Feb. 19, 2010
Ah yes... that smell. Just like rotting flesh
Fairly sure that all hunters know Beast Mastery is (and has been) in a bad place for a while. But will it see any changes pre-Cataclysm?
In my opinion, players spend too much effort trying to compare their rotation to that of other classes or specs that they may not understand as well. Bad Arcane mages mash two buttons and bad BM hunters mash two buttons. You’re not going to top charts as Arcane if that’s all you do.
We don’t want to buff the pet damage for BM any more for a couple of reasons. One is that it puts too much dependence on the pet. If the pet does 50% of your damage (which is an exaggeration) and the pet dies, then your dps just dropped by 50%. Even if you can get the pet back quickly, you’ve suffered a lot of damage loss. Secondly, the pet doesn’t require that much babysitting. Few players are clicking their pet abilities on and off. As such, it just acts like a dot with cool art. When we talk about the risk of BM being too easy to play, we don’t want to over-reward players for just doing Steady and having the pet attack. What I’m saying is that the more damage the pet does, the less the hunter player even has to pay attention. If the pet required more micro-management, then that would change. If pets built up combo points, or Kill Command acted like a Conflag, or something where the hunter had to react, then more pet damage wouldn’t be so bad (though the risk of death doesn’t go away).
We’d like to buff BM PvE damage, but we have to be careful not to buff it too much in PvP where it still has really high burst. This means we can’t just do things like boost the Arcane Shot damage of Ferocious Inspiration or the like. The damage would have to be more of the slowly stacking / sustained variety, and that’s harder to implement. (Technically, it’s not hard to implement per se, but it’s hard to get it feeling right without causing weird things to player behavior, the talent trees or causing other problems that lead to a two hour fix taking two weeks instead.)
Beastcleave teams, you know I love you guys (and I really do, love seeing hunters in competitive Arena), but I hate reading between the lines and seeing, “PVE has no easy fix because it all would impact PVP and make hunters more dominant there.” Whaaaa?! Part of me even thinks this might not be such a bad thing, seeing how we were rock bottom for so long. But no, I get it, I just don’t agree with it (what can I say, I’m selfish, I don’t do Arena personally so don’t give a [you know what] about its impact there).
In order to incorporate more pet micromanagement you’ll have to do a lot more work on pet pathing, paticularly in boss fights.
I meant micromanagement in terms of actually using the pet buttons instead of setting them all on autocast. I didn’t mean micromanagement in the RTS sense. If you’re just pointing out that pet behavior is unreliable because it’s controlled by a dumb computer, then you’re essentially agreeing with me that buffing pet damage is a risky thing to do.
Many suggestions have been discussed to buff BM’s damage that don’t result in just upping the pet coefficients. Adding a new shot, for example, was discussed all through WotLK, even by you GC, and yet it never came about. There’s no reason for it not to, it just didn’t.
Raccoon Shot is not a panacea. If it hits for less damage than Arcane / Steady then you won’t use it. If it hits for more, then the “Beastcleave” guy will use it. It would have to be a carefully constructed mechanic so that PvP was basically trading Arcane for Raccoon (or skipping Raccoon altogether) but PvE guy derived a meaningful sustained dps buff.
Arp scaling to pet would be a good change, but I believe GC has stated previously they wont bother doing that because of Arp being removed completely in Cataclysm.
No, the actual reason is that it would both A) buff the pet at the expense of the hunter, and B) lead to more PvP burst damage, which are the two things I said we want to avoid. :(
If arpen was a dead stat, we’d stop putting it on Icecrown gear.
By the way, the entire thread is here if you want to read it.
We want hunters and warlocks, and to a lesser extent Unholy DKs and Frost mages, to care about their pet. We don’t want the pet to ever overshadow the player. You can argue that it wouldn’t, but that’s our concern. Pet damage needs to be a smaller portion, though not trivially so, of total player damage. Thirty percent seems like a reasonable target on the high end.
Feb. 19, 2010
World of Warcraft PTR Patch 3.3.3
Besides the huge battleground changes coming, in 3.3.3 this is also an announced change, for hunters.
- Ferocious Inspiration: This ability is now an aura and provides 1/2/3% damage to all party or raid members within 100 yards.
And don’t go unloading your stockpile of Frozen Orbs just yet, even though 5g per is tempting.
- Frozo the Renowned has moved into the Dalaran Magus Commerce Exchange and will be trading your Frozen Orbs for various other trade goods.
Feb. 18, 2010
Incoming market crash
This was so good, I had to post it, although it’s not directly hunter related. But, what’s the quote? Ah yes, in the immortal words of Jayne Cobb, “10 percent of nothing is… let me do the math. Nothing, and nothing, carry the nothing…”
- The drop rate of Frost Lotus, from herbs in Northrend, has been increased by 50%.
