Jan. 7, 2009

Patch notes, updated

Patch notes have been updated. Does this mean we’re a week closer to seeing it go live?

• Tranquilizing Shot has had its cooldown reduced to 6 seconds, down from 15.
• Aspects: All aspects now have a 1 second global cooldown.
• Aspect of the Beast: Will now increase Hunter pet attack power by the correct amount.
• Aspect of the Viper: Beast Lore, Scare Beast, and Tame Beast will no longer trigger mana regeneration from this ability.
• Call of the Wild: Now only works on the pet and their own master.
• Carrion Feeder: No longer causes extremely large amounts of threat when the pet gains happiness.
• Chimera Shot: The secondary effects of this shot will now still be triggered even when the target dies from the ability’s damage.
• Cower: Now longer shares a cooldown with Growl, but has its own separate cooldown.
• Dust Cloud: This pet ability will now be cast by the pet at the target instead of while they are moving toward the target.
• Marked for Death: Now works properly for Steady Shot and Glyph of Steady Shot.
• Master’s Call: Now makes the pet immune to roots and snares for the duration as well, allowing the pet to break roots on the target even when the pet is rooted.
• Nether Shock: Pets will now correctly use this ability on all targets, not just mana users.
• Noxious Stings: When this talent triggers Wyvern Sting, the Wyvern Sting will now last the proper duration.
• Owl’s Focus: Free abilities will no longer consume this effect.
• Prowl: This ability will no longer sometimes turns autocast on by itself.
• Sniper Training: Now increases the damage of Aimed Shot by the correct amount.
• Spirit Strike: This pet ability’s duration and period have both been reduced to 6 seconds.
• Spore Cloud: This ability will now work properly.
• Swipe: The tooltip has been adjusted.
• Tracking: Entering an arena no longer disables tracking types.
• Fixed a bug that allowed Viper’s Sting to target death knights. They are now invalid targets.

It is important to note that the change to Aspects will NOT be happening. Ghostcrawler followed up today saying:

No, it’s not over. We took them back off the GCD.

So, despite what was said about it previously, Aspects will not be put back onto the GCD. Here’s the follow-up regarding that (and a few things about DPS and the Survival tree).

We talked about it, and Aspects on the GCD is not that big an issue for us. We don’t think it’s a huge balance problem either way. We can understand though why it feels like a nerf to not have the GCD now and to get it back in 3.0.8. So we can keep Aspects off the GCD. No harm done. (They will still have the 1 sec shared cooldown.)

The argument of why you can’t just do too much damage until Ulduar is a silly one. Hunters are doing too much damage. Yes, some other specs are also doing too much damage, but we are reigning those in too.

Remember, our tests are not done with the PTR data. Our builds are more recent than that and have numbers, bug-fixes and data you haven’t seen. We try and give you a heads up to major changes when we can, but we can’t give you an accurate picture of the data with just words.

We understand the concern that Survival’s damage is too high relative to other hunters. That may be the case on the PTR but it isn’t the case for us. We have some different numbers for Explosive Shot than the PTR has. We understand the concerns about T.N.T.

On the Aspects issue, we don’t like taking things off of the GCD. There is a reason we have a GCD and it has everything to do with being a server-client based game. We tried to fix the problem with Aspects being difficult to manage by reducing the need to switch from a defensive aspect (Monkey) and an offensive aspect (Hawk). Enough people (and not just on this thread) said Viper would still be a problem, so we agreed in this case to take the Aspects off the GCD. This is a good example of feedback working.

And more new numbers (updated) regarding Scorpid Poison/Rake/Spirit Strike:

Rank 6 Scorpid Poison – 23 base Nature damage per tick, ticks every 2 sec for 10 sec, 0.014 coefficient, 1 stack max, 10 sec cooldown
Rank 6 Rake – 57 base physical damage, plus 21 base damage per tick, ticks every 3 sec for 9 sec, 0.0175 coefficient
Rank 6 Spirit Strike – 57 base Arcane damage plus 57 additional damage after 6 sec. The initial hit can crit. 0.04 coefficient. 10 sec cooldown.

