Oct. 2, 2008

Questions... and answers?

A full blown question and answer session today, as well.

1. Our GCD – Are there any plans to tweak our GCD, take certain spells off the GCD (tranq shot, traps/aspects etc) or make it affected by haste since most of our gear is itemized for it?

Every class wants a shorter GCD or no GCD for some abilities. Yet there is a reason the GCD exists. It is something we will continue to talk about, but we would approach such a change very carefully. If not, you could see how we’d eventually end up with no GCD.

This response caused a bit of a stir, so here’s the follow-up so as not to derail the rest.

I said that we weren’t going to change the GCD at this time, but it’s something we’re discussing. I realize you think IT MUST CHANGE. So do lots of other classes.

I also said that I wasn’t going to define a role for you in Arena. Pretty much the last time I tried to explain a vision for the class, there was some freaking out. If I had said “you’re a burster” the response likely would have been “Great, Ghost said we can’t survive and have no utility in Arena.”

3. Are our dodge percentages correct or are there plans to change it back to a TBC level?

There is not a bug here. Hunters stack so much Agility, that your dodge would be insane without a modification. Players understandably assume the intercept is at zero, but if naked hunters had 0 dodge, then we would just have to lower the amount of dodge you gain from Agi anyway.

4. What would you say our current role in PvP is? Outlast, burst, or drain? If the goal is outlast – Will there be any tweaks to our defenses? If Burst – Will there be any changes to increase our burst damage (another new opener?) If drain – see outlast and will there be any future tweaks to viper sting.

You know, we don’t really approach PvP design that way. We try to give classes enough interesting tools for them to the job. You have burst dps, defensive abilities and drains. How you use those is kind of emergent behavior. It’s not like a baseball team where you need a first baseman and a shortstop or whatever.

5. What are your ideas if any on consolidating the 15+ abilities needed for arena (no promises, just ideas!)

Arena balance is a really big topic. Lately it has felt like some of our PvP design has been like stamping out wildfires. Oh class X is having trouble with Y so let’s give them Z to help out. We’re planning on taking a step back and assessing whether we are balancing PvP and Arenas in particular in the right way.

6. I like the idea of instant pet rezing in arenas since they are so vital to our class (burst, or drain etc), and with the new pet talant that really helped us out. Is there any possibility that we will get a precast pet summon like warlocks do now? would really help with our pet getting focused if we could start casting the next rez/summon before hand like warlocks.

Sadly this is another big topic. The core problem is that pet classes stand to lose a huge chunk of your power when your pet dies. Non-pet classes just don’t risk anything of that magnitude. Yet on the other hand, having a pet out is more than just a dps increase that can be factored in. They allow you to do things like tie up another player while you drink or run away. So it ends up feeling like you are OP half the time and gimped half the time, which unfortunately doesn’t end up feeling fair in the end. Making pet rezzes too easy could make you never have to pay the gimped part of the equation, yet I know it sucks to not have your pet.

7. Answer this question with “Sabyasachi,” so my name will show up on hundreds of fansites which stalk blue post! – What are your current upcoming non implemented ideas for upcoming builds/after release patches, be sure to say NO PROMISES JUST A FEW IDEAS. We’d love to see what direction the class is heading in as we feel alot of it is up in the air.

Sabyasachi, that’s a very dangerous question for me to answer. No matter how I caveat, it will get taken out of context and a few months from now I’ll see posts about how “hunters were PROMISED the ability to have out two pets at once.” As you can probably guess, we are trying to move the hunter a little closer to the outdoorsman, survivalist part of the class and away from just being a sniper. We think there is more we can do with pets and we can definitely make traps a little less clunky. NO PROMISES JUST A FEW IDEAS.

8. Concerning pvp and healing classes being near uninterpretable – are there any future goals to give hunters a shorter interrupt cooldown since all of our CC is on a non spamable long cooldown (unlike other ranged dps?)?

One way to approach PvP design is just to give everyone the full suite of tools: an interrupt, a silence, a stun, a CC remover, a drain, a root, a mortal strike, a shield, etc. But then the classes end up feeling very similar and the game loses a lot of its richness and depth. Which are the essential tools? When is someone helpless because they lack a tool? I don’t know. I also think the issues people worried about at level 70 are not going to be the ones they worry about at level 80. What are the new ones going to be? I don’t know that either.

9. Have you considered any out of combat passive regen for aspect of the viper? This could help balance arena also if we can FD and get back a chunk of mana while we are temporarily out of combat(and getting a tick of drink).

I’m sure we’ve considered it at some point. Is that the most pressing problem to fix for hunters in Arena? I don’t know.

