Aug. 14, 2008

New build

While I may not have a ticket to Blizzcon yet (I have hopes for the ticket lottery that was just announced, but maybe I should be playing Powerball instead?) I can at least console myself with the latest Wrath build. Here’s the comprehensive list of changes to date (some of these were mentioned previously but are now “official”).

• All pet families now have one unique ability. New abilities have been added for families such as bears and sporebats.
• Arcane Shot: No longer dispels magical effects.
• Aspects now no longer cost mana.
• Aspect of the Beast: Now increases your melee attack power by 10%.
• Avoidance, Dash / Dive and Cobra Reflexes are now pet talents instead of pet skills.
• Bite now has no cooldown, does the same damage and costs the same Focus as Claw, so works as a Focus dump.
• Clever Traps (Survival) has been renamed “Trap Mastery.”
• Concussive Barrage (Marksmanship) – Can now proc from Volley attacks.
• Counterattack: Damage increased by 20%, and now also scales with your attack power.
• Deterrence (Survival) – Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, and now also increases your chance to resist spells by 60%. Now has a new spell effect.
• Every hunter pet can learn Growl, Cower and either Bite or Claw (never both).
• Hunter pets can now learn talents in one of three trees depending on family. Pets gain talent points starting at level 20 and earn an extra talent point every 4 levels.
• If a hunter tames a pet that is more than five levels beneath their own level, the pet will then have their level increased to five levels beneath the hunter’s own level.
• Improved Feign Death (Survival): Now also reduces damage taken during Feign Death by 15/30%.
• Loyalty, Training Points and the hunter Beast Training button no longer exist. Hunter pets can now learn all skills at their level. They will get new ranks automatically as they gain levels.
• Master Tactician (Survival) – Chance to proc increased to 10%, up from 6%.
• Mongoose Bite: No longer requires you to dodge in order to use this ability.
• Monster Slaying (Survival) and Humanoid Slaying (Survival) has been combined into “Improved Tracking”.
• New Talent – Improved Tracking (Survival) – Increases all damage done to targets that are being tracked 1/2/3/4/5%.
• Savage Strikes: Now includes Counterattack.
• Steady Shot now uses ammo. In result, its bonus damage has been slightly reduced. Players can notice a damage increase based upon what ammo they use.
• Surefooted (Survival) now reduces the duration of movement impairing effects by 10/20/30% (instead of resist % chance).
• Tranquilizing Shot: Cooldown reduced to 15 seconds (down from 20) and now dispels Enrage and Magic effects.
• Trap Mastery (Survival) has been removed.
• Wing Clip: No longer does damage.
• Devilsaur Eye now increases your pet’s attack power for a short duration instead of increasing its critical strike chance. It also provides a small amount (+5) of passive Agility.

Another interesting thing to note is that you will no longer be able to raise weapon or defense skill on the servants in the Blasted Lands, at least come Wrath.

In other news on the Beta board, there were some additional significant announcements from Koraa:

We’ll be making Master’s Call and Deterrence both base.

I’ll be interested to see what gets put in those spots although I think we’re all mentally thinking, “If only it were Scatter Shot.”

In regards to the lack of viability of stings in a shot rotation:

Bumped up the coefficient for Serpent Sting. With the mana cost changes, I think it’s come out lower than what it was before too. The other stings I think are fine.

As to the lack of mount speed scaling in Animal Handler, compared to other classes with similar talents:

This talent will be changed in an upcoming build, I do agree it’s somewhat lackluster.

Why is Sniper training is where it is, why can’t Marksmanship get a little love?

Sniper Training is in Survival because Hawk Eye is in Survival. To be honest, you can make an argument for a lot of talents and spells to be in Marks instead of Survival. Survival needs to be about more than just traps and melee. An upcoming build will have a big Survival restructuring.

Some other stuff from your post….

- We’ll change Silencing Shot to be a proper interrupt (PvE). – Trueshot Aura will now be raid wide.

Wild Quiver, Rapid Recuperation are both changing in an upcoming build. Though, I like the design of those two talents and think they just need some tweaks.

