Hunter Questions and Commentary.

#0 - June 15, 2009, 5:24 p.m.

As a US Marine, I was trained to Improvise, Adapt and Overcome. Now, allow me to say this before I go into how much of a cluster I think my class is. I've improvised with every curve ball Blizz has thrown at me, I've adapted to a new spec, a new rotation and a practically new class. Above all, I've overcome every setback Blizz has thrown in my face. Until now. Hunters used to be a force of reckoning in PvP, now all it takes is one rogue to disarm us, and we're done. It's over. A warrior in our deadzone, whoops. A druid heal spamming until help arrives? SOL, Jack.

With all due respect Blizzard, you've messed us up. Nice and good this time, you didn't just poke and prod like you do to most other classes, no sir, these were some good old fashioned beatings you laid down on us.

As for the issues I seek to address:

Deadzones - As every Marine knows, you have no deadzone. If a hostile gets in your face, you have a combat knife at his throat - Oorah, game over. If a hostile is within 3-5 yards of you, we have sidearms. A good idea for hunters, no? Sidearms, a weak little pistol that we can use our ranged spells with, but perhaps doesn't hit as hard? Or perhaps give us some actual melee capability. Whats the point in dual wielding if I never even get a chance to draw my blades? I mean, a stun and I'm done. That's become a motto on my realm "Stun and done," an unofficial saying for hunters everywhere.

Ammunition - I've never had to pay for ammunition in real life, someone else takes care of that, but it also doesn't take me 5-20 rounds to kill a wolf. At the very least, make ammunition cheaper. But, for example, if I'm using arrows I'd be able to run up to the corpse and pluck them out, right? Same idea with crossbow bolts. The bullets we use couldn't be retrieved, but rogues have lockpicking and poisons, why can't we cast our own bullets?

I can simplify this a bit for those who don't understand the complaint - Warriors don't have to get a new axe every time they lodge one into a poor creature's spleen. So you're telling me that they can parry countless blows, rain down upon their enemies with countless slices and hacks, and come away with a solid axe every time? Granted, they have to repair - eventually. Ever smacked a hatchet on something a bit strong for it? The handle snaps or the head flies off.

Pet Scaling - Everyone knows you're only as strong as your weakest link. That would seem to be my pet, a wolf I tamed in Heroic Hellfire Ramparts back at 70. Sure, she can lay down some damage - Boy, I've seen it myself - But she dies a hell of a lot, she can't take much damage. Not that I can take much more. Pet food is another issue, warlocks and death knights don't feed their little pets. Not like it costs much and pet talents can take care of it, but until your pet gets to that level, it's an annoyance.

Globals - It would seem to me that our globals really step on each other. I can't cast a sting and an explosive right after the other, nope. I can't cast an explosive, push that druid right down to 19% and killshot before his HoTs tick, no sir. I'll tell you what I can do, though, shift aspects without interrupting my waiting. I see only a minor flaw in that...

PvP - Back in the day a good hunter could dominate pvp. We had all these amazing stuns, dazes, slows and sleeps. We could lay down traps that were useful, and wouldn't be resisted. We would be able to actually stand against a pally or a rogue, and often times dominate them. We could decimate healers - No longer. It would seem to me that a healer can out-heal our damage, dispel our DoTs, Mana Drains and, with abolish poison already ticking, sleeps. You cut the time of our slows by several seconds. Unless we want to spec in to it, <sarcasm> because that won't interfere with something we need more. </sarcasm>

As it stands, a Ret paladin is my worst enemy in the world. Hear me out, please. A Ret Paladin can throw a repentance on me, I can trinket out of it, but by that time he's already on me with a hammer of justice. He will then proceed to mash a crusader strike and divine storm, all within one stun. After I'm out of that, I disengage, and throw a concussive shot on him - He can Hand of Justice out. Once he catches back up to me, which isn't hard when he's 15% faster and I have to move backwards to hit him, he can unleash another hellish torrent of crusader strikes and divine storms on me. Should I survive, he can then throw a hammer of... His execute, and destroy me. Should that miss, it's only a few seconds before he has it up again. But, if I'm fortunate enough to catch him off guard and burst him down to execute range (Hah!) you can be sure he'll pop a bubble and heal, as his bubble grows low he can then Repentance me.

