BigRedKitty: It's hunter-pinata time, part III
by Daniel Howell 
Dec 10th 2008 at 9:00AM
1) Steady Shot – now only gains 10% of attack power as damage (down from 20%).
Since the primary part of BM-hunter DPS is Steady Shot, it makes sense to downgrade the RAP-bonus to see how its affected. If 20% is too much, it'll be bumped back up. But it's much better to test at 20 and move it up to 15, then start at 10 and move it down a second time to 15, don't you think? Blizzard does too.
2) Volley – reduced the damage by about 30% for all ranks. Note that AE damage from many classes is very high right now and we are looking at all of them. Volley in particular had reached the point where some hunters were using it to the exclusion of most other attacks.
Hunters were never meant to be an AoE class. Right now, we are an AoE class. Heck, we were a pioneer in the Gorilladin Offensive that combined an AoE pet with an constant AoE attack. Volley should be useful, but not mage-powerful, c'mon. 30% sounds heavy, we admit, but you'll still be able to grind away the days with your gorilla. But we won't be making mages wonder if perhaps a reroll as a tank might guarantee them a more secure spot in raids.
3) Readiness – no longer affects the cooldown of Bestial Wrath.
How many spells really benefit from Readiness? Silencing Shot, Wyvern Sting, Kill Shot, Scatter Shot, Counterattack, and Bestial Wrath. (Hope we didn't forget one. Apologies if we did.) All of these, save Bestial Wrath, are primarily PvP-oriented. Is there a reason BM isn't a surprisingly effective arena-spec? Yes, because the primary power of the BM tree comes from getting out of melee range while attempting to stand still and Auto/Steady stuff to death. Readiness + Bestial Wrath = much more effective BM hunter in PvP! Changing this is precisely the opposite of what hunters need; more options for PvP, not fewer! If Blizz wants to remove Bestial Wrath from the effects of Readiness, perhaps they should just admit that the Readiness talent belongs at the 41st point in the Survival tree and chunk it back where it belongs.
4) Deterrence – has been completely overhauled. It now allows you to deflect 100% of incoming melee or spell damage for 5 seconds, but prevents you from attacking while active. You still must be facing the attacker to deflect the damage (this is a limitation we are trying and might end up removing). 60 sec cooldown.
Now we only did arena for one season; we achieved a state of anger much too quickly when we lost, so we abandoned this portion of the game. But it's our initial impression that if a hunter pops Deterrence and becomes basically invulnerable, but also becomes impotent, then the other team is just going to switch targets and focus-fire someone else, like the healer. This could be a fine tactic for one-on-one fights, allowing the hunter to quaff a healing potion or something, but this doesn't seem to address any of our critical class-issues in PvP. Hooray for new toys, boo for not fixing that which needs fixing.
5) Kill Shot – cooldown reduced to 15 sec (from 35 sec).
Sounds great, but what's a huge buff doing in a list of hunter-nerfs? /suspicious
Finally a PvP-oriented fix we've been asking for! Just don't pop Deterrence...
6) Kindred Spirits – now only grants 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
This is a reduction from 20% to 15%, and if this is a "major" reduction, we'll live with it. Pet-DPS has been outstanding in WotLK, and if Blizz needs this adjustment to make them happy, even we, BRK, will bless it. But if pet-DPS needs to come down, then pet-Health needs to come up, and pet-Resilience needs to be introduced. When feral druids are running amok with 40k health and our Spirit Beast has 10k, something's amiss. When our pet can be two-shot by a mage because Hobbes has zero resilience and the mage can go crit-berserk on his furry butt, somethings blatantly wrong. Pet-DPS too high? Fix it. Pet-Survivability too low? Fix. It!
7) Serpent's Swiftness – now only grants 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet.
Pet attack speed is the place from where all hunter-goodness begins. Faster pet attacks means more pet crits, which mean more Ferocious Inspiration procs, which means more DPS for the hunter's entire raid. But here's the kicker: if we get fewer FI-procs, our entire raid's DPS goes down! This isn't just a decrease to hunter-DPS, but to total raid-DPS! This isn't nerfing BM hunters, it's nerfing the desire of the raid leader to bring a BM hunter to raids.
OK, that's a little overboard. We would guess that no hunter would be uninvited to a raid because his pet is going to FI-proc less frequently. But the main point remains sound: this is a raid-DPS nerf, not a hunter-DPS nerf. It doesn't fix the supposed problem.
8) All hunter pet abilities with a cooldown longer than 30 sec have been moved off the global cooldown.
