The Hunter Manifesto

#0 - Dec. 18, 2008, 5:23 p.m.

I of course realize that many hunter's make posts like this, so I can only say that I have been playing a hunter since MC. I have spent hundreds of hours on the battleground, as well as every instance and raid that has ever been in this game. I am not asking for massive buffs to make hunters into superheroes. I believe the changes I ask for are reasonable, and not overpowering. Please read and enjoy.

ASPECTS: Blizzard wants hunters to use dragonhawk and viper for 99% of game content, which effectively gives us a "stance" system. This is good change, but just needs a few changes:

1.) Allow aspects to be changed while mounted, and let them persist through death. These are simple changes for convenience only, much like warrior stances.

2.) Combine Aspect of the Beast, and Aspect of the Wild. This is simply for consolidation purposes only.

3.) Combine Aspect of the Cheetah, and Aspect of the Viper, and remove the daze effect. This is one of the pvp "buffs". Giving +30% run speed to hunters will require a penalty of some sort, and -50% damage is a fair penalty.

These changes would bring hunters down to 4 total aspects, only 2 of which are actually used 99% of the time.

FEIGN DEATH CHANGE:

The feign death mechanic just needs a slight change. Hunters need a way to have their pets FD with them, so here's a simple way to do it:

- If your pet is attacking a target, and hunter casts FD, pet DOES NOT FD with the hunter.

-if your pet has been commanded to stop attack (Passive), and hunter casts FD. pet DOES FD with hunter.

Simple, effective, perfect solution.

GLOBAL COOLDOWN:

Some abilities that hunters have need to be removed form the GCD. Nothing that deals damage should be removed, only buffs/debuff/utility.

1.) Hunter's Mark - rarely used at all due to being on the GCD.

MINIMUM RANGE REMOVAL:

Hunter's mechanics directly contradict themselves. Hunters cannot do dps while moving, but we must move to stay out of melee. The result is that every class can simply stay in our melee and avoid taking any real damage. Something has to change, or hunters will never be PVP balanced.

The removal of the minimum range on all hunter abilities is a big change, but a necessary one. The minimum range mechanic worked in vanilla wow, but the game has changed drastically and it just doesn't work anymore.

Mages, locks, and other casters can use all of their abilities in melee range, but they still try to get range on melee opponents to avoid damage and spell pushback. This would be no different with hunters. The minimum range removal would not result in hunters standing in melee destroying people.

This change combined with Viper and Cheetah combined, would balance hunters in PVP quite nicely.

CAMOUFLAGE:

Yes, I am going to talk about camo. The original camo was removed, and it was the right choice. Giving hunters a CoS/Vanish was a bad idea. Camo should not be an escape mechanic, it should be an opener.

The Camo ability that hunters should get is simply the old shadowmeld. Weak stealth on 10s cooldown that is only used out of combat, and any movement breaks the effect. Allow casting while melded, but combat breaks the effect (this should effect your pet also).

The result would be that hunters wouldn't get an overpowered ability to escape death, they would get an ability that allows them to set up an ambush on other players. This ability fits in perfectly with the spirit of the hunter class, and would be a great addition to our spellbook.

All of these changes will result in no extra DPS of any kind. They simple utility and minor PVP buffs that are greatly needed. Thank you for reading, and thanks in advance for your constructive posts.

I also don't advocate blindly giving these changes to hunters. I only ask that they be considered and tested on the next PTR to see what they do to the class.

Ghostcrawler

#63 - Dec. 19, 2008, 6:02 p.m.

There are some good ideas here.

I would agree that some of them fall into the quality of life or minor annoyance category. While those are still good things for us to look at (and sometimes great things since they can often be fixed pretty easily) it leads to a long list, which you even called a manifesto. An outside reader might conclude every aspect of the hunter class is broken (which is not true) or that hunters need all of those changes to be Arena viable or fun. I’m not asking you to cull out the minor suggestions, but you do want to make sure we see the ones you really, really want us to see.

On combining Viper and Cheetah, I would be concerned that you are accepting a penalty (decreased damage) that isn’t really a penalty. When you want to run away, you want to run away. Think of the PvE implications of removing the daze. Even think of the PvP ones. When you want to fight, you fight, and when you want to escape, you escape. Now consider a Cheetah where you take extra damage if you run – now that is an actual decision. You might get away, but you also might get clobbered. (This isn't a change we are making - I'm just trying to show you how we think. Hitting a situational button should generally be a decision, not something you would always do in a given situation.)

We’re not interested in giving hunters stealth of any sort at this time. Even the Shadowmeld-like functionality is supposed to be handled by Feign Death.

We’re also pretty unlikely to remove the minimum range on hunter ranged attacks. Casters don’t have them, but casters are also very unlikely to stand there and keep casting when you close to melee with them. We don’t want to see hunters ever ignore or shrug off melee who are attacking them. Attacking them back is a different story, as long as we could guarantee the hunter felt like they had to attack their attacker and not just keep shooting whoever they were shooting.

Q u o t e:
Nah, it's not that they don't care, it's just that there's a fine line between being OP and weak for certain aspects of PvP. As the cap has been expanded, that line (imo) has become thinner and thinner.

GC (or one of the other Blues) hinted to this some time ago: that it's not fun being kited to death without being able to do anything about it, so there will always be more ways to get into range than to get out of it. Since Hunters are the ones most affected by the range issue, obviously they're going to be hurt most by it. Given all the crazy combinatorics of the various attacks and dynamics, they're always going to be overly cautious about where Hunters are in the line between OP and "balanced", erring on the side of caution. This makes sense, since it's one class out of many.

I admit I'm biased, I like the Hunter class best, so I'm more likely to argue for things like the Black Arrow, some form of Cameo, fixing traps (reduce the cooldown by 1/2 would be nice), replace Freezing Arrow with something like Frost Arrow or Snake Shot or ... or even making Freezing Arrow separate from trap cooldown altogether and make it a direct CC ability. But for every such suggestion, there are going to be 9 other classes worth of players arguing against it. In the end, I don't believe Blizzard would intentionally abandon one of the classes in their game. Folks who design games take pride in their work.

I also wanted to give props to Stonesmasher who does a pretty textbook example of how to disagree with us and / or offer feedback on what he would like to see in the class without turning Blizzard into TEHENEMY or foaming at the mouth. I don’t know how many more ways to say this, but we are much more likely to really read and consider feedback of this style. (But I will also throw out again that just because I didn’t respond to similar posts in other threads doesn’t mean we ignored them.)