No buffs coming to hunters - official post

[Dracodraco]

Some points in this thread:
- The RPPM changes hit other classes the same as they hit you. Some more, and some less.

Almost every single one of the other classes were hit less, as focus fire/rapid fire were both "real" haste, and thus counted towards the proc chances. With the 2 set and CDR trinket, we could weave them so that we'd have almost 100% uptime on a personal bloodlust (30% more haste). The only other spec that has as much haste as us is Enhancement, due to their .5 modifier.

- Simc is not accurate, because that which usually is quoted is only the single target / no movement szenario. E.g. ferals / enhancer / WWs should do more dps than warlocks according to sims in BiS. Which in most cases, they don't.

Exactly the point. This is a single target, no movement scenario. As hunters have no cleave, no multidotting, and only mediocre AOE compared to basicly every other class, this means that a singletarget patchwerk fight is the IDEAL scenario for a hunter. You just went out of your way to reinforce the fact that most fights are NOT ideal for a hunter, and even the classes who simulates lower due to singletarget will get ahead of hunters due to multidotting.

[Deleted]

Exactly the point. This is a single target, no movement scenario. As hunters have no cleave, no multidotting, and only mediocre AOE compared to basicly every other class, this means that a singletarget patchwerk fight is the IDEAL scenario for a hunter. You just went out of your way to reinforce the fact that most fights are NOT ideal for a hunter, and even the classes who simulates lower due to singletarget will get ahead of hunters due to multidotting.

It depends to which class you compare yourself. There are many classes out there that don't shine on cleave and aoe, and also not on single target fights.
Do hunters need a buff compared to e.g. mages, locks and rogues? Yes.
Do other classes and specs too? Yes.
The problem in my opinion right now is not that there are 2-3 specs / classes which are too bad. The problem is there are some classes / specs which are just too good, and everyone compares himself to those. As written, a good hunter in top gear will on average never do as much damage as a good mage in good gear. But so won't a good warrior, a good dk, a good paladin, ... .

Note: Haven't tested anything on the PTR, so what I'm saying is mostly the actual situation without too many of the class changes coming in mind. But in a single patch class balancing does usually not get shifted completely. If you're weak, you stay quite weak. If you're good, you stay quite good. Sad, and I don't agree with it, but it's actually how it mostly is.

[Beace]

I absolutely hate these kind of topics. The blue post said they were not gonna make any more changes to compensate for Readiness change. They did not say hunters were not gonna get any more number adjustments.

[bendak]

There are many hunters, because it's an awesome class (yay pets). Making hunters stronger than other classes would increase the population of them even more, and I think Blizz wants to keep it more balanced.

So your theory is they are keeping hunters mediocre because there is a lot of them? I wouldn't put it past blizzard, but that's entering tinfoil hat territory (and nothing they would ever publicly admit anyway)

The thing about hunters though is almost everyone has a hunter alt... when it comes to normal and heroic raiding, they aren't really more common than other classes in my experience. Most raid groups tend to have a token hunter (2 token hunters in 25 sometimes) as agi mail and ranged weapon gear soaks. When you only have 1 or 2 hunters, they tend to gear up fast, and when they stay a few item levels above everyone else they can remain competitive. Once people start to get their BiS, etc. then hunters begin to fall again and we get our aspect of the hawk bandaid.

[Mortaeron]

As an old Hunter (Vanilla-style) I have to say that lately i feel like the class has had its times but when I look at my other chars with much lower gear and see higher numbers,i find it hard to come back to "hunting".
I am mostly looking forward to these upcoming changes of the class next x-pac or whenever...
I am overall disappointed.

[Kaeth]

I absolutely hate these kind of topics. The blue post said they were not gonna make any more changes to compensate for Readiness change. They did not say hunters were not gonna get any more buffs (number adjustments).

Learn to read, and stop misinterpreting everything.

My apologies. The overwhelming amount of prior precedent from this development team has left the hunter community jaded. I, personally, will attempt to calm down and wait for the (nonexistent) upcoming buffs with a cool head. Made easier because I already unsubbed two weeks ago.

