Feb. 1, 2010

Er... weapon not working!

Lack of hunter 2h’ers and 1h’ers? Of course there is.

I think the melee weapon for hunters isn’t that important and is more of a stat stick, which is why something like Zod’s was put on the second boss in 25 player mode and that other bone bow in 10 player mode so there are upgrades a lot of raiders have a shot at each week.

Druids may have a bigger reason to complain but as the Plagueworks and Crimson Halls become easier over time they will have several options each week.

Yes, but stats are stats. I can’t slap on Zod’s Repeating Crossbow and then wear full T7 and expect to put out ICC DPS.

And it’s a bit of an off-handed gesture to say “well, all your melee DPS will have their full weapon loadout upgraded to 264 pugging the first 4 bosses of the instance – but you hunters have to wait for your stat sticks until we implement the “welfare” buff.”

There are several one handers with agility that come from the first four bosses and I’ve seen several hunters dual wielding them now.

And I never said you’d have to wait for the welfare buff, that is up to you and your guild/raiding group’s progression, but there are a lot of people who are defeating at least the initial bosses in the new wings now.

Jan. 29, 2010

Trinket Itemization and Philosophy and...

Moar trinkets!

Our raid item philosophy has evolved a lot since vanilla. The tier sets were once considered a badge of honor. Someone stalking around (or mailbox afking) with their full set bonus might as well have been sporting a legendary item. These days, we virtually guarantee that any player with an interest in raiding is going to be able to complete at least the lowest level version of their set with just a minimal level of persistence. This ultimately serves as a powerful reward mechanism and is in line with our philosophy of letting more players actually see the content.

This design though also has its risks. One of the big ones is that item progression becomes very predictable and deterministic. Imagine (just as an example) a model where all bosses drop emblems and every item you want is for sale. That may sound cool for a few weeks, until you hit the point that without any kind of random element to progression that you can calculate to the day/week at which you will finish gearing up your character. The excitement of what the boss drops would be gone and we feel this would end up making the purpose of clearing new content very underwhelming.

Trinkets are really the one item (weapons are to a lesser extent) that we use to try and capture that old slot machine feel from the classic Molten Core days. Yes, completely random loot with huge loot tables can be frustrating but we are pretty far from being completely random these days. Trinkets however are still somewhat random, they can be hard to acquire, and there is often a lot of competition for them.

Trinkets are also tricky to design because we don’t want them to be just a pile of stats like other items. We generally want them to be unique by having a random proc or an on-use ability or something similar. These types of things are always trickier to balance, but this is also what makes them interesting. We also don’t necessarily want every trinket to be a guaranteed upgrade just because the item level is higher. Knowing what works or doesn’t work for your particular character and play style is one of the ways players have to demonstrate their mastery of the game.

There are some aspects of trinkets for which we think we can do better. For example, it’s annoying when a superior item is on a lower tier of content to where you feel like you have to argue with your guild to go back and farm easy bosses or run a 10 player version when everyone else wants to do 25. Many of the trinkets probably represent too big a dps (or equivalent) jump given how difficult it can be to acquire them. It’s also easy for us to fall into a rut of offering basically the same one every time (often because we know players like it) rather than experimenting with different things. We like to try new things to keep gear interesting for players as we know some have been evaluating trinkets for over five years now.

We also probably just need to drop more of them. That doesn’t mean they should be trivial to acquire, but when say a caster only has 2 good options in Ulduar and 1 requires a hard mode, then there is going to be ton of competition when they do drop. We know it’s rough when the trinket you have been wanting finally drops and you have to roll against 10 other people for it. Having more trinkets would mean more variety, which means players may want different ones and ultimately will be a little more different from their friends/guildmates.

A reminder about the upcoming gear changes in Cataclysm (hands off our mail, plate wearers!)

The original post was directed at the plate wearers because a mail-based class who is wearing leather going into Cataclysm won’t be at the same disadvantage as a plate-based class who is wearing leather or mail will be.

For an enhancement shaman or hunter, the mail will lose its Intellect, but the physical dps mail and leather will both have Agility that enhancement shaman and hunters want. However, we are also going to offer a small additional incentive for characters to wear “their” armor so it will encourage shaman and hunters to wear mail over leather, balance druids to want leather over cloth, holy paladins to prefer plate, etc.

We realize everyone will have lots of questions about what will happen to their gear, and we will eventually share all of that with you. We just wanted to post this reminder for plate wearers who are currently after leather and/or mail items to let them they will really not want it when we convert to the next expansion.

Part of the Cataclysm re-itemization will be to change all of the old (pre-Wrath of the Lich King) items, which will include doing things like actually having low level balance druid leather or holy paladin plate.

