Bornakk Taking on Hunters

[bullseyed]

So, Bornakk has started posting in a very developer-like way about hunters recently. He seems more knowledgeable than Ghostcrawler, so I am tentatively pleased about this. That being said, let's get some commentary on his post.

I know some of you were reading into my comments a bit much so I'll try and explain things a little more.

The wolf is overpowered when compared to the other available pets, mostly because it buffs the master. Buffing all of the pets to that level would require a number of different changes to different pets and the chance that one of those buffs would be too much or not enough is reasonably high. When you have say 10 or more things all roughly equal and then one that is outside of that group, the one that’s outside is called an outlier. Defining it as the new normal isn’t smart game design and just like we do with classes, we are likely to nerf the single thing at the top than buff all the others.

Hunter's are currently being balanced around wolves in their current state. That means that wolves are in fact NOT overpowered, all other pets are UNDERPOWERED. What the developers choose to balance around is their own issue, but as long as wolves are in the equation, wolves are not overpowered. If wolves are overpowered, then we need a baseline buff to hunter damage across the board (again). I know rogues are always supposed to "win" in the last tier of content, but we're going to need some help to keep up by the time this tier of content is done, especially if wolves get nerfed.

When it comes down to it, you don't really need to nerf wolves or buff all other pets. You can just make ferocious howl a pet talent and give something new and exciting to wolves. Maybe change howl to something that sounds less wolf-like... I can't see a cat howling.

It might not be possible to ever get the pets completely identical (see comments below), so very competitive raiders will probably still only take the best one. But if the best one is only slightly ahead of the others, then it will feel more acceptable to some players to run with the pet they like. For most players, improving their own game will have a larger effect than picking the “best in slot” pet if they are comparable.

I'm not sure if I would switch pets if wolves were on top by only 3-5 dps. I certainly would be tempted, but going with something non-ideal over something as trivial as graphics is not something I am inclined to do. If model editing wasn't a violation of the ToS hunters could just make their wolves look like something else on their own screens and be done with it. Get the best dps and that flavor they want.

As far as the Spirit Beasts are concerned, there are several reasons why they would make a bad “best” pet. There are not very many options to choose from and all of them require “farming”; a rare spawn that is more of a testament to blind luck than any kind of player skill. As we said before, there is no advantage to having a wider spectrum of pets to choose from if there is only one right choice.

Completely disagree with the first part, and agree with the second. Spirit Beasts are not a matter of luck. They are a matter of skill and dedication. When I leveled (and I leveled 24/7 from release to 80) the only thing I stopped for was to fly laps around Sholazar Basin once an hour to look for Loque. Every single one of my guildies was on the lookout for me as well while we leveled. I got the server first one. You cannot tell me it was luck, much less blind luck.

He's right about the second part though. There is no point in having many pets if one is better in all situations. Now, if different pets were better in different situations that would be even worse because then we'd need one of each and have to swap them between bosses.

We have talked about literally making all the pet families identical and letting the player just pick one based on looks. That certainly homogenizes the game quite a bit, which is why we haven’t done it, but it would ultimately allow pet choice to be cosmetic.

I kind of shocked myself when I realize, I am in favor of this. Don't necessarily make them all identical... but make them like players. Give any pet the choice of any "family special" ability, but they get only one. My cat can have swipe if I want a cat to tank and my spider can have ferocious howl if I want him to buff me in raids. Let the hunter choose which tree to spec them into as well.

Along with that, I'd really like to see the removal of exotic pets (but I know it would never happen). I would raid MM with Loque with ferocious howl if I could.

In the end, yes, we do want to get BM competitive with Survival and Marks. We even did some buffs in 3.3 to help them get there but the reason for my comments earlier is that we’d rather have two viable raiding specs than just one so Hunters as a whole are not in terrible shape. Eventually we do plan to get all 3 there. Just remember that when players obsess about 1% differences in dps you can understand why that task is pretty gigantic. There are probably more raiding BM hunters in 3.3 than in 3.2 and probably a lot more than there are Subtlety rogues (sorry for the example rogues, but you/we know it's true). It’s far from a dead spec.

