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.

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.

Jan. 27, 2009

Either way, we were destined to end up like this

Although probably not the “final” word on the subject, in the long (last time I checked it was up to 54 pages) thread I linked in the previous news update, Ghostcrawler came back today and said this:

We talked about it a great deal today and agreed that we probably over-nerfed BM. Marks is in a good spot and Survival might be too high once we look at the changes we are making to all other classes.

Our plan is to buff BM before Ulduar, but I can’t give you a timetable more detailed than that, and things could change for any number of reasons. We are unlikely to touch Steady Shot for the reasons I have mentioned before. We are more likely to look at Kindred Spirits and Serpents Swiftness again.

Again, huge caveats: Predicting changes we are discussing making but haven’t made yet is fraught with peril. I only wanted to address this issue because it caused a lot of consternation in the community.

I don’t mind admitting when we make a mistake in the hope that it builds our credibility in the community. This was one. It won’t be the last. :)

By the way, good hunters agree that SV is fine =P

They are comparing themselves to relative not absolute numbers.

Jan. 23, 2009

The worse the situation, the worse your jokes get

Sometimes it’s hard for me not to editorialize, as is the case today. This thread are the first responses we’ve received regarding the live changes to hunters in the latest patch, specifically to Beast Mastery and Marksmanship (from Ghostcrawler).

In order to lend any weight to statements such as “You nerfed our other 2 trees to oblivion,” you are going to have to provide numbers comparing the 3 specs and they are going to have to be numbers that a reasonable amount of other players believe are reasonable numbers.

Real numbers are much more compelling than what spreadsheets estimate. Multiple bosses are more compelling that combat dummies.

Currently we are seeing a lot of “Someone smart posted some numbers showing Survival was the best dps spec, so I went that spec.” We need to see a lot more players trying out different builds and strategies. Declarations that “I too adopted a cookie cutter spec” aren’t as compelling when you are taking about potential and effective dps.

More posts. Then.

Correct me if I’m wrong, GC, but didn’t you recently say that the devs don’t give much credibility to player-supplied data because you guys “have access to the real data from realms”?

Sometimes players post numbers and then say “There. Go fix it.” It of course doesn’t work that way. But numbers generated from the community are always very useful.

Note that I didn’t say we lacked hard evidence. I said that posts saying “BM and MM are broken,” without much proof aren’t very useful. Yes, I know I can go over and read EJ’s forums. I do that a lot. Posts that say “Go look at EJ’s numbers” aren’t that useful either.

What I am hoping to see is someone say perhaps “BM is 1000 dps lower than SV” so that maybe someone else can come in and say “Um, those numbers look suspicious to me” or “I get that on some fights but not on others.” Slowly some kind of consensus can be arrived at. Just quoting another player’s numbers over and over doesn’t provide the same kind of data set.

every hunter and their mother called that MM and BM would be uncompetitive

From my POV it was more like some smart theorycrafters (possibly even on EJ) came up with some numbers and then a lot of people adopted those as fact and started echoing that MM and BM would be uncompetitive. I don’t feel that the community has really had enough time with the changes to figure out the nuances of specs that many people had abandoned for a long time. I still see discussions about whether raptors or wasps (or moths!?) provide the most dps.

From what we can tell, SV and MM are pretty close. SV may be slightly higher, but not by hundreds of dps. Affliction and Destro aren’t at the same exact number but you still see both in raids (for the time being). MM also brings a really nice group buff (Trueshot Aura) while SV provides Replenishment, and we take those into consideration.

BM is an easier spec to play. We tend to reward specs that are a little tougher to play if played very well with higher dps. Affliction and Mutilate are good examples, though we went overboard with Mutilate’s dominance over other specs. If BM was simpler and provided the same or higher dps, then you would see 95% BM hunters (which, no suprise, is exactly what we had). Some players will try SV or MM, decide it’s not for them and go back to BM. If they couldn’t make SV work, then their dps may be just fine as BM (or else the drop will be so low that they don’t care). At issue is how much lower BM can be than MM and SV before it isn’t worth spec’ing into. Combat for rogues is too far below Assassination so that you take too big a hit if you choose to opt out of the more demanding Mutilate play style. Make sense?

Again I will offer that for 95% of players out there, your individual skill and gear are going to have more effect than your spec. Just because very good hunters (or spreadsheets) come up with the highest possible dps for Survivial, does not mean that your dps will improve as Survival or that you cannot improve your dps as Marks or BM. I know it’s a tradition in WoW to adopt cookie-cutter specs, and to some extent we’ll never get away from that. But don’t absolve yourself of the responsibility for trying to maximize your dps. When the community suddenly shifts, it’s because some smart player experimented with a new build and made that work.

Oh man. Lots more posts.

