We had a whole heap of blue posts today, shedding light on a lot of what they’re thinking for the hunter class, and filling in some gaps left from just looking at the new talents.
Blue on minimum range:
It’s not a “dead zone.” It’s a minimum range. I say that because many hunters use “dead zone” to refer to an old design quirk where there was a range at which neither range nor melee attacks would work. We haven’t had a dead zone for some time.
If a melee is up in your stuff, you have a couple of choices. Choice one is to use your melee abilities. Choice two, which will probably work out better, is to get away from them and resume using ranged attacks. You have several defensive cooldowns you can use to gain distance or survive long enough to gain distance.
So no plans at the moment to allow any kind of ability to shoot our standard shots in melee range, even with a damage reduction component. One of the interesting things about this thread was all the people complaining about the hunters complaining, and their arguments against giving anything to hunters. My favorite was the mage talking about how, sure, mages could attack in melee but they ended up spending all their time trying to get to range and attack from range because attacking from melee was deadly for them. Yeah… that’s kinda my argument too for hunters attacking from melee. We’ll never want to be there, we’ll just be able to do something when we are.
Blue comments on focus costs, focus dumps, and signature shots
Focus — We’ll be messing with ability costs for some time. Depending on your weapon, autoshot costs can be higher than “focus dump” abilities, which clearly won’t work. We’re working on a DPCT priority list that makes more sense. As far as regen goes though, we think the current rate is about right. We don’t want the rotation to become erratic and we like the gameplay of building focus through shots. In situations where you just can’t stand still, such as kiting, you can use the new Aspect of the Fox. We’ve tied the focus regen for using cast-time shots during Aspect of the Hawk, otherwise there would be no reason to be in anything but Fox. Focus is more of a combo between rage and energy, since you build it and use it up. The skill of playing a hunter involves keeping your focus high enough — as it is somewhat random due to procs — but use it before you overflow.
Shots — Each hunter talent tree has a “signature” focus dump: Survival has Explosive Shot, Marks has Chimera Shot, and Beastmaster has Raccoon Shot… I mean Kill Command. These all have cooldowns, so if you are at 100 focus, use Kill Command and still have focus left over, you can use Arcane Shot next. This is why Explosive and Arcane no longer share cooldowns. Once you figure out which abilities to use for each spec, the number of abilities you need to manage should feel less daunting. For example, Marks would use Serpent Sting, Steady Shot, Arimed Shot, Chimera Shot and Arcane Shot on a boss fight, and Serpent Sting gets refreshed automatically. Think less in terms of shot rotations and more in terms of prioritizations.
It’s interesting to me that the “focus dump” shots have cooldowns… that’s kinda the opposite of what we’re used to thinking of as a focus dump. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s necessary that they have cooldowns, but I think that makes them not a focus dump. My hunch is we use our steady/cobra to keep up our focus as needed, re-apply serpent sting as needed, use our signature shot whenever we can, and use Arcane Shot when that’s on cooldown.
It’s also interesting to see that they don’t really intend for Kill Command to be part of the SV/MM rotation — which is good, ’cause I was having trouble finding a reason to make it so.
Blue comments on pets — fascinating stuff here!
Pets — We haven’t done our design pass on them yet. The design is for them to no longer receive raid buff since they get complete scaling from the master (and we don’t want them to double dip). Their abilities will be divided into 3 categories: basic focus dumps (e.g. Claw), specials (e.g. web), and exotic abilities for the BM exotic pets. Specials never cost focus and basics have short cooldowns but meaningful damage. All pets will do the same dps. We don’t want “wolf or die” in Cataclysm (and before that it was cat). Each pet family will bring a unique raid buff, allowing hunters to be wildcards for when you are lacking something. The ease of swapping pets will facilitate this further.
Okay…. this is fascinating. Pet special abilities never cost focus — so we’ll always be able to use them when available. But really big is that pets will not be able to get raid buffs, instead we get our confirmation that pets will be scaling with all hunter abilities.
I think this works perfectly. Right now because pets don’t scale with a bunch of our stats, our pets scale disproportionately to the hunter. Thus at lower gear levels our pet is a much higher percentage of our damage, and as our gear improves our pet improves much more slowly. If they can get the pet to get some percent of all of our stats, then the pet doesn’t need raid buffs. As we buff up, so too the pet.