And the biggest news of all, at least at the moment.

Big hunter push on the way, will be in the build after next.

I bet all these announcements are making you think to yourself – I wish I had a beta key too! Well, never fear, my hunter friends. TKA Something will be giving away a Beta key to one lucky person so you can test all these changes (and more!) yourself. Stay tuned for the announcement about how to enter this coming Friday (08/15/08).

Aug. 11, 2008

Add another ticket and attendee

While I wait for the Blizzard store to process my Blizzcon ticket purchase, let’s get everyone caught up to date with the Beta news. Two new Exotics added this most recent build – worms and silithids. That brings the total number of Exotics to four (devilsaur and chimera being the others). The 51 point talent has also had its NYI tag removed and pets do gain the 5 extra talent points. Here are some of the blue responses we’ve received in response to various comments/concerns/questions from both Koraa and Ghostwalker.

Regarding the mana cost of some of our higher ability ranks:

We’d like to note that we are currently in the process of revamping the mana cost of new spells, abilities and the new ranks of spells and abilities in the expansion. We are aware players feel the mana cost of certain abilities is too high, and we agree. Though I can’t really go into much detail yet as the actual specifics of what’s changing is still being debated internally, be rest assured your voice on the issue has been heard and it is one of our top priorities right now.

What happened to the Camouflage ability we got a glimpse at via data mining?

Used to be the 51-pt Survival, but we felt it was too PvP oriented, and we’re really trying to flesh the tree out to be more than traps and melee (we are not done, as you can tell).

That said… Camouflage may just come back as a base ability… maybe =] (Though a bit different from the against-the-rules data mining version you saw)

Chimeras doing crazy damage with their species ability? Say it ain’t so!

Because the chimera ability does two types of damage at once (like the new Mage spell), it seems to have some crazy scaling effect. This is the first pet ability with two types of damage, so it’s likely that is the problem.

A possible revamp of the pet focus system?

I like the idea of removing more pet abilities from Focus. It’s kind of a weird energy source since it fills so quickly in most cases. Growl and Cower might be trickier, but perhaps they could just be really cheap. Making the Focus dump abilities (Bite etc.) relatively expensive could do unpredictable things to threat or dps, especially very early in a fight. It’s worth considering though since then they would typically only get used if the other autocast stuff was on cooldown. Letting some specials be free would help balance utility specials with pure dps specials (which could still have a Focus cost).

Less pet aggro in the most recent build? Does Onyxia deep breath more?

As you can see, the results are a little inconsistent. Before we just buff pet threat across the board, we need to make sure that there aren’t more bugs resulting in spiky or unpredictable behavior.

Pets have had their innate resistances reduced. Previously, they had the max (120) available via training on live across the board. This has been reduced to 1 resistance per level (so a LV80 pet will have 80 resist shadow/fire/frost/nature/arcane) baring any additional talent training. Why was this change made?

The problem with spell resistance is a successful resist grants immunity to both damage and effects such as CC.

We don’t want pets to get to the point where they resist nearly all CC effects… though being that this is a board of hunters you will probably disagree. :)

But we don’t want your pets to die to a single spell either, which is why we’d rather handle surviving spell damage (especially in PvP) through a percent damage reduction. That is something we are looking at now. There are also talents that can further reduce spell damage.

Because your pets benefit from your resistance, it should still be possible to get them to survive in magic-heavy PvE encounters.

Will pets ever gain a portion of the master’s hit/resilience?

If we do it for Warlocks, we’ll do it for Hunters too (%hit).

Regarding Resilience on pets, we feel we’d rather give the classes tools to keep their pet alive rather than giving them passive defense (we want you to care about keeping them alive, not ignoring them because you know it’s impossible to kill them). If you’re talking about a group environment, you can heal your pet and your group can heal your pet. The drawback to players attacking your pet is that they are essentially crowd-controlling themselves. Currently we feel (in PvP) that we’ve more or less achieved the right amount of survivability for the pet (without giving it Resilience). This of course changes all the time because of gear and scaling. If we feel the pet does not scale in terms of health with the master, we can make changes in that regard.