What buffs occurred in 3.3 to buff BM hunters? If there were any, they were not in the patch notes. This is the part where I start getting pissed at Bornakk, because he is straight up lying. He falls further and further back onto Ghostcrawler rhetoric. Yeah, there are good players who play the game. Yeah, they're going to do their best regardless of the cost. What the developers keep saying over and over again since the B team took over is that "If we don't think we can get it perfectly correct with minimal effort, we won't bother trying". Getting classes within 1% of each other isn't hard at all (speaking as someone with experience in both data modeling and computer programming). Every one of the millions of transistors in your processor is running at the same voltage. You can handle making 10 computer processes produce the same output. MM and SV right now are so close together that my guild runs one of each. There is no reason why BM can't be there as well, and they haven't even tried to put it there. They want BM to use arcane, aimed and steady shot. They have a few options.

1.) Remove exotic pets from BM specific talents. This allows more people to use more pets and it frees up a talent in BM. Create a BM specific shot to counter claims that BM is too easy. Make BM's ability bleed based to it meshes with the tree. Call it "Fresh Blood" or something. The hunter puts a bleed on the NPC doing X damage every 3 seconds and increasing pet damage by X%/Yvalue while active.

BM gains synergy with other physical dps classes (mangle/trauma buff) just like MM does, and it will make BM work better with armor penetration.

2.) Add nothing new to BM, but buff abilities. Just add modifiers to existing talents. Make beastial discipline also increase the damage done by steady shot by 2/4%. Since steady shot will give us more focus next expansion, it makes sense that discipline would make our steady shots hit harder.

3.) Give pets full stat scaling. "Technological difficulties" is not an excuse. The programmers here know what that really means, it means you did a shit job with the coding. You're the B team, you didn't code many of these abilities, and you have no idea how they work. It's ok. Go figure it out or hack around it. The problem here comes to pet/hunter damage balance. If your pet goes from 0 ArP to ArP capped overnight, it is going to hit like a truck. Pets were hitting for 40-50% of the hunter's damage in Naxx (granted, with readiness BW) and Blizzard stated that they did not want pets doing more damage than the hunter because they are primarily AI controlled. Well, either redistribute the balance by doing something like what is listed in [2] or give us more control over the pets.

One digression on that topic. We have had issues since forever about pet positioning. A while back they made pets try to go behind targets they do not have aggro on and in front of target they do have aggro on. Fine and dandy. Except some bosses have tail swipes resulting in a huge dps loss for the hunter, or have other abilities that get the pet killed. Avoidance was instituted to fix this, but has never really worked right. (for example, the explosion on Mim applies a dot which oneshots pets.) Why not let the hunter control the position? On the end of our pet bar, have a little orb on a circle. Put a notch on the circle indicating the boss's face. Wherever the orb lies on the circle with regard to the head will be where the pet positions himself. It will be fairly simple to pull off. Both the hit box and circle have 360 degrees. All you need to do is report the angle from the control to the pet and he'll position himself properly. Bosses have front/back orientation already encoded for rogue/druid abilities.

[Azyoulike]

Hunter's are currently being balanced around wolves in their current state. That means that wolves are in fact NOT overpowered, all other pets are UNDERPOWERED.

To just hit this issue, you're misunderstanding. Wolves can be OP even if hunters with wolves are not. It just means that when they nerf wolves to be back with the rest of the pets they'll need to slightly buff hunter dps to compensate.

They have an idea how much DPS they want due to the pet, wolves are contributing more than that ( and more than other pets ), thus they are OP.

Anyway given that they're completely redoing hunters for Cata, I doubt there's much interest in them fixing this before then.

[Antillar]

Like it or not it is pretty stupid that there is, literally, only one pet you can bring to a raid if you're serious about doing the most dps possible with your toon. I'm not sure nerfing wolves is the answer unless they completely remove the AP buff. Even if they dropped the buff to 100 AP I don't see many hunters abandoning their wolves in favor of tailstriders or something.

[bullseyed]

To just hit this issue, you're misunderstanding. Wolves can be OP even if hunters with wolves are not. It just means that when they nerf wolves to be back with the rest of the pets they'll need to slightly buff hunter dps to compensate.

They have an idea how much DPS they want due to the pet, wolves are contributing more than that ( and more than other pets ), thus they are OP.

Nope. Whatever they choose to balance around is balanced. Since hunter dps is balanced around wolves, wolves damage is not OP.

[bullseyed]

Like it or not it is pretty stupid that there is, literally, only one pet you can bring to a raid if you're serious about doing the most dps possible with your toon. I'm not sure nerfing wolves is the answer unless they completely remove the AP buff. Even if they dropped the buff to 100 AP I don't see many hunters abandoning their wolves in favor of tailstriders or something.

Well tallstriders suck. I did use tallstriders in TBC but mostly as a joke. I had a purple one from that secret island in the south of Terokar and named it after my guild's shadowpriest GM.

