Hunter Damage Between Specs Still Seems Off

Players generally do a great job generating numbers with what they have. They don't always have the most up to date numbers, and we don't make a herculean effort to get numbers to them. PTRs are our best shot, but even they can lag behind our most current builds.

As a most recent example, Elemental shamans were perplexed by why their numbers were different from ours and there was some amount of shouting that we didn't know what we were talking about and why couldn't we just accept the community's numbers and balance around those? It turned out that the shamans had misunderstood the way a talent worked (almost certainly because of unclear statements on my part) and that when they were able to test on the PTR, their numbers were close to what we predicted. Happy ending.

I don't know know why the EJ hunter numbers you cited don't match ours. It would take a great deal of time for us to dig through all the numbers that we are presented with to understand where the disagreements occur. In this case I suspect it is because Explosive Shot does less damage now than it does on the PTR, but I don't know. Survival is a miniscule percentage of total hunters out there, so we really won't mind them getting a significant bump, but it isn't our intent that they are far and away the highest dps hunter spec (BM shouldn't be either).

We do our tests under a variety of conditions, and fully raid buffed is certainly one of them.

The Ulduar comment I made has been widely mininterpreted, but I made it because so many players were using the argument "We may be okay now, but we won't scale." While some players understand "scaling" perfectly well, it also gets thrown around a lot by less-informed players as the generic reason for why something fails ("RNG" occupies that niche on the PvP side of things sometimes). In the hunter case, it may be that they do scale just fine but it is irrelevant because we are rebalancing hunters for 3.1.

Q u o t e:
GC while im excited that your changing us for 3.1 that is months away. Will you be inclinded to hotfix us if you see Live dmg output is extremely low?

Yes. We are even trying to build in more hooks when we do things like this so we can do changes if needed.

Q u o t e:
Also GC consider that there is a reason why Survival is not played by most hunters. The mechanics for the tree feel too clunky and with the addition of 30 sec CD to LnL that isn't represented on the UI, the tree has become extremely Clunky.

Fair enough. Just buffing dps isn’t always enough to change something from not fun to fun. There are however some hunters even in this thread who want to play Survival and just can’t justify it at the moment.

Q u o t e:
Cunning pets overall just are a waste of code at this point. Roar of Recovery is useful, but at a 6min cooldown makes it a drop in the bucket.

While 400 dps is low, you are making the assumption that anything that isn’t a raiding pet is a waste of code. Those pets weren’t intended to be for raiding – that’s what Ferocity pets are for. Thanks for all of the numbers though, Neruse.

Q u o t e:
Sorry we're a bit panicky ... we're all thinking of Ret Pally's back in Beta and how you didn't listen then when folks said they were OP and umm ... they were?

Sure, but the Ret pallies said they weren’t and were really upset with the magnitude of the nerfs (which turned out, I think, to be on target or even a little light). I understand what you’re trying to say, but players can be very selective about when we’re supposed to listen to them or not.

On LnL, we’re still messing with the specifics on it. It’s too early to comment until we have something we’re happy with.