[Hunter] BM and MM are broken.

In order to lend any weight to statements such as "You nerfed our other 2 trees to oblivion," you are going to have to provide numbers comparing the 3 specs and they are going to have to be numbers that a reasonable amount of other players believe are reasonable numbers.

Real numbers are much more compelling than what spreadsheets estimate. Multiple bosses are more compelling that combat dummies.

Currently we are seeing a lot of "Someone smart posted some numbers showing Survival was the best dps spec, so I went that spec." We need to see a lot more players trying out different builds and strategies. Declarations that "I too adopted a cookie cutter spec" aren't as compelling when you are taking about potential and effective dps.

Q u o t e:
Correct me if I'm wrong, GC, but didn't you recently say that the devs don't give much credibility to player-supplied data because you guys "have access to the real data from realms"?

Sometimes players post numbers and then say "There. Go fix it." It of course doesn't work that way. But numbers generated from the community are always very useful.

Note that I didn't say we lacked hard evidence. I said that posts saying "BM and MM are broken," without much proof aren't very useful. Yes, I know I can go over and read EJ's forums. I do that a lot. Posts that say "Go look at EJ's numbers" aren't that useful either.

What I am hoping to see is someone say perhaps "BM is 1000 dps lower than SV" so that maybe someone else can come in and say "Um, those numbers look suspicious to me" or "I get that on some fights but not on others." Slowly some kind of consensus can be arrived at. Just quoting another player's numbers over and over doesn't provide the same kind of data set.

Q u o t e:
every hunter and their mother called that MM and BM would be uncompetitive

From my POV it was more like some smart theorycrafters (possibly even on EJ) came up with some numbers and then a lot of people adopted those as fact and started echoing that MM and BM would be uncompetitive. I don't feel that the community has really had enough time with the changes to figure out the nuances of specs that many people had abandoned for a long time. I still see discussions about whether raptors or wasps (or moths!?) provide the most dps.

From what we can tell, SV and MM are pretty close. SV may be slightly higher, but not by hundreds of dps. Affliction and Destro aren't at the same exact number but you still see both in raids (for the time being). MM also brings a really nice group buff (Trueshot Aura) while SV provides Replenishment, and we take those into consideration.

BM is an easier spec to play. We tend to reward specs that are a little tougher to play if played very well with higher dps. Affliction and Mutilate are good examples, though we went overboard with Mutilate's dominance over other specs. If BM was simpler and provided the same or higher dps, then you would see 95% BM hunters (which, no suprise, is exactly what we had). Some players will try SV or MM, decide it's not for them and go back to BM. If they couldn't make SV work, then their dps may be just fine as BM (or else the drop will be so low that they don't care). At issue is how much lower BM can be than MM and SV before it isn't worth spec'ing into. Combat for rogues is too far below Assassination so that you take too big a hit if you choose to opt out of the more demanding Mutilate play style. Make sense?

Again I will offer that for 95% of players out there, your individual skill and gear are going to have more effect than your spec. Just because very good hunters (or spreadsheets) come up with the highest possible dps for Survivial, does not mean that *your* dps will improve as Survival or that you cannot improve your dps as Marks or BM. I know it's a tradition in WoW to adopt cookie-cutter specs, and to some extent we'll never get away from that. But don't absolve yourself of the responsibility for trying to maximize your dps. When the community suddenly shifts, it's because some smart player experimented with a new build and made that work.

First, some of you need to chill. I answered some questions players had been asking. If you don't like my answers, you are welcome to say that. However, if you yell and scream and insult us, you are going to be banned. Several of the low level alts with a history of trolling have been banned permanently.

You all have asked a lot of questions and I can't answer them all, but here are some.

Q u o t e:
GC I find it amazing that with all the tools you have at your disposal that you cannot pull the data from the system yourself.

You're not reading what I am saying. Yes, of course we can do that. And we do.

My post was essentially that saying "Everyone knows SV is the hunter spec and BM and MM are garbage" is not a useful post. It probably isn't even true. There have been several posts asking why I didn't respond to threads with this as their thesis. I am attempting to explain why.

Q u o t e:
Is it honestly your contention that we all just copy and paste a fotm spec from EJ without thinking or testing various ideas out?

