#0 - April 23, 2008, 7:35 p.m.
# The hunter pet ability Growl will no longer scale with pet Attack Power.
Already I see boars becoming obsolete, basically moving over to the junk pile to make friends with crocolisks, tallstriders, turtles and the like. Though personally, I don't quite see the point. With a boar, you used a WHOLE stable slot for a pet you ONLY used during extremely long grind sessions. Thanks to charge, you could use your highest dps rotation to burst down one out of three mobs, plus charge had an added convenience of rooting the target for a second, preventing it from taking your pet 40 yards in an unknown direction, aggroing more mobs and forcing you to kite. Ok, I get carried away.
First thing I would like to note is that kiting mobs is fun. Hell, kiting is half of what hunters are about if you ask me. But during long grinding sessions, like when you need to make more money than the daily quest limit allows (you'd understand if you were raiding sunwell), kiting can become a nightmare. Seriously, forcing customers to press mouse keys as much as kiting a hundred mobs takes should be forbidden by the law for how agonizing it is. It's probably already forbidden, we just haven't read about it yet.
Now you think "why would you need to kite if, as a hunter, you are supposed to just autoshot the mob until it dies?". Well, check my gear please - I do 700 damage per auto shot, and a 1600 crit. So, when the first auto shot that leaves my bow is a crit, the mob has already forgotten about my silly pet and is running towards me. If I stay in melee, I'll be doing 200 dps at max and continuously losing HP, which - admit it - SO TICKS YOU OFF (when you're grinding). But if I choose to kite the mob, a whole new world of fingertip pains awaits me. I don't have the strafe function bound to keys - I think it's silly and I never use it. Instead, I hold down my right mouse button whenever I want to kite. All in all I press my left and right mouse buttons a minimum of 5 times to kill a single mob. 500 times to kill 100 mobs. Compare that with ANY OTHER CLASS, which have to press the mouse 2 times - to target the mob, and to loot it. That's 500 mouse clicks versus 200. Can you hear than saying carpal tunnel syndrome? (I checked a site earlier and found myself having two symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome - frequent tingling with a numbness in the index and middle fingers of my right hand. Didn't have that before I started playing)
Anyway, now you're like "ok, but you have feign death, kill command, all that stuff in your arsenal". Pressing feign death in time to still be 5+ yards away from the mob when it actually understands that it didn't resist the feign may require reflexes. Not saying I don't possess them, but more casual players probably don't. Blizzard always cares for their casual players, so I'm giving them a chance to care for them even more. And kill command - oh please, it's something like 300 damage and in any case, 800 (growl) + 110 (bite) + 150 (swing) + doesn't make 1600. Plus, FD can be resisted. Plus, growl can be resisted (and does get resisted lol).
Plus, with a 2.11 sec attack speed, I can pull aggro with two normal shots, then 0.5 secs later another growl comes, the mob targets my pet but they both continue waltzing in my direction, stopping only at the spot where I'm standing. More mouse clicks to move away and face the mob again. What the hell?
And what's more - it takes 15 seconds on average for me to kill a mob in, say, quel'danas without pulling aggro from my pet. 15 seconds!!! That's a hell of a lot when you compare it with destro warlocks, fury warriors, combat rogues. PVP geared arms warriors are having an easier time killing mobs than me!!! I'm wearing the best gear available bar sunwell loot, running a cookie-cutter hunter PvE spec and it takes 15 seconds for me to kill a squishy little elf, of which I have to kill 20 more to get 11 gold. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it, honestly =\
Anyway, all this was to say that I don't blame hunters who buy gold, and you shouldn't either.
Just joking, I only got to the part where I demand buffs instead of nerfs, here goes:
1. First and foremost, fix the bug when after pet + mob collision, the mob takes the pet somewhere far away (or the pet takes the mob, not sure really). It's extremely annoying and forces us to make more mouse clicks.
2. Second, we need growl to a) generate enough threat without scaling with anything (something like 1100 should do I suppose), b) scale with the hunter's attack power (not the pet's attack power), so that people in higher-end gear can achieve faster grinding than people in season 1 pvp gear (which is completely logical since the former are definitely playing their main characters, whereas the latter are probably just gold farmers on the job).
3. We need to remove the aspect of kiting from grinding monsters. I'm talking about people playing hunters risking to get carpal tunnel syndrome because of how our class works. "Play it or quit" just doesn't cut it IMO.
4. Keep in mind that what I just said applies to the CURRENT, 2.4.1 state of growl - with my 2270 attack power unbuffed (which is no small feat to achieve when specced beast mastery), my pet generates around 850 threat per growl. That's far from enough to be grinding comfortably.
How and where did I get the nerve to post this? - I'm just seeing all the other DPS classes like warriors, rogues and warlocks - they can be specced whatever they want, warriors can go arms, rogues can go hemo, warlocks can be afflict specced and still put out MUCH FASTER farming (that is including warrior downtimes) than a hunter in top gear, specced in the best PvE spec available (dps -wise). "This just seems counter-intuitive", as blizzard posters like to say.
/sign if you agree and if you feel the same way, I guess. Hopefully someone will tell us we got it wrong and that growl will end up generating more threat after the patch, or at least this information will be given to the responsible developers and after consulting with a neurology specialist, they will come to realise the risks imposed by kiting large amounts of monsters for hours on end.
