Hunter Q&A Thoughts

Q u o t e:
"At the same time, we don’t necessarily want to give them one because then Arcane Shot risks just vanishing from the hunter rotation. But, we can’t just buff Arcane Shot (unless it is very deep in Beast Mastery) because Survival and Marks use that too. See the problem?"

Ya, the problem is you do not know how hunters work. Explosive and Arcane on the same CD. Good job Ghostcrawler.

What I read: "I am so eager to try and put down the devs that I don't like to think about what they said." This has been brought up in like 4 threads since the Q&A went live. If your main goal is to find ammo for how the devs don't understand your class, at least read the other threads first.

If we buff the holy heck out of Arcane, then every Survival hunter just shoots Arcane and won't take Explosive Shot. Since a lot of the Survival tree is designed to prop up Explosive Shot, we think this would a bad thing. Hence, we have to be very careful about how much we buff Arcane. If we do it in a very deep BM talent, then it's probably safe. If we do it baseline or through a glyph or an upper talent, then we might get into problems. By contrast, buffing Explosive or Chimera is pretty safe because no other hunter can ever use those shots. BM doesn't have a "this is BM only" attack to buff, unless it applies to the pet.

There is a similar discussion going on for DKs about at what point they can stop using Scourge Strike and just use Obliterate instead. That would be bad, because an Obliterate-based Unholy build is a lot less fun or distinct to play. A similar thing happened the last time we tried to buff Devastate. Fury warriors said "Yummy," and gave up a big chunk of the Fury tree in order to get it.

Q u o t e:
Compare the times on the posts. I believe my post brought it up initially in the DD forums. I could be wrong.

I doesn't really affect me which thread brought it up first. I just think it's a bit silly to spend so much effort trying to catch us in a gotcha moment instead of discussing actual hunter issues .Something like half of this thread is posts that say "Ha ha, Explosive Shot shares a cooldown with Arcane Shot." I am sure the players making the other half of the posts are thinking "This is why we can't have nice things." :)

As I have said a couple of times now, a very deep BM talent to buff Arcane Shot might work. Otherwise, most of the BM damage is tied up in the pet or at least the pet being alive. Perhaps BM could benefit from a totally new mechanic, even it wasn't a signature shot, so that we would have more knobs to turn when we needed to buff BM (and only BM).

Q u o t e:
Are you SERIOUSLY, SERIOUSLY trying to make a comparison between PvP in this game compared to PvP in most FPS games? Are you TRYING to compare the extreme imbalance between all of the classes in this game to most FPS PvP where players are given the exact same characters, given chances to get all of the same weapons, have all of the same abilities, and where actual SKILL is the determining factor more often than not?

So, you're telling me that as is right now...as a Hunter I could constantly circle-strife around melee and casters and completely negate all of the gap-closers like Death Grip, Intercept, etc, and auto-shoot them to death while threading in instants? ...Please GC, PLEASE think about this for a moment...EVERYONE think about this for a moment. Now, I know I have absolutely no Arena ratings and will probably get criticized like heck for it, but really do I need them? Do I need them to justify the logic that if I am put in a confined space without a large amount of room to kite that melee/casters will inevitably close the gap, get into melee range, and then proceed to slow and keep me from gaining distance to 'circle strafe'?

I am saying circle strafing is not our vision for WoW PvP. It is supposed to be about using your abilities at the right time. We don’t want to solve a balance problem by turning our PvP into a game where nobody ever stands still. I will turn this around, and say that your solutions need to account for a melee class being able to kill you even if you're a really clever hunter. Any of these solutions that approach "and that way melee won't ever be able to catch me" sound great if you're a hunter and not so great if you're a game designer. We don't want melee to clobber you every encounter. But we don't want you to kite them while shooting at them either. At least in the first example you are doing some damage to them. In the second, they don't even get a hit off.

I also think you are underestimating the role of skill in WoW PvP. Yes, your class or comp choice can have a big affect on your rating. But as long as there are players doing better than you with the same class, then you have to accept the role that skill plays. Players like to deemphasize skill when they think their class needs buffed or another class needs to be nerfed. But when they win, that’s all skill. :)

Q u o t e:
Nice, but not once have I seen any attempt to do that. WotLK alone added what, 10 more buttons to our bar in PvP? They could add things like mongoose bite to wing clip for starters, a simple fix, yet there is no mention or evidence of them doing that or anything like it.

You no longer have to manage Aspects.

Q u o t e:
-Pet survivability when it comes to AoE debuffs (mimiron, Sartharion waves... not that it was a problem... but still)

We did talk about pets taking AE damage. Debuffs would logically fall under that system, though you say yourself that the only example you could come up with wasn’t an actual problem, which makes me wonder why you’d use that as evidence that we missed the boat.

We’re not going to answer every question we get, because there are hundreds of them. We chose some that seemed to be asked over and over. After every one of these Q&As some indignant players have posted that we chose the wrong questions to answer. I’m pretty convinced that would happen almost no matter what.

