Hunters with focus, will it really matter?

If you ignore combo points (which we aren't planning on adding to hunters), then the biggest decision energy-users face is whether to use a single 60 energy attack or two 30 energy attacks. The answer depends on a lot of variables, including which does more damage, what is on cooldown, the synergy between the abilities, etc.

If you consider the cat druid (because it's slightly simpler) and ignore finishing moves, then the druid rotation would look something like getting up a +bleed attack, applying a bleed dot, getting up a +damage buff, and then doing the actual damage. You could imagine something similar like that for hunters. I don't mean hunters are going to be a +bleed class, but more that the choice of what attack to push next should have some decision behind it. It won't just be Serpent Sting x 1, Chimera Shot x 1000. Repeat.

Also most of the answers quoted above were from Blizzcon. These answers fall into three basic categories: things we know we're going to do, things we'd like to do, and things we hadn't really thought about before someone asked a question (e.g. taming mounts).

Also, Enhancement shamans will almost certainly stay as mana-users but still share (non Int) gear with hunters. This likely means some kind of attack power to mana regen mechanic like Ret paladins have currently. However development on stuff like this is still early.

Q u o t e:

Enh shaman also already have the attack power -> spellpower conversion, so I'm really confused as to what GC means by that statement.

I meant Ret is a spec of a mana-using class that gets everything they need from attack power gear. This is different from say Feral druids who don't use mana in their melee mode. Our assumption is that Enhancement shaman will wear gear without any Int on it but still use mana for their spells.

Q u o t e:
Mangle > SR > 5cp Rip > Rake (4pc10 bonus hasn't been tested, so this may bump Rip with the bonus up) > Shred. FB if you are in a situation where you have ~40 energy, 5cps, and >8 seconds left on both SR and Rip (or thereabouts).

So basically you can operate on a priority system with an "energy based" class, and GC was slightly off on his Kitty "rotation" ;)

I said ignore the finishers, so that removes Rip and FB. You are left with a bleed (Rake), a bleed buffer (Mangle), a damage buff (SR) and then the actual attack, Shred. Someone unfamiliar with kitties might say "Oh I'll just use all my energy on Shred, because it does the most dps" the way someone unfamiliar with focus-based hunters might say "Oh I'll just use all my focus on Chimera / Explosive once they aren't on cooldowns." Our plan is to make the rotation have more depth than that. It won't be at the Feral level of complexity without cps and finishers and because hunters have other things to manage, like Fluffy.

Q u o t e:
Yeah but I'm just thinking what other stats.... I mean Agility....Stamina....then what Spirit? O_o

You probably won't focus on Agi or Sta since it will be on your gear in relatively inflexible amounts already. You could gem or enchant for it though. You'd probably look at hit, crit, haste and mastery and decide what fits your spec and gear the best.

Q u o t e:
GC clearly says: "Oh I'll just use all my focus on Chimera / Explosive once they aren't on cooldowns." which again means they will likely have cooldowns.

Sorry, I meant if we remove the cooldown from those shots then someone might jump to the conclusion that hunters will just spam them. I don't know if we will be able to remove the cooldown or not. Shred does not have a cooldown yet Ferals use many other abilities. That is one way to go. Another is to keep a small cooldown, but in general we think focus will let us take cooldowns off a lot of hunter abilities since the income rate of focus will help us balance the costs.

In general (and with many exceptions) you can't balance mana-using spells around cost since casters have nearly unlimited mana at any point in time and certainly early on in a fight. Energy (and focus, and rage to a much lesser extent to where it's actually a problem) are limited at any given moment but come back pretty quickly. Mana-spells have to be balanced around cast times and cooldowns instead. Hunters generally lack cast times, so most abilities have cooldowns which lead to annoying collisions and a lot of timer-watching. Focus should help improve that. We hope!

Q u o t e:
So it is still a priority based system. Just with 4 abilities instead of 6. I think Hunters kinda like their priority based system, and are worried it will go away with the change to "energy". I think you and I are on the same page to reassure them that you can really have a priority system with "energy" and it really can be fun.

Yea, I think we agree. The difference is whether the priority is based on "I do more damage if I do X first because of synergy with Y" or priority based on "X is on cooldown." Too many cooldowns can get annoying. Just ask any hunter or Ret paladin.

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And by the way, the rotation described at the end paragraph 1 does not describe a rotation that any hunter uses. Put on your customer service hat and make me understand WHY you are doing this. I think the money I've paid so far entitles me to an explanation beyond "the choice of what attack to push next should have some decision behind it."

I was describing a rotation that could evolve if the focus model was as simple as just using your best attack and nothing else. I don't think hunters do that today. However, we also think the hunter rotation could be more fun than it is today. You may not agree, and that's cool, but I'm sure you can tell from reading this thread that a lot of hunters do. WoW is blessed with a large player base so it's unlikely we will ever get 100% consensus on any game change. We have to make the decisions we think are best for the game and try to make those decisions informed ones based on the experiences players are having. We don't make changes like this arbitrarily, because among other things, it's a lot of work. :)

Q u o t e:
Now, to me, this seems like Hunters will be 'Rogues but worse'. See, they'll have less focus regeneration than Rogues, and we won't have combo abilities. This means Hunters would do less damage than a Rogue whilst the Rogue builds up combo points, and then when the Rogue gets to blow the combo points for an extra burst of damage, the Hunter just continues at the sub-par level of damage.