What can I do about it? Pop some cool downs and pray he doesn't end up behind me. Or just avoid pvp on my hunter all together.

Ghostcrawler

#42 - June 16, 2009, 4:33 a.m.

Q u o t e:
As a US Marine, I was trained to Improvise, Adapt and Overcome.

Hats off to you, sir. I grew up on a military post.

Q u o t e:
Ammunition - I've never had to pay for ammunition in real life, someone else takes care of that, but it also doesn't take me 5-20 rounds to kill a wolf. At the very least, make ammunition cheaper. But, for example, if I'm using arrows I'd be able to run up to the corpse and pluck them out, right? Same idea with crossbow bolts. The bullets we use couldn't be retrieved, but rogues have lockpicking and poisons, why can't we cast our own bullets?

We agree with the comments that ammo costs have gotten too high. It was acceptable when hunters realistically did not die as often, and thus didn't have high repair bills. But it has gotten too high now.

Q u o t e:
Pet Scaling - Everyone knows you're only as strong as your weakest link. That would seem to be my pet, a wolf I tamed in Heroic Hellfire Ramparts back at 70. Sure, she can lay down some damage - Boy, I've seen it myself - But she dies a hell of a lot, she can't take much damage. Not that I can take much more. Pet food is another issue, warlocks and death knights don't feed their little pets. Not like it costs much and pet talents can take care of it, but until your pet gets to that level, it's an annoyance.

Pets need to scale better. As soon as you have a hunter choosing say AP over crit because one helps the pet and the other doesn't then that's a problem.

Q u o t e:
PvP - Back in the day a good hunter could dominate pvp. We had all these amazing stuns, dazes, slows and sleeps. We could lay down traps that were useful, and wouldn't be resisted. We would be able to actually stand against a pally or a rogue, and often times dominate them. We could decimate healers - No longer. It would seem to me that a healer can out-heal our damage, dispel our DoTs, Mana Drains and, with abolish poison already ticking, sleeps. You cut the time of our slows by several seconds. Unless we want to spec in to it, <sarcasm> because that won't interfere with something we need more. </sarcasm>

I'm not sure if the healer can out-heal your damage or not. That's a longer discussion about how much damage a healer should have to heal through and if the only healer counter should be CC. But we did design the hunter around having potent CC, and we don't think their CC feels scary any longer. Traps are probably in most need of some attention here. We'll try and go into more detail in the class Q&A if it isn't too far away.

Ghostcrawler

#98 - June 16, 2009, 7:16 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Hes good at that. making you feel better about your broken class without telling you how it will be fixed, or when it will be fixed.

We don't typically make big announcements deep in forum posts where players have to hunt for them. Big changes that we don't want you to miss are promiment, often made by CMs, and released around the world at the same time. We're not lurking around just waiting for someone to ask the right question before we spring changes on you.

We rarely ever announce ETAs. The player base can be really unforgiving if we miss a target, and we're so hard on our stuff that we miss our targets a lot.

Ghostcrawler

#231 - June 17, 2009, 10:01 p.m.

First off, let's drop the political debate. It's not appropriate in these forums.

Second, the fizzling traps were something we put in place because of immune bosses. We think we have a solution to prevent traps from fizzling when immune players cross them. As I suggested earlier, traps are supposed to be a main component of the hunter class and we want to keep them potent. We have a few trap buffs in 3.2.

Third, I want to discuss a little ability called Roar of Sacrifice. We added it to make the new pet talent trees cooler. However in order to prevent players from chain use of the ability to keep tanks alive on raid encounters, we had to change it to only work on the hunter. This was unfortunate because we liked the way it was used in PvP and gave hunters a useful tool that they could use on other teammates. We would very much like to get Roar back into PvP and let you use it on anyone again. The way we would do this would be to have it somehow linked to critical hits instead of just pure damage (making it useless to ever use on a PvE tank).