5.4, hunters in PvE - concerns, etc.

[scriix]

thanks for this extremely cogent and relevant post, im pretty sure you hit on just about every point i can think of, now i just hope SOMETHING is done to correct these issues, because if they arent i will either be changing classes or quitting entirely

[Tehstool]

according to you, doing the damage of three arcane shots in three globals is better/burstier than doing the damage of three arcane shots in two globals

:-)

Take that and see how many arcane shots you cast in a fight, then take 2/3 away (so you are left with 1/3 aka 33%) You would've saved that many GCDs. The math is there and it's a huge buff.

[asdfsaf]

i know it's a buff. the other guy (and many others from what i've read) is saying that it's a (burst) nerf.

[Libertarian]

according to you, doing the damage of three arcane shots in three globals is better/burstier than doing the damage of three arcane shots in two globals

:-)

I never said it wasn't a huge buff. I'm saying that I don't think it's the right buff. I don't like how our special and dump are around the same focus cost.

---------- Post added 2013-06-27 at 03:18 AM ----------

i know it's a buff. the other guy (and many others from what i've read) is saying that it's a (burst) nerf.

My post said

I see this causing some issues with "burst target switching" on fights where you need to kill things really fast, and they don't live long enough for cobra shots.

Obviously you don't understand what I'm talking about. I'm specifically only talking about swapping targets.

[mistahwilshire]

I gotta say I agree wholeheartedly with basically all of this. I've been talking about the role in raids portion for months and months now. It would be simply amazing if our issues could be resolved (or at least made manageable) pre-progression for the first time in...years?

[Tehstool]

i know it's a buff. the other guy (and many others from what i've read) is saying that it's a (burst) nerf.

I was just agreeing and expanding on your point.

I never said it wasn't a huge buff. I'm saying that I don't think it's the right buff. I don't like how our special and dump are around the same focus cost.

---------- Post added 2013-06-27 at 03:18 AM ----------



My post said

I see this causing some issues with "burst target switching" on fights where you need to kill things really fast, and they don't live long enough for cobra shots.

Obviously you don't understand what I'm talking about. I'm specifically only talking about swapping targets.

Burst target switching? It has the exact same damage and focus, but delivered in a shorter period of time. If anything this change is superior.

[Libertarian]

I was just agreeing and expanding on your point.



Burst target switching? It has the exact same damage and focus, but delivered in a shorter period of time. If anything this change is superior.

If you're assuming 100 focus a long duration, yes. If you're talking about low focus and a short duration, no. At 40 focus 5.3 arcane will do more in 2s than 5.4 arcane shot. This change affects pvp hunters a lot more than you think. Not everything is entirely black and white and people don't play like a spreadsheet. There are a lot of variables to consider and many different situations, and again I never said this wasn't a buff to hunter overall dps.

[Tehstool]

If you're assuming 100 focus a long duration, yes. If you're talking about low focus and a short duration, no. At 40 focus 5.3 arcane will do more in 2s than 5.4 arcane shot. This change affects pvp hunters a lot more than you think. Not everything is entirely black and white and people don't play like a spreadsheet. There are a lot of variables to consider and many different situations, and again I never said this wasn't a buff to hunter overall dps.

Just about in every scenario the new arcane shot is better. If you are going into a burst target swap fight (akin to ra'den), why would you knowingly deprive yourself of focus? The new arcane shot is superior.

[Perrito]

Just about in every scenario the new arcane shot is better. If you are going into a burst target swap fight (akin to ra'den), why would you knowingly deprive yourself of focus? The new arcane shot is superior.

all i see is them buffing TOTH nothing else is prolly going to be much better than other 2 talents.

[Deleted]

well tip of the hat to draco...its an amazing post and i really hope that it will get the tides going....as of late i really feel like the hunter class is struggling here /...hope that the devs will also see that and finally do something about it...anyway great post draco keep up te good work m8

[Rtslbd]

Agree with the post and i would post in the blizzard thread but its on eu :<

I feel that hunters were perfectly fine before they nerfed stampede, just needed some sort of raid utility to solidify out raid spots. I cant see any way we will remain competitive if the readiness change goes through without some sort of real compensation.