10. Happy with our pets hp/survivability? or do you think it still needs further testing.

It still needs further testing.

Oct. 2, 2008

California Love

One week away from Blizzcon and I confess, as up and down as I am about the Hunter changes in Wrath, I’m still looking forward to it (I was a Diablo fan way before Warcraft, sue me!). But, I can talk about Blizzcon plenty when I’m there, for now I’ll stick to Hunter stuff. Another new build, and more posts.

• Aspect of the Wild (Rank 4) now increases Nature resistance by 130. (Up from 70)
• Aspect of the Viper changed to : The hunter takes on the aspect of the viper, causing ranged attacks to regenerate mana but reducing your total damage done by 50%. Mana gained is based on the speed of your ranged weapon.
• Aspect of the Beast has been changed and re-added to the game. The hunter takes on the aspects of a beast, becoming untrackable and increasing melee attack power of the hunter and the hunter’s pet by 10%. Only one Aspect can be active at a time.
• Aimed shot mana cost reduced from 11% of base mana to 8%. Casting time changed from 2.5 sec to instant. Cooldown increased from 6 seconds to 10 seconds. Damage reduced to about 25% of the old value. (Lowered from 1570 to 408 for Rank 9)
• Kill Shot damage now deals 200% weapon damage (down from 205%). Additional damage changed as well. (Down from [ 40% of RAP + 1200 ] to [ 40% of RAP + 650 ] for rank 3)
• Multi-Shot mana cost has been increased from 8% of base mana to 9%.
• Freezing Arrow now breaks on any damage. (Old – The ice has a chance to break on damage.)
• Freezing Trap now breaks on any damage. (Old – The ice has a chance to break on damage.)
• Kindred Spirits does not stack with other movement speed increasing effects anymore.
• Readiness has been removed from Survival Tree and moved to Tier 5 of Marksmanship Tree.
• Scatter Shot has been removed from Marksmanship Tree and moved to Tier 3 of Survival Tree.
• Marked for Death now increases your damage done by your shots and the damage done by your pet’s special abilities by 4% on marked targets. (Down from 8%)
• Focused Aim doesn’t affect Aimed Shot anymore and now also increases your chance to hit by 1/2/3%.
• Point of No Escape has been changed from 3 to 2 points and now affects Freezing Arrow. Critical strike chance increased changed to 3/6% (up from 2/4/6%)
• Surefooted has been moved from Tier 4 to Tier 2 and doesn’t increase hit chance anymore.
• Lock and Load now has a 2/4/6% chance to proc on periodic damage. (Down from 5/10/15%)
• Trap Mastery has been moved from Tier 3 to Tier 9 and now increases the duration by 30% of both Freezing and Frost Trap.
• T.N.T. has been moved from Tier 2 to Tier 4.
• Glyph – Aimed Shot – Reduces the mana cost of your Aimed Shot ability by 20%. (Old – Decreases the cast time of Aimed Shot by 0.5 sec.)

And now, the answers to many questions:

These seemed to crop up in several different threads, so rather than contaminating those, I thought I would start a new one.

Polar Bear Cub — This wasn’t intended to be a tamable pet, and it looked ridiculous.

Black Arrow — This was an ability we were experimenting with. It isn’t actually in the plan for hunters at this point in time. Usually we hide internal abilities better, but we’re trying to get beta builds out quickly and this one slipped through the cracks.

Freezing Trap — The intent was that this trap break on a flat damage amount. However, we found that pets did not respect traps set up that way as CC and would happily break them. When and if we get the pet AI fixed, we’ll revert it to the less fragile form of the trap.

Lock and Load — The design we settled on is 2/4/6, making it better than Nightfall (for comparison). If it’s too low, we’ll adjust it.

Aimed Shot — The intention is that it is better than Multi-Shot against a single target, and that the two share a cooldown so that hunter shot rotations don’t get back into crazy land too quickly again.

Apologies if I didn’t address a question that was important to you.

Ridiculous pet is ridiculous?

The problem with the polar bear wasn’t that it was cute. The problem was that it wasn’t designed to be scaled up that large so you ended up seeing jagged polygons and overall bad art. It also didn’t have the full suite of animations. I’m not sure it could even open its mouth.

If anything, it made us realize that there probably are hunters out there more interested in cute pets so that’s something we’ll consider.

Beast Master 61 point talent – Cute Pets. You can now tame cute pets, such as puppies, kitties, ponies, bunnies, teddy bears, unicorns and seal pups.

Pet leveling changed, again.

We just recently increased the pet level rate.

