Dec. 11, 2008

PTR, PDQ

PTR patch notes are up and available (downloading the client as we speak). Obviously, some of this isn’t news but here you go.

  • Achievement: The Loremaster of Kalimdor Achievement has had its quest amount reduced.
  • Racial restrictions on mounts have now been lifted. Night elves on mechanostrider? Tauren on raptor? You’re not seeing things.
  • Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.
  • Wintergrasp Commendations can now also be purchased for the low low price of 9 Wintergrasp Marks of Honor. Players can visit their respective Wintergrasp vendors and put those Marks of Honor to use!
  • Aspect of the Wild – This aspect is now raid-wide.
  • Deterrence: Design changed to grant 100% parry and 100% chance to “deflect” spells coming from the front, but prevents the Hunter from attacking. Lasts 5 sec. 60 sec. cooldown.
  • Kill Shot – Cooldown reduced to 15 seconds, down from 35 sec.
  • Steady Shot: Now gains 10% of attack power as damage instead of 20%.
  • Viper Sting: Now drains a percentage of maximum mana.
  • The daily quest, “Shoot 'Em Up” now only requires 15 Jotunheim Proto-Drakes to be shot down, down from 20. As well, the harpoon now only costs 5 energy to shoot, down from 10.
  • Shoveltusk Meat obtained during the quest, “Shoveltusk Soup Again?” is now correctly flagged as a quest item with no sell price.
  • Obsidian Sanctum: Players will now be affected by Twilight Residue when they leave the Twilight Realm. Twilight Residue grants immunity to Fire and Shadow damage for a few seconds.
  • The following crafted weapons have had their stats adjusted to properly reflect their intended power: Corroded Saronite Edge, Corroded Saronite Woundbringer, Cudgel of Saronite Justice, Furious Saronite Beaststick, Saronite Spellblade, Saronite Shiv, Savage Cobalt Slicer, Notched Cobalt War Axe, Sturdy Cobalt Quickblade, Cobalt Tenderizer
  • Players can now open clams while riding a vehicle, sitting, mounted, stealthed, and invisible.
  • Reduced the stats on the Savage Cobalt Slicer to match the weapon’s level.

Dec. 10, 2008

But the second mouse gets the cheese

Ghostcrawler made this comment regarding why the hunter changes are being done all at once rather than in smaller incremental stages:

When we make changes, we prefer to make enough changes to actually fix the problem so we can move on. There are a lot of different aspects of the game we want to touch so we’d rather not still be dealing with hunter dps imabalance months from now.

I admit when we make mistakes in our numbers. But you shouldn’t turn that into our numbers never being close to the mark. Lack of perfection does not translate into a total mess.

Another reason we like the Steady Shot change is it puts more emphasis on the instant and other hunter shots. Steady is a good bread and butter ability but it’s not much more interesting than auto shot. We’d like to see Aimed Shot, Multi Shot, Arcane Shot and other abilities be what the player focuses on. When you get such a big chunk of damage from auto + steady, it makes those other attacks feel puny and the fact you have to use them feel annoying.

Dec. 10, 2008

Posts with nothing but QQ aren't helpful

Obviously this isn’t the last we’re going to hear about the upcoming hunter changes, if and when they do all go live.

I did say these are not all the hunter changes we’re working on. Some we haven’t quite worked out yet and others (one exciting one in particular concerning ammo) won’t be ready until Ulduar or so.

We think MM was too high and BM was way too high. Survival is probably a little low. We are looking at buffing Survival, possibly through Explosive Shot, but we haven’t finalized that yet.

The Deterrence change is defintely something we’ll need to see in action on the PTR.

I don’t want to do a disservice to all the good PvP feedback by attempting to boil it down too much. However, in general a lot of hunters were concerned about being able to do damage as much as they were concerned about being able to survive damage. We don’t expect the Deterrence change to solve the former problem obviously. We’re still working on that one, but we wanted to go ahead and announce what changes we have now so that you guys can be chewing on them.