[Deleted]

So your theory is they are keeping hunters mediocre because there is a lot of them? I wouldn't put it past blizzard, but that's entering tinfoil hat territory (and nothing they would ever publicly admit anyway)

I know, thus said only a personal theory with absolutely no evidence to back it up, that people don't take it too seriously.

The thing about hunters though is almost everyone has a hunter alt... when it comes to normal and heroic raiding, they aren't really more common than other classes in my experience. Most raid groups tend to have a token hunter (2 token hunters in 25 sometimes) as agi mail and ranged weapon gear soaks. When you only have 1 or 2 hunters, they tend to gear up fast, and when they stay a few item levels above everyone else they can remain competitive. Once people start to get their BiS, etc. then hunters begin to fall again and we get our aspect of the hawk bandaid.

That's actually true. I quote here something from the monk forum, basically a statistic between LFR / normal / hc participation of dds (I think nh / hc were numbers for 10man Lei Shen, respectively). Raidbots is taken as source.

@ jazzyy - I assume he got the data from raidbots. I used data from raidbots to add in a LFR representation column as well as a change from LFR to normal column:

Class	Range/Melee	% LFR Distribution	% Normal Distribution	% Heroic Distribution	% Change from LFR to Normal	% Change from Normal to Heroic
Druid	Range		 3.07%			 5.28%			 8.55% 			171.99%				161.83%
Shaman	Range		 6.29%			 5.96%			 8.43%			 94.75%				141.28%
Mage	Range		12.50%			12.87%			16.78%			102.96%				130.32%
Warlock	Range		12.77%			14.26%			15.59%			111.67%				109.29%
Priest	Range		 6.15%			 8.22%			 8.87%			133.66%				107.96%
Rogue	Melee		 7.14%			10.39%			11.21%			145.52%				107.82%
Hunter	Range		15.06%			11.48%			12.12%			 76.23%				105.61%
Shaman	Melee		 2.47%			 3.36%			 2.89%			136.03%				85.87%
DK	Melee		 9.68%			 7.20%			 5.66%			 74.38%				 78.70%
Warrior	Melee		 9.42%			 7.98%			 4.53%			 84.71%				 56.84%
Druid	Melee		 2.45%			 2.68%			 1.30%			109.39%				 48.45%
Paladin	Melee		 8.39%			 6.10%			 2.73%			 72.71%				 44.77%
Monk	Melee		 4.63%			 4.21%			 1.34%			 90.93%				 31.94%

Difficult to interpret, but the change from LFR to normal could exactly be because of your reasons.

[Tehterokkar]

I absolutely hate these kind of topics. The blue post said they were not gonna make any more changes to compensate for Readiness change. They did not say hunters were not gonna get any more number adjustments.

Things they have forgotten/ignored:
-Exhiliration is even more of a dumpster talent
-Lynx Rush didn't receive compensation like aMoC did
-Deterrance is providing less uptime than before even with charge system
-They said they hated passive talents being better than active, yet no words on overbuff to aMoC/LR or nerf to BS

[Beace]

My apologies. The overwhelming amount of prior precedent from this development team has left the hunter community jaded. I, personally, will attempt to calm down and wait for the (nonexistent) upcoming buffs with a cool head. Made easier because I already unsubbed two weeks ago.

Maybe we'll get buffed, maybe we won't. Don't make topics quoting a blue for saying something they didn't say. I like to think MMO-C is better than the average news tabloid.

[Dracodraco]

It depends to which class you compare yourself. There are many classes out there that don't shine on cleave and aoe, and also not on single target fights.
Do hunters need a buff compared to e.g. mages, locks and rogues? Yes.
Do other classes and specs too? Yes.
The problem in my opinion right now is not that there are 2-3 specs / classes which are too bad. The problem is there are some classes / specs which are just too good, and everyone compares himself to those. As written, a good hunter in top gear will on average never do as much damage as a good mage in good gear. But so won't a good warrior, a good dk, a good paladin, ... .

