Dec. 12, 2008
Mortal Shot and Explosive Shot buffs
That was the title of Ghostcrawler’s post anyway. But it was a typo (he said so, trust me! Nothing is being done to Mortal Shots, go away you pesky black helicopters!)
One of the concerns with nerfing Steady Shot was hurting the dps potential for Survival hunters. One of the opportunities with the nerf was to make other shots more attractive so that hunter dps wouldn’t be so much about auto + steady.
Here are two changes we are going to try on the PTR.
Explosive Shot — damage increased substantially (e.g. from 260 to 520 base at rank 4), and additional scaling added to compensate. No longer deals AE damage to other targets.
Arcane Shot — mana cost lowered to the cost of Steady Shot.
As to the few posts saying the AE component would be missed:
Adding the AE component back might make a decent glyph or something, but really we felt like hunters had options for AE and what we really needed to do was give Survival a button that really did some major damage.
These changes are NOT on the PTR yet – not sure when they will be. So copy your character, download the client and be ready, already!
Dec. 12, 2008
Arena tool or Arena TOOL
Even more regarding the re-working of Deterrence.
We built this ability primarily as an Arena tool. It isn’t going to help you much in a one-on-one situation. It will buy you time to get a heal or to have an ally deal with the player attacking you. You can also buy a few seconds of life in order to Disengage or the like.
The directional component is something we are trying. It may not fly and we’re prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out. We wanted the hunter to have to do something other than just pop immunity and run away, but we also realize we ask an awful lot of hunters in general so this just may be too much.
We are much less likely to remove the inability to attack. We’ve had trouble with defensive abilities being used offensively and don’t want to get into situations where the hunter lols at the melee who is up on top of him while he (the hunter) merrily takes shots at the healer.
One of the biggest reasons we wanted to change the spell in this way, though I understand it may not mean much to some of you, was to get a great visual in there of the hunter just parrying stuff right and left. It can look cool and it can be a visible indicator of what the hunter is doing rather than asking people to pay even more attention to tiny buff icons. It is hard to overestimate how much good art can help an ability feel cool.
Now long term, something we are going to explore a lot more is just plain juicing up hunter melee capabilities. You’ve got mail and you’ve even got some melee weapon strikes. If those were actually scary abilities, then a melee (or caster) class that closes with you risks taking a beating. The hunter could choose to flee or stand and fight. We’re not talking about giving hunters a viable melee option (like Survival has flirted with a couple of times). But imagine your melee damage was 80% of your ranged damage. Ranged would always be preferable, but melee would be a decent last resort rather than pretty pathetic (as it is now). I want to stress that this is a long-term change, not something you’ll see in the next patch or two, and I’ll be the first to suggest that it may not work out. But it is an idea we’re discussing.
Also, a few more changes filtering in from PTR.
- Glyph of Serpent Sting – Increases the duration of your Serpent Sting by 6 sec.
- Spirit Strike (Spirit Beast) now deals its damage over 6 seconds.
Dec. 11, 2008
3.0.8
The patch notes have been updated to include the following changes (I’m just going to re-list everything hunter related for the sake of completeness, with the other changes at the bottom of the list).
- All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.
- 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 sec. 60 sec. cooldown.
- 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.
- The coefficient of Rake (Cat) and Scorpid Venom (Scorpid) has been lowered.
- 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.
- Unleashed Fury: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
- Viper Sting: Now drains a percentage of maximum mana, draining 16% of mana over 8 sec (up to a maximum of 32% of the caster’s maximum mana).
- Volley: The damage has been reduced on all ranks by approximately 30% (including attack power scaling).
- The run speed in spirit form has been increased by 50%. Night Elves in Wisp form will now move at 75% speed.
- We have added over 60 new graveyards to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms.
- The Winds of the North has had its requirements changed. This achievement is now earned by getting Exalted with the Alliance Vanguard or Horde Expedition.
- Glyph of Deterrence: Now -10 seconds instead of -20.
- The Wintergrasp Aura should now properly update in all instances, transferring the buff when the zone control changes.
Coming as a surprise is the change to Unleashed Fury, which was not mentioned in Ghostcrawler’s original post regarding the upcoming hunter changes. And, of course, there are always some UNdocumented changes:
- Prowl (Rank 2) level requirement lowered from 40 to 30.
- Trap Mastery now only increases periodic damage done by Immolation and Explosive Trap.
- Marked for Death now also affects Arcane Shot.
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.
[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 57 58 59 [Next]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.