Nerfing classes is never fun. It means that our initial tests and estimates didn’t play out in the real world, which is a failing on our part, not anything the players did wrong. While buffing is a lot more fun, we think we’d get to crazy land too quickly by trying to make current BM dps the new benchmark. That would mean touching virtually every other class and spec as well as many encounters. While it might produce more positive PR in the short-term, it’s a ton more work in the long-term that we would rather spend on new content or other problem areas.

Also, the sky is not falling. We’re posting here so we can get feedback. Threats of rerolling or that sort of melodrama aren’t really giving us any information we need. I can understand while you might want to vent a little bit, but posts with nothing but QQ aren’t helpful.

Dec. 9, 2008

I MUST find a way to keep Christmas from coming!

It’s been said that history always ends up repeating itself. This proves fairly true for hunters – we were the first to be changed up in Burning Crusade and (okay, paladins might have beaten us a bit to the punch this time, but it’s still less than a month into the expansion) Ghostcrawler announced today the following changes to Hunters:

Hunters of all specs, and particularly Beastmaster, are doing too much damage in PvE.

We tested this a lot internally in beta and knew hunters were high but we hoped other classes would be able to catch up in a way they have as yet been unable to do. We want to be careful not to hurt hunter dps too much in PvP, so we’re taking most of the damage out of Steady Shot and Volley. Beastmaster hunters are in addition losing some of their pet dps. We still want BMs to have the best pets, but pet dps numbers are a little high at the moment. We are also still concerned about hunter survivability in PvP and taking the opportunity to jazz up Deterrence into something that looks and plays a little more interesting.

These are not all of the changes we are working on for hunters, but those changes we feel are ready for testing. We hope to get these changes up on the PTR so players will have a chance to test them out and respond before they go live.

1) Steady Shot – now only gains 10% of attack power as damage (down from 20%).
2) Volley – reduced the damage by about 30% for all ranks. Note that AE damage from many classes is very high right now and we are looking at all of them. Volley in particular had reached the point where some hunters were using it to the exclusion of most other attacks.
3) Readiness – no longer affects the cooldown of Bestial Wrath.
4) Deterrence – has been completely overhauled. It now allows you to deflect 100% of incoming melee or spell damage for 5 seconds, but prevents you from attacking while active. You still must be facing the attacker to deflect the damage (this is a limitation we are trying and might end up removing). 60 sec cooldown.
5) Kill Shot – cooldown reduced to 15 sec (from 35 sec).
6) Kindred Spirits – now only grants 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
7) Serpent’s Swiftness – now only grants 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet. (EDIT: Still grants the current bonus to the hunter.)
8) All hunter pet abilities with a cooldown longer than 30 sec have been moved off the global cooldown.
9) Growl— threat generation increased by 20% (same for Voidwalker Torment).
10) Call of the Wild – now benefits only the hunter and his or her pet.
11) Rake and Scorpid Poison – slightly nerfed to bring them into line with other pet abilities.
12) Spirit Strike – reduced the period on the dot so it will work better with Longevity.
Improved Tracking – now benefits damage to all included creature types as long as you are tracking one of them. You don’t have to swap around what you are tracking as much.
13) Aspect of the Wild – now raid-wide.

EDIT: The “only” on Serpent’s Swiftness meant 10% pet attack speed instead of 20%. The hunter bonus is unchanged.

Thankfully, this will be on the PTR first so please PLEASE do test out these changes and provide feedback!

Nov. 25, 2008

Hunter Arena issues

Ghostcrawler has started a thread on the official Blizzard forums regarding Hunter Arena issues.

Because it is so difficult to get intelligent discussion on this topic, I am creating this new thread.

It will be heavily moderated.

You don’t have to play a hunter to post here. But I am only interested in a discussion of mechanics, problems, ideas and solutions.

This is not a place to request a massive overhaul of talents. This is not a place for your 5 page manifesto on how to redesign the class. This is not a place to whine about past neglect or how Blizzard doesn’t understand or care about class. This is not a place to declare hunters are OP and how we should pay attention to a different class.

Please stay focused. :)

Concise posts are more useful.

I know a lot of hunters aren’t really wanting to wait yet another Arena season before we drag ourselves out of the bottom spot in representation so it will be a topic to watch.

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