Hunter Q&A released
by Adam Holisky 
Jul 23rd 2009 at 1:18PM
Eyonix posted the initial version of the Hunter Q&A today.
Please note that there will be another version of this coming out later today. We'll bring you both versions, as well as the differences.
Some of the highlights of the Hunter Q&A:
Please note that there will be another version of this coming out later today. We'll bring you both versions, as well as the differences.
Some of the highlights of the Hunter Q&A:
- Ammo removal is still on the table. More details brought to light as to why it can't be implemented just yet.
- "Dead Zone" in its current form is not going away completely.
- Auto-Shoot should not work while moving, moving is a penalty.
- Possibly an announcement at BlizzCon concerning Hunter's reliance on mana. A new system, removing the need for mana? Pay attention at BlizzCon!
- Hunters are too cooldown limited.
- Blizzard is not happy with the current solutions to keeping pets alive. Avoidance mechanics "just don't work well."
- Available number of pet action bar slots will be expanded.
- No plans to expand the use of Tranquilizing Shot. Magmadar is scared! Oh noes!
Hunter Q&A with Ghostcrawler and the World of Warcraft Community Team
Community Team: We'd like start this Q&A off by asking a question that players of all classes often ask in regard to the very purpose of their class. In this case, we're looking specifically at the hunter.
Q: Where do hunters fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do we see them going from this point forward?
A: We solved a lot of perennial hunter problems in Wrath of the Lich King, from the shot clipping problems of Steady Shot, to bringing Survival back to life, and making pet choice and training a lot more meaningful and hopefully enjoyable. Going forward we have several objectives we still want to accomplish. We want to make sure hunters in PvP are as good in Arenas as they are in Battlegrounds. We think their damage is sufficient, so we want to focus on their survival and crowd control. We want to make sure their PvE utility is as good as their dps (especially making traps live up to their potential for crowd control). We want to resolve what a hunter is supposed to do in melee (Raptor Strike? Disengage?).
We want to clean up some of the clunkiness that still exists around pet control (both the UI itself and what the pet does on the battlefield). We think hunters have a good niche as the only real ranged damage-dealer that focuses on (mostly) physical damage based on a weapon rather than cast-time based spells. We just want to make sure they live up to that niche.
Q: It was stated that we had intended to remove consumable ammunition from the game for patch 3.1.0, However, due to certain functionality not being ready in time, the change was put on hold. Is there any new information in regards to the functionality of non-consumable ammunition, and also a possible estimate as to when hunters may expect to see these changes implemented?
A: From a technical standpoint, what happened is that the quiver is considered a bag just like other bags on the character but also, most critically, those in the bank. In order to remove ammo we would have to move the location of all of a character's bank slots on the database that stores all of the World of Warcraft characters, which would be a risky thing to do in the middle of an expansion, and could result in "missing stuff" issues if something went wrong. It was just one of those last-minute show-stoppers.
We still want to make ammo more of a gear choice than a consumable. We're not sure if this would be as simple as getting the 125 dps arrows to upgrade your 120 dps arrows, or if you would do things like swap between your fire and poison arrows??? but that kind of thing is definitely on the table.
I'm not sure when we can do it right. It's not going to be for 3.2 unfortunately.
Q: On the topic of hunter ammunition, currently, it becomes quite expensive for hunters to purchase Mammoth Cutters and Saronite Razorheads, especially given how much many hunters use in a given week. Are there any plans to reduce the cost, by potentially looking into the materials required to craft both types of ammunition?
A: The problem with upgrading hunter ammo currently is how we work the progression. We don't want to drop ammo on bosses for what I hope are obvious reasons so long as they are consumed. We need to have ammo improve as other gear improves, however, or the hunter overall starts to fall behind. Therefore there has to be some barrier that stops freshly leveled hunters from getting the best ammo while letting cutting-edge hunters procure it. In Burning Crusade, we handled this through a reputation grind, but it still wasn't a very satisfying answer. In Wrath of the Lich King, we went with Engineer-crafted ammo and more recently changed the way ranged weapons scaled so that they would keep improving even if the ammo did not.
For 3.2 we lowered the cost of the ammo quite a bit -- only 4 gold for a stack to manufacture. If you were paying 50 gold a night, that should drop to say 16 gold a night. Long-term this won't be a problem because arrows won't be consumed.
Q: While we had previously reduced the range of the hunter's dead zone, it's still brought up as a concern. Is it possible to remove the dead zone completely? If this is not something under current consideration, what are the current design philosophies and balance reasons behind keeping this particular mechanic in-game?