[Libertarian]

Agree with the post and i would post in the blizzard thread but its on eu :<

I feel that hunters were perfectly fine before they nerfed stampede, just needed some sort of raid utility to solidify out raid spots. I cant see any way we will remain competitive if the readiness change goes through without some sort of real compensation.

I honestly hope they buff piercing shots, explosive shot (dot) and add a bleed to kill command or bite.

[Flidro]

Glyph of Explosive Shot - You slap a larger TNT charge on your arrows, dealing X% fire damage to enemies in a 5 yard radius of your target.

[Finick]

Was a really great read, Draco. I don't post often on these forums (though I do lurk a lot) but I've always really valued the insights the higher end hunters have been able to provide on the class overall. I've often ranted in guild chat about a lot of the same points you're bringing up here.

1) The change to stampede is really enraging to me, as it probably was to a lot of people here. The fact that it does just around 20k more than 1 cast of dire beast is honestly just pathetic for a 5 minute, 20 second duration cooldown. I feel like they should just remove it at this point because it's lost all of it's utility it ever had before, or they could just buff the damage the summoned pets do to like 75% or something. I'd like to see the passive arrow talents that were in early MoP beta (maybe they were just examples of the new talents? I'm honestly not sure) introduced as passives for each spec, or maybe an actual DPS cooldown that we so desperately need (rapid fire just doesn't cut it.)

2) I agree wholeheartedly here. I just can't see the rationale behind removing an interrupt from 2 out of 3 specs, and leaving it with the weakest of the three. All the specs should have a baseline interrupt, with MM having the blanket part to it. Hell, I don't even think we should have to sacrifice scatter shot to gain an interrupt at all if that change goes through, but at least they'd be throwing us a bone.

3) I've often wondered why the threat generated by my pet is left out of MD. Even running 5 man dungeons my pet simply out threats the tank (hitting for 250k bites/kill commands is quite a bit of threat.) I've felt like this expansion has been a mess of squishy pets overall. I feel like they think we need to micromanage where our pet is at all times otherwise it seemingly is just 1 shot by random things, which is extremely frustrating. I kind of wish that the threat generated by our pets would just be applied to us, but that would have some negative side effects when soloing, or trying to keep mobs on our pets, so I'm not totally sure how they could even fix it.

4) Admittedly, I was pretty upset about the readiness change. While I don't think hunters are terribly weak now (we could use a slight buff, I guess) I felt like we were in a decent spot going into next tier, especially given the buff to arcane shot that's incoming. Was a pretty shitty feeling to see that change pop up on the notes. I'm probably one of the few who kind of enjoys the BM opener in it's current state. It's basically a spamfest of cooldowns, but the resulting burst when you get good trinket procs is pretty satisfying (I love when I just get a scope proc on the pull.) I'm okay with them nerfing readiness if there's some kind of compensation (they said this was going to happen) to ensure that we don't lose dps in PvE. I do have concerns though that losing readiness for things like BW and our shots definitely hurts our on demand burst in a lot of cases where something just needs to die quicker. If proper balance can be achieved for our damage though by shedding readiness from our dps cooldowns then by all means, I'm happy with the change.

5) Nothing to really refute here, I can agree on mostly every point. I think if they even just gave us a simple raid CD we'd be in a much better spot. I've seen others mention bringing aspect of the wild back, but as a cooldown and not an aspect, and I think that's a pretty solid idea. I would love to see our specs play different otherwise though, and MM just needs some attention of its own. I think that the whole aspect thing should probably just be done away with similar to what was done with shaman totems. They could simply make hawk into a DPS cooldown, which would be a pretty effective one (I think every hunter would appreciate a 25% AP cooldown), cheetah a personal movement CD (obviously similar to dash), and pack would just be similar to a stampeding roar. cheetah/pack would honestly be pretty boring and druid like, but I'd rather have that then just be the guy who helps us run back from a wipe faster. They'd obviously need to balance us around the loss of hawk, but I don't think that'd be such a bad thing in the end.