The big one for us is Heart of the Phoenix. No longer will we have to wait for the global cooldown before we can insta-rez our dead pet. Of course, HotP is terrible borked already: it won't insta-cast, one has to use a macro manually; and many times a HotP-rez'd pet will be "grayed-out", unable to perform any actions whatsoever. Frankly, instead of this "buff" to pet abilities, we'd like the Cower/Growl/Prowl bugs fixed so they don't keep changing auto-cast states. Fix the broken stuff before "fixing" stuff that seems to work adequately, that's all we're saying.
9) Growl- threat generation increased by 20% (same for Voidwalker Torment).
Although pet-threat isn't a problem, when we put #7 into effect, pet-threat will be decreased as well. A buff to Growl would prevent the decreased attack speed from making our pets less-able to hold threat while soloing, so at least Blizz is looking ahead and trying to anticipate the effects of their DPS-changes.
10) Call of the Wild – now benefits only the hunter and his or her pet.
Call of the Wild currently affects all party members. Making it only benefit the hunter and his pet is a net-increase to hunters, as compared to the other classes! If we remove the benefit to party members, their DPS is going to decrease. But it'll still buff the hunter, so his DPS will remain the same. This change flies in the face of the concept that hunter DPS is too high and makes no sense whatsoever. If we want to decrease hunter DPS as compared to other classes in raids, this buff's benefits should be made raid-wide, so everybody is buffed up, not down.
11) Rake and Scorpid Poison – slightly nerfed to bring them into line with other pet abilities.
Cats and Scorpids have been doing more DPS than any pet but Devilsaurs, and sometimes even more than them. The concept is that exotic pets are supposed to do a little more DPS -- we've read 10% -- than non-exotic pets. This isn't so much a nerf as it is putting these pets back in their proper place. Hobbes, our beloved Winterspring Frostsaber Pridewatcher, will still sit Shiv'ah, though.
12) Spirit Strike – reduced the period on the dot so it will work better with Longevity.
This is a personal grudge we have with Blizz over the Spirit Beast. We begged them to let us tame one in the beta so we could analyze its performance. No dice, they said. Find one yourself, you'll get no help from us. Well guess what, the pet came out of beta borked. Longevity does cooldown the cooldown of Spirit Strike, but does not cooldown the delayed damage debuff the spell puts on its target. So it sounds like they're going to make the dot have a seven second cooldown, so Longevity will "play nice". If we'd been allowed to play with a Spirit Beast in the beta, perhaps we could've made some noise about this issue. /still hurt
13) Improved Tracking – now benefits damage to all included creature types as long as you are tracking one of them. You don't have to swap around what you are tracking as much.
Alright, we'll accept that this is an entry-level talent and making it a basic "Increases damage by 1/2/3%" talent doesn't bother us too much. We're always tracking something, right? But it sure makes Ranged Weapon Specialization look really dumb, doing almost exactly the same thing as Improved Tracking, as a 26th point talent. Marksmen hunters should have a "ranged weapon specialization" obviously; they're marksman! Swap RWS with
something like Focused Aim, and we'll make the change to Improved Tracking without further comment.
14) Aspect of the Wild – now raid-wide.
/blink
Now when was the last time we needed nature-protection raid-wide... Hydross the Unstable? No, that was just one of the two tanks, right? Perhaps Blizz is telling us something about a future raid, or maybe this was just forgotten in the huge list of spells that were to be raid-wide once WotLK arrived. Who knows. It's a buff, thanks, but... OK, thanks.
So if we look at all this, what concerns us the most is... none of them. Really, if BM hunter DPS is tamped-down by the nerf to Steady Shot, let's accept that with grace, dignity, and poise, and move on. A small decrease to pet attack speed isn't something we'd wish for, but at least we're not going back to all running with Ravagers.
Now let's move on to getting some freaking help in arenas, shall we? And the Survivalist tree is still honked up. Heart of the Phoenix, one of the best reasons for getting the Beast Mastery talent, isn't working properly. There aren't enough level 80 pets to tame. Why can't we tame Mammoths!
And fix Cower, for Elune's sake! COWER, people!
Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Big Red Kitty
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
Eq Dec 10th 2008 9:10AM
MAybe GC has better stuff to do then to post 3 pages just to be diplomatic. Stop crying you know that it was coming.
Coldbear Dec 10th 2008 9:20AM
It's the cycle of life, WOW-style.
OP buffs. Nerf. OP buffs. Nerf...
Sure, Hunters in arenas have had problems, but so did many other classes/specs. One of the changes specifically addresses that, and don't tell me that getting a paladin bubble isn't a bloody awesome thing for a few seconds here and there.