That said, if we find that pets aren’t surviving as well in beta compared to live, then we can explore the possibility of increasing it’s base defense.

Currently, there are also some apparent changes in the works for Kill Command. Rank 1 now has a 2 minute cooldown and instead of granting additional damage, it adds a % increase to the pet’s next several specials. And, the dispel effect has been removed from Arcane Shot. It is now a part of Tranquilizing Shot and attempts to remove one Frenzy, Enrage or Magic effect from an enemy target.

Aug. 1, 2008

Prayers answered

In the latest Wrath build that went in today, it turns out that “Okay” did indeed mean we get two more stable slots. Don’t believe me? Too good to be true? That’s fine, you can look at the screenshots here.

July 30, 2008

Getting caught up

I’ve been a little under the weather the last few days and haven’t updated some of the “blue” information as much as I should have been, so here’s a big lump!

Someone suggested more stable slots. Ghostcrawler said:

Okay.

No, I don’t know if that means, 'Okay, thank you for the feedback” or “Okay, we’ll talk about it” or “Okay, you’ll get more stable slots”. There was no further clarification given so I’d take the wait and see approach. As to the 51 point talent (although you can currently tame devilsaurs in Beta now, the talent isn’t fully implemented yet):

We’re still working on implementing this particular talent. The talent will allow you to train a different “class” of pets which we’re calling “exotic” right now. Only hunters with this talent will be able to train those pets. They won’t necessarily be “stronger” (though will all have unique abilities that you can only get from exotic pets), the extra power you should get from the talent will be from the additional pet skill points (pet talent points).

As to how expensive in terms of focus the current new pet talents are and how hard it is to manage them in terms of maximum useage/output:

We’ve discussed a few systems for managing this, but honestly the simplest one might just be to have all pet abilities be a little more consistent in cost.

We’d love to do an actual system to let you manage abilities more intelligently, but it might have to wait.

Master’s Call is implemented, but the hunter can’t use it on themselves if they’re already stunned. But we want it!

Able to use while stunned? Consider it done.

And what about the old pet abilities, like Thunderstomp, that have yet to be brought in line with the new skills, will they be normalized so they have a LV80 verison as well?

That is in the plan.

And, a final word or two about pet talents, in general.

The bottom talents in particular need to have some pretty stringent pre-reqs so that hunters can’t just cherry pick all of the active abilities. We can and will iterate on what those pre-req talents are though.

Active pet abilities in general represent some interesting design challenges. On the one hand, if the hunter just programs the pet and puts it on autopilot, then having unique abilities just sort of blends into a generic +dps for the pet. On the other hand, it would be sad if hunters never took the active abilities because the pet has trouble using the expensive ones and the hunter feels like he already has too many of his own abilities to hit.

This is something on which we’ll try to hit a reasonable balance. Warlocks seem to have a pretty decent mix of demon abilities that can be used by the demon AI and some that the warlock specifically needs to use.

July 28, 2008

3.0.1.8681

A new build on the Wrath Beta is live, with a few hunter changes:

• Hunting Party now gives your critical shots a 20/30/40/50/60% chance to restore 2% mana, 10 energy, 4 rage, or 10 runic power to all member of your party. (Old version : 20/40/60/80/100% chance)
• Potent Venom now increases the amount of damage done to targets afflicted by your Wyvern or Serpent Sting by 1% regardless of the rank. (Old version : Increased the damage by 1% for each rank, up to 3%)

MMO-Champion also has a preview of some new Glyphs provided via the new Inscription tradeskill, mostly druid, but this one for hunters:

• Venomous Mana (Glyph Passive) – Empowers a Greater Glyph to grant your Viper Sting ability an additional 15% chance to resist dispel effects.

Undocumented is the change to potions. Now, when you consume a potion (say, a mana potion) you receive a debuff entitled 'Potion Sickness’. The description reads, “Unable to consume potions until you rest out of combat for a short duration.” Oh. My.

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