Feb. 10, 2009
Hunter Ammo Changes
This just posted from Eyonix:
In our 3.1.0 class updates post, we had announced plans to remove consumable ammunition from the game upon the release of the next major content patch. Our original plans were to change ammunition so that hunters would no longer need to utilize bag space, while adding some new functionality that would continue to make ammunition a compelling element of gameplay. Unfortunately, this intended change will not be completely ready in time for patch 3.1.0.
We still fully intend to move forward with this change when the additional functionality becomes available, and for 3.1.0 we still intend to remove the need for pouches/quivers by greatly increasing the stack sizes on arrows and bullets, and the haste bonus from the bags will be preserved in another fashion. We’ll be sure to inform our players with further updates once they become available.
Feb. 9, 2009
Extended downtime = patch?
Not official, but being reported by MMO-Champion is that 3.0.9 will be going live tomorrow with the following changes to Hunters:
- Kindred Spirits (Beast Mastery): This talent now grants 20% pet damage at max rank.
- Serpent’s Swiftness (Beast Mastery): This talent now grants 20% pet attack speed at max rank.
- Lava Breath now reduces the target’s casting speed by 25%, down from 50%.
- Poison Spit now reduces the target’s casting speed by 25%, down from 50%.
Unleashed Fury will possibly remain in its post-nerf form. Obviously as these aren’t official notes, not everything is mentioned so I think we have to wait until 3.0.9 to be sure of ANYTHING.
Indirectly confirmed that these notes are real (sort of) was a comment made by Ghostcrawler regarding a change to rogues (Hunger for Blood):
The damage increase is for 3.09. The mechanic increase is for 3.1. We probably confused some people by announcing the much larger 3.1 changes first.
Oh, and, I meant to include this a bit ago, but it slipped my mind. Regarding Malygos and Feign Death.
Feign death not working in actually intentional, but certainly not desired. It was causing a very nasty problem, and we’ve been trying to figure out a way to handle the particular boundary case without setting the creature flag that ignores feign death.
Feb. 5, 2009
Upcoming Class Change Highlights (Part 3)
Just posted by Eyonix is the preview for Hunters for 3.1:
- Consumable ammunition has been removed from the game. Arrows and bullets no longer stack, but are not consumed. Ranged attack speed bonus gained from quivers and ammo bags will be preserved in a different capacity.
- A new tier of hunter pet talents have been added. In particular, this allows Beastmaster hunters to improve their damage per second (DPS) with their 51 point talent.
- Hunting Party – this talent has been reduced to 3 ranks and also grants a passive bonus to the hunter.
- Piercing Shots – this talent has been changed. Your Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of damage dealt for 8 sec.
- Sniper Training – this talent has been changed. After standing still for 6 sec, you gain a 2/4/6% damage bonus to Steady, Aimed and Explosive Shot.
- We are also looking to add additional trap functionality to Survival.
I’m not at all surprised by the ammunition change. I had a feeling we were heading towards that, was even telling someone that the other day in game – it feels good to be vindicated.
Dual talent specs might be reality by 3.1:
It will not be in the next patch, 3.0.8. If all goes well, we’ll get it in the one after that, but we usually don’t tell you our estimates so there is less ALL CAPS POSTING when we miss our targets.
There was also a post regarding Hunting Party, which was obviously addressed with the 3.1 preview. And a Ghostcrawler question/answer:
You said you are happy with the dps a MM hunter can pull. I have been playing in a competitive raid environment for 4 years and when I spec marks I fall 1000 dps behind ele shams, 800 dps behind the moonkin and 700 dps behind the arcane mages. We also then see you stating that you feel arcane mages are performing well in pve. Do your internal tests have MM hunters and arcane mages near each other or are we reading too much into what you are saying?
What I said before was that players tend to look at relative numbers while we look at absolute numbers. All the players saying “SV is not too high” justify that by saying “because I am not topping the meters.” And in some cases, SV is topping the meters. :)
You want all ferocity pets to feel viable in PVE but pets like wasps, wolves, tall striders and carrion birds have utility specials instead of damage specials. The only way I can see balancing the pets would be to give them 2 unique specials, one utility and one damage oriented. What ideas have been brainstormed at the table?
There is a trade-off between damage and utility. We specifically gave some hunter pets raid buff / debuff options in case your group, esp. a 5 or 10-player group, has trouble having access to that bonus. I have seen a lot of wasps out there lately.
But as I also said, more parity among pets is something we want to pursue. Currently most of the hunter discussions on the forums are about SV-MM-BM differences or PvP however.
41 point survival talent was due for a buff coming out of beta but we have seen no further discussion on it; last patch it even received a nerf! What are your plans for this?
We hope to be able to announce some 3.1 changes soon.
MM is still crippled by Chimera shots ~580 mana cost. Any chance we could see some arcane shot glyph inspired solutions to this? Possibly make rapid recuperation like shamanistic rage?
We will be adding more glyphs over time, especially for newer abilities. We didn’t want to add them all right away for fear that players would just assume the glyphed version of the spell was the way the spell worked rather than realizing what a benefit the glyph itself brought. If that makes sense.
Feb. 4, 2009
Is this a dagger which I see before me...
Doing less damage with Explosive Shot? No, you’re not imaging it.