Note: Haven't tested anything on the PTR, so what I'm saying is mostly the actual situation without too many of the class changes coming in mind. But in a single patch class balancing does usually not get shifted completely. If you're weak, you stay quite weak. If you're good, you stay quite good. Sad, and I don't agree with it, but it's actually how it mostly is.

That's not true, though. Let's take a look at it, completly unbiased and logical.

Hunters are a ranged class, and gets affected by ranged abilities. This means that we should be comparing them to ranged, and not melee. This puts them in the same box as:

Mages.
Warlocks.
Ele shamans.
Boomkins.
Shadow priests.

-Boomkins, shadow priests and warlocks are all incredible at multidotting/cleaving.
-Ele shamans, Warlocks and to some extent Mages are incredible at AOE'ing (and ele shamans singletarget goes up when there's more than 1 target due to CL+fulmination).
-Mages and Warlocks have had infuriatingly high singletarget damage.

Hunters falls into none of the categories. Hunters has no multidotting (we have no procs that scales with dotting multiple targets, and doing it over singletarget is barely an increase).
We have sub-par AOE compared to warlocks/shamans, and it's roughly "on par" with the rest of the ranged classes. Add the fact that to take full advantage of BM AOE, you need to:
Save BW.
Load up 5 frenzy stacks.
Position your pet correctly.
And you still only do as much damage as a spriest that presses halo+mind sear.
SV is slightly better as the AOE damage is more on-demand, but it obviously takes a hit in singletarget damage.

All that aside, even IF hunters were on par with all of them, locks brings healthstones, portals, soulstones and the likes, boomkins brings tranq, spriest brings VE, ele shaman brings stormlash, AG, HTT... You get the idea. Hunters brings nothing. Even if we WERE the strongest in one niche, we wouldn't bring utility like other classes would.

I have full understanding for the fact that we, for example, beat boomkins on full-out AOE unless they manage to hit the jackpot with solar eclipse+meta proc etc for the hasted hurricane. But that doesn't really matter alot when they trumph our multi dotting, and brings a raid CD along with utility like stampeding roar and symbiosis <__<.

[Kurgosh]

So, instead of adapting and learning how to play with the new changes, you're giving up and playing another potential FOTM class?

That's fine, but it'll probably really piss you off when other hunters kill you.

We haven't been FoTM since... well, ever. Sindragosa, maybe. We were finally decent at PVP, but that's just forbidden for hunters. And in the course of making us suck in PVP like we have pretty much forever, they've made us suck in PVE too. Compare to mages or warlocks - good at PVP nearly every season, top of the PVE damage charts pretty much forever, and either decent (mages) or enormous (warlock) utility. And those two classes - ranged pure DPS classes - are our direct competition for raid spots. We can play as well as possible with the new changes, but the bottom line is that we won't even be as good as we are right now on live, and that level isn't very good in PVE at all. Why is it that hunters are the class that's never allowed to be good in PVP (well, us and pallies)? Why is that a rule?

[Deleted]

Yeah until you find out that we have been nerfed too, just like every other class come 5.4. I get that no class likes to get nerfed, but as I stated, they nerfed every good dps spec in the game there was in ToT. So until you get over yourselfs and see the hunter changes in context you are driving yourself crazy with all this wining and crying.

Please reroll everybody, just so you can switch to the next class when it gets nerfed. Or you can be good players and adept to change. Hunter won't be bad in 5.4 because every good spec was nerfed.

Actually they buffed rogues by 4%.

But anyways. Enhancers lose 15%; Elementals 14%; fire mages 15%; shadow and Balance over 10%. BM only 4% - without reforging. Hunters are going to be a little better than Currently on live.

Though they will be the only pure dps who is only middle of the pack while rogues and warlocks will dominate and mages will dominate with ilvl 560. Perhaps hunters are a hybrid because they have a healing spell.

[Dracodraco]

Actually they buffed rogues by 4%.

But anyways. Enhancers lose 15%; Elementals 14%; fire mages 15%; shadow and Balance over 10%. BM only 4% - without reforging. Hunters are going to be a little better than Currently on live.