People would switch to cats or raptors if wolves were nerfed enough to be inferior. Hunter dps would need a buff to compensate though.

[Surtfire]

What buffs occurred in 3.3 to buff BM hunters?

There were, however they were PVP. Pets get 90% AOE reduction and100% resil of hunter and Intimidation is instant if the pet is in melle range.

I like some of your ideas about helping BM. I personally tend to negelct my spirit beast and, atleast in arena cleave situations, I prefer a raptor (10% damage increase on Crit of special). If something along these lines could be applied to all pet talent trees and you would need prehaps 18-19 pet skill points in the tree, which could only be achieved by getting Beast matery (final talent in tree) then i believe BM as a whole would be doing more damage in both raids and arenas.

Your final paragraph proves to me that you havent read the patch notes nor do you really know what your on about. In the patch they made it so that pets got 90% AOE reduction and they made tail swipes not apply to pets
Second of all your last paragraph sounds as if you want to put pets infront of bosses... So many things come to mind any boss cleave or dragon fire, Meteor fists in VOA...

[Guitarn]

Nope. Whatever they choose to balance around is balanced. Since hunter dps is balanced around wolves, wolves damage is not OP.

And that's why you're wrong.

I think a blue outright saying multiple times that wolves are not in fact balanced supersedes your awesome logic.

[palladiamors]

BM need's its own shot period, though I dunno if it should be the fifty one point talent or not. Also, I am pretty sure they've stated that come Cataclysm pets will recieve all stat's from the hunter directly, so that one is in the works. We probably just won't see it for a while.

It always ticks me off when some one mentions that BM is 'easier' to play then the other two hunter specs. Easier to level with, maybe due to a tougher 'tank', but at high end we still push about the same number of buttons as the other two specs, AND it becomes vital that our pet not die. Suddenly pet control and pet positioning become a lot more important, meaning that not only do you have to worry about not standing in fire, but what this boss or that may be doing to your pet. PvP it's even more laughable, since not paying attention or properly focusing your pet will result in a huge damage decrease on your primary target, while that is pretty much a non-issue for both marksmen and survival.

Long story short, it's a BS excuse, and one that had a simple fix that wasn't taken: Roll The beast within into Beastial wrath and add a talented shot to the BM tree, minor nerf to pet's to compensate. Instead what we got was a massive kick to the face and the excuse of "ur 2 ez, shldnt del dmg!"

[bullseyed]

And that's why you're wrong.

I think a blue outright saying multiple times that wolves are not in fact balanced supersedes your awesome logic.

We did consider nerfing them for patch 3.3 but decided that the nerf to pretty much all hunter PvE dps was not worth the benefit of providing more options for pets.

Blizzard admitted they balance around wolves in their current state.

[Guitarn]

Blizzard admitted they balance around wolves in their current state.

I think you're confusing "balancing around current overpoweredness" with "balancing around currently fine".

Just because they balance around it does not mean it's fine. Kinda like how they said they're overpowered.

[bullseyed]

Your final paragraph proves to me that you havent read the patch notes nor do you really know what your on about. In the patch they made it so that pets got 90% AOE reduction and they made tail swipes not apply to pets

Just because the patch notes say it, does not mean it works that way in game for one. For two, the patch notes specifically use terms like "many" and "most" because it will not work on all of them. Giving hunters the ability to manually position their pets adds to the 'difficulty' of the class by giving the potential for a good player to outshine others. The primary thing keeping BM down at this point is "lulz pets are easy like afk autoshot". Just in general, more control and less AI is always better.

3.3 Patch Notes:

[u]Many of the tail sweeps with knockback effects will no longer hit players' pets.

Second of all your last paragraph sounds as if you want to put pets infront of bosses... So many things come to mind any boss cleave or dragon fire, Meteor fists in VOA...

The ability to, yes. First, if pets are tanking (either heroics, farming, or occasionally raid bosses) they currently do go in front of the NPC, if they have aggro. Being able to manually choose to position them there is something we should have control over. Oddly enough, for some of the specific reasons you ignorantly mentioned. More and more bosses are getting abilities that hit for split damage on all players in front of the boss. Right now, they're a joke for beacon healing paladins. When hard modes come out, if they are in fact hard, these abilities will probably hit like a truck. Adding a 3rd target to split damage with may be beneficial or even essential in world first kills. Being able to throw a turtle pet in front of the boss to shield a cleave, allowing both tanks to live is something I would like to be able to do as a hunter for raid utility.