Crybaby.
Sayce Dec 10th 2008 1:22PM
C'mon fellas.... you know you hate nerfs too. Just cuz it isn't your class doesn't mean you shouldn't feel a little pity for them. If it was your class, you'd want to QQ a little too, regardless of whether you saw it coming or not.
And did you read the whole post? BRK really didn't QQ at all...
I'm glad GC communicates with us at all... it's much better than what we had... though BRK's point is valid... a little diplomacy, honestly delivered, would go a long way towards keeping the overall outcry down a bit.
Sinthar Dec 11th 2008 10:50AM
Didnt QQ much - 3 naffin pages of whinging - followed by a oh well wot concerns us most is - nothing. Wot a climax to his post. Love the only class he compares hunters to is mages. FFS mages are SQUISHY. If a hunter cant beat one, then he needs to learn more. A Mage compared with a hunter eh - well Armour - mail vs cloth, a Pet, that can by itself kill most cruddy mages, oh and lets not forget BM's can be immune to their polys - while the pets are almost immune to their AOE. Yet it has been said in comments that a hunter should be able to out dps a mage too - if thats the case forget mages. Im not saying Hunters have it all rosy by any means, but just because your not immune to the nerf bat - esp as you yourselfs admit you are OP, makes this 3 page monster post seem a bit OTT to say the least.
Personally i feel if he had have used the flowery diplomatic language in his (GC) post , the article would have been about how he wasnt clear and pussyfooting around.
Meh just getting really peeved at WOW insider recently - time to find new blog with slightly diff approach maybe
wholetthatguyin Dec 18th 2008 7:11PM
Wake up dude. Thoughtful analysis isn't crying. In fact you may want to try it for yourself sometime.
Davebo Dec 29th 2008 7:42PM
I Totally disagree with the imp tracking talent. Why not get imp tracking AND Ranged Weapon Specialization for a constant 10% damage bonus?
My current spec has both and lightnig reflexes and trueshot aura.
With careful aim, Hunter VS Wild, and expose weakness I am on my way to keeping up with if not beating my BM brethren. Especially with the pet damage nerf. After this next patch I think we will see some people switching back to MM or even survival (doubtful) for lvl 80 raiding.
Tiago Dec 10th 2008 9:11AM
Diplomacy is a dying art you say?
But it looks like we got enough whining around here to more than up for it.
I rather Blizz tells it how it is instead of doing the political thing of trying to not piss anyone off, like we got in the days of CMs relaying the bad news.
It's a nerf, deal with it.
edenxiii Dec 10th 2008 11:18AM
@tiago
"Telling it like it is" and "keeping it real" is an a-hole's excuse. There's never a valid reason to be a rude clod when communicating with people, least of all when you're representing a multi-million dollar company. GC didn't mean to insult hunters, and he often goes out of his way to make sure his comments are well-spoken, but to think a nerf announcement deserved only a few words in a midday forum post was short-sighted on his part.
Rox Dec 11th 2008 10:35AM
Blizz, and in this case mainly in the person of GC, seems to forget that he is supposed to represent a commercial company and is dealing with paying customers. And as everyone whereever has learnt who has to deal with customers: you treat them with respect. And that also means you do not drop something on them they way GC did, and in fact repeatedly does.
GC might be a hell of a dev, but he should stay far away from the customer base of Blizz, cause he s*cks at that.
Blizz: get someone else to do your communications and let GC sit quietly behind his screen sorting out the long awaited hunter bugs.
Rox Dec 11th 2008 10:39AM
... awaited solutions to the hunter bugs.
;)
Kibibi Dec 10th 2008 9:17AM
It's kinda sad when a hunter beats a mage in damage. I also play a hunter, and it was over-powered, plain and simple. I also play a shaman, and I know that class, too, is over powered and going to get a nerf at some point. You're obviously not new to the game, so this shouldn't really be a new concept for you. Have some patience, and possibly and adult beverage, and chill-out.
What's REALLY sad here is that I see little talk of 'balance' but more text that will get angry hunters to this short series of posts. Great for advertising, eh?
Redem Dec 10th 2008 7:04PM
Why is it sad that hunters might beat mages in raid damage?
Someone's going to be the top, why not us? Not like we have anything else going for us other than actually being good killing things.
Zooca Dec 11th 2008 6:25AM
It's not sad if a hunter beats a mage on dps. Hunters and mages are both pure dps classes and when there are two people dpsing one will usually be higher than the other. So the sad thing is not that the hunter beats the mage, the sad thing, if anything, is that the hunter consistantly beats the mage. As blizzard says is the case atm.