Though they will be the only pure dps who is only middle of the pack while rogues and warlocks will dominate and mages will dominate with ilvl 560. Perhaps hunters are a hybrid because they have a healing spell.

What are those numbers based on, and what are you trying to explain with them? The damage loss from RPPM? The damage loss from changes overall <.<?

[Bisso]

The way I read this is that they have buffed abilities that benefit from readiness in the past so those abilities wouldn't feel so weak in 5.4. No where in there they say they will no longer put any work into numbers. His choice of words is questionnable, especially when talking about a very delicate subject, but I personally thought he meant we have balanced out the fact that people no longer have readiness, so now we can focus on their DPS vs other classes on PTR.

[Deleted]

-snip-

Only comparing yourself to other ranged classes, yes, you take the short stick. But I don't think you can just only compare melee with melee and ranged with ranged. Most guilds don't do "we take 3 melee / 3 ranged dds" (or 8/8 or something like that). Compare any class to WL / shaman aoe and they get destroyed. Compare any class to the cleave / multidot of WL / shadow / moonkin, and they get destroyed. With some exceptions, when the stars / procs align (e.g. a RoRo proc for a WW monk with RJW specced at the right time, and even WLs would drool at the aoe dps), of course. And also the "bad" classes differ a little in those categories.
Shadow / shaman also don't shine on single target dps. WL... that's another story.

How to solve that? I still think that bringing down some classes would do more for balance than bringing up the rest of them. Because the "rest of them" are just more.

Though it is a complex matter. Some classes have their niches (e.g. multidot), and sadly most of the bosses seem to be designed around those niches - especially multidot and aoe. Hunters was once ranged dps while moving, which has been handled out to almost all ranged dds.
And the scaling issue was already mentioned. If you look at ALL hc logs, hunters aren't really far behind most classes (1-2 %). It you look at ALL nh logs, they can compete with most of them. Only if you look at top logs they fall behind, and that far. As said, Blizz balances for the average raider, and not for high end. Sadly, that is where balancing mostly matters, but you can't fix that problem without really fixing the scaling.

@ Kurgosh: Hunters were FOTM in that short timespan after the release of Cataclysm, before people got raidgear and before SV was nerfed. The only thing that could compete were UH dks.

[bendak]

Kinda funny how they outright ignored Lynx Rush by not giving it compensation for Readiness, even though it was already crap even WITH Readiness. It's like they've written it off.

[Dracodraco]

Only comparing yourself to other ranged classes, yes, you take the short stick. But I don't think you can just only compare melee with melee and ranged with ranged. Most guilds don't do "we take 3 melee / 3 ranged dds" (or 8/8 or something like that). Compare any class to WL / shaman aoe and they get destroyed. Compare any class to the cleave / multidot of WL / shadow / moonkin, and they get destroyed. With some exceptions, when the stars / procs align (e.g. a RoRo proc for a WW monk with RJW specced at the right time, and even WLs would drool at the aoe dps), of course. And also the "bad" classes differ a little in those categories.
Shadow / shaman also don't shine on single target dps. WL... that's another story.

How to solve that? I still think that bringing down some classes would do more for balance than bringing up the rest of them. Because the "rest of them" are just more.

Though it is a complex matter. Some classes have their niches (e.g. multidot), and sadly most of the bosses seem to be designed around those niches - especially multidot and aoe. Hunters was once ranged dps while moving, which has been handled out to almost all ranged dds.
And the scaling issue was already mentioned. If you look at ALL hc logs, hunters aren't really far behind most classes (1-2 %). It you look at ALL nh logs, they can compete with most of them. Only if you look at top logs they fall behind, and that far. As said, Blizz balances for the average raider, and not for high end. Sadly, that is where balancing mostly matters, but you can't fix that problem without really fixing the scaling.

@ Kurgosh: Hunters were FOTM in that short timespan after the release of Cataclysm, before people got raidgear and before SV was nerfed. The only thing that could compete were UH dks.

Thing is that even then, alot of melee would still be preferable to a hunter except for the bosses where melee just sucks ass. Take Lei Shen for example, you can pick a hunter or a ret paladin. There's no downside to having melee on this fight, the ret paladin might do slightly less dps, but you get a devo aura, an extremely reliant ball-soaker (40% reduc so he can soak doubles if needed), and has a speed cooldown that negates helm of command.

