#0 - Feb. 17, 2009, 9:02 p.m.
I have seen the hunter QQ bandwagon spiraling out of control in these last 2 weeks of Dev's abscence from posting. It seems many players have forgotten that underperforming specs are going to be receiving buffs coming up shortly, which could have drastic changes to game balance on its own.
However, I was talking with megatf the other day about what nerfs must are most apparent, if nerfs must be made. They include:
1.) Removing TnT stun of course (and impact and blackout and all other stupid RNG potentially-game-winning CC like MI polyspam)
2.) Removing the ability for LnL to double proc (once from a serpent sting tick and once immediately following that from a trap activation). The vast majority of the playerbase doesn't even know this can happen, but back to back LnL procs are happening everywhere and it is influencing people on a subconscious level that hunter burst is OP. I'm not saying hunter burst isn't too high without a double proc, but bugged double LnL procs CERTAINLY aren't helping things
There are people getting hit with 6+ explosive shots in 10 seconds from a double LnL, not recognizing that this is a bug, and saying to themselves "OMFG hunter damage is OBSCENE WTF!"
Now, the fix for this has to be delicate. Raiders need a way to be assured LnL procs, and arena hunters would appreciate a way to create LnL burst for themselves through their own workings, and not some RNG tick of a serpent sting. I'm not sure what your work-around is going to be for this, but I assume you at least recognize the problem.
To further tweak things if needed, you could increase the internal CD on lock n load, although I'm not sure what affect that would have on PvE.
3.) Wyvern could be made into a longer CD. You could easily modify or remove the glyph to put it back to 1 minute.
4.) Re-work or re-design trap mastery to remove the ability for hunters to double-frost-trap. This can be especially crippling in 3v3 and 5v5 environments where hunters can have literally almost half the map covered in ice proc'ing entrapment.
5.) A suggestion to help deal with hunter's ability to chain CC (without having to move scatter back to deep marks) is to do something similar to what you did with arcane and create a shard "lockout cooldown" period between wyvern and scatter, where you cannot use both within [xxxxx] seconds of each other.
I have a few other fixes in mind, but I'll stop at these main 5. We should see how the buffs to underperforming specs pans out in 3.1 before getting too drastic.
Also, any idea when you are going to put 3.1 up on the test realm?
