Oct. 2, 2009
Dude only has to do it once
With the change to (pet’s) avoidance on PTR, we got this comment from Ghostcrawler.
It is likely we will just replace the hunter pet Avoidance talent with one that increases pet dps. It is too situational to have as a talent now. Hunter pets will just take 90% less damage from creature AE the same as other pets do (meaning “for free”). We offer that avoidance as recognition that Fluffy doesn’t have the AI to get out of the fire on boss fights and likes to go in straight lines between you and a target, even if that means crossing fire.
Ninety percent avoidance should be enough to survive almost all boss AE attacks for a second or two — enough to get a heal or move your wolf (or sporebat). It isn’t intended to let your pet just ignore AE completely and stand in void zones. If you’re a pet class, you are going to have to manage the pet a little in dungeons and raids.
It was never our intent that pets just shrug off AE in PvP situations. In fact, it’s a little goofy if you think about it. We just technically couldn’t distinguish between creature and player AE before. We only go to that distinction as a last resort, since we like for PvP and PvE to work similarly. However we thought it was necessary in this case, since the complexity of boss encounters just doesn’t always leave pets with a way to avoid the AE damage. We think PvP AE damage often is avoidable (dude isn’t literally Bladestorming the entire arena at once), but we still understand that this is a PvP nerf to pets and we may buff them in other ways to compensate.
Does this mean we might see an overall buff or consolidation of skills to the pet talent trees? Probably not.
Before we added the bottom row of pet talents, BM hunters felt that their 51-point talent wasn’t attractive because they couldn’t actually improve pet dps with those points. If we made it too easy to cherry pick the dps talents, I fear we’d be in the same situation again.
You can have 5 different pets now, so even if you find a talent somewhat situational, you can probably find a pet to give it to.
Besides, judging from these responses, most pets already had the points in Avoidance, so you should just see pet dps increase with the current build (assuming we stick with this plan).
I’ve already made the comment in this thread that rather than more DPS talents, now might be a good time to revisit the old Spirit Bond in Avoidance’s place or perhaps put the T5 set bonus there in 5/10/15% increments.
Oct. 1, 2009
3.3.0
Get your motors running, the new 3.3.0 patch notes are available for your viewing pleasure.
- Default Equipment: Starting weapons are now more uniform. Rogues now start with a pair of daggers equipped. All other classes except shamans start with a 2-handed weapon equipped and the required skill already known. Shamans start with a 1-handed weapon and a shield, as they benefit more from the shield than they would from a 2-handed weapon.
- Racial Attribute Bonuses: These bonuses have been recalibrated to even out the amount of starting health on the various races. All races start with a standardized level of stamina, except for orcs, dwarves, and tauren who now start with 1 extra point of stamina. For each class, bonuses and penalties to all attributes have been adjusted so that each race has an equal attribute total.
- Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.
- Intimidation: If the hunter’s pet is in melee range of its target, the stun from Intimidation will now be applied immediately instead of on the pet’s next swing or attack.
- Avoidance: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 30/60/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
Sept. 22, 2009
The Brood Mother returns
3.2.2! I can’t wait for Onyxia tonight. Some people might complain about “recycled content” but I always liked fighting Onyxia (it was, for me, the first raid I ever participated in) so…
- After years of lurking in her lair battling the many brave adventurers who travelled from afar to challenge her, Onyxia returns stronger than before to commemorate World of Warcraft’s five-year anniversary.
- Onyxia has been scaled to offer new challenges to level 80 players in 10- and 25-player modes. Adjusted for modern raiding, but with the fundamental experience of fighting the Brood Mother still in effect, including the horrors of her Deep Breaths!
- The Beast Within: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds. In addition, hunters with this talent will do 10% additional damage at all times.
- Bestial Wrath: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds.
- Master’s Call: This ability now correctly removes the snaring component of Infected Wounds, Frostfire Bolt, and Slow.
- Trap Mastery’s (Survival) tooltip now states the correct amount of snakes summoned.
- Players may now only queue for no more than two Battlegrounds at a time.
- Hunter Tier-9 2-Piece Set Bonus: Critical damage from Serpent Sting will now work properly with the Mortal Shots and Expose Weakness talents.
- Players may now only queue for no more than two Battlegrounds at a time.
Not making it into the patch notes, but still live is that the damage of Hunter’s Volley ability has been increased.
The AP coefficient of Volley has been increased from 0.0586 to 0.0837. Base points did not change.
Sept. 21, 2009
Like you have iron jazz hands
It’s a reasonable discussion about Deterrence. No really.
I can totally understand that there is a perception problem with Deterrence because it affects melee and spells but not ranged attacks. Because there are exceptions to what it protects against, it can earn a reputation for being unreliable or for being actually buggy. (We haven’t found any evidence that it is buggy though.)
Something we could use feedback on is if the ranged damage is really a problem or just complicates the issue by leading to players not understanding how Deterrence is supposed to work. Is it really a big deal versus other hunters? If we changed it, then it would be both a buff and a nerf to hunters in some sense.
On a philosophical level, we don’t like defensive abilities that confer an offensive advantage. We aren’t likely to take the penalty off of Deterrence, or it just becomes the thing you pop when you want to kill someone and don’t want to be stopped instead of the thing you do to survive when the other team is doing it to you.
We also didn’t want the ability to just be the same defensive cooldown that other classes have. It’s important to us that different classes have different mechanics that players need to learn instead of saying “This is your Ice Block with a different name and graphic.” I mention this not to say that Deterrence must stay as it is forever, but to steer your suggestions towards ideas we are more likely to embrace.
If dots are the thing that you think really make hunters suffer right now, then that is a fair thing to discuss. I’m not sure making Deterrence break dots is necessarily the best answer to that though.
What I’m fishing for is some discussion of whether Deterrence is a big weakness for hunters (Plops and a few others don’t seem to think it is), or if hunters have big weaknesses and Deterrence is a way to mitigate some of those, or if hunters just have weaknesses period and talking about Deterrence just muddies the waters. Those are three slightly different situations with different potential resolutions.
Saying other classes have better cooldowns doesn’t carry that much weight with us. Other classes might have better heals or better snares or better crowd control or whatever. Comparing the individual abilities can only get you so far. Prot warriors have great defensive cooldowns, but you don’t see many balance concerns about them. DKs and paladin “tanks” are another story, in part because you have to look at the whole package.
Sept. 16, 2009
Rattle some chains or something
As promised (sort of), the mana conservation aspect of The Beast Within has been changed on Test.
- The Beast Within now reduces the mana costs of all spells by 50% for 10sec.
Also, in response to questions regarding the design intent behind some Hunter mechanics:
[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]I can’t go into detail on all of them, but for starters Intimidation could be a lot better and Kill Command could be as fun as say Lock and Load instead of a macro’d ability. We’re not going to be in a big hurry to buff Tranq Shot. It might be a better way to go to nerf all dispels to something more like that so that they didn’t trivially undo buffs, debuffs and CC.