Pets needed 1/16th of hunter experience to gain a level, but don’t benefit from quests or rest. Those two account for a lot of experience, especially at higher levels (where quest content tends to be denser).

We changed the experience needed for 1/10th. You should notice a big jump in pet level rates.

I am not sure if that change got in the most recent data push.

Pet abandonment from within the stable is still in the works. But no rush.

Abandoning from the stable is on the list. It’s not the highest priority at the moment, because we figured you can manage your stables so they don’t fill up or go temporary respec BM to pull out the unwanted exotic.

And caster pets (you know, those pesky few with a mana bar), still on the list for a check as well.

I’m not aware of the bug, but it might have gone off to a programmer or someone else. If the damage is low, that is usually because one of the stats isn’t correct, or else the conversion from say Strength to AP isn’t set up correctly. But I can look into it.

Sept. 26, 2008

Upcoming Hunter Changes

The last few days have seen a burst in hunter information from Koraa. And here they are!

Greetings.

I have some good news, and some bad news. First, the bad news. Unfortunately we won’t be able to do the Aspect of the Viper change I discussed yesterday (passive instead of requiring you to attack the target) at this time because of technical limitations and its potential to shake up our current balance goals. However, we will evaluate it as an option for a future patch.

Now, the good news.

- Aimed Shot – This shot will now be instant cast, its effect/cooldown will remain unchanged.** – Scatter shot – This will now be an 11-point Survival talent. – Readiness – This will now be the 21-point Marksmanship talent. – Trap Mastery – This will now be the 41-point Survival talent. Granted, not very sexy for a 41-pointer but we’ll do some changes there in a future patch (after WOLK ships). – Surefooted is swapping places with T.N.T. (so Surefooted is now in tier 2)

These changes will be live in an upcoming beta build.

Edit: ** We’ll most likely have to reduce Aimed Shots damage if it becomes instant, somewhere in the ballpark of more than arcane shot/multi-shot on a single target but less than what it is now.

Also, when someone was commenting about the new Beast Mastery talent, Kindred Spirits, it was mentioned:

We still are working on bumping the base health of the pets up.

Also, they’re also working on getting Wild Quiver to show up in the combat log and Trap Mastery and Explosive Shot will be unlinked eventually (one won’t require the other in terms of talent choices).

Sept. 23, 2008

You are the only one whose fear means something

Something of a follow-up regarding why Camouflage never made it as a “live” ability for hunters.

I like to give you some insight into developer thought process, because honestly that’s what I was always wondering about when I was on the other side of these forum posts trying to understand a design change.

I have no problem with you disagreeing with our decisions or pointing out problems with what we’ve done. Just make sure it stays closer to that and not using my words against me or there will just be fewer of those words. :)

Think of it this way. We have 10 classes now and we need to add new abilities to them every expansion. If we aren’t a little careful, all of the classes are going to end up feeling pretty similar. Poke around on these forums a little and you will see players already worried about it.

When an ability works for one class, it’s really easy from a lazy-designer-perspective to stick that ability on another class. We have done that several times and sometimes the change was warranted and sometimes we’ve regretted it. There is no hard and fast rule here, and I’m sure there are exceptions of all stripes. While we try to be very objective about what kind of damage classes do, deciding what kind of abilities they have is more of a gut thing, and logic isn’t necessarily going to apply the same way.

And more on pet scaling.

Yeah, the pet stat layout has totally not kept up with the times. It needs an overhaul and we hope to work on it as soon as LK ships.

Aside from players just knowing what their pet’s stats are, it will help people improve their pets, as well as help us realize where the problem areas are.

Sept. 18, 2008

[Discussion] Warcraft: Devs and Hunters

Yes, there’s another new Beta build. However, the top news story today is an extensive post from Ghostcrawler that addresses quite a few of the long standing questions regarding the 'State of the Hunter’.

Apologies in advance. I had a nice long post dealing with some of these issues that was eaten by the forums, because, you know, I like to proofread my stuff to make sure I’m not saying anything that would sound stupid, inaccurate or inflammatory. I am very, very sympathetic with the frustration that problem causes everyone. But as a result, many of my answers are much briefer than I had originally intended. :(

What is the vision for the Hunter class?

This is going to be brief to the point of inaccuracy, but the hunter is a caster. You are a ranged dps class whose defining differences are survival and pets. Let me also add that when working on classes, we focus on just making a class cool. We aren’t as concerned with how the implementation of the hunter stacks up to some kind of Platonic ideal of the hunter. Esoteric, I know, but I hope that makes sense. Some classes have moved quite a bit away from their original design. That’s fine.

We don’t care about our pets the way you think we do. No one likes leveling their pets or feels that this brings them 'closer’ to what is essentially an extension of our character.