This, this right here, explains a lot to me. All that reduction is pet focus regen is probably related to this. They seem to be carefully balancing pet damage to that it remains a consistent percentage of hunter damage. They could have left pet focus regen high and assumed that your pet was spamming claw and lowered the damage of it, or they could lower the pet focus regen and increase the damage of the ability. Personally, I don’t care remotely which they do — the damage will be the same either way. But having the special abilities cost no focus removes my only concern.
We also hear again that all pets will do the same damage, and that their special will be a raid buff to let you fill in for buffs/debuffs your raid is missing (probably weaker versions of those buffs/debuffs). We have been talking about this system for balancing pets for months on the Hunting Party Podcast and I think it works very well. This way there’s no obvious “right” raiding pet, and yet the pets are still unique — it’s not like they’re all identical with different skins. Multiple hunters in a raid will want to coordinate their pets, and likely each raid situation will have one or two “right” choices of buffs to fill in. But those choices will be different from my raid and your raid, since we’re missing different buffs.
Particularly with the rise of 10-mans we’re going to see in Cataclysm, this is an incredibly useful ability that will make hunters much more beloved of raid leaders.
The rest of the blue comments
Cobra Shot — We’re not happy with the damage yet. We want BM to basically not use Steady ever again. Marks may use Cobra in PvP situations where spell damage trumps physical damage.
Kill Command — We like the Frenzy / Focus Fire mechanic, but are likely to make it it’s own clicky and not tied to Kill Command. Kill Command itself will be the signature focus dump for BM. For other specs, it will be more situational, such as dealing damage to a target out of your (but not your pet) LoS. Marks also has the Resistance is Futile talent to give it some more use.
Aimed Shot — We are returning this ability to be an opener once again, like Ravage or Ambush. In longer fights, Master Marskman can proc instant Aimed Shots, to keep the ability relevant.
AE damage — The design is that you use Multi-Shot on 2+ targets, and Explosive Trap and Volley on 4+ targets.
Venoms — The focus cost may be too high. However, don’t expect to have to use these on every target. Part of separating Serpent Sting from the Venoms so that they could be more situational. Even Serpent Sting isn’t necessary on every target, especially those that will die quickly. Instead 2-3 Steadies with an Arcane or Kill Shot should do the job. Hunters are used to using every ability on every target because there is no real resource cost with mana. Now priority and efficiency become important.
Ultimately, we think these changes will solve some of the problems the hunter class has had as well as making them more fun to play, or we wouldn’t be going through so much re-design.
I think it’s going to be easy to make cobra do more damage than steady, but what’s going to be a bit tricky is to have steady still do more damage than cobra for MM hunters. There’s a fine line there, and that’s really going to depend on how much armor reduction the MM mastery gives them.
Overall I think these comments answered some great questions raised by looking at the talents and told us a lot we wanted to know.
If all pets are the same but for abilities we will maybe still have a required pet just a different required pet for each encounter? But no extra stable slots so all of them will end up taken by the same pets as everyone else has?
Sounds good for raiders though.
The question now becomes, what type of Exotic abilities do exotic pets have and do they cost focus? If my raptor has Focus Dump A and Special B, but my Devilsaur has Focus Dump A, Special X, *and* Exotic Y, will Exotic Y always make a Devilsaur (or perhaps a corehound or spirit beast) trump a raptor, or will we see BM need to bring non-exotic pets into raids? It seems to me that part of the allure of BM is bringing the exotic pets along, but if the pet you bring is dictated by the raid buff you need, you might have too much incentive in doing what’s best for the raid and not be able to bring BM’s signature feature. Or will exotic pets simply get the same Specials as non-exotics, but they also have their exotic ability?
@alisaunder
You have to remember tha since we can call pets from our stables you will want to have multie pets for different situations
for example while soloing as an mm hunter to get to 85 you may want to have a wolf or some other ferocity pet (cat or raptor), but then your random dungeon appears and when you get in you may want to switch to your ravaged because ofthe extra “armor pen”.
Blizzard has failed to state the major changes such as due to focus we have no more set rotations due to varying levels of haste, and how that is in anyway beneficial to our dps. Also I honestly believe this was some tricky way of nerfing us because hunters would rape lvl 19 pvp and always end up topping the charts in dps and damage done. Heck I’ve even out healed the healer because he refused to heal my pet ( that’s why mend pet may be channeled!)
