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.
June 2, 2009
Hunter Questions
3.1.3 went in today, with the changes to Hunter’s Mark and Master Marksman now live.
- Hunter’s Mark: The ranged attack power bonus from this ability has been increased from 300 to 500.
- Master Marksman: This talent now also decreases the cost of Aimed Shot and Chimera Shot by 5/10/15/20/25%.
Blizzard has also posted about a class Question and Answer series.
We are looking for community class questions and topics for a class Question & Answer series. Over the next few weeks, we will be posting in each of the class forums and discussing the latest high priority questions and topics the community has. We will then be compiling these questions and topics into a larger Question & Answer post to address as many of questions as possible. While we will be creating one post in each of the class forums to solicit questions and topics of interest, we will also be keeping a close eye on additional posts and discussions.
It is important to keep in mind that we have a schedule of classes we will be addressing and will be getting to each class individually over this period of time. Please note, this list is subject to change.
Correspondingly, on both the US and EU Hunter class boards:
As a part of our class Question & Answer series, we are looking for any questions you may have concerning your class and ask that you post in this thread.
Neither thread are very long at the moment but I imagine they’ll grow a bit over the coming weeks.
May 31, 2009
The wait is over
Maybe.
We think it’s probably time to let pets scale, to some extent, with resilience and spell pen.
The way pets scale from the master’s stats was implemented (on our side) in a slightly clunky way which made it difficult to add additional stats. In BC, it took some effort to kill a pet so it wasn’t a burning problem for us. In LK, we have bumped up pet health a few times, but we are thinking now that the balance will never work right without some crit mitigation. Pets will never scale right with gear as long as the master improves in ways that don’t benefit the pet.
We have a new way to let pets scale, and assuming it works, we should be able to give the pets scale with all relevant stats from the master, from hit to haste to crit. Some things will need to scale at 100%, since it’s silly to have your pet inherit part of your +hit.
No promises until you actually see it live, but that’s what we are thinking at the moment.
And…
[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]We don’t want you to have to stack stats on your character just to benefit your pet. For example, we currently let warlock demons earn melee hit based on the caster’s spell hit.