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.
This thread quickly deteriorated from talking about the MLG matches to the same old tired arguments:
1) RMP is skill. Anything that isn’t RMP is faceroll.
vs.
2) CC is boring. Let’s kill something.
It doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other. There is room in competitive Arena for a lot of different comps. I for one am glad to see really talented players gravitating to something besides RMP vs. RMP for every match. It was nice to see other classes in there. I do wish the hunter + shaman combos fell back on other strategies more often than instantly blowing wolves + Bloodlust. In an ideal world it would be very effective (you are gambling a lot of cooldowns on that opening move after all), just less so than it is now.
I don’t fault the players at all — they do it because it’s effective. They focus because they have to focus — because getting someone to 50% and switching targets would be ineffective. But if other teams could survive that initial burst a little more often, then it would be more risky, and in turn it wouldn’t be so popular as the the first thing to do when the gates went up. I really don’t think we’re that far away from that, by which I mean we don’t have to redesign every class to have Frost Nova + Ice Block to make Arena matches last a little longer.
But as I said above (and most smart players realize) just buffing health / lowering damage alone won’t do anything but put even more emphasis on burst, because getting someone to 2% will be as irrelevant as getting them to 99% (because the healers will just reset the match). Lower damage and lower healing and the matches will almost certainly last longer, hopefully without richocheting to the other extreme of layered CC or mana drains being the only way to play.
Jan. 7, 2010
I hope I don't get blood all over me again
Keep a repair bot handy.
Zod’s proc works similarly to the talent Wild Quiver. Since Wild Quiver causes extra durability through additional weapon use, Zod’s does too. We will keep an eye on it but don’t have any current plans to change anything unless there is a but resulting in additional durability damage.
Jan. 5, 2010
We all have our reasons for doing what we do
Fixed bow is fixed.
- The proc on Zod’s Repeating Longbow should no longer reset auto shots.
- Wyvern Sting no longer triggers the extra shot effect from Zod’s Repeating Longbow.
Jan. 4, 2010
Yours should be a face that smiles
That Zod’s Repeating Longbow is bugged has been confirmed and it will be hotfixed. If only they could do that with the Call Stabled Pet bug…
Zod’s should not reset your autoshot. This is a bug. We can and will hotfix the problem with Zod’s Repeating Longbow. This hotfix should be deployed in the next day or two, barring unforeseen issues, etc.
The proc might even be getting a buff!
The general answer is “yes” since I already recently mentioned a change we’d like to make on Nibelung. What we won’t do is make a lot of really fast changes to procs. Some procs can start out pretty weak, but we are well versed in our players’ abilities to find ways to use things and need to be careful on buffing something as tricky as a proc.
As a more detailed explanation, our itemization philosophy has evolved a lot from vanilla where in comparison to today’s gear it almost seemed like random stats were thrown together like everybody’s classic favorite Strength and Spirit items. One of the biggest risks we feel like we face currently is itemization becoming too stale and predictable where the only thing you get out of a new tier of content are the current item with a few more stats on it.
Procs are one of the ways we’re trying to address this and we expect you’ll continue to see a lot more of them for the future. With any new feature, though, it’s going to take time to figure out which implementations succeed or fail. Also keep in mind that we know we haven’t always had the best track record with items that give up some of their stat budget for procs which is particularly true of casters.
We aren’t ready to announce any specific changes at this time, but rest assured we do intend to tweak the procs over time. This is a model you’re likely to see a lot more of in future content.
Will the issue with the Zod proc be addressed as well? Currently when it procs it’s resetting the autoshot timer, which negates a large portion of the damage gain from the proc. It seems like this is a bug in the implementation and not intended but it would be helpful to have a clarification.
We are looking into the proc on this weapon as well.
What’s going to happen to our gear (specifically that itemized with Armor Penetration) come Cataclysm?
There isn’t a cut and dry sort of answer that we can give you on this just yet. There are many different factors that will need to come into account.