Venom compiled a list of player talent specs represented in the top Putricide kills. 0 BM hunters wut! Unpossible.

I think one of the most interesting aspects is to look at those classes where one spec is generally perceived to be “the best.”

For rogues, locks and hunters there are some players who choose the “second” spec even at a presumed dps loss. For mages, nearly all go Arcane even though Fire’s damage really isn’t that bad. (What I mean is that I don’t think you can argue Combat, Survival and Destruction all trump Fire to explain why there are more of those specs on this fight). In all four cases, the third spec is pretty dead. (We’ll assume the Demo locks are mostly there for DP, which as I’ve said before is not ideal).

Keep the encounter in mind, too. Putricide is a fight where standing still is heavily penalized, yet healing is also not as much of a bottleneck as is damage. We see a lot of groups have a healer go dps for example, which might boost e.g. the Elemental and Shadow numbers just for this fight.

Hopefully I won’t derail this thread by posting, because I find these discussions fascinating.

Most of the thread consists of mage derailment though.

Jan. 22, 2010

Whew! This... is going on forever!

Another update about whether or not the ammo changes are still planned for hunters sometime in the future (TLDR: yes).

We haven’t announced the Cataclysm ammo change yet, except to say that it will no longer be a consumable.

The simplest solution is certainly that ammo goes away and guns, bows and crossbows just don’t ever run out of ammo. More complicated features might be more exciting as you say, but have potential downsides too. Applying fire to your arrows sounds cool, but is ultimately any more interesting than just having a “Fire Shot” ability. Do you really conceive of a lot of situations where you’d rather do Fire damage over physical damage? Having different kinds of arrows sounds interesting until you consider the delivery mechanism of having to “catch them all” through rare drops, badge vendors or the like. As you say, hunters do have a lot of buttons and a pet to manage, so I’m not sure they really need a whole additional mechanic to worry about.

Jan. 15, 2010

One does not do what I do and fear death

Twitter Developer Chat was today and there were some hunter questions answered (unlike the previous ones, where they tended to generally steer clear of class questions).

Can you please explain why Feign Death is still on the Spell Hit metric, especially in raids?

It’s a known issue, but just has to do with the way the spell is set up. Melee and ranged attacks mean a very specific thing to the game engine. We’re hoping to be able to clean up some of this with the Cataclysm overhaul.

You mentioned pet scaling being added for patch 3.3 but due to time constraints, was delayed. Will this be in the next patch?

We’ll try to do what we can. Technically it’s just more challenging than you might think. For Cataclysm, we have on our list that 100% of stats scale. If they don’t then certain stats just won’t be as valuable for pet classes. At the very least, we can do stuff like convert your X into damage for the pet so every stat is valuable. Getting everyone to scale with every stat better is a major goal for the class team for Cataclysm.

Will rogues/hunters ever be able to dual wield hand-crossbows or pistols?

The pistol idea for hunters gets suggested a lot. It could either be an alternate to the gun / bow / crosssbow or something they use for short-range attacks. Rogues probably have plenty of weapons at this point. :)

Are there any plans to fix the relative value of stats for certain specs? Eg.Strength being way better than Armor Penetration for Retribution Paladins or Armor Penetration being way better than Haste for Marksmanship Hunters.

For Cataclysm, absolutely. We’ll do what we can in the meantime, but it’s cruel to make players re-gear when they’re halfway through a new raid tier.

Jan. 12, 2010

They look like they have the mange

Beastcleave triumphant at MLG Orlando. But anything involving hunters succeeding at PvP, you know there’s going to be crying somewhere.

I don’t think this is a clothie issue at all. In fact, appropriate use of Ice Block and Demonic Circle defensively made a big difference.

I also don’t want to discount the skill of those players at all. Make no mistake – these are very good players. While some of the matches were over very quickly, I think you’re dramatically underestimating things if you think anyone would have performed the same with same setup.

That said, coordinated damage (from the BM + the shaman’s wolves for example) is just really high, and in some sense it has to be or everyone will just be healed again. We need to see more matches where everyone in the game is playing in a wounded state. You need to be able to wear someone down (without just wearing the mana of the healers down). Health just needs to be higher for everyone across the board, even in PvE, and healing power has to be lower. The buckets need time to fill and drain instead of being full or empty 90% of the time.

I also think it’s cool to see warlocks, hunters, shaman, paladins, druids and whatever classes I forgot that saw a lot of use at MLG Orlando, besides just RMP. Ideally those other comps would use a bit more CC (even if it’s not quite at the RMP level) and there would be some matches that would last longer. The announcers did a good job of the play by play, but sometimes there just weren’t enough plays to really have a sense of the kind of back and forth that make competitive sports interesting.

TKA Something