[OFFICIAL] MoP Beta Hunter Information

[stalkerzzzz]

I think they should just leave it as it is. The people who just macro them into their abilities are the ones losing dps.

[Deleted]

I think they should just leave it as it is. The people who just macro them into their abilities are the ones losing dps.

Basically this, it shows bad hunter play if you macro all your instants with hawk and focus generating shots with cobra.


Edit

It would be easier enough for them to fix without adding a GCD. All they would have to do is not allow their use in macros.

See thats not a good fix either, I macro them both, so I can swap between them using one keybind

[Gray_Matter]

It would be easier enough for them to fix without adding a GCD. All they would have to do is not allow their use in macros.

[Windthorn]

I macro fox/Hawk to one keybind (caplocks in my case) - I hope we can still do this, not too bothered about macroing it into shots as I don't do that anyway. Increased GCD between aspects seems a crap idea too, one suggested by GC.

[Gray_Matter]

I macro fox/Hawk to one keybind (caplocks in my case) - I hope we can still do this, not too bothered about macroing it into shots as I don't do that anyway. Increased GCD between aspects seems a crap idea too, one suggested by GC.

He may also be thinking of putting a CD on changing aspects.

[Aspenarious]

It seems to me that the reason that people have Aspect Dancing macroed in the first place is to overcome a problem with gameplay. I agree with the statement that it's conceptually unfun to be constantly swapping Aspects. The best way to change the practice is to find a way of changing gameplay so that it's no longer desirable to Aspect Dance, rather than make Aspect Dancing harder to do effectively.

The only things I can think of are things that will never happen. To whit: combining the Aspects so that you can always cast on the run, or changing all shots to be instant so that there's no need for Fox any more. More creative minds than mine might have better luck.

Personally, I would love a reduction in casted attacks.

[Kidoeng7]

Omg this will make me come back for sure

[Goretex]

I got a question hopefully someone can answer, what's our stat priority going to look like? I got beta but haven't played that much because of D3 and now i can't play that. So will our stat priority be agi>8%hit>8%exp>crit>haste? I haven't seen any posts about this. Oh also how do you guys think BM will do in a raid environment?

[Gotjuice]

This is ridiculous, as if hunter PvP wasn't complex enough already.

[Drakoes]

This definitely hurts hunters in PvP more tbh... It's more forgiving in PvE and although a lot of people will see that as more of a 'huntard' move, many top arena Hunters use this for PvP due to how much we need to kite, move and to deal with LOS.

[Keren]

I got a question hopefully someone can answer, what's our stat priority going to look like? I got beta but haven't played that much because of D3 and now i can't play that. So will our stat priority be agi>8%hit>8%exp>crit>haste? I haven't seen any posts about this. Oh also how do you guys think BM will do in a raid environment?

the explicit balancing about second stats is not done yet. there is a blue that they will looking at mastery to inherit sam benefit as crit or haste. With recent changes in Kill command there is no block for BM become a strong pve spec.
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Hope GC wont touch our Aspects. Arm does Stance Dance now for 2 tiers of raiding and no one is complaining. =(
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I have it showing as costing 20 focus so macroing it ala KC in wrath probably won't be the best idea.

Why wouldn't it be beneficial in single target fights to macro it? We did the same back as MM while silence shot was of gcd an procced Wild Quiver?!

[Arhippa]

Why wouldn't it be beneficial in single target fights to macro it? We did the same back as MM while silence shot was of gcd an procced Wild Quiver?!

Silencing shot was free, glaive toss costs 20 focus. That is the reason why you don't want to just blindly macro it in.

[Schwebels]

we could probably just have the same attack twice on our bar. one with glaive toss in the macro, one without. and depending on how much focus we have will tell us which attack to hit

[Cyph3r]

Got bored and decided to scour the balance thread for any and all Hunter related stuff. So here it is for anyone who didn't want to read that whole thing themselves. I did actually leave out a couple items which have already been directly quoted/discussed in this thread.

Pets:

(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.) 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.

Pet Scaling: Still working on a more comprehensive description of our new pet scaling system. Please continue to report things that seem like bugs or inconsistencies. (not clear how much this applies to us).

Talents:

(poweshot vs barrage) We generally try not to make you choose between Damage and Utility, so tuning talents that are each Damage+Utility can be tricky. It does seem that Barrage always wins on damage right now, so look for changes to one of them in a later build. If you have some data and/or analysis on Lynx Rush, we’d be interested.

(powershot and barrage damage) I believe there was previously a bug with their damage calculations, but that has been fixed. If you can try in the next build that goes to Beta, and provide data, that would be helpful.

Bug (and a slightly sneaky one). The issues you raise with Murder of Crows and Dire Beast are one of the challenges with summoned creatures. It's possible they won't always get the same number of attacks off, but we can balance around the average.

As an aside, we have a lot of abilities that summon extra creatures for hunters, including Stampede. This can create client performance problems on lower end machines, so we may ultimately have to redesign some of them. (We don't want to hear raid or BG leaders asking hunters not to use certain abilities.) Stampede would be the last one we touch.

Barrage vs Powershot: We’re currently planning to reduce Barrage’s damage a bit, so that it ends up being on par with the others on the row in terms of overall DPS.

Miscelaneous:

Misdirection works correctly in a group. There is a bug preventing it from working when you are not in a group, which means you can't MD to your pet when solo. This will be fixed in a future build.

However, we think the current loss of stats in MoP is too extreme, and is exacerbated by losing all of the passive talents and glyphs that often added haste and crit especially. We believe, and we're certainly hearing the feedback, that players are playing from level 85 to 90 with haste, crit and mastery percentages that are so low as to be unfun. We think we have room to bring those up a little, which is something we're looking at right now.