Do you really think that those of us who have played this class for years have so little understanding of the mechnics that we are just little robot followers who pick specs based not on facts, but on fashion?

No, of course not. My message was to those players that are doing that however. A quick glance at the forums will reveal a lot of them.

Q u o t e:
Wow, I see a lot of unhappy PAYING customers in this thread. As a former software customer service rep myself I would just like to make note here that it's a very, very bad idea to even remotely insinuate that it may these PAYING customers' own fault that they're unhappy.

This is a tired argument and the kind of thing that will get you banned. Yes, of course we care about players being happy. That is why I spend so much time on these forums. Buffing players just because they ask for it will no doubt make them very happy. It will also make all of the other classes rather unhappy.

Q u o t e:
Why do you keep insisting that Assassination is over the top NOW? Not pre-LK when our poisons were bugged and doing way too much dmg.

Miscomm. Assassination is doing too much damage relative to other rogues. Rogues as a whole are still too low in PvE and we have plans to bring them up.

Q u o t e:
Thing's like this have been posted to death both here, on the PTR forum, and EJ.

Okay, but if you have posted the numbers to death already and don’t want to post any more, what exactly is the purpose of constantly launching new threads on the topic? I hope it isn't just to get a blue response. Flooding the forums with the same topic is just going to make it harder for anyone to find information.

Q u o t e:
Affliction and Destro aren't at the same exact number but you still see both in raids
(for the time being).


My first response to this as a warlock is 'WTH DOES THIS MEAN!!!'.

My second is that this comment scares me.

I only meant that someone may figure out a killer Destro rotation that pushes them over the top. These things change over time. Relax. :)

Q u o t e:
How did we arrive there? Especially from here a point where every hunter tree had a valuable use:
- low-to-mid rated arena, or competitive PVE damage? Beast
- high rated arena? Marks
- mana efficiency and a great raid buff? Survival

I’m telling you that nearly every hunter was BM. You can say that all the specs were viable before the recent patch, but the fact is that very few players were trying the others, especially Survival.

Q u o t e:
Hunters have 3 dps trees, just like DKs. Out of the 3 trees, DKs have a LOT of viable specs (2H Frost, Frost DRM/BotN IT spam, Blood, 32/39, 44/27, unholy). Not all of these specs are optimal, but you wont see a spec beating the crap out of the others.

Hunters got one spec. And they're doing well by exploiting a clunky trap dance "feature". Where are the hunter hybrid specs? Do devs seriously think none have spawned because hunters are too friggin dense? Hunters are doing what they can with the talents they got.

Okay, I think this is the disconnect. This is exactly what we want - 3 viable specs. We don't want BM to be the noob spec that serious players don't use. We also don't want it to be the spec that every hunter uses, which I agree is where it has been for some time.

My comment was that BM can't be both easier to play and do more dps. We can debate whether or not BM is actually easier to play, but that is a slightly different discussion. Perhaps it is more fair to say that even though skilled BMs can squeeze even more dps out of their attacks, a BM player who did nothing but Steady Shot and use the pet could still do very high dps, which is not what we want.

If BM becomes too unpopular with these changes, if it becomes no longer viable in PvE or PvP, then we will fix it. The problem was that for a long time BM was the only PvE spec and it had increasingly become the leveling and PvP spec too.

I think some of my Ulduar comments have been taken out of context or misunderstood. We are making some changes to hunters. Some of them are pretty cool. We will have to rebalance many of the attacks at that time. For example, we are likely to add additional pet talents that increase dps so that the 4 bonus points from BM 51 will inflate player dps overall.

Q u o t e:
For those saying that BM is the more complicated spec and "you actually have to worry about managing your pet"- I just don't understand the argument. All hunters need to manage their pets, whether it's doing 15% or 50% of their dps. It doesn't suddenly become easier to keep your pet out of the flames on Sarth just because it's doing less damage.

What I DO know about BM is that I dinged 80, did Sarth in dungeon blues withing 30 minutes and topped the damage charts. BM was easy to hit great damage with crappy gear- maybe SV isn't quite like that. If that's the case, I can certainly understand the change. Maybe it isn't so much about shot rotations but about that hunter in crappy gear out damaging everyone in Vault 25 the day he dings 80. /shrug- who knows? I'm just throwing stuff out there.