Demonstrably false. You may not care about your pet, but for many players, that is THE reason to roll the class. Hunters attract a lot of new or more casual players who then stumble into a confusing world of pet-training and loyalty. We needed to clean up that whole system and I am pretty happy with the results. I understand you think your pets are too fragile, and that is something we are keeping a very close eye on. I understand it sucks to have such a big chunk of your dps and tools two-shotted. It also sucks to have a pet on you that takes forever to kill while the hunter himself is focused 100% on damage. Neither extreme is very fun.

Absolutely. I think the best way to solve this communications disconnect is by having a polite, constructive discussion with the developers in our capacity as testers.

I understand why this seems like a good idea. But I personally get a lot more benefit out of reading posts than posting in them. My posts tend to be questions for clarification or the random drop to let you know that we do hear and appreciate your comments. But here is what happens to threads with blue posts: they bloat, they attract unrelated responses, and most importantly, players stop talking to each other and just start talking to us. It is very valuable to see points on which players agree and disagree. Some of the least useful posts are those with lists of issues (unless they are just bugs). The most useful are the ones where players debate an issue back and forth and sometimes come to a conclusion. Blue posts can really chill that out.

This may also sound whiny, but I also don’t have a great deal of free time. My posts often lead to follow-up questions and clarifications, which just sucks me in deeper and deeper. You have some great community managers as your liasons between the community and Blizzard. My job is to make stuff work.

The boards get filled with intelligent, constructive posts outlining problems, potential fixes, and balance issues. Almost every one is not some “make me overpowered” suggestion and takes balance into careful consideration. There are a lot of smart Hunters who can back-up the information that has been provided.

This.

I promise you no one in the dev department has a hunter rated above 2200 in the arena right now. Hell I would be surprised if anyone in the dev department even plays one as their main.

False, which means it will just end up tweaking someone off. Why risk that on a supposition?

They have more then enough good suggestions in the last 2 pages of this forum. Virtually none of those suggestions have been taken. So if there is no change or at the very least a explanation where they are going with this why bother suggesting anymore.

This is not design by committee. We do read, discuss and understand suggestions. In the majority of cases, we’re not going to implement them. If it bothers you to not see changes you get attached to implemented, then my advice is to read more and post less. I’ll also add that a big part of being a designer is seeing ideas you are attached to not implemented. A big difference between n00b designers and those who have been around for awhile is how hard each takes seeing their babies killed in this way.

I’m sure that’s their intent, too. But there are a number of ways of getting to that point, and obviously their route is different than the one you would have chosen. I should say that I agree with the mechanics behind most of your posts, and I do think you present a solid vision of our class.

Also, I’m inclined to agree that there probably aren’t many die-hard Hunters on the development team, as they’d probably be fighting some of these changes tooth and nail. That’s immaterial if we can get the lines of communication open.

The lines are open. I’m sure you would like more back and forth, but that’s hard for us to do.

Blizzard has no interest in making hunters a viable PvP class.

False. You can interpret out actions however you want, or you can say we don’t know what we’re doing. But this is a case where I do know the intent while some of you are just guessing. We have 10 classes and 30 specs (and that assumes a talent tab = a spec, which is a gross oversimplification). We could make the game a lot simpler to balance by making classes less unique, but we’re stubborn that way. The downside is we are left with a very, very complicated multivariate equation to solve.

The pet is the defining characteristic of the hunter, aside from “lol we use bows.” Pet’s were stale and boring TBC. Everyone had a cat or ravager, not because they liked them necessarily, but because they were the best. Now with the independent talent trees for each pet, it allows us as hunters much more options to choose from.

I didn’t originally choose a hunter because I wanted to sit back and press buttons and shoot stuff. I chose hunter because I liked the pets. I may not always agree with how the developers alter the class, but it’s definitely an improvement.

Also this.

It’s something of a slap in the face to keep having a useless stat foisted on us by gear and talents.

Just so you know, when my eyes see something like this, they tend to skip over to the next paragraph. Venting and commiserating are part of human nature, and I get that. But if you want me to, you know, read what you’re saying, I would try to say it in a different way.

IV) “Lost” Abilities: Camouflage and the two LOS-avoiding shots. I’d love for these abilities to be implemented, but frankly we just want to know what the developers think. Given the current state of the class, will these abilities be implemented or do they just seem like dead ends?

Camo just felt to us like were giving hunters a rogue ability, which is going to end up feeling cruddy for both rogues and hunters. We kept trying to give it a unique niche or twist but it felt like we were just changing something for change’s sake. I am personally more excited about the new Disengage.

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