Freak Out!
So some unexpected nuances to the Hunter class have been gently nudged into the game mechanics. And as expected, there’s such an outcry on the WoW Forums that their collective screams have managed to change the Earth’s orbit around the sun. They’ve caused panic not seen since Cabbage Patch Kids hit the scene. People are huddling together to survive the hysteria in such numbers that the BRK Center for Population and Pudding-Pop Analysis is predicting a ‘Hunter-Nerf Baby-Boom’ in September, 2008.
We’ve received thousands and thousands of emails begging for guidance during these dark times. To these scared and jittery people we have one thought that should calm and soothe you:
IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD! RUN!!
OK seriously. There are big differences when comparing a correction to an obvious game-mechanic flaw, an “oops!”, and a nerf.
Removed the ability to double-trap: Corrected game mechanic flaw. Yes it rocked but no other class can crowd-control multiple mobs, why should we. Our “speciality” is that we can crowd-control just about any type of mob; beasts, undead, humanoids, mechanicals, etc. It was never intended that we could crowd-control multiple mobs. It was cool, it was clever, but it was not intended.
Lower ranks of Arcane Shot not scaling: That’s an “Oops!” of course. They’ll fix this, don’t worry. Stay tuned for 2.3.1 OK?
Feign Death not taking hunters out of combat: That’s another “Oops!” except in the case of boss-fights. They’ll take care of it.
As for FD’ing against bosses, we kind of think of this of a nerf, but not a really big one. As a hunter, if you’re taking cr#p-loads of damage, usually that’s a sign that something in the party-mechanics has screwed up. Either you’ve grabbed aggro or you’re too close and absorbing AoE attacks, or something else that has put you in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only really big reason we ever FD’d against a boss was to feed Hobbes after he was killed…
Can’t feed pets after a FD in a boss fight: Corrected game mechanic flaw. If you allow your pet to die in a boss fight and rez him, you’re supposed to take a hit of some kind. The hit is supposed to be that your pet decreases his happiness and thus his DPS is decreased. Perfectly legitimate but was easily overcome by FD’ing and feeding your pet back to 125% damage capability. Sorry, Blizz is not going to re-break this.
Pets not attacking: Big-time “Oops!” but completely expected. When they changed pet-behavior so that they always try to attack from behind, it should hardly be a surprise that something in the code got a little wonky.
We were grinding Wind Scales yesterday and watched helplessly as Hobbes refused to get into combat when the wind serpents were facing a particular way while on an incline. We knew that this was a problem most like caused by the reworking of the pet-attack mechanics. They’ll fix it, don’t freak.
Do you see any real nerfs there? Not really, no. Of course, you are totally allowed to feel disappointed, like when you ask your dad for a cookie and he says Yes but then mom catches you grabbing your “legal” cookie and she brings the hammer down. You know the law; no cookies before dinner, no matter what dad says.
You may be cookie-less, but it was never really your cookie to begin with.
Are we temporarily gimped with the pet-attack thing? Yeah, we’ll agree with that. Should this have been seen on the PTR? Frankly, yes it should’ve been. We’ll even go so far as to say that this is a big ‘WTF’ and those in charge should be flogged. But it’ll be fixed, we have faith.
Does the loss of Double-Trapping make us sad? It does, and it also really hurts those Survivalist hunters who could astound their friends with their flair for Double and even Triple-Trapping. Is there a hunter out there who has been double-trapping their way through heroics because their guild has zero other crowd-control options? Dude or dudette, you have our sympathies if you answered ‘yes’.
Oh. Does this relieve you of your obligation to learn how to properly Chain Trap? H#ll no.
Does the Feign Death stuff hurt? Yes. Will you have to become a better hunter to overcome it? Yes. Will more non-Beastmaster hunters suddenly decide their pets aren’t worth the electrons they’re made of because they can’t “repair” their pets on the fly? We sure hope not.
You want some BRK Happy Thoughts to tide you over until 3.2.1? You got it.
Arcane Shot removing a buff from a target makes us giggle. Even those silly wind serpents in Netherstorm with their stacked electric field get that buff totally removed with a single Arcane Shot. Our favorite shot gets some unexpected love and Blizz better not touch it again. They tossed that ball in our yard and now it’s ours!