We made a hotfix recently to lower the coefficient of Explosive Shot. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to announce the change ahead of time. We don’t typically do patch notes for hotfixes so we don’t have a system in place to always broadcast these before they happen.
We are in the process of making some changes to get damage done more in parity (in PvP and PvE). If there are other classes far ahead of you on the damage meters, chances are good they will see some nerfs to their damage soon too.
Overall, we are trying to make changes in a more timely manner so that players won’t feel like they are stuck with a bug or other issue forever. We won’t be able to get every issue fixed overnight, but it’s a start.
Ok where is the un nerf for BM then since you want to fix issues in a timely manner.
Soon. I can’t tell you a date, but it won’t be long.
Feb. 3, 2009
Hunter Talent Direction
In response to a post regarding hunter talents and why have three different talent trees if they’re all going to do the same DPS, Ghostcrawler replied:
The key is playstyle. It is easiest to explain with the death knight. The blood tree emphasizes melee combat and healing. The frost tree emphasizes frost damage and control. The unholy tree emphasizes diseases and minions.
To do the same thing with hunters, you’d say that BM emphasizes the pet, MM emphasizes the shots, and SV emphasizes the traps. That’s a gross generalization, but you get the idea. If you like to manage your pet, you might like BM. If you want to spend less effort running the pet in and out of combat and want traps to be a smaller part of your game, then you might look at MM, understanding that it probably means more emphasis on your ranged attacks.
But you could PvP (or in the case of the death knight, tank) with any tree as long as you maximized your focus on that role with the specific talents you chose. The trees themselves become more like flavor: do you like Frost, Fire or Arcane spells?
Again, this all assumes that the relative dps, pvp utility, tanking or healing are all equitable, which is something we are trying to improve.
And where do changes to hunter pets come into the equation? And why are Ravagers a cunning pet (although I think they’re too ugly to be called an actual pet, personally).
The Ferocious pets were intended predominantly for PvE use. We figured a pet with a stun would not be very popular in a raid encounter compared to a pet that just did more damage. (It is possible in a 5-player dungeon that the stun might come in handy).
Since “Ravage” has traditionally been a stun, it made sense to put them in the Cunning tree.
We are willing to make changes to make the Cunning tree more viable for PvP and other situations. Frankly, most of the community feedback on hunters has been on their shot damage or on which pet provides the highest dps boost in a raid setting. More feedback on hunter pet families and their talent trees would be useful. Too often, though, this discussions wander off topic into the role of the pet or the hunter in general.
Ideally we’d like to see nearly every Ferocious pet and the occasional Cunning pet feel like they were valid choices for PvE and nearly every Cunning pet and the occasional Tenacity pet feel like they were valid choices in PvP. Our priority lately has been on the hunter trees themselves though.
I’m glad Blizzard feels this way, but I have a feeling that in terms of priority, it’s not very high, simply because the pet is an NPC and to keep people happy, you’ve always really got to focus on the player character first (pet talent trees were a step on the right direction, don’t get me wrong, but five steps don’t make a marathon).
And from a few days ago.
You’re telling us that you really don’t care about the data (that you keep telling us you like) that showed undeniably that Hunters were not out of line compared to other DPS classes.
Many of the arguments that hunter dps is currently too low are arrived at by comparing hunter dps to classes whose dps is too high.
You’re telling us that despite the fact that even though Survival is the highest DPS spec for hunters right now and despite the fact that it still does not do as much DPS as the old BM build, that you think it’s too much DPS. The data shows GC that hunters are not “consistently” at the top since the changes nor were they consistently at the top BEFORE the changes. Yes, they’re about 10% lower than they used to be while other classes are as high or higher than they used to be (Mages, Warriors, DKs).
We like the damage numbers coming out of Marks hunters. That is our target right now. Your feedback would be better directed (assuming you want it to make a difference) suggesting how to get BM and SV closer to that target.
You’re telling us that all of us who think of the Hunter class as a DPS class are wrong because you’re telling us that you have some other plan – because if you’re telling us that Survival is currently TOO STRONG despite being weaker than a NUMBER of other classes in DPS, then you’re telling us that we have some other role besides DPS. Because how else can a DPS class be a DPS class if they don’t have competitive DPS?
You are a dps class. You should be up there with mages, locks and rogues… all things being equal. Things are rarely equal. A very talented and well-geared Retadin or Boomkin might beat you. Even though we can disagree on which hunter spec is the easiest to play, the class as a whole is not easy to play, at least not at the expert level.
But I suspect what you are really getting at is that certain classes are doing more damage than you consistently. We know. Those classes know it too and they can probably guess what is about to happen. Then there will be many posts like this from them. :)
You’re telling us that hunters do not deserve a 10% representation in arenas either because you are continuing to ignore the fact that you nerfed the only spec that gave hunters better than a 2% or so arena representation in the history of the game.
[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]There are some balance problems in Arena at the moment, absolutely. However, if you look at hunter participation, it is growing every week. You can find plenty of players posting right now today that they think hunters are too good in Arena. Our ultimate goal is for every spec to have equal Arena representation. Clearly that is a very lofty goal and we aren’t going to get there overnight for say Prot paladins or Fire mages.