May 29, 2009
Warlock PvP is not ok...
Can we also agree that Hunters are in the same boat? As it happens, yes.
We want hunter representation in Arena to be higher than it currently is.
May 26, 2009
3.1.3
Looks like Marksmanship is going to get a little mana aid with the upcoming patch (no ETA).
- 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%.
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).
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