Hunter -Nerfs- there needs to be progression.

#0 - Dec. 10, 2008, 1:25 p.m.

The first thing that should be done is taking care of imbalances and stacking issues.

1st phase of nerfs
-Call of the Wild
-Rake
-Scorpid Poison
-Readiness/BW

If we're still not balanced then...

2nd phase of nerfs(universal pet scaling)
-serpents swiftness
-kindred spirits
-etc

If we're still not balanced then...

3rd phase of nerfs
-possible base/scaling values of shots

Rolling out all of those changes at the same time WILL neuter the class. Anyone with a calculator and a 3rd grade education can easily see that. I don't know what blue is seeing on their internal testing but something is wrong.

I'll be hugely disappointed if anything makes it live besides the items mentioned in the first phase section of my post.

Lets fix bugs/cool down issues before starting to gut base values.

Ghostcrawler

#49 - Dec. 10, 2008, 5:03 p.m.

This isn't a Ret paladin issue and it's not really a PR issue.

When we make changes, we prefer to make enough changes to actually fix the problem so we can move on. There are a lot of different aspects of the game we want to touch so we'd rather not still be dealing with hunter dps imabalance months from now.

I admit when we make mistakes in our numbers. But you shouldn't turn that into our numbers never being close to the mark. Lack of perfection does not translate into a total mess.

Another reason we like the Steady Shot change is it puts more emphasis on the instant and other hunter shots. Steady is a good bread and butter ability but it's not much more interesting than auto shot. We'd like to see Aimed Shot, Multi Shot, Arcane Shot and other abilities be what the player focuses on. When you get such a big chunk of damage from auto + steady, it makes those other attacks feel puny and the fact you have to use them feel annoying.

Ghostcrawler

#107 - Dec. 10, 2008, 5:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Anyone else remember when SS had a 10% AP modifier? I do, and it was changed to 20% because hunters were not scaling with gear and falling behind. There is a lesson in that.

This is true. However one of the LK changes was to let Steady Shot use (and scale with) ammo. So it does calculate damage differently than in those days.

Q u o t e:
Which is it, trying to keep our dps down, or change what shots we weave? They are two different discussions, and is at once stupid and illogical to combine the two ideas into one sweeping set of changes. You have been very clear in beta to hunters that you didn't want to make us OP in pvp so you would make one change at a time and see how it affected us. But then you just go super hypocrite and just make massive changes with two different objectives?

We rarely make changes for a single reason. There may be an overarching goal we are trying to reach, but when we hit on a solution that we all like, it is often because it has secondary benefits. I try to explain our logic a little bit because I think players appreciate that, but I don't always go into as much detail as we actually do in our design discussions.