Loss of the Dead Zone. Now this is a bit of a misnomer. We still have a Dead Zone, it’s just five yards instead of eight. Helpful? Sure, especially now that we can get a Concussive Shot off earlier. We did a massive Halaa engagement and had tremendous fun kiting warriors with our improved Dead Zone. Can we point-blank pop a cap in someone’s noggin’, a la Trinity? No. You must still have mad skillz to know how to get to range.
Twenty-Four Slot Ammo Pouches and Quivers. Do you have yours? You’d better get one. No more storing extra ammo in your regular bags for those long instances. Load up a 24-slotter and go crazy for a long, long time.
Aimed Shot reducing all healing a target takes by 50% for 10 seconds is one of the biggest buffs this hunter has ever seen our class get granted. We used Aimed Shot right before Magtheridon’s channelers healed themselves. When an interrupt failed, the channeler only healed himself for half of what he normally did. Yes it hurt our own DPS to change our shot rotation, but holy batdung, if a channeler normally heals himself for 80k and we prevented 40k, that was essentially a 40k Aimed Shot.
A 40,000-damage Aimed Shot. Chew on that, ya whining, sniveling b#stards. Makes Curse of Doom look like a kid popping bubblewrap.
Complaints or deeply-held grievances? Go ahead and let the comments fly.
P.S. The time-stamp on this post is appropriate to those of us with an Air Force background. /teehee
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45 Responses to “Freak Out!”
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If they are going to take away the ability to feign death they should allow us to feed pets in combat. If a fight is really long or if they die they go down in happiness and doing fd is the only way we had of getting them happy. You’ve even said yourself the only reason you took IRP is because of him dying in Gruul’s lair that can’t always be helped. Imagine now having Hobbes be unhappy most of the fight and the dps hurt from it. In addition its possible he might even lose a level of loyalty. So yes taking the ability to fd during boss fights to feed a pet is a nerf. If they allow me to feed the pet in combat then I can accept it.
If I read this correctly, you can’t FD/drink to get mana in combat any more?
Bummer - I actually did that quite a bit (in 5-mans at least).
Everything else is cool though, once they iron the bugs out.
Good insight, BRK. I was doing my cooking daily today and needed to FD when I mistargeted once…a “Wtf?” moment to be sure (since it wasn’t resisted)…now I remember having seen a comment on this.
Ummm…20 years in USAF, and I don’t get the 3:41pm reference??
Talonis and Talon/Kul Tiras
Oh an added comment. Maybe its serpent’s swiftness doing this but did you also notice that Aimed Shot only takes 2.5 secs to cast instead of the 3 secs it was reduced to?
Imagine now having Hobbes be unhappy most of the fight and the dps hurt from it.
Imagine it? It happens every Maulgar fight. Hobbes is sent on a suicide mission against Blind Eye to absorb damage and die so other people in the raid don’t get hurt.
However, we pay a price for that tactic now; decreased hunter-pet DPS. It hurts BM hunters most of all, of course, so finding an alterntive to letting Hobbes die against Blind Eye is now one of our top priorities.
Jabari said…
“If I read this correctly, you can’t FD/drink to get mana in combat any more?”
The fix is to not allow FD to take you out of combat on boss fights only,
but if I read this correctly, it’s not taking you out of combat against any mob?
By double-trap, im assuming you mean trapping two mobs at the same time? How does this nerf work? Can you lay a second trap while one is active? I havent been on since before the patch, and wont be able to log until probably after thanksgiving, at this rate.
and was the time stamp supposed to be in Oh-Hundred hours? whats the story there?
/me resolves to make a post at 13:48 one day soon
–Sherp
BRK,
Another thing that seems to have Hunters up in arms right now is that the standard BM Steady / Auto Macro seems to be “broken” for most. What are your thoughts on that?
The FD bug must be vs bosses only because i’ve used it in arena and while farming and in 5 mans since the patch they probably made a change to the boss’s in combat tic that thing that puts the whole raid in combat when a boss is pulled.
–Oh an added comment. Maybe its serpent’s swiftness doing this but did you also notice that Aimed Shot only takes 2.5 secs to cast instead of the 3 secs it was reduced to?–
Aimed and steadyshot are both effected by haste just like they always have been. All hunters have a 15% increase to their cast speed from their quivers and BM’s have an additional 20%. I was using rapid fire to rip these things off easily in arena.
LOL… I love your style and humor. Awesome job pointing out the flaws & the buffs. Sometimes people focus on one side of the pool so much, they can’t see the other side.