A: It's possible to do so technically, but something we aren't likely to do. Personally I think calling the current implementation a dead zone is just confusing and trying to sell the problem as worse than it is. Back in the day there was an actual distance at which neither ranged nor melee attacks would work – it was a dead zone. Currently there is just a minimum range for most ranged attacks. The way we want the hunter to work is that when you get into min range with the hunter, then the hunter needs to switch to melee, or more likely escape back to ranged distance again. We certainly don't want the hunter to unload with both melee and ranged attacks at once – that might make them operate better at melee than range. Casters by contrast don't have to do this, though it is often in their best interest to do so since their cast can get delayed or even interrupted by melee attacks. You can argue it's goofy to be firing bows or rifles at point-blank range, but really it gets more into how we want the hunter (and all ranged weapon attacks) to work.
I'll add that the melee attack issue for hunters themselves is something we keep discussing. While we are unlikely to go back to a melee-focused build for hunters, we might consider a model where hunters don't run away most of the time but switch to melee attacks – perhaps even a single punishing attack on a cooldown before the hunter Disengaged or whatever. This would be one of those things that helped hunters feel more different than actual magic casters, and might make them care about melee weapons as more than stat sticks. Additional feedback from the community on this sort of thing would be appreciated.
Q: Would we consider allowing auto-shoot to work while moving? If there aren't plans for that specific change, is there anything in the works that will assist hunter dps in fights where a great deal of movement becomes necessary?
A: Moving should feel like a penalty. We don't want ranged attackers constantly circle strafing FPS-style because it confers a defensive advantage without giving up an offensive one. Moving is supposed to be bad and how you handle it is a test of your skill. We do give instant cast spells to some classes, but it should always be a dps loss when they have to focus on these exclusively. We would consider giving hunters another way to pull off an instant shot or beef up their dots, but we would want to make sure these would only be used in true long-distance movement situations. What I mean by that is we think we've possibly already gone too far towards balancing the Arena around instant attacks that can't be countered before they go off.
Q: Are there any long term plans to possibly removing the need for hunters to rely on a different resource system then mana?
A: I hate to do this to you, but this is a great BlizzCon question. For these Q&As, we'd like to keep the focus on each class's current status and short-term plans, but at BlizzCon we'll be happy to go into some more detail on our long-term vision for them.
Q: Are there any plans to increase the benefit hunters gain from haste?
A: There are two ways to answer this question. The more general one, which applies to all classes, is that we want haste to be a useful stat. Rogues, warriors, and some casters like it currently, and we need to get it there for everyone. As I have said in several of the Q&As, some stats have just fallen away from some specs even though they routinely appears on your gear. Sometimes this happens because talents prop up other stats so much that instead of being more attractive, they feel mandatory, and the ones that aren't supported go from sub-optimal to junk status. We need the ability to put a variety of stats on your gear. We don't want there to be an uber stat for anyone that trumps everything else to the point at which you don't even look at the other stats. Gear is supposed to be a choice. I'll say again that I think the online community sometimes focuses too much on the best-in-slot mentality, to the extent at which they consider everything except those BiS items to be worth skipping over. Remember, if it improves your dps, it's an upgrade, even if another item would improve it more. That sounds so obvious, but I think there is a tendency for some players to stop thinking that way.
Now for hunters specifically, we think the class is just too cooldown limited, which creates problems with haste. We've driven in that direction in order to give hunters a more interesting rotation, and to be fair, we feel like we've done that. But being cooldown limited isn't necessarily a fun way for the class to play and we think it's one of those things that makes hunters feel more like casters than like ranged-weapon users. (Hunters are casters in the sense that they're ranged dps, but we still want the emphasis to be on the gun or bow.) More on this at BlizzCon, too.
Q: How do we feel about the current state of stings? Are there any improvements planned for the way stings work, such as removing them from a shared global cooldown (GCD)? Are there current plans to improve individual stings?
A: The best way to describe stings is we want them to feel like warlock curses. They should be a meaningful part of your rotation and something you should want to keep up. We understand that some of the stings are much more attractive than others (though to be fair, curses have a similar problem) and we need to make the less-popular stings more useful or just end up cutting them. We aren't likely to remove any damage-dealing ability from the GCD and we've even taken a second look at whether we have removed too many defensive abilities from the GCD. It's there for a reason, particularly in a client-server based game with inherent Internet lag.
