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.

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.

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.

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