Jan. 16, 2009

That's just the way it goes, that's life

The official notes have been been adjusted to reflect some of what we’ve been talking about over the last week.

Hunter Aspects are now off the Global Cooldown again. They still have a shared 1 second cooldown.
Ferocious Inspiration: This talent now also increase the damage the Hunter does with Arcane Shot by 3/6/9%.
Lock and Load: Now has a 30 second cooldown.
Tranquilizing Shot (Hunter): Cooldown increased to 8 sec, up from 6. Mana cost reduced to 8%, down from 12%.
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.
Gronnstalker Set: The Aspect of Viper bonus from this set has been changed to work correctly with the redesigned Aspect of the Viper.

Pet buffing is still being looked at, although this response was to a shaman (damn their ghost wolves!).

Yes, I have tried to post several times that the way pets receive buffs from their masters is inconsistent. We need to take a holistic look at stats, especially those like hit, spell pen and haste. It doesn’t make sense, for example, for a pet to receive a percentage of your spell hit. Where are they ever going to get the remainder of their hit from?

Many classes have pets now, and those classes have different stats to provide to those pets. While locks and hunters (and DKs to a lesser extent) are the most dependent on having a good system in place, the whole paradigm just needs to be reexamined. It is on the list.

And I’m behind a few days with this big response from Ghostcrawler about hunter stuffs.

Players generally do a great job generating numbers with what they have. They don’t always have the most up to date numbers, and we don’t make a herculean effort to get numbers to them. PTRs are our best shot, but even they can lag behind our most current builds.

As a most recent example, Elemental shamans were perplexed by why their numbers were different from ours and there was some amount of shouting that we didn’t know what we were talking about and why couldn’t we just accept the community’s numbers and balance around those? It turned out that the shamans had misunderstood the way a talent worked (almost certainly because of unclear statements on my part) and that when they were able to test on the PTR, their numbers were close to what we predicted. Happy ending.

I don’t know know why the EJ hunter numbers you cited don’t match ours. It would take a great deal of time for us to dig through all the numbers that we are presented with to understand where the disagreements occur. In this case I suspect it is because Explosive Shot does less damage now than it does on the PTR, but I don’t know. Survival is a miniscule percentage of total hunters out there, so we really won’t mind them getting a significant bump, but it isn’t our intent that they are far and away the highest dps hunter spec (BM shouldn’t be either).

We do our tests under a variety of conditions, and fully raid buffed is certainly one of them.

The Ulduar comment I made has been widely misinterpreted, but I made it because so many players were using the argument “We may be okay now, but we won’t scale.” While some players understand “scaling” perfectly well, it also gets thrown around a lot by less-informed players as the generic reason for why something fails (“RNG” occupies that niche on the PvP side of things sometimes). In the hunter case, it may be that they do scale just fine but it is irrelevant because we are rebalancing hunters for 3.1.

GC while im excited that your changing us for 3.1 that is months away. Will you be inclined to hotfix us if you see Live dmg output is extremely low?

Yes. We are even trying to build in more hooks when we do things like this so we can do changes if needed.

Also GC consider that there is a reason why Survival is not played by most hunters. The mechanics for the tree feel too clunky and with the addition of 30 sec CD to LnL that isn’t represented on the UI, the tree has become extremely clunky.

Fair enough. Just buffing dps isn’t always enough to change something from not fun to fun. There are however some hunters even in this thread who want to play Survival and just can’t justify it at the moment.

Cunning pets overall just are a waste of code at this point. Roar of Recovery is useful, but at a 6min cooldown makes it a drop in the bucket.

While 400 dps is low, you are making the assumption that anything that isn’t a raiding pet is a waste of code. Those pets weren’t intended to be for raiding – that’s what Ferocity pets are for. Thanks for all of the numbers though, Neruse.

Sorry we’re a bit panicky … we’re all thinking of Ret Pally’s back in Beta and how you didn’t listen then when folks said they were OP and umm … they were?

Sure, but the Ret pallies said they weren’t and were really upset with the magnitude of the nerfs (which turned out, I think, to be on target or even a little light). I understand what you’re trying to say, but players can be very selective about when we’re supposed to listen to them or not.

On LnL, we’re still messing with the specifics on it. It’s too early to comment until we have something we’re happy with.

Jan. 10, 2009

UNdocumented changes

As you know, the posted Patch Notes do not always correspond with the most recent information (obviously there’s been more than a few reported changes than the notes now demonstrate). Here are some further undocumented changes – which, remember, may or may not actually be live when the patch hits. Everything is still subject to change.

Ferocious Inspiration now also increase the damage of Arcane Shot by 3/6/9%
Lock and Load now has a 30 seconds cooldown.
Explosive shot damage has been slightly decreased and now deal {RAP*0.16+428} – {RAP*0.16+428} Fire damage at level 80. (Down from {RAP*0.18+476} – {RAP*0.18+476})
Improved Stings now reduces the chance your Sting damage over time effects will be dispelled by 10/20/30%.
Spirit Strike (Spirit Beast) damage has been decreased and now Burns the enemy for 49 to 65 Arcane damage and an additional 49 to 65 damage over 6 sec at max rank.
Rake (Cat) damage has been increased, now deals 47-67 bleed damage and an additional 19-25 damage over 9 seconds at max rank.
Scorpid Poison damage has been increased from 45 to 100 Nature damage over 10 sec for the last rank.

And, regarding Spirit Beasts and Prowl:

We fixed this bug. Prowl was designed to work with cats, so it wasn’t set up to look for ranged, non-physical attacks. Spirit Beasts have gotten a lot of love, and we certainly run the risk that they will feel like mandatory pets now. We’ll see.

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.

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.

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