We realize gorillas are great for tanking and leveling and we’d like to get other Tenacity pets up there, but right now we are focuses on the raid dps pets since they seem to be of the most concern to the community.

And, about Dismantle.

I just wanted to comment on this for any hunters who are new to being disarmed. Weapon chains affect your global disarm duration. They aren’t tied to the weapon per se. An offhand weapon chain works on both weapons and your bow. When disarmed, you lose abilities tied to that item and armor, but not other stats.

Jan. 6, 2009

I read the post. I read them all.

Another flurry of posts from Ghostcrawler, regarding a variety of issues.

We know there are some problems with the geometry of the Org Arena. We have fixed many of them.

In our most recent testing BM and MM were neck and neck and Survival was probably a little high. We might tone down Explosive Shot before it goes out the door.

We think with these changes, hunter PvE damage will be in line with other dps classes. We’re not concerned about scaling at higher gear levels because we are changing hunter damage enough for 3.1 that we will have to rebalance them anyway.

I said: we think these changes will put all 3 specs close together for PvE dps rather than BM (or on the PTR Survival) being way out in front. I anticipated some players saying “Yeah but we won’t scale” because players often say that when they think nerfs are too severe (though I don’t mean to imply it isn’t a legit concern in general). I said we have a plan for that in the Ulduar patch (we hope) so how Steady Shot stacks up at some future date isn’t productive for you guys to worry about because by the time you get there the numbers will be pretty different. It would be like comparing LK’s Steady Shot to BC’s or to the hunter class before Steady existed.

Now I will say again that you should not interpret our telling you that we have some future plans for your class to mean that we think your class is just a quivering mess and needs to be totally rebuilt. We are always looking a few months ahead toward the next thing we want to work on. Car manufacturers release new models all the time and other companies announce expansions or future initiatives. That doesn’t mean their current models are utter failures. It just means they have an eye on the future. WoW isn’t the kind of game you ever finish designing.

More on the Steady Shot change:

I don’t think I ever said the nerfs are a bit much. Plenty of hunters may have said that. Steady Shot got a massive buff in LK when it started using ammo. We thought it was doing too much damage. If hunter damage is low, and I don’t really think it is going to be from the tests we’ve done and some of the raiding groups we’ve talked to, we’ll likely adjust hunters in other ways.

Obviously some big plans are in the works for hunters:

I mentioned Ulduar because I suspected hunters would say “Our dps may be okay now but it won’t scale.” That may be true, but we are planning making some other changes to hunters so we will have a chance to reevaluate scaling before Ulduar ships. We’re not ready to share these other change with you, in part because if we end up not going through with the changes players will be “sad” (which I use as a euphamism). Many of the changes we’re talking about are designed to make hunters more fun to play, so you shouldn’t be scared of them.

Blizzard has always had long term plans for every class and we still do. Perhaps we haven’t always been as forthcoming about those plans as I have been lately. But you shouldn’t intrepret the fact that we have long term plans to mean that we think your class is horribly broken and shipped it in a horribly broken state.

And, as promised previously, the new numbers for cats and scorpids.

Here are the cat and scorpid numbers for anyone who wants to theorycraft them. These will be in the next patch (3.0.8 ) even though they were not on the PTR.

We also did fix several pet families not getting their correct stat adjustment: Wasps, Spirit Beasts, Rhinos and Silithids were affected I believe. Spirit Strike should work with Longevity now and has an initial damage component that can crit. Not sure why it wouldn’t work with Kill Command, but I’ll look into that.

Rank 6 Scorpid Poison – 20 base Nature damage per tick, ticks every 2 sec for 10 sec, 0.04 coefficient, 1 stack max
Rank 6 Rake – 29 base physical damage, plus 21 base damage per tick, ticks every 3 sec for 9 sec, 0.06 coefficient
Rank 6 Spirit Strike – 50 base Arcane damage, plus 50 damage per tick, ticks every 6 sec for 6 sec (it ticks twice), 0.049 coefficient

My comment about many hunters caring about what their pets look like was just that, not that 51 BM was intended to be a cosmetic talent point. If you just hate dinosaurs and core hounds, I’m not sure what more we can do in the short term, but show me other exotics than don’t stack up and perhaps we can adjust their numbers. Longer-term we’d like to explore just letting you be able to increase damage with the bonus talent points.

