Hunter Feedback Blizzard is looking for

#0 - Jan. 13, 2009, 3:56 a.m.

TITLE EDIT: took the GC out of it. I believe this title follows the guidelines even though it now has Blizzard in the name, it's not a title that directly asks for a blue response anymore and is merely reflecting that this thread is about hunter feedback Blizz (GC) specifically requested. On that note however, a blue response would be greatly apprecaited, but I will no longer ask for them in my thread titles :)

Taken from another post: GC quote

Q u o t e:
The kind of feedback we're looking for:

-- I have trouble with getting away from melee in Arenas.
-- I don't like this talent This other talent is a much better expenditure of talent points.
-- I can't figure out a way to fit this spell in my rotation.
-- I find this mechanic confusing. (Or even, I love the way this works.)
-- Under these conditions, this spell behaves strangely.
-- This spell might be bugged.
-- My dps is low in this situation.
-- I don't want to use this item because it interferes with this mechanic.
-- I'm not having fun because of this reason. (Or even, I'm having fun for this reason.)

Q u o t e:
-- I don't like this talent This other talent is a much better expenditure of talent points.

There's too many to list obviously, so I'll give you feedback on a very select few. I could go over every single talent that I don't like, but the fact is I can respect the fact that most talents, regardless if I like them, could have a use in different situations and circumstances.

I do not like the Pathfinding talent in the BM tree. I've never known a hunter to take this talent seriously and I cannot think of any situation where a hunter would take this except for maybe a 'help powerlevel a friend's lowbie' talent which I do not believe to be a valid argument to take a talent. In fact, I just now went through every hunter talent in all the trees and this is the only one I seriously find to be truly useless in nearly every situation or circumstance.

Q u o t e:
-- My dps is low in this situation.

This is an excellent feedback example of some of the problems with hunter design. My DPS is low in any situation where my pet is limited when one or more of the following criteria are met. (I'll follow with examples)
-My pet does not receive the same buffs that the players get from the encounter. (Thaddius / Loatheb / Malygos)
-My pet frequently dies during an encounter (Heigan / Sartharion)
-My pet bugs out during an encounter. (Malygos)
-My pet cannot contribute during an encounter. (Malygos phase 2)
-My pet has pathing issues during an encounter. (Thaddius / Gluth Tunnel)
-My pet's primary ability cannot be used during an encounter. (no recent encounters come to mind, but encounters such as Void Reaver when poison using pets could not poison)

Q u o t e:
-- I'm not having fun because of this reason. (Or even, I'm having fun for this reason.)

I'm not having fun when I'm having to tame and level new pets, especially for testing purposes.

IE: recently with the upcoming pet changes to scorpid and cat, I needed to test out other pets in place of the scorpid. Leveling a pet 5 levels for several hours back to back to find out 'that's not for me' and ditching him is a poor game mechanic that is not fun at all. Nobody likes to see their time go to waste like that.

I realize you don't want pets to be another 'throw away ability' in terms of just going out, taming what you need for that encounter then tossing that pet aside and taming something else after. One such solution I came up with (if you want to hear it) is give pet taming a 3 day cooldown (or whattever you thought was fair, be it 6 hours or 7 days. I just tossed a number out there), but the pets are tamed at equal level to the hunter, and pets would level up as the hunter leveled. Honestly, it feels like we are being punished when we want to play with a different pet because we are forced to waste time leveling it and it is not fun. I feel that many more pets would be tried out, tested and played with if hunters did not have to go through the headache of wasting literally days to level a pet up. I'd rather forced to wait to get another pet than forced to level one. This type of change would also give hunter a bit more leeway on PTR pet testing as they would be more inclined (at least I would) to test pets they normally would not give a second glance.

Edit: I just wanted to put this out there, but I don't find it very fair for some pets to be able to be tossed aside on a whim simply because high level tamable versions of that beast are available in game and some cannot because no high level versions of that beast exist. Why should I be punished for wanting to play with a sporebat, but not if I want to play with a Worm? Anyway, just thought I'd put that out there.

Please consider this feedback, and if I think of other issues I will post them

#37 - Jan. 17, 2009, 8:16 p.m.

I'll respond to a couple of points.

It's nearly impossible to make an AI-controlled pet smart enough to always do the right things especially in encounters as complicated as ours. We try to work around that by letting the pet survive when it does the wrong thing (staying out during Saph deep breaths for example).

It may be that for specs like BM (and Demonology) that the pet just too high a percent of overall damage. When the pet does well, you do very well, but when the pet suffers, you suffer too much as well, so that your success hinges a lot more on encounter design. If we nerfed the pet damage, we would buff the character's of course.

Another idea some players have advocated lately is to prevent the pet from getting buffed at all, but let it scale better from buffs on the player. This removes some of the inconsistencies where the pet can't benefit from buffs properly. We don't currently have the technology to do that, but it is something we are exploring.

We think the ultimate solution to feedback about BM-51 is just to add more talents to the pet talent trees so that the bonus 4 talent points can improve pet dps by an amount equivalent to the cost of the hunter talent point. The exotic pets themselves would be more of window-dressing, perhaps with more utility from some of their special abilities.