Any plans to buff Spirit Beasts?

#0 - Dec. 20, 2009, 6:26 p.m.

Beast Mastery, while a decent pump in pet dps, also gives BM Hunters the ability to tame exotic pets like devilsaurs and spirit beasts. Currently there are four spirit beasts, Gondria, Loque, Skoll, and Arcturis - and they all suck for BM Hunters.

Even worse, a run of the mill wolf, that any Hunter spec can grab, still puts out more dps than spirit beasts.

Now, if spirit beasts were in plentiful supply I wouldn't care as much. However, they're pretty hard to get and for some requires weeks of camping because of the lengthy spawn times.

Personally I think if BM Hunters have to work so hard to get a spirit beast, the dps increase should be well worth the effort.

Now, I'm not trying to argue that Blizz should buff the BM spec to match SV/MM. I'm just saying that, in general, spirit beasts should put out more dps than a Vanilla wolf tamed at level 10.

And while I'm on the subject of spirit beasts, can spirit beasts get their own individual special attacks?

While Spirit Strike does look cool, all four of them don't need it.

Personally I think it would be cool if only Gondria had Spirit Strike. Maybe give Skoll an aoe lightning attack that hits 2-3 mobs. Give Loque a claw attack that stacks, and Arcturis could have some sort of aoe threat building attack.

Bornakk

#9 - Dec. 22, 2009, 12:50 a.m.

The spirit beasts are not the real issue from our perspective. We this spirit beasts are doing fine and we don't want them to be the only choice for BM hunters since speccing BM should give a player more choices for pets (ideally) and not less.

The problem mainly lies with the wolf just being overpowered. We did consider nerfing them for patch 3.3 but decided that the nerf to pretty much all hunter PvE dps was not worth the benefit of providing more options for pets. Keep in mind though that we have and will continue to make unpopular or even controversial nerfs if we feel they are a benefit for the game.

Bornakk

#12 - Dec. 22, 2009, 12:55 a.m.

Q u o t e:
wanna make some controversial buffs to the BM tree maybe? Since it is pointless in real raiding.

It may not be great for raiding but is still good for leveling while both Marks and Surv are competitive for raiding. I wouldn't expect any big changes for now.

Bornakk

#79 - Dec. 22, 2009, 4:39 p.m.

Q u o t e:

Wasn't there some design goal to have all specs of all classes viable in PvP and endgame raiding? Wasn't "leveling tree" supposed to be a bygone concept?

We'd love to have every spec viable for all aspects of the game, it just rarely turns out that way since balancing can be pretty tricky. At this stage in the game we aren't planning to make many (if any) big changes to classes since we are already working on doing just that for Cataclysm so that's why I wouldn't expect much in the near future.

Bornakk

#86 - Dec. 22, 2009, 4:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I know we probably can expect at least one point patch (3.3.1) soonâ„¢ - are they still looking at possibly having more stats pass through to pets? This would be a decent buff for Beastmasters and possibly make them fully raid viable again.

Small changes are still being discussed a bit, but nothing has been determined at this point.

Bornakk

#103 - Dec. 22, 2009, 8:57 p.m.

I know some of you were reading into my comments a bit much so I'll try and explain things a little more.

The wolf is overpowered when compared to the other available pets, mostly because it buffs the master. Buffing all of the pets to that level would require a number of different changes to different pets and the chance that one of those buffs would be too much or not enough is reasonably high. When you have say 10 or more things all roughly equal and then one that is outside of that group, the one that’s outside is called an outlier. Defining it as the new normal isn’t smart game design and just like we do with classes, we are likely to nerf the single thing at the top than buff all the others.

It might not be possible to ever get the pets completely identical (see comments below), so very competitive raiders will probably still only take the best one. But if the best one is only slightly ahead of the others, then it will feel more acceptable to some players to run with the pet they like. For most players, improving their own game will have a larger effect than picking the “best in slot” pet if they are comparable.

As far as the Spirit Beasts are concerned, there are several reasons why they would make a bad “best” pet. There are not very many options to choose from and all of them require “farming” a rare spawn that is more of a testament to blind luck than any kind of player skill. As we said before, there is no advantage to having a wider spectrum of pets to choose from if there is only one right choice.

We have talked about literally making all the pet families identical and letting the player just pick one based on looks. That certainly homogenizes the game quite a bit, which is why we haven’t done it, but it would ultimately allow pet choice to be cosmetic.

In the end, yes, we do want to get BM competitive with Survival and Marks. We even did some buffs in 3.3 to help them get there but the reason for my comments earlier is that we’d rather have two viable raiding specs than just one so Hunters as a whole are not in terrible shape. Eventually we do plan to get all 3 there. Just remember that when players obsess about 1% differences in dps you can understand why that task is pretty gigantic. There are probably more raiding BM hunters in 3.3 than in 3.2 and probably a lot more than there are Subtlety rogues (sorry for the example rogues, but you/we know it's true). It’s far from a dead spec.