[OFFICIAL] MoP Beta Hunter Information

[Keren]

New! Glyph of Distracting Shot: Your Distracting Shot now distracts the target to attack your pet instead of you.
New! Glyph of Endless Wrath: While Bestial Wrath is active, your pet cannot be killed, but can still be damaged.

Someone else does see this as possebility to evade heavy tank-hit mechanics? Can't imagine this will go live -_-
Every Boss with hard-hit mechanic the tank will do save a cd and the bm can let the pet tank it without let it die. After the 6 sec the tank get the aggro again, perfect play for end-game guilds and save-spot for bm hunter! +1!

[Deleted]

all boss mobs in ds are "immune" to distracting shot due to hunter kiting and whatsoever. guess theyll have more reasons to go along with it in mop. probably we will be able to abuse it on some adds though.

[Keren]

hm, never used it in ds. but I used it for halfus healdebuff reset and for FL kite this nasty dog away from tank. In DS I heared there are Hunters in the early weeks who distract hagara, coud probably missinformation but I will test it this week/search for hotfixes/notes...

[odie]

Any one who is playing Beta can ya tell me do hunters still have many buttons or have they reduced to mop . Played a hunter all the expansions was planning to shelf him for MOP

[Tehterokkar]

Any one who is playing Beta can ya tell me do hunters still have many buttons or have they reduced to mop . Played a hunter all the expansions was planning to shelf him for MOP

I think you have to use 1-5 Keybinds more, at least I did. Had to drop Flare and Scare beast off my keybinds bars because I hardly use them(I only do PvE). We definitely get more skills, but I'm an Engineer, so I have to have Parachute and Nitro Boost binded also

[Deleted]

all boss mobs in ds are "immune" to distracting shot due to hunter kiting and whatsoever. guess theyll have more reasons to go along with it in mop. probably we will be able to abuse it on some adds though.

This is just unfair, either all taunts work or none of them should exist.

The whole aggro mechanic in PvE is just unfair, from a lore and story point of view. I mean all this bosses, the prime evils which claim world dominance and so on, are so dumb and stupid and fall for the same old trick performed on them countless times, again and again. This thing doesn't even work in PvP, there's no such thing as aggro, taunts and forcing an other player to target and attack you. So aggro doesn't work on average WoW inhabitants (aka players), but the prime evils fall for it? Seriously?

I completely dislike the aggro mechanic, it's just there to justify the existance of tanks. Due to tanks it will NEVER be possible to have bosses in WoW who act inteligently, as that would impose to get rid of this "mind control" mechanic called aggro. Most games are proud of having powerful artificial intelligence, yet in MMOs such things as AI are not allowed to exist, due to tanks. Just a funny example: let a random raid boss be controlled by a player, the boss keeps all his stats, spells and cooldowns, nothing is different, only the fact that the player will take the decisions whom to attack, which spells to use when and where to move. I guess the professional raiding guilds could then go back to WotLK and try their luck with the raids there...

Sry, off topic rant. :-)

[eschatological]

hm, never used it in ds. but I used it for halfus healdebuff reset and for FL kite this nasty dog away from tank. In DS I heared there are Hunters in the early weeks who distract hagara, coud probably missinformation but I will test it this week/search for hotfixes/notes...

I was trying H-Hagara week 2 of heroic modes, and it wasn't working then, so I doubt it ever worked, which was too bad since it was our initial strat. In week 2 I still got to MC myself and not take any damage in ice phase while standing in the bubble. That was amusing.

[stalkerzzzz]

This is just unfair, either all taunts work or none of them should exist.

The whole aggro mechanic in PvE is just unfair, from a lore and story point of view. I mean all this bosses, the prime evils which claim world dominance and so on, are so dumb and stupid and fall for the same old trick performed on them countless times, again and again. This thing doesn't even work in PvP, there's no such thing as aggro, taunts and forcing an other player to target and attack you. So aggro doesn't work on average WoW inhabitants (aka players), but the prime evils fall for it? Seriously?

I completely dislike the aggro mechanic, it's just there to justify the existance of tanks. Due to tanks it will NEVER be possible to have bosses in WoW who act inteligently, as that would impose to get rid of this "mind control" mechanic called aggro. Most games are proud of having powerful artificial intelligence, yet in MMOs such things as AI are not allowed to exist, due to tanks. Just a funny example: let a random raid boss be controlled by a player, the boss keeps all his stats, spells and cooldowns, nothing is different, only the fact that the player will take the decisions whom to attack, which spells to use when and where to move. I guess the professional raiding guilds could then go back to WotLK and try their luck with the raids there...

Sry, off topic rant. :-)

And then you would end up with bosses that can't be killed and a pointless game.