To add onto all of that though, this expansion started out with such a great deal of promise as soon as the PTR notes were popping up and I saw how much attention hunters were getting compared to what I've seen before. After launch though, seeing the mid tier hotfix trend start up again was really disheartening. It really makes me envious and bitter towards casters like mages and warlocks. They seemingly have absolutely no weaknesses. They can put out insane single target, absurd AoE, and even if mages can't multi dot like a warlock, any other caster pretty much can and like you said they grow in power with more targets. Removing the ICD on Viper Venom is something I thought they should've done a little while back. It'd make multi-shot really strong for survival, but I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing. I quite like Invigoration for BM, and I think if they just buffed the chance to proc, and maybe made it capable of proccing off of beast cleave hits that could be a nice bonus. I also think that Frenzy should be able to proc off of beast cleave, but that's not really a huge concern. I'm not really a fan of frenzy as it is now anyways, I much preferred it when it was something you'd be able to control and have up pretty much at all times.

I know that nothing I'm saying really adds on to what you posted, but I suppose I'm just looking to agree with the points, and voice my frustration at the same time. I really want to enjoy raiding next tier, and I hope that enough people just voice their opinions about stuff like this so that we can.

[Tehterokkar]

Glyph of Explosive Shot - You slap a larger TNT charge on your arrows, dealing X% fire damage to enemies in a 5 yard radius of your target.

Would be fun, for a Set bonus even! 10% of Damage dealt as AoE(not reducing single target damage, just taking 10% of ES damage and adding that as an AoE), would make it pretty hilarious to have LnL for those Burst AoE moments.

[Kalcheus]

Anyone else saddened by the fact that we posted this on the US Forums the same day that the Zarhym/GC thread got a thousand blue responses?

[Kyubbi]

Spot on Draco, i feel you have addressed all the problems for the wider raiding hunter audience.

I would also like to thank your for the time and effort you've put into the post. It's really appreciated (at least on my part)

Fingers crossed it all works out for us hunters when 5.4 goes live, would be nice to see hunters among the top dps in WoL instead of it rotating between locks rogues mages dks etc, lets hope we can get at least 1 tier of dominating PVE, Pretty sure BM in TBC was the last time

[GoKs]

Anyone else saddened by the fact that we posted this on the US Forums the same day that the Zarhym/GC thread got a thousand blue responses?

And this surprizes you?
We (Hunters) are being ignored, asslong as our DMG isnt insane, no need for Blizz to look at us.
Maybe we should all make Lock alts and go and complain about poor Hunter DPS .

[Thorazyn]

I'd like to encourage everyone who's responded here to also respond on the primary EU/US threads on the WoW forums.

Please also communicate this forward to all PvE hunters you know who have similar concerns. So many of us seem to be in consensus on what needs to change (or that change actually needs to happen!) but I don't know that we've really made a unified front behind one set of feedback. Given the work that Draco has done, and how well-written it is, I feel this should be the time we all pitch in and try to get these two posts the visibility they deserve.

For ease of use:

EU original thread: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7713981999
US PTR thread (our best bet, imo): http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/9377367946

[Dracodraco]

First off -
Thanks to everyone giving me such high praise . Didn't really expect that, knowing the normal behaviour of online forums <.<.
But yea - I believe that the best possibility for being recognised, is to try and come up with coherent arguments - never mind the whole "number-tuning" thing, we haven't even gotten to that point yet. It's just all the "quality of life"-issues we have - and the reasons why they should be.
Everytime I see a blue post respond to a rage or QQ topic, they always say that we should try and give them detailed feedback and valid reasons, and that is what I'm trying here.

Second, updated main post to include the links to EU and US threads - keep them active and on the front page, so we have a better chance of being seen!