Q: Beast Mastery falls behind Marksmanship and Survival in regards to DPS, especially when the pet dies, due to how much damage comes from the pet when specialized in the Beast Mastery talent tree. Do we have plans to bring the potential damage the Beast Mastery tree offers to be more on par with what's currently possible with Survival and Marksmanship?
A: Ideally, we want Beast Mastery to be able to do competitive damage with Survival and Marksmanship. Realistically with dps classes, it's a math problem, and one tree nearly always edges out the other ones in most situations. That doesn't mean we stop trying, but it also means we have to be realistic about what it will take to really get the specs to within 1% dps of each other, which is sometimes the point I fear we'd need to hit.
The buffs to Catlike Reflexes and Wild Hunt were intended to boost Beast Mastery a little without causing every hunter in the game to swing back to Beast Mastery the way they all swung to Survival a few patches ago. We don't necessarily like buffing Beast Mastery through the pet all the time. However, Beast Mastery also doesn't have a signature attack like Chimera or Explosive Shot. 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? Ultimately the tree is supposed to be about pets, so we would rather make the pet easier to control and give the hunter ways to get the pet out of trouble so that they don't face the profound dps loss of pet death. And even then, having a pet that is 50% or more of your dps is always going to have design problems, so we can't go overboard. Beast Mastery and Demonology (and even the Unholy death knight) are going to be at a greater loss when their pet dies. That's just the cost of having a more powerful pet.
Q: In regards to the survivability to hunter pets are there plans to make additional improvements? The resilience change should help somewhat in PvP, however in end-game PvE environments, the hunter's pet can die pretty easily, especially given the specific encounter. One suggestion made by many hunters was to add a passive ability that healed the hunter's pet when the hunter received a heal from a party or raid member.
A: Honestly, we aren't happy with some of the current solutions to keeping pets alive. In particular, the area damage avoidance mechanics just don't work well. They are frustrating for other players in a PvP setting when Bladestorm or Arcane Explosion can't really hurt pets, and they don't keep pets alive on a 5 million damage Mimiron missile. What we really need is a system where certain PvE attacks just don't hurt the pet (maybe they can't set off Mimiron mines for instance). We don't want players to have to pay the price because the pet AI is in fact just an AI. This is something we're working on.
We'd rather not have to come up with additional mechanics needed to heal pets or keep them alive. We'd rather just the pet didn't die in situations where a player that can make intelligent choices wouldn't have died. Hunters do have abilities to heal or rez pets, and those ideally should be sufficient.
Q: As a follow-up to the previous question, do we have plans to make it easier for the hunter to bring a dead pet back to life, such as reducing the casting time of the base ability?
A: We talk about this a lot, but the trade off would be a much more fragile pet. In some ways we think a system might work better where the pets were easy to kill, especially in PvP, but the hunter (or warlock) could bring them back say every 30 seconds or so without a huge loss to personal dps. But in that situation, we would nerf pet health quite a bit so that the pets would crumple quickly when focused. The death knight (especially with an unglyphed Ghoul) works a little more like this currently – they have like 12K health without the glyph. But to make this change we would have to solve the PvE pet-gibbing mechanics referenced above.
To be clear, this is a hypothetical different model than I've been talking about in the rest of this Q&A. I don't want to confuse anyone by saying pets should both be hard to kill and hard to rez, and easy to kill and easy to rez.
Q: The Cunning pet-type was originally designed to be optimal for PvP use, however, most hunters feel that the Cunning pet-type falls short. How do we feel about the current state of what Cunning pets are offering, and are there any current plans to make improvements?
A: We made an effort in 3.1 to get the Cunning pets up to speed by giving them talents like Roar of Sacrifice, and normalizing all of the pet stats so that Cunning pets had the same stats as the other two types, modified by pet talents. Crabs are still fairly popular and they probably should be a Cunning pet given their crowd control ability, but the carapace also made them feel like they should be able tanks. And selfishly, I had no problem with seeing a lot of crab pets. (No, I'm not serious.)
This is something we would love to see more feedback on. Hunters in the online community tend to focus a lot on overall PvE dps or overall PvP survival and not get too much into pet comparisons. Someone theorycrafts the best pet and then hunters just go and get it instead of discussing what the other pets would need to be more competitive. To be fair, there is some of that discussion, but it's not always easy to find, and I have looked. It's not super high priority given some of the other hunter design issues we're looking at, but we do want pets to be a choice.
Q: Due to the number of abilities available to hunters, many level 80 players have expressed concerns in regards to placing all necessary abilities on their action bars. Are there any improvements coming that will assist hunters with this particular issue?