Now the poor Crocolisk needs to be adjusted too (Bad Attitude, too long a cooldown, fix it!)

And, about the revert of the aspects being put back on the GCD.

Initially we removed the GCD. Then the more we thought about it, what we were asking hunters to do was quickly swap aspects as needed (and more likely just macro them). We thought hunters had a lot of buttons to push already especially when melee get on you and intsead just made a new aspect so you could get the benefits of both defense and ranged and wouldn’t have to swap as much. If you are just swapping to Viper, the cooldown doesn’t seem like a big imposition.

Jan. 4, 2009

Kachoo, achoo!

Happy New Years to everyone! The holidays have kept me a little busier than normal, so that means I’m a little behind in the news – and man there’s been a lot over the last few days, let me catch us up a bit.

Regarding the concerns about hunter changes in 3.0.8:

It bothers me that after years of testing and months on a beta no one thought about us being able to spec into readiness. I assume that readiness was moved up so that we can use it in BM as well as the other 2 specs since it is a major talent.

We did consider it, and thought it was an interesting talent build choice, but it ended up dominating. We made some changes pretty late in the cycle that ended up inflating hunter damage, especially the chunk coming from pets. We also went back and forth a little on which raid-wide buffs would affect ranged attacks. Hunter dps just ended up being higher than we thought.

As far as steady shot goes wont that hurt all 3 specs? MM and SV much more than BM?

It affects all 3 specs, but we changed Arcane and Explosive to offset that some, as well as fixing a glyph that was hurting Marks. Steady was just a huge portion of hunter damage, and not a particularly interesting ability (in that you can just sit there and mash the button without worrying about timing other abilities around it), so when we wanted to bring hunter dps down, it was an attractive target. FWIW, ammo was another one. We considered nerfing how much damage all ammo in the game contributed, but went with the SS change for the reason I stated.

Also for years hunters haven’t had a great AOE ability, hitting with the original volly was a joke, now its great maybe a bit op on trash but I don’t think anyone cares who is topping the trash meter and I have never seen a volley used on a boss.

I agree with the first part, which is why we buffed Volley quite a bit. But in retrospect, we buffed it too much. We didn’t want hunters to have the highest single-target damage and highest AE damage, as well as bringing great buffs and CC to the group. With the new Volley, I expect every PvE hunter will still be using that button on large groups, but going back to Multi on smaller ones.

I disagree with the “trash meter” comment. For one, players do care about trash. Elemental shamans and rogues for example felt like there was so much AE’ing going on that they were not attractive specs for raids. Players can say “nobody cares about trash,” but we don’t buy it. Raids wipe on trash. Raids are called when trash respawns. For speed clears, to satisfy a hard mode achievement or bear-mount style challenge, the rate at which you can clear trash very much matters. If it didn’t I’m not sure you’d mind a Volley nerf at all.

Second, you AE on an awful lot of bosses too.

More about exotic pets:

I have said most of this before, but perhaps some of you are just joining us.