[Arhippa]

Any one who is playing Beta can ya tell me do hunters still have many buttons or have they reduced to mop . Played a hunter all the expansions was planning to shelf him for MOP

I think we're losing 4-5 keybinds (depending on your spec) and gaining 5-6 (depending on your talent choices). Some of those might be old abilities, like silencing shot and readiness if you play MM currently on live and pick the same talents in mop, but still.

[Cyph3r]

In case you guys haven't seen this yet; New post from GC on the forms regarding expertise for Hunters:

Shots that cost focus should give a partial refund when they miss. If that isn't happening, we'll fix it.

We don't think Steady and Cobra Shot need to provide resources even when they miss. We're not going for a design where hunters can be certain to always have maximum resource income in PvP. As long as they have enough focus, they'll be fine. If we see evidence that hunters are focus-starved, we'll adjust accordingly, but we haven't seen that so far. There hasn't been a ton of PvP testing on beta yet. There has been a lot of speculation, and while that is still valuable feedback, it is understandably less valuable.

If Shred and Backstab were so reliable in PvP, I don't think there would be such a storied history of druids and rogues asking to buff alternatives to the positional requirements or just removing the positional requirements for PvP. In other words, I think "melee can nearly always attack from behind in PvP" is overstated.

If hunters get close to hit and expertise caps, they should do fine even against Agi users with high dodge chances. They won't do fine against a rogue that pops Evasion, but Evasion is intended as a survivability cooldown. Different classes are different and cooldowns and durations all vary, but I don't know that rogues have a great counter for Deterrence either.

The loss of minimum range is a huge hunter PvP buff. I don't think we've seen the full ramifications of it yet.

So it looks like we can expect the signature shots to have a refund mechanic added at some point in the near future, and as of right now they're NOT going to make steady/cobra always generate focus, even on a miss. Definitely not what I expected, but it's nice to see we'll at least get some compensation if those big shots get dodged. That alone should help considerably. It's interesting that they're basically telling us there hasn't been enough level 90 pvp feedback yet. I guess we know where we need to focus next.

[Deleted]

It's a sad day for hunters when GC posts a reply like this. It clearly shows he has no clue of our class. Minimal range removal being a huge buff in pvp? It's simply a quality of life change, nothing more, nothing less. It only helps to deal with pillar huggers and keeps mages from sitting on our faces, we still don't want to be caught in melee combat... Deterrence vs. evasion: 5 secs vs. 15, 100% deflect with not being able to attack vs. 50% dodge while being able to melt faces. We shouldn't even compare the 2 defensive cds, cuz they are so different. Regarding agi users with high dodge, if I remember correctly we are one of the agi users, yet we have like 5% dodge chance, so clearly something is wrong. Getting close to expertise and hit caps only helps against non agi classes, so either he's math is flawed or he's high again. Plus the whole threads main point was about making our control shots, aka scatter & concussive undodgeable, to atleast throw us a bone in this expertise inferno (expertise was wrong in the first place imho)

[Neidrah]

Why on earth is binding shot still on a 1.5 minute CD? All it is is a snare with an avoidable stun, i don't see why it warrants a 1.5 minute CD

I don't know whats more ridiculous, ring of frost on a 30 sec CD or this turd

they're always seemingly overly cautious with hunter abilities, we're the only class they gets shadowfury but with a dozen restrictions or safeguards to prevent us from being OP as they like to say time and time again.

Silencing is fine at 20s

Wyvern should be 30s

Binding should be at 45s cd

I agree with this. Shadow Fury is the same stun, but instant and thus unavoidable + capable of interrupting, with a larger range and a 30sec CD. It's just so much better than Binding Shot that has a 1min30 CD... That just doesn't make any sense.

It's a sad day for hunters when GC posts a reply like this. It clearly shows he has no clue of our class. Minimal range removal being a huge buff in pvp? It's simply a quality of life change, nothing more, nothing less. It only helps to deal with pillar huggers and keeps mages from sitting on our faces, we still don't want to be caught in melee combat... Deterrence vs. evasion: 5 secs vs. 15, 100% deflect with not being able to attack vs. 50% dodge while being able to melt faces. We shouldn't even compare the 2 defensive cds, cuz they are so different. Regarding agi users with high dodge, if I remember correctly we are one of the agi users, yet we have like 5% dodge chance, so clearly something is wrong. Getting close to expertise and hit caps only helps against non agi classes, so either he's math is flawed or he's high again. Plus the whole threads main point was about making our control shots, aka scatter & concussive undodgeable, to atleast throw us a bone in this expertise inferno (expertise was wrong in the first place imho)

Yeah seriously, the fact that he thinks not having a minimum range is a solutions to the fact that some classes will be much, much harder to kite is just ridiculous. Rogues on evasion + sprint are already unkitable on live. I guess it'll just be like that, but all the time now

[Drakoes]

...GC comparing evasion with detterence made me /facepalm. First off, the removal of the minimum firing range is a quality of life change, no other class but us had this thing; this is not an excuse for why expertise should exist. It's not like our damage was overwhelmingly high that it had to be penalized in one way or another either - a caster absolutely puts out like ten fold of more pressure, especially on multi targets.