It's impossible (or at least not logical) to make the assumption that hunters will do less damage than rogues given the very little information you have available. A lot of what makes rogue gameplay interesting isn't the base mechanics but the way their talents affect their energy flow. You have to imagine hunter mechanics that are similar to Adrenaline Rush, Dirty Deeds, Focused Attacks, etc.

I keep going back to the Feral druid, because that rotation would still be fairly interesting if Mangle, Rake, Shred and Savage Roar were the only usable buttons. Imagine hunters had Mangle Shot, Rake Shot, Shred Shot and Savage Roar Shot. Now toss in Hunter's Mark, Kill Command, Bestial Wrath, Lock and Load and similar talents and abilities.

I know change can be scary, but we're convinced this is a good change. It will finally make hunters feel like a weapon-based class instead of a dps caster like mages or locks.

Q u o t e:
Abilities and damage can't be balanced based on mana alone. If you gave mages an ability that takes 50% of their mana and does huge damage, mages would cast the ability twice (gibbing 2 players) and then complain that they go OOM too fast.

Mana is a fight timer mechanic. This used to apply to all ranged classes and healers. Presumably the trade-off was meant to be "bring 5 casters who take little damage but will be unable to do damage whatsoever after X minutes", or "bring 5 melee who can do damage indefinitely, but take more AOE damage which means the healers will run out of mana faster".

Increasingly mana has been made near-infinite for damage classes and specs and AOE has spread out to the ranged dps. The primary purpose of mana in the game is now only to limit the longevity of healers. This is ultimately a good thing, as it guarantees you won't brute-force encounters by, say, 2-manning a raid boss for 3 hours with the paladin spamming his biggest heals the entire time while you slowly chip away at him. Or, more practically speaking, if your group's tank or dps undergear an encounter, the healer is where it will ultimately show.

The fact that ret paladins and ehancement shamans are also healing classes is the reason they will continue to have mana, with near-infinite mana in their DPS specs. For hunters it will be much easier to fix their wonky mana mechanics by swapping them over to a quick-regen small-quantity mechanic. It also "feels" right because they don't cast spells.

Gameplay-wise, I don't see any reason mages and warlocks couldn't also be improved by switching to a new mechanic. Why should those classes be limited at 5 minutes of damage, while hunters and melee can dps indefinitely? It might feel strange having mages not use mana, but perhaps they'll come up with another mechanic that feels equally magical.

This is a prettty good summary. The answer is that we are changing mana-based nukers but not by removing their mana. Instead we are just going to make them less dependent on mana regen, specifically Spirit. You are correct that we really only want healers to run OOM, and we can't really get rid of it for reasons Squirrelbot mentions. DPS casters still have to manage mana to some degree but they should have tools (e.g. Evocate) to handle that. They shouldn't "run dry" the way a Holy priest or Resto shaman needs to run dry (ideally -- I know this isn't happening now) when the encounter isn't going well for you.

Q u o t e:
I presume they will have to do alot more balancing to make it work.

You guys are worried about the color of the curtains when the foundation hasn't been poured yet. All 30 talent trees are changing for Cataclysm. It's very premature to try and assert hunter dps will be low or foucs will be impossible to manage based on the limited information you have.

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I think there will be fewer cooldowns on individual abilities - damage-per-focus is a far more effective tool for balancing damage abilities over a short period of time than damage-per-mana, and the relatively small focus pool provides inherent limitations on the number of targets that can be simultaneously affected by an ability without a cooldown. That's two reasons for individual ability cooldowns that will no longer apply to hunters.

Heavily damage oriented shots, such as Aimed, Arcane and Multi are most amenable to having their individual cooldowns removed. Explosive and Chimaera are a bit trickier - as 51-point talents, you want them to have really good damage-per-focus, but you don't really want people spamming them to the exclusion of all other abilities. I would expect those two to retain some kind of cooldown. Ditto for Black Arrow.

Debuffs with a relatively long duration on a single target (i.e. stings) can be balanced by giving them a high focus cost for application (preventing effective application to multiple targets), but sufficiently long durations that they don't consume excessive amounts of focus in a sustained PvE battle. Such an approach would likely require tweaks to make this work in PvP - e.g. a glyph or talent to restore focus when a sting was dispelled.

Some abilities will still have cooldowns in order to keep the focus cost low without allowing chaining of the ability (e.g. Maim on my druid has a 10 second CD to ensure maximum uptime of 50% even without DR and to limit the frequency with which it can be used as an interrupt). Some of our utility abilities (Tranq/Scatter/Silencing) will likely fall into this category.

I expect Kill Shot to move to a Ferocious Bite style mechanic, where the base shot has excellent damage-per-focus characteristics, but it also consumes all other focus at a comparatively poor damage-per-focus conversion rate. However, since we won't have the combo point mechanic to limit the rate of fire for the ability, I'd expect this to also retain some kind of cooldown.

TLDR version: There are plenty of reasons to expect several key hunter abilities to lose their cooldowns in the transition to focus, but there are also reasons to expect the remaining abilities to retain their cooldowns.

There's a lot of sense in Nimizar's post here. I can't promise that everything will work exactly how he describes, but we went through a lot of the same mental steps when trying to decide if this was a good change to make.