In fact, the only melee that has no raid CD is Windwalker monks, and I fully agree that they are going to get benched alongside hunters next tier unless their DPS is brought up, too.
Add this to the fact that the melee "niche" is usually "cleave" (think DK's with howling blast/diseases lasting half a minute, ferals thrash etc). I agree that none of them has multidotting, but only windwalkers, rogues and enhance shamans are pretty stricly "singletarget only". Something they turned out to be gods at in 5.3 - we will have to wait and see for 5.4.

And in any case, I have to make sure you know - I both handle setups and tactics etc for a top-end 25 man guild. I can assure you that there's a balance of melee:ranged ratio on almost every single fight. Usually, it'll be 6 healers, 2 tanks, 7 melee dps and 10 ranged DPS for a "normal" progress fight that does not require heavy stacking, atleast in my guild.

[Slot]

Actually they buffed rogues by 4%.

But anyways. Enhancers lose 15%; Elementals 14%; fire mages 15%; shadow and Balance over 10%. BM only 4% - without reforging. Hunters are going to be a little better than Currently on live.

Though they will be the only pure dps who is only middle of the pack while rogues and warlocks will dominate and mages will dominate with ilvl 560. Perhaps hunters are a hybrid because they have a healing spell.

With my 550 ilvl I lose 15k dps as BM next patch so says female dwarf.

[Deleted]

I've made that too, for some years, though not in a progress guild, so probably not as strictly as you. A certain balance was always there, yes, but not very often fixed numbers. As an example (to take about your numbers): 7 melee, 7 ranged + ~3 which can be both. And there usually ranged get favoured, but that's a completely different story.
I can only point out the sad truth (well, in my opinion at least): The game is not balanced about high end progress. Hunter / mage comparison is a prime example of this due to their completely different scaling. That this part of the game is the part where it really matters, sucks.

To the raid CDs: Yes, a class without raid CDs is not as useful as one with one. That's a problem. But GC already dismissed this, when WWs where complaining - also with the numbers I posted above: from NH to HC raiding, numbers taken for Lei Shen were according to you melees don't have disadvantages, WW participation shrinks by about 68%. All melee participation shrinks except for rogues. Something along the lines "There is no utility arms race. If we would give everyone utility, it would be a matter of how strong it is, ...". If interested I can search for the tweet.

On a sidenote: WW's niche is aoe, and it will probably be cleave too in the next tier. Single target dps of WW gets nerfed by about 15% according to sims - though they haven't been accurate for WW in the past. And yes, they will get benched too (especially in 10m), but not for damage - for lack of utility it is.

[Slot]

Thing is that even then, alot of melee would still be preferable to a hunter except for the bosses where melee just sucks ass. Take Lei Shen for example, you can pick a hunter or a ret paladin. There's no downside to having melee on this fight, the ret paladin might do slightly less dps, but you get a devo aura, an extremely reliant ball-soaker (40% reduc so he can soak doubles if needed), and has a speed cooldown that negates helm of command.

In fact, the only melee that has no raid CD is Windwalker monks, and I fully agree that they are going to get benched alongside hunters next tier unless their DPS is brought up, too.
Add this to the fact that the melee "niche" is usually "cleave" (think DK's with howling blast/diseases lasting half a minute, ferals thrash etc). I agree that none of them has multidotting, but only windwalkers, rogues and enhance shamans are pretty stricly "singletarget only". Something they turned out to be gods at in 5.3 - we will have to wait and see for 5.4.

And in any case, I have to make sure you know - I both handle setups and tactics etc for a top-end 25 man guild. I can assure you that there's a balance of melee:ranged ratio on almost every single fight. Usually, it'll be 6 healers, 2 tanks, 7 melee dps and 10 ranged DPS for a "normal" progress fight that does not require heavy stacking, atleast in my guild.

Zen meditation is a raid CD. I don't know how effective it is. But still one ups Hunter utility.