A: We recognize this as a problem. We need to get more buttons off of the bar. We made some progress with streamlining say tracking and aspects, but we're not there yet.
Q: Additionally, do we plan to expand upon the number of pet action bar slots? Due to the current number of slots available for pets, hunters frequently have to swap pet abilities in and out of their spell/ability book.
A: Yes, we definitely want to do this. The whole pet bar needs a little work. There are still some bugs relating to which abilities can be moved on or off the bar and whether they default to autocast or not. We want the bar to work much more like character action bars.
Q: Are there any plans to allow Tranquilizing Shot to play a larger role in the hunter's arsenal?
A: Consider that on the one hand this ability just used to be for Magmadar, and on the other hand I just acknowledged above that hunters have a lot of abilities to manage. Given that, we don't really want Tranquilizing Shot to be in your rotation like Steady Shot or even Kill Shot. It's a bit situational, and we're fine with that. We did make some recent efforts to make Enrages feel more like a major mechanic that you'd want to dispel the way you dispel magic and other effects.
Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!Filed under: Hunter
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Avrus Jul 23rd 2009 1:26PM
I'll stat by saying, I'm a Rogue not a Hunter.
Their fixes for ammo seems to try and over complicate the issue. Quivers and ammunition doesn't need to be removed from the game. Leave it alone.
Simplest and most flexible solution - you create a bind on character 'ammo item', that can drop into the ammo slot on your paper doll. This one ammo item is coded to be unlimited ammo. You can provide the ammo items with whatever properties you want them to have, just as you now do for stacks of ammunition.
This provides future flexibility to allow different types of 'ammo', while providing a fix of not needing ammunition and not requiring a risky work around to delete all ammunition from the game.
Theoretically this would also allow hunters to continue using quivers if they so desired to take up a bag slot.
Dharmabhum Jul 23rd 2009 1:53PM
Could be an interesting work-around to their problem of deleting all the ammo bags/quivers in the world. They basically implement some new ammo items that are Soulbound (this means they can drop them from bosses, or multiple bosses as well) and allow them to be used either from the ammo slot on the character window or from a quiver if someone wants to keep their quiver around for some reason. Over a short amount of time, most people will be switching over to the new ammo genre (this is easiest if they put in several lowbie ammo types also) and eventually you can begin to see everyone moving away from quivers and consumable ammo. When the dev's feel that they're at a sufficient point that most everyone has made the switch, then they can make the decision to delete quivers and ammo pouches or consumable ammo or just leave them around and in disuse.
M Jul 23rd 2009 2:31PM
Yeah, the answer to that question seemed to be related to ... nothing that the question asked.
I'd imagine Blizzard still wants ammo to be a gold sink, so instead of just making it unlimited ammo, they should make it consume durability, like thrown weapons, each time a piece of ammo would otherwise be consumed. They would just need to make it a pretty high durability level (I run around with around 6000 Engineered ammo, plus the boxes to make about 8000 more). Then you just go to a repair person and get it repaired, like anything else.
It's a little more work involved than your proposal, but I think it's ultimately the way it should end up. Though, I would be surprised if there wasn't some sort of consumeCharge() generic function call to do all the work; for ammo, the implementation would just decrease the durability. Hmm, the more I think about it, the less work it should require.
Upgrades then would be dps, poison-type effects, AND increased durability/shots.
Avrus Jul 23rd 2009 2:53PM
"so instead of just making it unlimited ammo, they should make it consume durability, like thrown weapons"
I think that's a great idea.
Hoggersbud Jul 23rd 2009 3:20PM
While it is possible to do things that way, I suspect Blizzard does not want to deal with it as a legacy issue, but rather make a full transition to a new way of doing things. That entails some complication, but in the long run, may be a better choice.
Robert M Jul 23rd 2009 4:34PM
I don't know if anyone saw this, but on the blue tracker on mmo champion, there is a GC response and he ends with making a joke about "racoon shot" for bm hunters!
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/18680002539-hunter-qa-what-a-let-down.html
/2 WTB racoon ammo, will pay double!
Artificial Jul 23rd 2009 8:14PM
"so instead of just making it unlimited ammo, they should make it consume durability, like thrown weapons"
They removed durability from thrown weapons in patch 3.1.
Tom Jul 23rd 2009 1:32PM
I'm confused. Did he imply they might be changing Hunters away from a mana based resource system?
That's what it sounded like, but the question he's answering is really poorly worded.