I really do wish BM wasn't nerfed so hard. It's really frustrating a lot of the hunters in my guild who I taught to play the spec and worked hard to gear for it. I'm sure they'll live- but they sure aren't having fun right now.

Personally, I'm looking forward to SV- it's certainly been fun in BGs. I can't wait to try arena, and tomorrow will be my first Naxx with the spec. Should be a good time.

My real complaint here is that per-nerf we were told that hunter damage was too high, so that was the reason for the changes. Now we are hearing that BM is too easy, and that is why it was changed. My guess is that the reasons were more nuanced than were expressed in GCs earlier posts, but I think a lot of heartache and frustration could have been alleviated by a statement like "we believe BM is too easy to get great damage with, so we want to tone it down". At least we'd have understood why we were seeing the numbers we were in the spreadsheets and PTR and GC was saying they were fine.

Elwynnia said just about everything I was trying to say, probably more eloquently.

Saying “BM is too easy to get great damage with” may be a good way to explain it. I don’t honestly believe every BM hunter raided while eating a sandwich. But the problem was you could do that, and while better BM hunters might be out dpsing you, you were still doing really high dps. Put another way, BM played badly could beat out a lot of other classes practically with SS and the pet alone.

We appreciate the data and other feedback. We do want to give the community a little more time to really try to max their dps with various specs and rotations and for us to make sure all the major bugs shake out. As many of you pointed out, the hunter class does have a lot going on and we don't think everyone is going to be operating near their max potential with all ofthe changes after less than a week of raiding and Arenas turned off half the time. If after that time BM continues to lag behind, we’ll buff it. We just don’t want to do it in such a way that sends every hunter stampeding back to that spec. If that happens, I will have no problem admitting we over-nerfed BM.

Sadly, we will continue to ban players who just come here to vent until they figure out not to do that. :(

Q u o t e:
Somebody please get this man a HAT parse.

Honor Among Thieves had a bug, which every rogue knew. The only way it can do amazing damage now is by overstacking a group with hunter pets. :) Mutilate remains the dominant spec, but we have plans to get them all up to speed.

Q u o t e:
The issue I have with banning people from the forums is the so called 'Trolls' quite often aren't trolls at all, that has become a generic term that you use for 'People who rudely throw well constructed and sensible information in my face, without saying please, thank you, and kissing my ass the entire time.'

Your job is your job, if you don't like it, well that pretty much sucks for you; this doesn't mean that because some people don't treat you nice that you should be banning them, it's your damned job to fix what's not working, not sit here and play forumcop for all the people you don't like.

These are our forums. If you want to post here, you have to play by our rules. They are not negotiable.

Players do not get banned for disagreeing with us or throwing well constructed and sensible arguments at us. I have made many posts attempting to describe the difference for players who have trouble understanding it – they are easy to find.

It is not my job (nor the job of any Blizzard employee) to put up with whatever you want to say because you feel some aspect of the game has made you so frustrated that you are no longer responsible for your actions. You are responsible for what you post here. If you can’t control yourself, then I suggest you don’t post.

I am quite weary of talking about forum moderation. I would rather spend my time in this thread reading and posting about hunter issues. I only bring it up because players don’t always notice the bans unless we take the “head on a pike” approach and do it publicly.

Now back to the actual discussion....

Q u o t e:
I'm glad you're playing the spec if it's how you like to play. I think everyone should play the way they want to. I just think that each spec should be comparable to eachother.

Well put, and that's what we want too. BM was the highest spec before by a considerable margin (and has been for a few years). If it is too low now, we will buff it. It is challenging with dps classes to get the numbers within 1% of each other. But if they are close enough, then it won't matter for the majority of players, who can then play whatever matches their playstyle the best.

Those players who always want the highest dps at any cost will respec for even a marginal dps gain, and we can live with that. For 95% of guilds though, that marginal dps increase is not what is standing between success and failure. There are very few moments in the history of the game where a few dps was the difference between success and failure for all but the most cutting edge of guilds.

But first we just have to get all the specs to be marginally different from each other.

