening silence :)
[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 [Next]We don’t think it’s a strong design to have too much of your dps tied up in the pet, because then you are really crippled when it dies and we aren’t going to provide you with 100% certainty that that isn’t going to happen.