Even better, for situations where healers have failed and the OT has died, being able to throw your pet in front of the boss to save the MT from being oneshot could result in a dead boss. Good players would be able to do this, and it is therefore something we should be given control over.

[bullseyed]

BM need's its own shot period, though I dunno if it should be the fifty one point talent or not. Also, I am pretty sure they've stated that come Cataclysm pets will recieve all stat's from the hunter directly, so that one is in the works. We probably just won't see it for a while.

That was supposed to happen for 3.3. They failed. I don't have much confidence that it will happen in Cata either. You're falling for the carrot on the stick. Go open the cover to you WotLK box. Planes in WG, I'm glad that happened. Remember when SV was given a placeholder talent while they designed trap launcher? Yeeeaahhh, good luck with that. Blizzard lies. They always have, and always will. Expect nothing and you will always be pleased with the outcome instead of being continually let down.

It always ticks me off when some one mentions that BM is 'easier' to play then the other two hunter specs. Easier to level with, maybe due to a tougher 'tank', but at high end we still push about the same number of buttons as the other two specs, AND it becomes vital that our pet not die. Suddenly pet control and pet positioning become a lot more important, meaning that not only do you have to worry about not standing in fire, but what this boss or that may be doing to your pet. PvP it's even more laughable, since not paying attention or properly focusing your pet will result in a huge damage decrease on your primary target, while that is pretty much a non-issue for both marksmen and survival.

Yes and no. The things that are (or should be) hard about BM we have no real control over. You mentioned pet positioning and pet dying. Both are just as essential to MM and SV though.

The only control we have over pet positioning is calling the pet back to us. It dies to stupid shit like flame wall on three drake OS unless you call it back through a gap. That is why I want more control over pet positioning. Start with position relative to the boss's head. Expand from there to make BM more skill based.

Pet healing is the other part that could be more skill based for BM. The problem is, we are entirely helpless to save our pets. Mend pet is shit, will always be shit and has always been shit. Our pets get hit much much harder and much much faster than we can heal them, in both PvE and PvP. The AoE in PvP change is especially ridiculous. Pets shouldn't be killable unless they are specifically targeted.

[Kuldrad]

3.3 hunter buffs;

Epic ammo and 3% damage increase with Culling of the Herd.

Epic ammo increased my DPS by close to 100pts, and CotH is up often enough in boss fights to consider it a buff.

[bullseyed]

I think you're confusing "balancing around current overpoweredness" with "balancing around currently fine".

Just because they balance around it does not mean it's fine. Kinda like how they said they're overpowered.

You just said something can be balanced and overpowered at the same time. I think you're confusing yourself with an intelligent person. Go back to the Blizzard forums if you want to use invented definitions and ignore logic.

[bullseyed]

3.3 hunter buffs;

Epic ammo and 3% damage increase with Culling of the Herd.

Epic ammo increased my DPS by close to 100pts, and CotH is up often enough in boss fights to consider it a buff.

Hey chief, this is a thread talking about comparative damage between BM hunters (which are non-raid viable in the words of the blues) and MM/SV damage (which is very well balanced at the moment).

Neither of those items are exclusive to BM hunters, and thus is not a buff to BM hunters comparative to MM/SV.

[Fizzlebeard]

You just said something can be balanced and overpowered at the same time. I think you're confusing yourself with an intelligent person. Go back to the Blizzard forums if you want to use invented definitions and ignore logic.

Not exactly, he is saying that something can be overpowered in one area (pets) but balanced in another (hunters). This is not an illogical statement.

[Nexus2089]

I like your idea's esp the ability to position your pet in a 360 degree area around a mob

[bullseyed]

Not exactly, he is saying that something can be overpowered in one area (pets) but balanced in another (hunters). This is not an illogical statement.

While what you said is logically sound, that isn't what he said. It may be what he meant, but I am not one to judge on what people mean, only on what they say.


If you want to go that route though and consider the pet and the hunter separately, wolves would be hard to classify as overpowered as well. Wolves by themselves do less damage than other pets. The attack power bonus to hunters is what differentiates them, and hunters are balanced around having that attack power.

In short, wolves are only better than other pets if you consider the hunter, so it is useless to analyze them apart from the hunter. In that situation, as said previously, they are balanced because that is what Blizzard chose to balance hunters around.


Now if hunters were doing 15k single target dps with a wolf, wolves would be overpowered. As it stand now, on live servers, wolves are balanced and all other pets are underpowered. Abstract design concepts may have different (and frankly irrelevant) perspectives.