Can we get an answer on hunters?

Q u o t e:
1) Are pets going to scale for 3.3?

If we can get it in. On a technical side, the implementation just ends up being a little different for every stat.

Keep in mind that pet scaling isn't essential to good damage. It's only essential for keeping your pet's damage growing at the same rate as your damage, and by extension keeping your total damage growing at the same rate as other classes. There aren't going to be 3 more tiers of content for Lich King, so it only gets to be an issue if other classes scale so much better that they leapfrog you in Icecrown / the final PvP season.

Q u o t e:
2) Are you going to remove crafting requirements from the ammo for 3.3?

No.

Q u o t e:
We've heard all the arguments for and against, which you've ignored and/or failed to comment on.

Please go light on this whole "ignored" perception. It wasn't that long ago that there was very little developer presence in these forums. We get way more questions on a daily basis than we are capable of answering. If you bring up something in the forums, I promise we will see it. Try not to interpret our intentions based on whether or not we post.

Q u o t e:
GC - your response about being ignored is illogical. Simply because there is more attention now does not mean we should be pleased with lackluster customer relations now. Having almost no attention *before* was utterly unacceptable for a company as thriving as blizzard. We are your customers, and the "way things were" isn't justification for the way things are now. For example, it's been six months since you have made a substantive post on ret Paladins to the ret community. And while it's clear that the development team thinks we're "fine", our mechanics are still boring, and your dev team still openly mocks us in the game for - you guessed it - playing the spec they designed.

I'm not here to perform customer relations. That’s not my job and that has nothing to with whether developers find time to post in the forums. Don’t approach the WoW forums as place to make your demands and you’ll probably end up in a happier place.

Q u o t e:
Honestly, I don't see how you can be taken aback in any way if hunters are peeved for being ignored. Just because it sucked worse before doesn't mean it's acceptable now. If you feed someone a poop sandwich, putting chocolate chips on it isn't really much of an improvement.

We don’t ignore any of the classes. On the other hand, we also don’t make it a point to make sure every class and spec gets their cheery post of the day so they know they're still loved. Please don’t try and equate any of the posts I make as having anything to do with design priority. I post when I can, largely on my own time.

Q u o t e:
Quoted for absolute emphasis. You tell me your going to remove ammo altogether because the system is clunky, then you go and make it harder than its ever been in the game period.

You realize that the only response you’re going to get from the “but you told us” line, is we just won’t tell you next time so there will be less blood spitting if we don’t get done everything we’d like. :)

To also be brutally honest, this is one of those threads that I hesitated for a long time before posting in. I think now you can understand why. You might ask yourself sometimes why there was a long tradition of so few developers posting, and why not many of them have much interest in it today.

Can someone articulate clearly your main concern about the Engineer specialization implementation? Most of what I read is that it's "clunky" or "inconvenient" which doesn't really explain the volume of discussion on this matter.

I understand that if it was up to you ammo would be infinite, and failing that it would be very cheap and convenient. We just want to make sure we're not missing something here.

I'm still not interested in hearing how hunters are always being held down by the man or whatever. :)

Q u o t e:
And again, I counter that in the past, the lack of interaction was absolutely unacceptable. We pay this company to play this game, and we spend a great deal of time playing it. You can't on one hand say you love your community and on the other behave like you are behaving here - responding to legitimate arguments with threats. It's inconsistent.

We do love our community. That doesn't mean you get to decide when or where we post.

We're going to use our forums the way see fit. If you want to make suggestions as to how you think we can do it better, that's cool, though this isn't the appropriate forum for that. If you are going to make demands and cancel your account if those demands aren't met, that's your perogative too, though please don't use this forum for threats like that either.

Since you asked, I'm not a member of the community team, though I work closely with them. I lead the team responsible for class design among other things. I'm here on my own terms, largely on my own time. Those terms aren't particularly negotiable. Sorry.

My canned response to posts like yours is to make good points and we will read them and take them under advisement. Smart players can trace a path from community discussions that eventually ended up informing game design. These forums represent a great opportunity for you to provide feedback to the people empowered with making design decisions. Don't make demands, especially for posts or answers. Don't junk up our forums with whining or name-calling. It's pretty simple, all things considered.

We've discussed forum policy enough. It really shouldn't be a secret for anyone who has spent much time here. I'm not going to address it again in this thread. My original response was just to bring up that when you respond bitterly and / or immaturely to our answers that you don't like, that isn't going to turn them into answers you like. It just means you'll get fewer answers and will be forced to rely on patch notes or maybe the occasional interview for your information. I'm sorry if that's "unacceptable." If you have ever paid for clothing or a car or a hotel room or even an mp3, that doesn't mean you get to design those products either (though hopefully the companies behind them, like ourselves, are open to feedback).