We talked about it a great deal today and agreed that we probably over-nerfed BM. Marks is in a good spot and Survival might be too high once we look at the changes we are making to all other classes.

Our plan is to buff BM before Ulduar, but I can't give you a timetable more detailed than that, and things could change for any number of reasons. We are unlikely to touch Steady Shot for the reasons I have mentioned before. We are more likely to look at Kindred Spirits and Serpents Swiftness again.

Again, huge caveats: Predicting changes we are discussing making but haven't made yet is fraught with peril. I only wanted to address this issue because it caused a lot of consternation in the community.

I don't mind admitting when we make a mistake in the hope that it builds our credibility in the community. This was one. It won't be the last. :)

I think some of you have a little bit of rose-colored glasses concerning the state of class balance pre-LK. :)

I suspect the main difference is we are a little more forthcoming with our opinions on the game these days. One of the reasons I try to be out here on the forums is that I remember back when you would see patch notes and have little idea on the state of your class until the next patch notes.

Q u o t e:
By the way, good hunters agree that SV is fine =P

They are comparing themselves to relative not absolute numbers.

Q u o t e:
It was GLARINGLY obvious to US that the changes made to BM were too much.

G-L-A-R-I-N-G-L-Y

It was glaringly obvious to the Ret paladins that they were nerfed to the ground and that the DKs wouldn't be able to PvP anymore after the nerfs. There are Arcane mages already lamenting the death of their spec in PvE and we haven't even announced changes yet. :)

We do listen to players, but we can't *just* listen to players. There is a lot of voodoo and black magic that goes into our design process and that's just the way it has to be. It often comes down to a judgement call. In this case, we did get the advice of expert BM players and we did look at the parses of PTR raids. We balanced that against what the community was saying on this and other forums and we did a lot of internal testing and napkin math too. Usually our system works out fine. This time it didn't and you have my apologies for that. But your expectation should never be that the players hand us up numbers and those go into the game. It's just more complicated than that.

Q u o t e:
I don't like the idea that Marks is where the baseline is being drawn, especially considering the numbers I'm seeing from every other class.

It is the habit of players to always compare themselves to the highest number they see. This is the cause of a great deal of misunderstanding (and regretably sometimes misinformation) among the community. Many of the players you are comparing yourselves to are broken or otherwise doing too much damage for some reason.

We have targets for every number in the game. We don't publicly discuss them often for a couple of reasons:

1) It takes a lot of mystery and experimentation out of the game. These aren't automobile road tests where we are clocking mph / kph. It's a game and trying to maximize the power of your character is a huge part of the entertainment value.

2) When we post target numbers and players fail to meet them, they often blame us for that instead of looking at their own gear, skill, co-raiders, or the encounter specifics.

Q u o t e:
Q u o t e:
Why dont they just take the whole freaking class and toss it in the crapper where it belongs and redo it form scratch..over the years evertime they "try" to fix the hunter class to make balance they do some dumb crap.

Hire someone who knows what they are doing to build the class right. anf fire the Dev team and hire people that actualy play and test things out.. not just some punk kids that get there rocks off by looking at almost naked Night elves.

Stop nerfing classes no mater what they are...an instead to buff the ones that are lacking. you can't do that right so why not try something diffrent .. or is that too hard to ask
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This is a good option let all the hunters changed their toon into any of the other pure dps classes and be done with hunters. Blizzard obviously does not want hunters a a pure dps class. (Give us a life tap transfer or something like BoLight that pallies have. I mean at least this way YOU CAN JUSTIFY NERFS. or give us coole and useful raid buffs in each of the three specs so YOU CAN JUSTIFY OUR LOWER THAN HYBRID DPS.) Give us something to make us useful. No one want to bring or play a class that sucks and offers nothing to a raid.

Comments like this will get you banned. If you think your dps is low, then constructive posts are the kind of thing that will get our attention. And there have been several of those. If your contribution to these forums is that we should delete classes or fire our staff, then we are all better off with you not posting.

You're also going to annoy your fellow players when they see blue replies that only deal with forum moderation. Post less like this and it won't be required. Is this really how you want me spending my time?

And if I may ask, please do not derail this thread into a forum moderation discussion and let's get back to the topic. :)