A mm hunter would probably open with
scorpid venom
aimed shot
steady
steady
dissengage
steady
kill shot
@shardavatius
chances are that the specials of exotic pets will be increasing the pets dps just like today’s, but you have to remember whattheyare doing to pets is to make them more valuable to the raid group so they can provide the missing debuffs. Maybe important enough for the healer to heal them instead of us channeling mend pet.
I plan to keep pets that each have a separate buff or debuff such as a wolf, a ravager, and a wind serpent.
I don’t believe that bm will be any “funner” because all they did was a cobra shot instead of steady. ((and the new and confusing Racoon shot)kill command)
I find it very interesting that BM hunter’s signature “shot” is going to be Kill Command, an ability that every hunter has. Why not just make Kill Command part of the BM tree, tie it into the Intimidation –> Beastial Wrath –> Beast Within path? So basically for BM, pets will not only have their focus dump and special attack (and for exotics the exotic ability) but also Kill Command, which I assume will be a pretty strong attack.
So when they say that pets will all do the same damage, I’m also assuming that they all have the same base damage with BM hunter’s pets doing the most damage because of talents and mastery.
And one last thing about Cobra Shot. I read in a previous blue post (probably posted on mmo-champion or something) that the BM tree will have talents that will make Cobra Shot more attractive to BM hunters but I don’t remember reading any of the BM talents doing that. I thought they said that Longevity will also lower Cobra Shot’s cast time to 1.5 (instead of the 2.something) seconds, but Longevity remains unchanged from what I read (still only reducing BW, Intimidation, and pet ability cooldowns). Maybe they didn’t update the tooltip? But another thing that could make Cobra Shot more attractive to BM hunters is by making Rhumba only affect Cobra Shot. It makes sense since they both deal with snakes.
To Alisaunder –
You have 5 active pets and 20 (or more) stable slots. You can summon an active pet whenever you want, out of combat. This replaces the remote stable spell. In other words, if you have a crab, a bear and a wolf, you can swap from wolf to bear in between encounters.
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/25626286557/hunter-pets-broken/
Ok, so there was a certain line in there that has me pretty confused, and no one seems to have mentioned it due to the “Big Bang” of information in these posts.
“Depending on your weapon, autoshot costs can be higher than “focus dump” abilities, which clearly won’t work. ”
So, if I’m reading this right, they’re saying that our autoshots are going to consume focus? If so, how much focus per autoshot. I can’t help but think that rogues and warriors, whom they have stated are the “parents” of our new system, don’t have to use energy or rage to hit things with their weapon. Can someone clear this up for me?
Only one comment:
Blue states: “Choice one is to use your melee abilities.”
Should be: Choice one is to use your melee ability.
We only have one yellow left
I know this seems counter-intuitive but the minimum range bothers me way less in PvP then it does in PvE. I never notice it in PvP because if a melee is up in my stuff I’m not thinking, “If only I could get off an explosive shot while this warrior wails on me.” I’m thinking, “Shit shit, get back!” ….like every other caster. In other words, I’m at range so I don’t die not because it helps me do damage. If the minimum range were taken away that would not change. My first priority would still be to get to range not try to go toe to toe with a melee. Note however, that the other casters have a huge advantage against hunters in melee range. That’s why the mage gets all upset at the idea of removing the hunter’s minimum range, not because he thinks it will help hunters against melee classes, he knows it will help hunters kill clothies.
In PvE being at range can cause you to be more likely to die… which is why I’m the only one at range while everyone else is humping the bosses leg. That’s when it bothers me. Blizzard can leave the minimum range in, but every raid boss needs to fart at random intervals instantly killing any clothie within 3 yards of its butt.
What about the global cooldown?
It was a good time to take a break
green quest reward :
Breathstone-Infused Longbow
Bow
Speed 2.80
548 – 1018 Damage
(279.6 damage per second)
+48 Agility
+72 Stamina
Item Level 272
Equip: Improves hit rating by 30.
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 33.
*looking at its precious Zod’s* … Well, time to do something else of my raiding time ^^
pssh another bow. blizz i hate you there’s no gun in 25man icc.
@Ottanok
Something to consider, is the dps on that bow higher because ammo dps has been added to it? I would assume that is the case as ammo is going away in Cata. So if you add Ice Blade Arrow damage to Zod’s it is actually higher than that quest bow. Assuming Zod’s dps is changed to reflect the loss of ammo it should jump up to around 340 dps.