How can you even compare these abilities. Detterence is our biggest emergency CD against ALL forms of damage, not just melee and acts our as our main 'oh crap' CD. A rogue doesn't need to counter detterence because that's like dealing with a frost mage's ice block - what do you want to do? Sure it can be dispelled and there are differences between these abilities, but the point is the same - it's our biggest emergency CD.

We can't do any damage and there is no pressure output'd from us for the duration, whereas evasion can last up to 4X as long and the rogue can still continue to do damage since it obviously doesn't turn his attack off. Up to a max of 20 secs of 50%-80% dodge > 5 secs of parry, lol. I'm not implying the need to change detterence, but I'm just getting the impression that GC doesn't know what he's talking about.

Rogues want a hunter to burn through their biggest defensive CD in PvP, it's a good thing, especially if they can do it asap as it also shuts off all of their damage. Now, for us, a rogue can easily rotate through many more of his other CDs, especially vanish to reset a fight if the timing is right.

[Deleted]

"As long as they have enough focus, they'll be fine. If we see evidence that hunters are focus-starved, we'll adjust accordingly, but we haven't seen that so far."

Im not sure if he is serious or just ignoring how Hunters have been for the majority of this expansion. We had to use 2 parts of the PvE tier to be alittle viable at all.

[aarjun]

The changes to talents have led to a pretty big change in hunter pet focus regen. Currently BM is the only hunter spec which has any talents which regen pet focus. Since pet base focus regen is fairly low, this means that the frequency of basic attacks for non-BM pets has dropped quite a bit. Even for BM the regen is pretty low (although that at least will improve with crit rate). I'm not sure if the intention is to make hunter pets do significantly lower damage or to tweak the pet melee attack to do a far larger portion of the pet damage, or if this is just a mechanic that hasn't really been worked on yet.

GC: "We essentially took some damage from the pet and gave it to the hunter. We think overall hunter damage is fairly balanced on beta, except for the AE issue noted above."

[Hyde]

I can't remember when I can do anything offensive against rogue while in deterrence., like how rogues stun locks me after he pops evasion.

[Tannon]

Minimal range removal being a huge buff in pvp? It's simply a quality of life change, nothing more, nothing less. It only helps to deal with pillar huggers and keeps mages from sitting on our faces, we still don't want to be caught in melee combat...

Of course it's a Huge buff..... or GC's Mage.

[Arcanimus]

I can't remember when I can do anything offensive against rogue while in deterrence., like how rogues stun locks me after he pops evasion.

You can offensively switch pets and drop traps while deterrenced. (Snake Trap, if specced for Entrapment) You can also reapply Hunter's Mark, which he's probably Cloaked off.

Regardless, it is still highly imbalanced. It's also rediculous that Hunters are balanced around pet swapping in pvp rather than their own survivability.

[Cyph3r]

I've always felt like Rogues and Hunters were fairly evenly balanced against eachother, and it often comes down to the skill of the player. Honestly, that's pretty much the only thing I'd like to keep intact. Even if the specifics change, the tactics these 2 classes have to use against eachother change, I just hope we remain fairly evenly balanced. Rogues have always been my favorite nemesis, you could say. If this tips the scales and Rogues become the "rock" to our "scissors", I'll definitely be a bit disappointed.

There clearly hasn't been enough solid level 90 pvp feedback. And I think they tend to balance more around what they can actually see and measure from the beta than direct feedback on the forums and such, which means we need to get in there and start fighting, so they can get a clearer picture of just what problems we are facing.

[resare]

If hunters get close to hit and expertise caps, they should do fine even against Agi users with high dodge chances. They won't do fine against a rogue that pops Evasion, but Evasion is intended as a survivability cooldown. Different classes are different and cooldowns and durations all vary, but I don't know that rogues have a great counter for Deterrence either.

It's quotes like that which really scare me about Blizzard's definition of class balance. Comparing Evasion and Deterrence is such a slap in the face, then topping it off with "... rogues (don't) have a great counter for Deterrence either," is so insanely stupid that it's hard to comprehend. I was going to post a rebuttal but it looks like everyone else caught this gaff too.