There is potential for anything that is currently considered Best in Slot now to not be once changes begin going in for Cataclysm.
You will also need to take into account potential changes in talents and abilities (as well as any other game related changes), and it leaves a bit of wiggle room for some theorycrafting once these changes start being discussed and experienced in more detail.
To that end though, we don’t plan to leave anyone high and dry and are planning out a series of informational releases that should start giving out more detail on these sorts of changes. We’ll be doing what we can to answer as many questions as possible on the changes to stats in particular since we know that it is an area that many people focus on. We also want to make sure that these changes are easy to understand and leave room for any additional developmental adjustments that are needed. As always, we’ll be keeping an eye on constructive feedback and discussions as well.
We still have some time until Cataclysm rolls around which means plenty of time for us to take a look at things that we feel might need a change before then. I can’t promise any specific changes on Armor Pen just yet for Wrath of the Lich King, but that doesn’t preclude us from taking a look at this stat sooner rather than later should we feel it needs attention prior to then. We don’t want to lock ourselves into the idea that changes won’t happen until Cataclysm so that if something sticks out to us as bothersome, we can do something about it if there is room in the plans for it. It’s easy to fall into the, “Wait 'til Cataclysm” mantra, but we don’t want to have to stay within that mold if we don’t have to.
Dec. 23, 2009
Well, they get by somehow, I'm sure
Do we take things out of context? No, never! But we sure will pounce on CMs who make comments about Beast Mastery.
Wasn’t there some design goal to have all specs of all classes viable in PvP and endgame raiding? Wasn’t “leveling tree” supposed to be a bygone concept?
We’d love to have every spec viable for all aspects of the game, it just rarely turns out that way since balancing can be pretty tricky. At this stage in the game we aren’t planning to make many (if any) big changes to classes since we are already working on doing just that for Cataclysm so that’s why I wouldn’t expect much in the near future.
I think we all knew by this time that pets inheriting stats wasn’t going to happen but it’s, nice (I guess?) to hear it pretty much confirmed.
Small changes are still being discussed a bit, but nothing has been determined at this point.
And, just to tie it all together.
I know some of you were reading into my comments a bit much so I’ll try and explain things a little more.
The wolf is overpowered when compared to the other available pets, mostly because it buffs the master. Buffing all of the pets to that level would require a number of different changes to different pets and the chance that one of those buffs would be too much or not enough is reasonably high. When you have say 10 or more things all roughly equal and then one that is outside of that group, the one that’s outside is called an outlier. Defining it as the new normal isn’t smart game design and just like we do with classes, we are likely to nerf the single thing at the top than buff all the others.
It might not be possible to ever get the pets completely identical (see comments below), so very competitive raiders will probably still only take the best one. But if the best one is only slightly ahead of the others, then it will feel more acceptable to some players to run with the pet they like. For most players, improving their own game will have a larger effect than picking the “best in slot” pet if they are comparable.
As far as the Spirit Beasts are concerned, there are several reasons why they would make a bad “best” pet. There are not very many options to choose from and all of them require “farming”; a rare spawn that is more of a testament to blind luck than any kind of player skill. As we said before, there is no advantage to having a wider spectrum of pets to choose from if there is only one right choice.
We have talked about literally making all the pet families identical and letting the player just pick one based on looks. That certainly homogenizes the game quite a bit, which is why we haven’t done it, but it would ultimately allow pet choice to be cosmetic.
[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 [Next]In the end, yes, we do want to get BM competitive with Survival and Marks. We even did some buffs in 3.3 to help them get there but the reason for my comments earlier is that we’d rather have two viable raiding specs than just one so Hunters as a whole are not in terrible shape. Eventually we do plan to get all 3 there. Just remember that when players obsess about 1% differences in dps you can understand why that task is pretty gigantic. There are probably more raiding BM hunters in 3.3 than in 3.2 and probably a lot more than there are Subtlety rogues (sorry for the example rogues, but you/we know it’s true). It’s far from a dead spec.