Q u o t e:
Lastly, I know this isn't the suggestion forums, but personally I think BM should get its own signature shot.

Suggestions are fine for this forum, particularly when they are on topic. If you wanted to pitch a new class or feature, then that might be more appropriate for the Suggestions forum. Getting more feedback on the BM shot rotation is something we have been asking for.

Q u o t e:
One thing that can easily be done if make Avoidance baseline. Thats 3 points we automatically save. Or, an option is giving hunter pets 20 talent points and giving BM hunters 24 talent points. One big thing about ferocity is that it doesn't have a lot of extra damage dealing that makes it a choice, they are auto put points in and you're set. Cunning and Tenacity have that to a degree, more tanking or extra damage. Ferocity just have damage, damage, damage.

As we suggested in the QA, we are more likely to just remove Avoidance as a talent and make pets largely immune to mob AE damage. We did however add more talents to the pet trees specifically because many BM hunters said that they couldn’t get anything really useful with their extra talent points.

Q u o t e:
You guys are in the middle of the "planning" phase and should have already been at the "finishing touches" phase for the patch.

Our list of what we want to fix or improve in WoW is very, very long. There is probably not a single feature that we think can’t be improved in some way. A great deal of this job is triage, yet the triage isn’t simply a matter of most pressing need vs. easiest to implement.

Q u o t e:
Well no. We're thinking "was this a sincere mistake, or are the devs really this out to lunch?". Seeing as how the revised Q&A still contains this 'error', I'm leaning towards the latter.

It's obviously not a typo, and I have known a few terrible Hunters to try to claim weaving Arcane into a LnL proc to be a DPS increase, so as mad as it sounds, it's not as ridiculous a claim as one might think. It's easy to see how we could be taking this as a serious indication of the Hunter devs' knowledge (or lack thereof) regarding our class. Can we get some clarification? Why does this still exist in the revised Q&A?

It’s not a typo. Can Survival use Arcane? Yes. It’s in their spellbook. Is there a risk Survival will use Arcane if it’s buffed too much? Of course. Is there a risk Survival will use Chimera if it’s buffed too much? No. Maybe I should have said "BM and Survival CAN use Arcane," but really if I am going to have to offer this much clarification on everything I write, then the QAs are going to be reduced to even fewer questions. If something I say is really confusing, then I apologize and will try to offer clarification. I don't think that's what this is though. I think this is spending too much effort looking for evidence that nobody really understands you.

Q u o t e:
If Spirit Strike could crit at 200% and if the subsequent "tick" could crit things might be better, but I dunno. Even now I think people who use spirit beasts just really like them, or really hate Devilsaurs (or both).

I don’t think we’d really be in a better place if every BM hunter used Spirit Beasts and nothing else, given that they aren’t trivial to tame.

Q u o t e:
So when there is 1000 posts on Hunters in PvP discussing the issue and then there is nothing in either the 3.2 patch notes or the Q@A you expect us to not be cynical and to discuss more issues among ourselves as they fall on deaf ears?

Oh please. This is just QQ. The new patch contains a buff to Deterrence, a buff to pet survivability in the form of scaling resilience, the ability to use multiple traps at once, and a fix to the problem where traps fizzle on immune targets. You're welcome to say those changes aren't enough and suggest what additional problems you have and possibly even solutions for them. When you drag out the "nothing in the patch notes" and "fall on deaf ears" then we tend to roll our eyes and move on. Hint: that's not the response you really want from us.

Q u o t e:
The catlike reflexes change wont be a dps boost because bm hunters dont have talent points that deep to spend in that talent, and kill command is hardly a damage boost.

It isn’t a huge damage boost, but it is a damage boost and it helps to make an unattractive talent perhaps more attractive. Now the Wild Hunt change is a pretty decent damage boost, and if you look around there are some predictions now that BM might beat the Armor Pen-focused MM hunter for max dps. We'll see.

Q u o t e:
He said "You no longer have to manage aspects". It was a blanket statement in response to someone who said that we have to manage 10 additional keybinds.

Do you really think that the combination of Hawk and Monkey is a significant reduction in the number of keybinds that Hunters use? It's not. GC knows this, you know this, I know this, the American people know this. He exaggerated to win an argument.

And so the thread shifts from “GC doesn’t understand Arcane cooldowns” to “GC doesn’t understand Aspects.” I’ll come back to this thread when it gets back on the topic of hunters and away from trying to catch the devs in incorrect statements.

Q u o t e:
Yes, well QQ gets created when you can see your pleas being ignored over, and over, and over. I am sick and freaking tired of GC demanding less QQ and if we do then they listen.

Look, you can do this one of two ways. You can make informative posts that lead to discussion among the community and give me something I can take to design meetings. Or you can try and argue that it’s your right to post angry venting posts, in which case you'll probably get banned and lose your ability to say anything. I hope it was worth it.