First, some of you need to chill. I answered some questions players had been asking. If you don’t like my answers, you are welcome to say that. However, if you yell and scream and insult us, you are going to be banned. Several of the low level alts with a history of trolling have been banned permanently.

You all have asked a lot of questions and I can’t answer them all, but here are some.

GC I find it amazing that with all the tools you have at your disposal that you cannot pull the data from the system yourself.

You’re not reading what I am saying. Yes, of course we can do that. And we do.

My post was essentially that saying “Everyone knows SV is the hunter spec and BM and MM are garbage” is not a useful post. It probably isn’t even true. There have been several posts asking why I didn’t respond to threads with this as their thesis. I am attempting to explain why.

Is it honestly your contention that we all just copy and paste a fotm spec from EJ without thinking or testing various ideas out?

Do you really think that those of us who have played this class for years have so little understanding of the mechnics that we are just little robot followers who pick specs based not on facts, but on fashion?

No, of course not. My message was to those players that are doing that however. A quick glance at the forums will reveal a lot of them.

Wow, I see a lot of unhappy PAYING customers in this thread. As a former software customer service rep myself I would just like to make note here that it’s a very, very bad idea to even remotely insinuate that it may these PAYING customers’ own fault that they’re unhappy.

This is a tired argument and the kind of thing that will get you banned. Yes, of course we care about players being happy. That is why I spend so much time on these forums. Buffing players just because they ask for it will no doubt make them very happy. It will also make all of the other classes rather unhappy.

Thing’s like this have been posted to death both here, on the PTR forum, and EJ

Okay, but if you have posted the numbers to death already and don’t want to post any more, what exactly is the purpose of constantly launching new threads on the topic? I hope it isn’t just to get a blue response. Flooding the forums with the same topic is just going to make it harder for anyone to find information.

How did we arrive there? Especially from here a point where every hunter tree had a valuable use:
* low-to-mid rated arena, or competitive PVE damage? Beast
* high rated arena? Marks
* mana efficiency and a great raid buff? Survival

I’m telling you that nearly every hunter was BM. You can say that all the specs were viable before the recent patch, but the fact is that very few players were trying the others, especially Survival.

Hunters have 3 dps trees, just like DKs. Out of the 3 trees, DKs have a LOT of viable specs (2H Frost, Frost DRM/BotN IT spam, Blood, 32/39, 44/27, unholy). Not all of these specs are optimal, but you wont see a spec beating the crap out of the others.

Hunters got one spec. And they’re doing well by exploiting a clunky trap dance “feature”. Where are the hunter hybrid specs? Do devs seriously think none have spawned because hunters are too friggin dense? Hunters are doing what they can with the talents they got.

Okay, I think this is the disconnect. This is exactly what we want – 3 viable specs. We don’t want BM to be the noob spec that serious players don’t use. We also don’t want it to be the spec that every hunter uses, which I agree is where it has been for some time.

My comment was that BM can’t be both easier to play and do more dps. We can debate whether or not BM is actually easier to play, but that is a slightly different discussion. Perhaps it is more fair to say that even though skilled BMs can squeeze even more dps out of their attacks, a BM player who did nothing but Steady Shot and use the pet could still do very high dps, which is not what we want.

If BM becomes too unpopular with these changes, if it becomes no longer viable in PvE or PvP, then we will fix it. The problem was that for a long time BM was the only PvE spec and it had increasingly become the leveling and PvP spec too.

I think some of my Ulduar comments have been taken out of context or misunderstood. We are making some changes to hunters. Some of them are pretty cool. We will have to rebalance many of the attacks at that time. For example, we are likely to add additional pet talents that increase dps so that the 4 bonus points from BM 51 will inflate player dps overall.

Jan. 20, 2009

3.0.8

So it’s live, finally. Here’s a recap of the patch notes, as they relate to hunters.