If you CC someone (say Scatter Shot, Freezing Traps and Wyvern Sting) and your autoshot gets turned off but Piercing Shots or Wild Quiver merrily break the CC, then that's a bug. If you CC someone and then keep shooting at them, then you're a bad hunter, and it's fine to break the CC. (In other words, you're supposed to choose between CC or damage.) Serpent Sting is a bit of a gray area, because you do have control over whether you put it up. You could be in a situation where you have a dot up and then decide to CC that target, but that situation happens for a variety of classes. We provide the glyphs for that situation. (Like everything else we discuss in this thread, none of that is set in stone.)

(multi-shot) We need to make some adjustments, but aren't sure buffing Multi is the right solution. As you point out, BM AE is fine. Marks is a little low and Survival is a lot low. These can all be fixed, but if we just buff Multi then we need to nerf BM elsewhere.

(General AOE, partially related): Somewhat. There are still a few outliers that we’re working on resolving. Additionally, AoE is extremely dependent upon the exact situation. The classes that win at 10sec AoE bursts may lose at 60sec or 5min sustained AoE. Same with 2 targets vs 3 targets vs 10 targets, etc. We try to balance for a variety of scenarios, but keep some strengths and weaknesses to everyone, and make sure they feel different. That isn’t to say that if you are amazing at cleave, you must be useless on 50 target AoE, or anything like that, just that we expect some variance in performance on any given AoE situation (much more than we do on single target situations, anyway).

[bil]

This from GC today:

All of the hunter level 90 talents are getting an across the board damage buff (they’re intended to be worth using single-target, and currently they’re not). I just meant that Barrage’s damage will be lowered a bit relative than Powershot. Hunter ranged attacks should not be blockable, and they currently are (known issue, will be fixed). Pet attacks should be blockable and able to glance.

I'm not sure how I feel about this... We have lots of buttons to push in our rotations already...

[Cyph3r]

I definitely think that the 90 talents should focus more on their utility side than their damage side. We really don't need another attack added to the rotation. I'm not sure we really even have room for one. After the things that have been said in the balance thread so far, I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see the top 2 talent tiers for Hunters get completely redesigned soon. I kind of hope they don't, just for balancing time's sake.

Honestly I think the problem is that our kit is already pretty complete. Talents are easy to design when there are holes to fill, or when there's room to add extra usefulness to existing abilities. This is all evident in our early talent tiers. But of course those later tiers should be big, significant things, so I understand going for new abilities. But Hunters don't really need new abilities. It's been this way for a while, it's how we ended up with Camouflage. The situation becomes "well, I guess we can give them a stealth?". That's the worst part of it for me, I can't even think of a better solution to the current design. I have no useful feedback at the moment.

[Arhippa]

I tried BM and SV in yesterday's raid testing and I wouldn't mind reducing one of the abilities from our rotation. That combined with what they said about us summoning too many pets and possibly changing the lvl75 tier as a result, it'd be interesting to see something that wasn't part of your rotation in their place.

[Drakoes]

I definitely think that the 90 talents should focus more on their utility side than their damage side. We really don't need another attack added to the rotation. I'm not sure we really even have room for one. After the things that have been said in the balance thread so far, I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see the top 2 talent tiers for Hunters get completely redesigned soon. I kind of hope they don't, just for balancing time's sake.

Honestly I think the problem is that our kit is already pretty complete. Talents are easy to design when there are holes to fill, or when there's room to add extra usefulness to existing abilities. This is all evident in our early talent tiers. But of course those later tiers should be big, significant things, so I understand going for new abilities. But Hunters don't really need new abilities. It's been this way for a while, it's how we ended up with Camouflage. The situation becomes "well, I guess we can give them a stealth?". That's the worst part of it for me, I can't even think of a better solution to the current design. I have no useful feedback at the moment.

I personally think that our level 90 talents are just boring and not too creative tbh. Once they get buffed, they'll definitely do a lot more damage and all, but what about an offensive CD that gives us a damage bonus or something cool that affects all our shots? Powershot does knock the target back and the glaives do snare targets, but those effects will probably serve almost no use in PvE. Obviously you're meant to choose the most viable talents for whatever you're doing, but the weak snare and knockback from these abilities still seem more PvP oriented. Barrage is kinda nice though, and if it procs wild quiver, then that's pretty sweet.

Oh and I don't know if it's just me but I really liked the idea of poison arrows back in the very, very early days of beta. I'm not saying it ought to be brought back, but you gotta admit that's definitely something a bit more interesting

So aside from Rapid Fire that is universal across all specs, we don't have a lot that is 'fancy' stuff compared to a lot of the other classes at this tier, such as shaman's ascendance and even a warrior's avatar to an extent. I wish Blizzard would throw in something more unique for once instead of just, well you know, shots (obviously this is a big theme of our class, but still...)
I wouldn't count Stampede and Dire Beast/Murder of Crows since almost every class is now getting pets of some sort, and these abilities still have their own problems such as the HP and even pathing time.

[Arrowset]

A standard move of mine in 1v1s is to swap my spirit beast for a shale spider in deterrence and web wrap the opponent so I can get distance. I do it a bunch in this world pvp video I just made:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wORtFABUvnk&feature=plcp

When I get to 90 I think I'm going to bring out a monkey or crane instead (for the 4 second cc, ensuring I get the cast off) and powershot my opponent.

Should be fun, and I can't think of anything my opponent can do to prevent it outside of trinketting it.

[ltm]

This from GC today:



I'm not sure how I feel about this... We have lots of buttons to push in our rotations already...

wait wut? so our attacks will no longer be blocked?