Q u o t e:
Its an added complexity no other class has to deal with, so we feel more or less singled out to be force to jump through more hoops just to reached the point of what we are balanced for.

That's just my take on it though. Other classes have their unique hoops, but none are reliant on a profession that the other classes are not.

I.e., everyone needs and enchanter, jewelcrafter and inscriptionist. You need a BS for a belt buckle, and a LW/Tail for a leg patch. You need an alchemist for flasks/potions.

At this point, for hunters, you tack on needing an engineer. Continuing with the norm (i.e. needing an eng, since we currently do) is one then, but then the added complexity of not only needing a raiding engineer, but one with the proper specialization.

You are just (overtly to some) filtering our potential crafters, for a hoop no other class has. That, I believe, sums it up.

If you couldn't get those items off of the Auction House, or if the prices were guaranteed to be exorbitant, or if you didn't have a lower cost, lower dps alternative you could use in a pinch then maybe I'd understand why this was Such A Big Deal. If it's just a quality of life issue, okay, but if I was a player out there with a hunter, I think I would be far more concerned about the pet scaling or other issues.

Q u o t e:
1. IF hunters are supposed to be the money maker for engineers, then you are cutting off half the potential player base from purchasing ammo from a specific person by only allowing that engineer to create one type of ammo.

Are you worried about the Engineers here or the hunters? "Both" is the easy answer, but I suspect most of the players posting here are worried about the hunters.

Q u o t e:
2. If a hunter makes his own ammo, you are forcing him to respec and pay 150g each time he gets a different type of ranged weapon or pay whatever ammo costs on the AH, which fluxuates greatly from server to server.

Hunters don't need to make their own ammo any more than weaponsmiths need to make their own maces. We're not expecting hunter Engineers to respec.

We're trying to design a social game that involves interacting with other players, even if that means only over the AH. We're not trying to create a game of one-man armies.

Q u o t e:
3. This is the most restrictive form of ammo ever created, which seems like a step backwards from your current trend of making ammo cheap, and easily accessible. Previous iterations of ammo have been either restricted by rep, restricted by trade, or restricted by price. The new ammo is being restricted by potentially all three, depending on the server. This is especially disconcerting considering ammo is slated to become non-consumable in the next expac.

It's tied to a recipe from Icecrown. To some extent it's supposed to be restrictive. You have lower dps alternatives, and in my experience progression-focused hunters make a call about when it's time to use the cheaper stuff (farming, learning attempts) and when it's time to break out the big guns. You aren't entitled to the highest dps ammo in the game any more than you are entitled to the highest dps gun or bow in the game, if that makes sense.

I don't think the Cataclysm argument is particularly relevant. We are getting rid of armor pen as a stat on gear in Cataclysm too. That doesn't mean we stopped putting it on 3.3 gear.

I'm not trying to nitpick here. We're just trying to understand if this is a real problem or if it's just inconvenient or if hunters just feel like they're being singled out.

Q u o t e:
Given the amount of serious discussion we're having now in guild regarding how we're going to make sure that the first person making Shadowmourne has enough primordial saronite while not limiting overmuch people's ability to craft gear.

I hate to bury a response that's possibly of interest to many players in a hunter-specific thread, but I imagine it will get cross-posted, etc.

We tried to structure the Shadowmourne quest in such a way that you don't really need to go crazy on feeding someone Primorial Saronite right away. You might be able to get a jump on Shadow's Edge, but you'll be restricted from making serious progress on Shadowmourne itself until some of the later bosses unlock.

If your guild wants to feed one player all the Primordial Saronite you can get your hands on, that's up to your own social dynamics. But your guild theoretically won't be way far ahead of a guild that does not do so with respect to Shadowmourne progression. I don't think it's going to be the saronite that limits folks, and meanwhile, the saronite has a ton of other uses (like ammo in this case).

Q u o t e:
Obviously you are going to be balancing around hunters having this top ammo however, they require that a raiding engineer of proper spec can make the ammo. So they are being balanced around a certain professions craftable that only hunters need (ie. everyone needs say.., enchanters, only hunters need engineers).

This would be in tune to say... a new "fire" spell power flask being dropped that is like 300 spell power. A fire mage's damage would ba balanced assuming they are going to be using this flask, however it requires an alchemist, with x rep, specced into elixir mastery to even make the flask.

Sure, but if you're comparing your performance to another class, both of you are also going to be balanced around having the best armor and weapons you can get out of Icecrown. There is also a chance you will never, ever get those items because you have extraordinary bad luck or just can't beat the content. The ammo, while a non-trivial dps upgrade, isn't the kind of upgrade you'll get from other equippable items.