Racial restrictions on mounts have now been lifted. Night Elves on mechanostriders? Tauren on raptors? You’re not seeing things.
Racial Resistances: These can now be mitigated against by gaining additional chance to hit.
Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.
All Silence spells now have diminishing returns. This includes: Arcane Torrent, Garrote silence effect, Improved Counterspell effect, Improved Kick effect, Silence, Gag Order, Silencing Shot, Spell Lock, and Strangulate.
We have added over 60 new graveyards to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms.
The run speed in spirit form has been increased by 50%. Night Elves in Wisp form will now move at a bonus 75% speed.
Reputation rewarded for killing mobs will no longer automatically deprecate. This means trivial mobs will continue to give out their full amounts of reputation on kill for the majority of cases in the game (level 70 creatures in Stratholme, for example, will continue to award the full amount of rep to level 80 players seeking to boost their Argent Dawn faction).
Vehicles can now be affected by most player spells, except CC, snares and roots.
Arena rating requirements for all Deadly Gladiator’s Arena items have been reduced by 100.
Arena, Ring of Valor: The small pillars will now rise immediately once the arena begins.
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!
Hunter Aspects are now off the Global Cooldown again. They still have a shared 1 second cooldown.
All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.
Arcane Shot: Mana cost lowered to match the cost of Steady Shot.
Aspect of the Wild – This aspect is now raid-wide.
Call of the Wild: The benefit from this pet talent now applies to only the Hunter and their own pet.
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 seconds and has a 90 second cooldown.
Explosive Shot: Damage increased substantially, and additional scaling added to compensate Survival Hunters for the decrease in power of Steady Shot. No longer deals damage to secondary targets.
Ferocious Inspiration: This talent now also increase the damage the Hunter does with Arcane Shot by 3/6/9%.
Improved Tracking(Survival): This talent has been slightly re-designed. Now reads: While tracking Beasts, Demons, Dragonkin, Elementals, Giants, Humanoids and Undead, all ranged damage done to those types is increased by 1/2/3/4/5%.
Kill Shot – Cooldown reduced to 15 seconds, down from 35 sec.
Kindred Spirits: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
Lock and Load: Now has a 30 second cooldown.
Readiness: No longer resets the cooldown on Bestial Wrath.
Steady Shot: Now gains 10% of attack power as damage instead of 20%.
Serpent’s Swiftness: This talent now grants only 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet. The hunter attack speed bonus is unchanged.
Tranquilizing Shot (Hunter): Cooldown increased to 8 sec, up from 6. Mana cost reduced to 8%, down from 12%.
Unleashed Fury: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
Viper Sting: Now drains a percentage of maximum mana.
Volley: The damage has been reduced on all ranks by approximately 30% (including attack power scaling).
The coefficient of Rake (Cat) and Scorpid Poison (Scorpid) has been lowered.
Rake: This hunter pet ability has had its damage adjusted to prevent unreasonable scaling with attack power.
Scorpid Poison: No longer stacks. The damage has been adjusted to prevent unreasonable scaling with attack power.
Spirit Strike (hunter pet ability) now has an initial attack (which can crit) and then a single dot. Damage overall is higher.
A recipe for the incredible Fish Feast can now be purchased for Dalaran Cooking Awards.
A new recipe for Worg Tartare is now available for purchase with Dalaran Cooking Awards. This delicacy imbues hit rating and Stamina upon those brave enough to eat it.
Many high level enchantment recipes have had the amount of Infinite Dust and Greater Cosmic Essence requirements significantly reduced, but with Dream Shards being added to them.
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 Beatstick, Saronite Spellblade, Saronite Shiv, Savage Cobalt Slicer, Notched Cobalt War Axe, Sturdy Cobalt Quickblade, Cobalt Tenderizer.
Reduced the stats on the Savage Cobalt Slicer to match the weapon’s level.
Glyph of Deterrence: Now -10 seconds instead of -20.
Racial, Berserking: Can now be used properly while under the affects of Hand of Protection.
Racial, Shadowmeld: This ability will now properly restore threat when it is canceled. In addition, it will correctly remove a player from combat if it is active when that player is the last person left alive that the creature hates. This ability is now also unusable while affected by Faerie Fire.
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 turn 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.
Gronnstalker Set: The Aspect of Viper bonus from this set has been changed to work correctly with the redesigned Aspect of the Viper.

Obviously, this isn’t comprehensive – the patch notes never contain everything. From the European forums, Blizzard poster Vaneras notes:

Some Hunter aspects behave as if they still have a global cooldown. The design is that Hunter Aspects should not be on the GCD.

Also, from a few days ago, from Ghostcrawler.

It’s nearly impossible to make an AI-controlled pet smart enough to always do the right things especially in encounters as complicated as ours. We try to work around that by letting the pet survive when it does the wrong thing (staying out during Saph deep breaths for example).

It may be that for specs like BM (and Demonology) that the pet just too high a percent of overall damage. When the pet does well, you do very well, but when the pet suffers, you suffer too much as well, so that your success hinges a lot more on encounter design. If we nerfed the pet damage, we would buff the character’s of course.

Another idea some players have advocated lately is to prevent the pet from getting buffed at all, but let it scale better from buffs on the player. This removes some of the inconsistencies where the pet can’t benefit from buffs properly. We don’t currently have the technology to do that, but it is something we are exploring.

We think the ultimate solution to feedback about BM-51 is just to add more talents to the pet talent trees so that the bonus 4 talent points can improve pet dps by an amount equivalent to the cost of the hunter talent point. The exotic pets themselves would be more of window-dressing, perhaps with more utility from some of their special abilities.

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