“Arcane Shot not scaling” sounds a lot better than my last couple nights of “Arcane Shot is now useless at level 40ish, doing 1/3 the damage of auto-shot while consuming mana”. Hope they fix this soon - I feel like a mage without a fireball. On the bright side, I guess this helps me avoid pulling aggro from a tank or pet.
/engage Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine. I used to run around with only one 341 in my pocket because I just KNEW I was the shiz… Good times…
Great site! Thanks so much for all the info.
CST
Ah, someone remembers his basic days…
“Gimme a 341, joker!”
And yes, pretty much all the uproar about the hunter changes are much ado about nothing.
Ya, on lurker last night we couldn’t FD drink after the adds like we used to … w/e … oil/pots, still rocked the meters.
BM macro works fine as ever …
@Sonvar
wait till Leo where your pet dies 4 or 5 times …. he’s pissed
@BRK
good point on the aimed shot ..i never thought of it that way ….
With the cost of the new ammo and no FD wipe protection I am looking at ~50 gold raid. Add another 50 gold for flasks and potions… and it is time to take a break from the hunter.
You can shine a turd, but it is still a turd. This patch will burn a lot of hunters out.
Actually BRK, Blizzard has stated that both the drinking and feeding were unfortunate sideeffects. In fact They have stated that they are looking into getting a way to feed pet again in another patch (note, they did not say ‘next’ patch).
Now, that just smells a long way of bad implementation, or bad testing. Bad testing seems the most likely as these changes were never on PTR.
Also it is clear that Blizzard never thought either was wrong. In fact several of them have commented on FD-drinking as an innovative way to play. Besides it has been in since birth… Time enough to correct it I would say.
Since, unfortunately, you haven’t gotten to the really really nasty pet-unfriendly bosses, the other aspect hasn’t really hit home yet. Blizzard knows those encounters are bad for pets, and that is why they want the feed pet fixed again. And you did suffer if you had to ress… loads of mana, 10 sec+ to do it, long time of no pet keeping FI up. I think losing a pet hit hard enough as it were… This is downright silly.
Thise entire change was made so hunters couldn’t change trinkets… Nice eh… Screw up these things to fixsomething very small. Blizzard should really have waited to fix this until they had solutions to the problems the ‘fix’ intoduced. But that is where the weak testing comes in…
Thank you for being the Voice of Reason as always. I can not believe the screaming about not being able to FD/drink. Lrn2manapot kthnx. As a bonus you won’t be wasting your time and usefulness to the raid having a widdle picnic instead of DPSing.
The trap thing’s annoying, but not a nerf, and the rest are bugs. And the buffs are huge enough to make warlocks complain about it in trade chat. Warlock tears. Does it get any better than this?
Btw, I’m happy about the Aimed Shot changes. I have indeed been thinking about using it against selfhealers and in fights where healers just aren’t the main target for some reason.
Arcane Shot dispel, nice to have, but really not that much of a PvE change. I guess I will find it useful, but since I haven’t been on either PTR or played much since the patch (EU here) I can’t say how much of an impact it will have.
Last night in Kara: Freeze-trapped my target, had dropped the trap early before the pull, so next trap was ready. Put next trap down a little away from first one. The skull target (One of the Spectral Chargers) does it’s random aggro thing and trips my second trap and is broken out right away, but my triangle also breaks out of trap immediately due to the double-trap change. Result was a wipe.
And here I was looking forward to being able to use jumper cables during a boss fight without having to waste a trinket slot. Ahh well.
@BRK
no other class can crowd-control multiple mobs, why should we.
Because no other class has a 30 second cooldown on their CC. If someone is talented enough to keep multiple mobs CCed with a 30sec CD, let them.
@anon
As a bonus you won’t be wasting your time and usefulness to the raid having a widdle picnic instead of DPSing.
As a downside there will now be times when a hunter is wasting his time and usefulness by only being able to autoshot or putting up AotV instead of AotH and gimping his DPS more than feign/drinking for 10seconds did. Even throwing my “widdle picnic” for Tidewalker I would still usually come out on top of the AOEers that were taking down the murlocs.
I was having problems with my pet attacking in AB last night. It seems as though my boar won’t use Charge anymore. His time to attack seems to have doubled.
So, if my pet can’t attack, and I can’t FD to get out of combat, then why am I still BM?..