Q u o t e:

Q u o t e:
We're asking "why?" and we're getting back a "why not?"... reminds me of how mad my friends get when I answer their questions with another question :(

Well, I feel a little similarly when my questions are answered with "because it's not fair." :(

I suspect if I start talking about our reasoning here, the entire conversation is just going to focus on the legitimacy of that design. Players have become quite talented about picking apart arguments, but in this case I'd rather focus on whether or not it's a big deal before drilling down into the why, or that will be all anyone talks about.

Q u o t e:
Actually from what I understand the recipe is purchased from the Ashen Verdict vendors for one primordial saronite (which costs 23 emblems of frost if you don't get it from a drop). The engineer needs honored rep to learn it plus the appropriate specialization.

I am concerned that the primordial saronite cost is going to mean very few engineers even bother to buy the recipe unless they're specifically requested to or the guild provides the primordial saronite for it. I expect it'll be many months before primordial saronite drops down to reasonable cost levels given how many emblems are required for the new gear and the added pressure from folks making Shadowmourne.

This is actually why I was so surprised to see such an uproar over the engineering specialization aspect of it. This isn't ammo that we're giving away on a vendor in Dalaran. It's something that is going to require some effort to get. Eventually it will probably trickle down to where any hunter can procure a pretty good supply of arrows or bullets, but it's not going to be that way at all on day one when 3.3 goes live.

I was wondering if what happened is some hunters read the forums and said to themselves "New ammo. Word." Then they realized it was tied to engineering specialization and realized it might be slightly harder for them to get their hands on. Meanwhile they didn't realize at all the steps they or an engineer would need to go through to get the recipe in the first place.

I've stepped through this design logic before, but let me do it again real quick:

1) We don't want to just give away ammo for the same reason we don't give away guns and bows: you need to earn you dps increase. Otherwise, hunters would just immediately do more damage than everyone else the moment a patch went live with new ammo in it.
2) However, because ammo is a consumable, it would be pretty frustrating to have say 10,000 arrows be a random drop on a boss in the same way a bow or ring might be. Yuck.
3) In the past, we handled this with the rep grind, insuring that brand new hunters wouldn't have access to the items, but experienced hunters who put in a little effort would be able to get there.
4) One problem with this approach is it doesn't scale. We have to keep adding new reps every time we add new tiers of gear, or else the ammo falls behind.
5) Not long ago, we increased the dps of ranged weapons to try and work around this problem. That sticky is still visible on this forum.
6) However, when we were designing the new craftable items for patch 3.3, we thought it would be fun to add something for engineers, and at the same time, give hunters a little bonus upgrade they could try and get. For all the reasons listed above, we didn't want this new ammo to be something every hunter would instantly have access to when 3.3 shipped.

That is why I act a little baffled that there is such a sense of entitlement to this new ammo. If you can get some, awesome. Your dps will go up a little. If not, well maybe you can get a weapon. That's probably a bigger jump anyway. Eventually the ammo will be more readily available and hunter dps will go up at about the same time everyone else's is going up from boss loot, badge gear and crafted items.

But why so much attention focused on the engineering specialization, at least from hunters if not actual engineers? The proverbial elephant in the room is that the Primordial Saronite and Ashen Verdict rep is a much bigger bottleneck, at least for the next few months. If your conclusions is that the ammo won't be trivial to get, well, yeah that was kind of the point.

I think the discussion over ammo cost is just a sideshow. Nothing has changed in that design; if anything the new ammo is actually cheaper to make. I think some player just saw this as a complain about ammo thread.

Q u o t e:
I wouldn't say that GC. Personally I think getting the right spec is a much bigger concern over the rep/saronite.

As I recall, it's 23 emblems for it? Give a couple of weeks, maybe 3 depending on how many bosses you are releasing + heroics + raid quest and it shouldn't take too long to get the rep. It's more that the spec requirement doesn't help with the chance that you get something that is not your spec. The rep you don't have to farm again, the 23 frost emblems is meh, but the 150g to drop and respec engineering is the biggest bottleneck.

But we're not expecting hunters to all become engineers and swap back and forth between goblin and gnome. If the ammo was BoP and we were requiring that, then yes, that would be ridiculous.

However, the ammo produced is BoE and is available from friends or guildies or can be purchased from the AH much like any consumable. If all of that is too much of a burden, then you have the option of using lower dps arrows or bullets. If you're and endgame-focused raider, I suspect it won't be a burden. If you're not an endgame-focused raider, then you should approach them in the same way you approach the weapons on Arthas: awesome to have, but not necessarily something you feel entitled to obtain without putting in the effort.