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.
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.