Time to speck glass-canon+hawkeye.
And thinking about it more, all the things that are broken hurt BM the most, and all the buffs help MM the most.. so.. MM FTW?..
FD+Drink: I can live without, better (and costlier) mana management.
FD+feed pet: They need to make a way to feed pet in combat. Stop DPS and stop pet from dpsing then feeding pet is not unreasonable.
FD + using Outfitter to switch to birthday suit to avoid an inevitable wipe and save a repair bill: Who the hell was pulling this stunt?
Nobody else can CC more than one mob so why should Hunters? Nobody else can FD, take that away too? A non-argument. If I can pull to a frost trap and then drop a snake trap both effects stack, one does not cancel the other out.
taken from http://www.wowblues.com
http://www.wowblues.com/us/hunter-pet-issues-since-patch-23-2968107895.html
(read the last paragraph!)
I have a bit more information for you all based on some dialogue I’ve had with our QA department.
First, we’re not seeing any change in the loss of Happiness at current from our own tests. If you all have more specific information in regard to the pet you are using, the level, etc, please feel free to post in the Bug forum so that our QA team can try to reproduce the issue and track it down.
We are also not able to see the stair issue in our own testing. Again, if you have more specific information on what exactly is happening (specific boss, mob) , please go ahead and post in the Bug forum so we can better track it down. There may be a particular situation or key element that is causing this issue for you.
We also are working on a fix for an issue where pets weren’t attacking if a player had their back up against a wall or corner.
Any further pathing issues that seem strange, please keep note of where you are and what mob it may be related to. We’ll do our best to see if we can find these issues if they exist.
Just to reiterate from another thread, we are planning to allow Hunters to feed their pets during combat in a future patch. It’s in the works right now.
that last post was Justyskie btw, lvl 70 hunter turalyon Europe
For those lazy enough to read the patch notes:
“Hunters
- Aimed Shot (Marksmanship) now reduces healing done to that target by 50% for 10 seconds, shot time reduced by 0.5 seconds.“
It’s right the 1st entry there, for our class, but still, some don’t like to read!
As for the “bug-fixes” and added bugs, what pisses me off and I believe many as well, is that they did not have any of this on the PTR! They left those for after PTR was down and before going live, which basically means introducing changes that WERE NOT tested!
They even didn’t bother mentioning them on the PATCH NOTES!!
Pets were pathing correctly on the PTR and then comes live and, BAM, new bug…
So this leads me to believe that someone at Blizzard (not me, someone else!), must have allowed work-in-progress changes to slip through 2.3 when they obviously weren’t ready and the guy in charge of making the PATCH NOTES didn’t even KNEW of them!
I’ve got a bit of a question regarding races for hunters now. It used to be that for allies, Dwarves won hands down due to the gun skill increase, thus greatly reducing the hit rating needed for lvl 73 bosses. Now that the racial benefit has been changed to simply +1% to crit, are Dwarves still the hands down best ally race? It seems to me that +1% crit is not nearly as big a benefit as the increased gun skill used to be. Any thoughts?
The problem I saw with the racial bonuses is that it truly did make dwarves/trolls the best race for hunters. Many n00bs don’t know that, of course, so they pick the cool-looking NE or draenei (like myself ^_^)
After leveling to 50 or so and really reading about my class and how to play it, i saw that dwarves had a big advantage in hit cap but it was too late to change, imo. what the new racials do is still provide a buff that other races wont have, of course. but now its a much more comparable change. I can still get the same crit as a dwarf; there was no way to get that +5 skill to guns. or at least no readily accessible way. At least that’s how I see it.
And PS- Blizz mentioned bringing aimed shot’s cast time down more… but with all the crying that hunters are OP now, I dont think we’ll see it. Just hoping against hope. Good luck and good gaming, all.
PPS- Anyone have a sec to relate the mechanics of the trap “nerf” (that i know, isnt a nerf, tyvm BRK ^_^) Someone above said that if you have a mob trapped and lay a second freezing trap, it breaks the 2nd immediately AND the first. that seems bugged/unfair? imo at least. thanks all!
I disagree with your opinion about traps and do think this is an unjustified nerf. The talents in the survival tree relating to traps and the Readiness talent seemed to enable a Hunter to trap multiple opponents by design.
