What was your plan for hunter rebalance?

#0 - March 28, 2009, 9:58 p.m.

I hate to have to call you out GC, but this is something I feel that needs to be answered or at least, provide a bit of insight on your original plan.

You said a while back that on http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14132916810&sid=1&pageNo=3#43

Q u o t e:
I mentioned Ulduar because I suspected hunters would say "Our dps may be okay now but it won't scale." That may be true, but we are planning making some other changes to hunters so we will have a chance to reevaluate scaling before Ulduar ships. We're not ready to share these other change with you, in part because if we end up not going through with the changes players will be "sad" (which I use as a euphamism). Many of the changes we're talking about are designed to make hunters more fun to play, so you shouldn't be scared of them.

One thing we were hoping to see in action was the ammo changes. I suppose that was gonna start the rebalancing act. That didn't go through, so we are pretty much in limbo because nothing else has been done.

I'm curious, what did you guys have planned if the ammo changes actually worked? What do you guys intend to do now cause most of your plans were brought down by technical problems? Is anything still on the table?

Ghostcrawler

#9 - March 29, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

We wanted to do more with ammo than we were technically able to do in the short term.

Ghostcrawler

#23 - March 29, 2009, 7:58 p.m.

Q u o t e:
In a PvE note, we're boned. PTR tests are proving this left and right.

In a PvP note, we're boned. Our mobility and utility has been removed. This removes our survivability and our damage from being a threat.

In case you wanted to know.

If you feel that way, then make a post on it. If you have already done so, then you can stop posting.

Posting relatively unrelated replies into threads is a good way to annoy other players and one of the reasons I am often reluctant to reply to threads at all.

Q u o t e:
Another interesting point is they never really asked for our feedback on what we would like to see done with ammo. Not that it is necessary, but with the delay they could at least see what community thinks would be a progressive way to evolve ammo.

Feel free to post your ideas. You don't need to wait for an invitation.

Ghostcrawler

#85 - March 30, 2009, 5:16 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Steady Shot was nerfed, and as such it does not scale as well as it once did with gear.

Blizz will not be reverting SS but instead intended a new arrow mechanic to solve this scaling problem.

You have to convince us there is "this scaling problem." At what gear level will hunters start to fall behind just because of gear? If that doesn't happen until players have attack power greater than 12,000 then it isn't going to affect you this expansion. As long as your damage increases with gear upgrades then you are scaling. If your damage increases slower than other dps classes with similar upgrades, then a problem exists.

Q u o t e:
This is what I think a good deal of people are getting up in arms about, including me. It's great that you've made the 'appropriate' nerfs that seem to be going along with these ammo changes you have hinted at. However, there's one thing missing from the equation...the change to the ammo that's supposed to be a buff beyond just compensation for the nerfs.

With Ulduar coming out and the raid dungeon being harder than Naxx and where DPS is going to probably count for a lot more, Hunters are concerned. They are concerned about the very near future and since you offer no insight to what it is that you (the devs) have coming down the pipe later on, Hunters are not caring. They are caring about the here and now, worried about their raid spots, and worried about their damage falling short of the mark.

Every class and spec on these boards is arguing their damage is too low for Ulduar. I haven't seen a ton of evidence yet to suggest that hunters are suffering worse than any other class.

There is this perception I think that we nerfed hunters because of ammo changes. We nerfed hunters because they were doing too much damage (and SS was a larger portion of total damage than we wanted).

I did say that we were going to redo some portions of the hunter equation for 3.1, which we did with changes to Explosive Shot, TNT, pet talent trees, Chimera Shot and all the other changes in the patch notes. When we redo ammo, we'll have to redo them all again. We made sure that hunters will continue to scale satisfactorily into the next couple of tiers of content, but if you think we made a mistake somewhere, feel free to point it out. But you need to be specific. Saying "We don't scale" isn't sufficient, because you in fact do.

Ghostcrawler

#93 - March 30, 2009, 5:57 p.m.

Q u o t e:
GC, you should really try to avoid unsubstantive posts like the one you made in this topic, people see a blue reply on the main forum page and get all excited, then read the thread to find out there is barely any relevant information in it.

I understand that, but I can't be held hostage by the blue trackers. I am out here to communicate with the WoW community. Sometimes that is going to be announcing exciting new changes, but most of the time it's going to be a lot more trivial.