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.
Nov. 20, 2008
PVE DPS
Doesn’t it figure – less than a week into Wrath of the Lich King and people are already picking on hunters and their position on the DPS meters in raids. Thank goodness for the Ghostcrawler 'Voice of Reason”.
Hunter pve dps is definitely something we’re keeping an eye on. It’s high and perhaps too high, but we need to see some more players raiding first.
We definitely don’t think it’s a good design to inflate a whole class in PvE if they are weak in PvP or vice versa. If hunters are weak in PvP, as many of the hunters suspect, then we want to handle that as a separate issue. A Steady Shot nerf for example, would have less impact on PvP than reducing dps across the board, and we would certainly be prepared to compensate hunters in other ways for PvP.
Again, we have not announced any changes. There is no hotfix incoming. We don’t think this is a hotfix worthy issue. Standard caveats to all that apply.
Nov. 18, 2008
Detour to Deterrence
Although I doubt we’d see this change for at least a month, it’s possible Deterrence will be changed down the line, which was touched on a few days ago.
With only a couple of exceptions, every change we made to hunters and every new talent we added were done to address specific concerns of players. You’re in fantastic shape for PvE and if you are indeed still too low in PvP as you suspect, then we’ll get that taken care of. We have a Deterrence idea we’re working on right now, but I don’t want to say any more until we’re farther along. One reason I don’t say as much about future plans as I could is players tend to get really upset if we change our minds or the implementation takes longer than we think. Somehow my mentioning “we’re working on it” gets turned into “broken promises” and then everyone gets their torches and pitchforks. :(
And, Camouflage is dead, gone and buried. So don’t even ask.
I can tell you when something is pointless. Arguing for Camo back is pointless — as I’ve said that’s just a problem with our vision for the class. Talking about PvP concerns is not. Yes, there is a terrible signal to noise ratio when you deal with player feedback, and for every gem we get there are plenty of people who think they can play and blame their failings on the class design (and the two aren’t always easy to tell apart without a lot of digging). But we still get a lot of good information and ideas by talking to the community too.
Nov. 17, 2008
Early to the Arena
A few comments from Ghostcrawler regarding our PVP and Arena viability.
Versus casters (mages):
We think survival against magic is a legit concern, and unfortunately gets overshadowed by (some) hunters concerns versus melee. We are discussing changing Deterrence.
Aspect of the Beast in, well – just Aspect of the Beast and its purpose.
We’re not sure what we’re going to do with Beast, but as you said, for now we basically consider the choice at 80 to be Dragonhawk vs. Viper.
Dismantle. Yes, we hate it.
I think discussion of this one would end up taking over the whole thread. Bottom line is we wanted to give rogues a cool new ability. Many of their new abilities for LK were very situational (though honestly this one is too).
Disengage, no it’s not supposed to remove snares (no, it really isn’t, trust me). But neither should you become the Six Million Dollar Man:
As I have explained before, the slow leap that occurs when snared is a bug. It shouldn’t remove the snare, but the leap itself should not be slow.
Survival. Not unfinished. Just perhaps not polished.
This issue is misunderstood a lot. In our minds nothing is finished. We always believe we can improve on every aspect of the game some more. If we really thought something was unfinished it, we wouldn’t ship it. I hope players don’t use our willingness to talk candidly about our future plans or things we’d like to change as ammo that we would ship something unfinished, or you’ll just find less of this talk in the future. There is more we want to do with Survival, but that isn’t the same thing as somehow giving you a half-baked tree.
Freezing Arrow.
Freezing Arrow is a way to remotely deploy traps. It is not intended to be an unavoidable, instant cast, long range, instant effect, 10 sec crowd control that you can reapply every 30 sec. I can understand why you or any class would want an ability that reliably and unpreventably takes a player out for 33% of their time though. :)
The trap change (where they don’t break instantly because of a few shots or a stray bite/claw) is still in the pipeline.
We still plan on implementing them the way that you want, but it will just take a little more time.
The overall Arena overview.
I have acknowledged that hunters were way too underpowered in Arenas for far too long. We don’t want to see that happen again. We made some changes to try and address that. I understand they are not the changes you wanted or would have made if our roles were reversed. :)
To name just a few examples, we think the hunter mana situation is in much better shape now, we think your base attacks are not so dependent on shot rotation mods or macros, and we think Disengage is a button worth pushing. We tried some Arena maps with fewer LOS-blocking elements and no safe starting rooms. We gave pets some cool abilities like Roar of Sacrifice and decent crowd control.
I know that the rest of this thread will be filled with counterarguments for why these are terrible ideas or won’t work for whatever reason. That is the way these things go, where you need to argue from your point of view. So ultimately, it is probably best if I just say we want hunters to be good in Arenas and are willing to make changes that perhaps we weren’t willing to make before to get to that point.
P.S. I have no problem with theorycrafting in general. It’s not a dirty word. I just always try to remind players that just because you see a ranked order of what dps every spec can do generated by someone’s spreadsheet (even if it was a very good spreadsheet) does not mean that will match reality.
And even if we might feel as if no one is listening. They’re listening.
We don’t at all brush off the opinions of beta hunters, or good or knowledgeable hunters in general. I want to make that very clear. I didn’t intend at all for my responses to be interpreted as QQ MOAR. We discuss these issues quite a bit. I replied to a couple of hunter posts today because I had at least two discussions at work where a fellow designer said almost verbatim “Hey, did you read that PvP hunter thread? I thought they made some good points.”
You should never interpret the lack of a blue response such as “Good idea — we’ll get that in right away,” to mean you’re being blown off.
Nov. 14, 2008
It's a guarantee
Although it still might take another season or so (or maybe not if we end up performing a bit better than previous seasons), hunters in Arena should expect to see some eventual improvements.
[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]Will we take steps to adjust hunters if they continue to be weak in Arenas? Yes. This is absolutely a concern of ours. To some extent my reputation is on the line here because I keep trying to assure players that we will make adjustments, and I know you’ll throw it back in my face if we don’t deliver. :) The game has only been out for a few days though, so it’s just premature to make sweeping changes yet. I realize some knowledgeable hunters are convinced the changes we made were not enough. At the end of the day though, it is us, not the players, who need to make decisions about game design. We will always listen to your feedback when making our decisions though.