• Exotic pets should be a choice. We do not want every BM (or every hunter for that matter) feeling like they have to get an exotic pet to be competitive. We spent a lot of effort to get say gorillas, crabs and spiders up to snuff so we didn’t want hunters to actually enter LK with fewer pet choices. Even a 51 BM hunter should feel like a crab (especially a crab) should be a useful pet.
• Exotic pets should be a choice, part ii. They should not be demonstrably below say cats and scorpids. That seems to be the case on live at the moment, so we adjusted it. Because of the somewhat convoluted way that pets scale, it’s not always easy to predict what the average pet will look like on live — it varies enormously depending on gear and buffs (more on this below).
• Our target is that the exotic pets are slightly better than normal pets. The key word is “slightly.” If you forego an exotic pet for whatever reason, you should not feel like you are gimping your team or group. Note that part of the value of the exotics is their unusual abilities, some of which can fill in missing debuff holes if you are lacking certain classes in your group.
• We offered the Spirit Beast as a challenge for hunters to try and tame. It would be a big mistake if we made this pet the best one in the game. For starters, it would no longer be rare. :(
• We disagree that the 4 extra pet talent points are useless. You can call them useless if you only care about your pet’s dps and can max that out without those talent points. Not all pet talents were intended to buff dps. (More on this below too.) At the end of the day, the BM 51 is just one talent point. It shouldn’t grant you a 10% dps increase. We like for the 51 point talents to be attractive but not mandatory.
• If you think that no hunter cares about the look of their pet, you are just wrong. Very optimized players might be willing to tame an untextured cube if it had the highest dps. However, a great many hunters (I would argue probably even the majority) rolled their class because they wanted to tame pets. Being able to tame exotic pets is very exciting for them.

(WTB Untextured cube pet class – just kidding. I want the cube with that guy’s face on it.) Now about Explosive Shot:

I agree it should make up its mind whether it is a physical or magical effect. We’ll look into it.

And miscellaneous other things. Tenacity pets will now be receiving the +10% baseline damage buff. The PTR does not reflect the scorpid/cat changes. And, to close:

On the actual topic, we are pretty happy with the numbers we can generate for hunters with the changes. However, I will certainly bring up with the team that many hunters have posted (some even after testing) that the nerfs were too severe, especially to BM.

Dec. 29, 2008

Oddsbodkins! Methinks that sounds like...

Ghostcrawler re-addressed the issue of how paladin buffs effect pets (how they are considered warriors in terms of the distribution of blessings). This is an old issue, last time I remember it being talked about by any CM’s (Hortus, in this case) was back in September 2007.

Okay, the issue is that paladin buffs are class based, which is funky with regard to pets. Got it. I’ll put it on the list.

I have a feeling that the answer for this is the same one that we got back then (that it’s the only implementation they’re able to achieve) but who knows.

Dec. 24, 2008

Santa has his own list and he checks it twice

There was a short question and answer session from Ghostcrawler regarding the new dual talents that’s set to be put into the game… sometime.

Will the current respec costs be reset or will they stay at the current 50g max?

If you mean will respec costs be changed permanently, no. If you mean will the costs be reset or will you get a free respec when this goes live, possibly.

How about the cost of our second spec? If the respec fee starts out at 10c or 1s (I forgot what it starts as) shouldn’t our “main” respec fee be reset?

A respec should be a respec.

I’m pretty sure this has been answered before but I’ll ask anyways. In regards to hunters and exotic pets. If I spec into the 51 point talent and I go to switch to survival how will I change pets? You said you wanted it to be somewhat easy to switch between specs but nothing trivial. Will we have a second pet that is automatically summoned when we switch specs? What about the extra four points our pet’s talent trees have? How will those be taken away or replaced when changing specs?

We have a solution for pets, but we’re not ready to announce it yet. You’ll like it.

Are there any plans to make switching gear sets easier? Healers, tanks and dps roles usually carry more than one set of gear. It can take up a lot of bag space and can be rather annoying at times. Is there a way to have your gear automatically switch when you change specs?

Not automatically, but we’re aware of the issue and dual spec would be a really opportune time to examine it.

How do you think dual specs will affect addons that modify the action bars? It seems like it will be a hit and miss. The addons will either become broken or no harm, no foul and the addons work as intended.

I’m sure the addon authors will figure out how to make them work with the new system. Things can sometimes be a little rocky just following a patch if you use a lot of addons.

We haven’t finalized the design, because ideally we want to be able to get it on a PTR and have players try it out.

Our thought at the moment is that swapping specs (going from A to B) will truly be free in towns and possibly during the prep phase of PvP. In an instance it may cost a nominal fee (think reagent level). We want you to be able to do it when you want to do it, but we also don’t want to slow things down if everyone is constantly flipping spec from fight to fight. But if it’s free in town, then obviously it can’t be more of a burden out of town than just hearthing and being summoned back is or nobody will use the remote option.

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