Avrus Jul 23rd 2009 1:35PM
I take that reply to be yes, and it's part of a larger presentation that will come out at BlizzCon.
Ringo Flinthammer Jul 23rd 2009 1:48PM
Before they were ever released in alpha, there was actually talk of hunters using focus instead of mana, but by the time they appeared in a playable form, they were on the mana system.
MazokuRanma Jul 23rd 2009 2:13PM
I know I always felt that because of their physical damage focus, they should use something more similar to a rogue's energy than a caster's mana.
I imagine that switching the system at this point is a huge endeavor though.
Angus Jul 23rd 2009 2:24PM
Be nice if every dps that wasn't a caster used something other than mana.
Rogues get by with energy fine. I imagine a mechanic like that should not be too bad for hunters. Gets rid of "Oh, I forgot to turn off aspect of the viper that fight..." and other such stupidity.
Only problem is that then Hunter mail needs to get rid of Int. Enhance shaman suddenly see no difference between mail and leather. Talents would have to be changed for them to make mail more useful.
Falcon6 Jul 23rd 2009 2:24PM
It would be very difficult to do, especially since we're talking about a class that, from 1 to 80, has been using mana and gotten used to it.
I've never heard of a class that had to change their complete resource system...if they do this, it will have to be in a way that makes it instinctively better than the mana issue.
Granted, if a focus system comes up, it won't be /too/ bad because we've used the system in a way before with our pets.
Mihalach Jul 23rd 2009 2:41PM
The simple solution for Intellect would be to have it effect our "focus" (Because we're making an assumption that this new resource is focus) gen. Between that and the Int->AP talent it would still be a worthwhile stat.
kabshiel Jul 23rd 2009 4:00PM
If I recall correctly, the original "focus" was nothing like the pet equivalent. You would start with an empty bar and gain more by standing still. Obviously that kind of sucked, even though it felt very hunter-y.
I do think that mana has never been a great fit for hunters. Maybe energy would work better for them, but that would require completely reitemizing both hunters and enhancement shaman and a complete talent tree overhaul for both classes.
Wither Jul 23rd 2009 1:39PM
Pretty interesting QA, compared to other class Q&As, it seems that there's more hunter mechanics that Blizzard are not happy with.
I'm most happy about the future improvements to pet action bars. In general, while most things in WoW are getting simpler, I'm glad they are expanding the pet dynamics as that's the essential role-play aspect for a hunter (for me at least). Here's hoping they find some synergy between hunter pets and the rather lackluster warlock pets.
On the subject of "gearing up ammo", I would have thought that if they eventually get rid of consumable ammo, the easier way to gear up bows and guns is to provide a greater range of enchantments for them, other than scopes. Alternatively a temporary buff (like rogue poisons) that allows hunters to choose the right type for the encounter (ice / fire / poison arrows).
crsh Jul 23rd 2009 7:09PM
Yeah, I'd like to add that while I don't play a hunter, I'm certainly envious that they're getting such care & attention. Hunters have been and still are a player base favorite, and that's fine with me; all classes really should have that kind of treatment, even if it's to deny changes everybody is asking for.
At the risk of proving the recent saying that priests are the mages when it comes to endlessly crying and whining, I'm still very much jealous. :P
NaRaKi Jul 23rd 2009 1:45PM
@ Avrus - No what they said was that due to how the database works in WoW they felt is was unsecure to implement those changes. And obviously making a backup of the whole playerbase DB wasnt feasable.
[quote]
In order to remove ammo we would have to ( move the location of all of a character's bank slots on the database that stores all of the World of Warcraft characters, ) which would be a risky thing to do in the middle of an expansion,
[/quote]
Regards
Jafari Jul 23rd 2009 2:38PM
Huh. I don't understand why they don't just make all the new bows like the legendary one, which makes its own arrows...
OR give hunters an ability like rogue's poison making, where only hunters can train it, and they make soulbound "arrows" which are implemented like a buff to the weapon, like poisons. The "arrow" buff would upgrade the base level arrows that the weapon comes with.
If they make arrows like poisons or shaman imbues, then all they have to do is implement BoP formulae for better arrow buffs. (WTB a Ulduar windfury recipe)
devilsei Jul 23rd 2009 3:07PM
Jafar, I agree with the first comment. Though, the big thing about that legendary bow, was the fact that it made its own arrows (main reason it was Legendary instead of epic).
That second idea wouldn't be done though. They removed the "poison" system and made it a basic consumable in lich king, so they wouldn't go back to that system for hunters I'd think.