Nov. 12, 2008

Damn you, East Coast!

Two hours and counting until Wrath of the Lich King becomes available (for me, and the rest of the West Coast anyway!). Things around TKA Something will obviously be quiet over the next week or so while I madly level to 80 – glad I got my meandering out of my system during the Beta, that was some leisurely leveling, nothing like release will be.

I’d mention that the site has undergone a new look but, well – you see that it has. Once I’m 80, I’ll be going back and putting in a few more bells and whistles, until then, well… see you in Northrend!

Oct. 30, 2008

Bye bye, Beta, bye bye

With the Wrath of the Lich King beta servers probably closing down in a few days, here are some (potentially) last words from Ghostcrawler:

I do want to mention that it is currently possible to exploit the fact that Aspects have no GCD — it is possible to benefit from Viper and another Aspect by rapidly swapping back and forth (which doesn’t make servers happy either by the way). Our concern of course is that all hunters feel like this power Aspect twisting becomes the right way to play.

If we can’t find another way around this, we might have to put Aspects back on the GCD or make the shared cooldown a lot longer than 1 sec. Other solutions (like Viper doesn’t kick in for 10 sec or whatever) also seem, well, bleh.

We’re hoping this isn’t as big a problem now that you don’t need to swap to Monkey immediately once you have Dragonhawk. But I did want you all to be aware of the problem.

Oct. 29, 2008

Chasing A-Me 01, er...

Looks like Loque’nahak will be remaining the lone spirit beast in the game once Wrath of the Lich King goes live and is available to Beast Mastery hunters who like their exotics very exotic. Our favorite crab, Ghostcrawler, had this to say about those frustrated with the long spawn time and competition on the Beta servers for him:

In case it’s not obvious, we added that creature and let it be tamable as a challenge for dedicated hunters. One of the things we hear from hunters often is that some of them liked the old-school gameplay of having to work really hard for a rare pet that would garner lots of attention. With so many new pets available, we didn’t think it would be a problem to have one that was relatively difficult to tame. He doesn’t provide a huge dps increase, so there shouldn’t be a need to tame him.

Keep in mind, also, that Loque’nahak is also part of the Northern Exposure Achievement. Obviously adding spirit beasts in the future isn’t outside the realm of possibility, as it’s been mentioned previously that including additional beasts or even adding new families is a much more streamlined process now, but until that happens, Har’koa’s mate remains the one and only available.

Oct. 22, 2008

Upcoming hunter changes. Again

From Ghostcrawler:

As I have suggested a few times, we are concerned that hunters of all 3 specs are doing damage that is clearly superior to other classes. While we’re trying to achieve closer parity among specs of all classes with regard to dps, and we want to particularly make sure that hunters, rogues, mages and locks are not left behind, we do think the hunters are too far ahead, particularly at 80, in good gear, when raid-buffed.

However, we have also tried to give hunters a substantial survivability boost in PvP and we don’t want to do anything that hurts them too much in PvP.

So here are changes you will most likely see soon:

1) Ranged attacks no longer benefit from the haste effects of Windfury Totem and Improved Icy Talons. This is a nerf to hunter white damage.

2) We are also improving the armor on level 83 raid bosses by 10%. This will be a nerf to the dps of any class that does physical damage. For classes that would slide behind with such a change, we’ll take steps to adjust them — though it probably isn’t as many as you think. The raid buff stacking overhaul was very beneficial to melee (and hunters). Sunder / Expose Armor alone can be a 20%+ dps increase, which is why we decided to attack the problem from this angle.

3) Now the armor change won’t affect PvP at all and the haste buff change will only have a marginal affect in BGs and only in Arena teams that include certain comps. However, in order to make sure we didn’t nerf hunters too much, we made two changes to Disengage. First, its cooldown dropped to 25 sec (from 30) which can be talented to 16. Second, it no longer requires a target, but does require you to be in combat. Now if someone closes to melee, you can leap back without having to select them first. We require you to be in combat though so we don’t see a lot of hunters bouncing around IF / Org or using it like Blink to goofily speed up travel.

Oct. 16, 2008

Boom Boom Ba

Some of the exotics might be fun, but the screen shaking boom that comes with them – less so. A fix is on the way though.

We are going to disable the screen shake once the pet is tamed.