Nirriti Dec 10th 2008 9:20AM
Great post. Humorous yet well defined points of fact. Be careful of what you wish for though. Blizzard might decide you can be their PR guy and "volunteer" your @ss to present us with all these lovely nerfs and other unpleasant news.
Eu Dec 10th 2008 9:23AM
Same as paladins, Blizz shouldn´t have taken OP stuff live. Period. The problem is that they did, people get used to be OP, then cry about it. Someone is really looking incompetent at Blizzard. If it is not meant to be like that, don't take it live. If you do, then live with it. If we were not beta testers, we shouldn't feel like beta testers now. On live servers.
Just note that these changes are really not that severe and will not affect game play much, it really seems tuning. Hunter pets alone doing the same/more damage than other classes is simply ridiculous.
The thing is, the nerfs are not even close to being as severe as the paladin nerfs. Paladins are just as bad (worse, probably) in arenas as hunters, and the sustained PVE damage of retribution is really not quite possible to keep up since JotW nerf. So, before crying, we hunters should pray we don't get the same TO THE GROUND treatment as paladins, thank for the kill shot buff, and admid we needed some tuning down.
Tofu Dec 10th 2008 9:26AM
/agree WTB diplomacy please.
I see this as a small part of a larger issue that I think Blizz is aware of however; the game is too easy.
Like BRK said, some of these changes aren't hunter nerfs but raid / group nerfs. I think they are looking at all classes and their DPS for downward tuning.
Whilke I admit to having massive fun, I have been able to level 2 toons to 80 already. In TBC, it took a lot longer.
Rugus Dec 10th 2008 9:32AM
> Whilke I admit to having massive fun, I have been able to
> level 2 toons to 80 already. In TBC, it took a lot longer.
If you already leveled 2 toons to 80, you are a *hardcore* player, not a casual one. I leveled 1 toon (hunter, pretty easy job) to 80 and it took a lot of time, playing every day. More or less the /played time per level was 8 hours, for a total of 80 game-time hours, questing all the time to maximize the xp income.
That means 20 days, 4 hours/day, every single day. For 10 levels. It's a lot of time, imho.
lootsayer Dec 10th 2008 9:26AM
yea i think the whole QQ would have been just as big if blizzard would have posted the whole "diplomatic" wall of text instead of the pure facts. maybe it would have gone down a bit smoother but in the end it would have come out just as angry ;)
however in my opinion the whole problem is something else. its something that blizzard is obviously doing and im not sure if it is the right approach for all of us. all this pve, pvp, solo grinding, aoe stuff is getting evened out way to much. what happend to class diversity? i was totally fine when mages and warlocks wrecked the dps meter in aoe situations. i was also fine when paladin tanks were the better choice for mount hyal for example.. thats just how different classes work. nowadays even rogues have aoe so they can keep up and be usefull in those situations.. furthermore they are even getting the cooldown on it removed.. hell no, they dont need aoe. just give them kick ass single target damage and maybe some dungeon/class design that makes this even more viable in raids.
this would even work if there wasnt the second factor.. PVP. every god damn change they make in the pve world has to get balanced out in pvp aswell, since they opened the door to millions of people who enjoy that content and now they need to please them aswell. this is just not making the game more fun for everyone, its a way of selling it to the most people becuase now i can choose every class and basically do everything like everyone else.. maybe we should just remove all the classes and let us switch between healer, super dps and aoe tank with one button press.. oh wait, some classes are almost there anyways.
i know this is a bit offtopic, but since this is a very thoughtfull article and this has been on my mind for a while now i thought i would share it here..
Rugus Dec 10th 2008 9:27AM
I just *hope* that nerfing our DPS will not make us a completely useless class. No one asks us to trap anymore in WOTLK instances... I never find a leader who really cares about marking stuff, they just charge, AoE aggro and the party adds some DPS/heal.
If we get normalized and our DPS becomes more or less the same as other classes, we will be offering WHAT, in raids and instances? Everyone else will offer a similar DPS plus other options (decent CC, healing, etc...).
We're no more a cc class, let's face it. Others do better than us. Why offer a spot to a hunter when others can do the same... in a better way?
Radiophonic Dec 10th 2008 10:30AM
Yeah, trapping and knowing HOW to trap was a big deal. It separated the good hunters from the bad oddly. I rarely have to use traps any more unless say, the heals have ago. Makes things kind of boring to be honest.