Feb. 12, 2010
BrynTROLL?
An interesting statement made by Ghostcrawler about weapon procs (Zod’s is talked about, making this worth mentioning):
I wouldn’t worry so much about how much percentage of your damage the proc is doing. I mentioned that once when comparing various proc weapons and it became adopted as the design goal for all proc weapons. It isn’t.
The only real salient comparison is Bryntroll to other two handed dps weapons of the same ilevel (or Zod’s to other bows or Trauma to other healing weapons, etc.) Procs are always going to be more random than pure stats, and we can live with that. If you’re very intolerant of RNG mechanics, then proc weapons probably aren’t for you. If swapping from Bryntroll to another item on the same tier of content is a significant dps increase (taking class, spec and other gear considerations in mind of course), then there is a problem with the weapon. It’s as simple as that.
Feb. 9, 2010
Lich King Weapon Changes
After reviewing several items available from the Lich King encounter, we’ve decided to re-optimize certain weapons that didn’t meet with our expectations and the quality that the Lich King expects. The weapons listed below, both their normal and Heroic versions, will now better represent their respective roles and present more intriguing options to players.
- Royal Scepter of Terenas II: mp5 replaced with haste rating
- Archus, Greatstaff of Antonidas: critical strike replaced with haste rating
- Heaven’s Fall, Kryss of a Thousand Lies: armor penetration replaced with haste rating
- Stormfury, Black Blade of the Betrayer: armor penetration replaced with expertise rating
- Fal’inrush, Defender of Quel’thalas: haste rating replaced with armor penetration
I’m still gonna take two of those Kryss, once our rogues have them. I don’t even care. They are too excellent to become shards and I miss my BC daggers. More about the Cataclysm gear changes (some of this is starting to seem pretty familiar)...
Actually, we aren’t trying to make gear choices easier. We like when it’s a hard call on whether to upgrade vs. stick with what you have, etc. In designer parlance terms, that is an “interesting decision.” Non-interesting decisions are typically no-brainers.
We want to remove some of the confusion over a complicated stat system, which we think we can do without reducing the system’s depth. In fact, the other motivation for the stats overhaul was to solve some of the problems where a certain stat trumps all or a certain stat is always junk. If we nail that, then gear choices will actually be harder in Cataclysm, not easier.
As an example, when you aren’t close to a crit cap and when buffs don’t provide so much crit and talents don’t provide so much crit, then haste vs. crit can be a pretty interesting choice. Haste lets you cast spells faster, but crit makes those spells you cast hit harder. At a very basic level you are choosing more spells vs. bigger spells, but because of a number of other factors, it’s not that cut and dried. Haste may provide a dps increase for a caster according to a spreadsheet, but it depends and it might cause you to change your rotation. If you have spell A that hits so hard that you need to use it on cooldown, and spell B gets boosted by haste, then you can run into the situation where more haste on B isn’t an improvement because you can’t squeeze in another B before it’s time to use A again. If you aren’t able to capitalize on the extra haste, then more isn’t always good for you. (That’s in an ideal world. The way stats work in Icecrown, if you like haste, it’s nearly always a no-brainer stat for you.)
Comparing armor pen vs. say attack power is much mathier, because they really just both buff melee damage in pretty much the same way. The only time it matters is when you’re near a cap or if you’re a spec that does a lot of spell damage. But you learn pretty quickly for your spec whether armor pen is an awesome stat for you or just an okay stat.
Many of your gear choices in Cataclysm should come down to haste vs. crit vs. mastery. You may still have one of those you like the most, but it shouldn’t be double the value of the other stats, so you may have to look at the total package of stats on that item (Do I need more hit? If I take that hit, can I swap it out somewhere else?) Add in set bonuses and procs, and I’m not sure the gear choice will be all that easy, but it should be easier to understand.
Last bit of (shocking) news for the day (yes, I was completely shocked).
After each region’s maintenance this week, raids will no longer lose attempts on wipes in Normal mode for Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana’thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King. There will still be limited attempts in Heroic mode.
We will continue to monitor developments in Icecrown Citadel in the future, especially since the Heroic difficulty has been unlocked by a significant number of raids.
Q: If you extend your raid lockout this week, will you still lose attempts on Normal after the hotfix?
A: No.
Q: If you run completely out of attempts on Heroic, will the wing bosses and Lich King no longer respawn, even if the difficulty is switched to Normal?
A: YES. So leave an attempt left if you wish to kill them on Normal. I’ll try and correct this in a future update.
[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]Q: Why is the counter still visible in Normal?
A: The hotfix being applied just stops the counter decrementing, and nothing more.