Other classes can only crowd control one or two types of mob but that is the only restriction. Hunters have to do deal with cooldowns and activation time and positioning and if the trap breaks early, it’s not possible to drop another one.
Being able to trap multiple enemies gave the Hunter a bit of an edge in crowd control and I still can’t believe it’s now considered a bug. Plus it makes the Readiness talent even more of a joke. Does anyone take that skill? If so, not much of a reason to now.
Wait a minute.
“If you allow your pet to die in a boss fight…”
You’re not allowing anything. Pets die in boss fight because of poor pet design and becuase the damage takes is designed to hit players (that get heals, decurses etc). The hunter does not allow his pet to die. The hunter might be mending his ass of and it still dies.
jeanne, SV hunters that have rapid killing and readiness can get 3 rapid fires in just over 6 minutes. on an extended, tough boss, do you know how much dps that pushes out? me neither, but lots. thats one way that readiness is useful…
Zomg BRK I believe you are dead wrong about the dead zone issue(pun semi-intended). I was just pwning for several hours in AV and after that I tried some PvE grinding and I can confirm that the deadzone is GONE!
I can shoot from 30 yards (or is it feet) right up to “shotgun to the back of the head” range, any any closer triggers melee range..
I have found levels of extacy never before imagined destroyng squishies and their ilk in PvP. Never again shall I be nuked to death by a frostmage again! Thank you blizzard you for showing us hunters the love we so deserved ^_^
“Hunters
- Aimed Shot (Marksmanship) now reduces healing done to that target by 50% for 10 seconds, shot time reduced by 0.5 seconds.”
W00t! finally something to lay the smackdown on those frikkin’ Paladin cockroaches
If you want Hunter traps to be eq of the other classes cc then loose the cooldown and arming time!
No deadzone and buffs: WoW! Cool, and thanks for that but not so needed. I played a hunter from day zero and I got so used to deadzone and kiting that now Now I still move back when I can still shoot… weird
No more multiple trapping (when I was survival I mostly done the cc with 2/3 traps each fight, and was really funny): this makes me really really sad.
Why? Because it was the line to see who is a Pro hunter and who is a noob: multiple trap + dps + not overaggro at the same time was a amazing thing to do.
I saw that they changed the volley animation effect to. Is there also something changed in the damage?
Conceptually, traps are Fire-And-Forget items - they do not require the attention of the person that set them to operate correctly. Also, if they are separate entities, they do not depend on the state of other traps to operate correctly. Blizzard seems to acknowledge that by not changing the other traps (specifically Frost Trap, just read about it), so I view this as a deliberate change and not a bug fix. And having in mind that a mob can’t jump into a mage’s hands and get polymorphed, I think Freezing trap was working perfectly well, with the ability to trap two mobs (and for a short duration only!) was compensating for the lack of complete control…
Regarding Hunter racials..
Agree that changing the +5 gun/bow to 1% for dwarves/trolls kind of negated the racial benefit for choosing them as hunters.
But at least the orcs still get +5% pet damage.
/nod at smokybg
I agree. We have to contend with CD on our traps, which can break early (resulting in kiting like a n00b) while shad priests seeme to shackle for a loooong time, or a sheep lasts a loooong time, or a sap that last a loooong time… follow me?
Not to mention, it’s great while they’re trapped but it isn’t fabulous. We still have to worry about run time away from trap #1 to make up for the CD time on trapping #2. It wasn’t all roses.
One thing I noticed last night in Sethekk was that if I just took a step back from melee range, I was still in AOE range. While that wasn’t a problem last night (low AOE damage), I can sure see that being a problem in a raid instance against a boss AOE!
Talonis & Talon of Kul Tiras
As for the animation for volley … THIS IS SPARTA!!! Okay, I’m kidding, it’s kinda weird looking and gets a good laugh whenever I use it on the raid.
Pet issues are fortunately being fixed. Blue post said they are looking at allowing feeding while in combat - yeah!
There’s some strangeness going on with instant cast shots - at times it seems they don’t want to go off - even when they are off CD. Don’t know if it’s a bug or me.
Doh - forgot to mention - have you moved your kill command above your auto/steady line in your macro yet?
You should - it no longer triggers GCD, and that way it doesn’t have to wait on a shot to trigger.
Survivalist here. I may be chomping at the bit at the loss of double and triple trapping but we’ll live. Love the 341 comment btw. “What the piss son! Give me a 341!”