Taking another look at the talent trees. If Kill Command is the BM focus dump why is Resistance is Futile in the MM tree, and why is it a pre-req for Marked for Death.
@Barakdorin
With the ArP existing only in MM, it could be the intention for Kill Command to be the filler rather than Arcane Shot as it deals physical damage via your pet. But, for this to be true, we’d have to take the inference to improved pet scaling to an extreme such that we include our mastery bonuses. Another case could be that this could also just be an intended complexity to make our “optimal” MM rotation require much more status watching of both yourself and the raid boss. Even another possibility is that we’re supposed to plan ahead for each individual encounter. What’s most likely? These aren’t finalized so it could be shuffled around to different prereqs or even different trees. There’s still at least three or four months left in the Beta, after all.
@Barakdorin
You’re right if dps from arrow will be transfer. We could ask someone in the beta to verify that. But I looked at the video of the full run of the 1st instance Blackrock Caverns. During the run, the player checked an icc item compare to a loot and we could see that Spellpower was still marked. So the pre-cata item conversion isn’t complete. We can’t be sure even by asking an hunter in the beta. (if Zod’s dps is increase, ok. If not, it may have not been converted yet).
But well, it’s a green loot for lvl 80 quest reward so it will be only a small amount of time before we change it :p
Well, its also a matter of if. Something like Zod’s will be replaced anyway, and nobody will go raid for the drop anymore – just the achie.
So they might just skip certain changes/conversions like adding ammo damage to Zod’s as it takes dev time but most wont really care.
Especially with pets scaling on all hunter stats, they might still switch out Zod’s.
Barker, i think Kill command is BM only. BM will has pet damage bonus so Kill command will be significantly more powerfull.
On top of that, the elemental/arp bonus on sv/mm means their explosive/cobra/arcane or chimera/steady/aimed attacks will hit harder.
So first Kill Command goes down (weaker pet/no pet talents/no mastery bonus) and then the other attacks go up cause of talents and ,mastery bonus. Added to that is the pet option. Since as mm/sv pets are less important, you’ll likely pick it based on the (de)buff to get higher dps yourself on those key shots.
The only reason i can see for mm/sv to use kill command is on boss fights with aoe. You hide to avoid aoe, but the pet only takes 10% damage cause its a pet so keeps attacking and you then use kill command to dump focus.
@Myrdreon
While I am mostly inclined to agree that Racoon Shot, I mean Kill Command, is the primary mode of BM damage output, I am less than inclined to simply accept that a spec will have only two shots and DoT upkeep in their rotations without frequent CD management. This holds doubly true for a spec which has a 10 second CD on the primary shot and maintains the primary DoT through the same means leaving far too many GCDs between shots to simply spam SS and not waste resources. This means that a focus dump will be used, however Arcane Shot receives no benefit from the second mastery bonus provided by the spec (ArP). It has been hinted at by developers that pets will scale much more drastically with their owners outside of simple AP which provides ground to suspect the inclusion of the mastery bonus.
This inference is secondary to the direct observation of Barakdorin which is the fact that a 3-rank talent which affects Kill Command and Kill Command only is now a prequisite for a significant MM talent while being located too deep in the tree for a BM spec to achieve. This can mean a few things: 1. Kill Command is expected to be part of the MM rotation, 2. the talent will be moved, 3. Developers are encouraging hybrid specs despite the mastery system, 4. Developers and/or disclosers have made a mistake and the information (and therefore all conclusions drawn from them) is false or going to be QQ’d to death. In the final case… probably both.
However, it should be noted that the only deep talent which affects Arcane Shot and not Kill Command in the Marksman tree is Dazzled Prey. Due to the fact that we’ve been explicitly told that 21-point talents are now available in other trees by design and the spec defining features of Focus Fire, Trueshot Aura, and TnT are beyond that reach… we can probably assume placement of talents are not arbitrary which is what my speculation is largely based on.
The only other alternative that I haven’t brought up that I can think of is that Blizzard is forcing a non-essential talent which provides no benefit to the spec which has occurred rarely in the past for this design team, but has occurred.
I would also like some clearance to the point that Dehvi has already mentioned. Please?
I did some spreadsheeting yesterday. Now before anyone comments, it is way to early to min-max and things will change more than they will stay the same probably. Just look at the changes they already made. Earlier they stated all 3 specs would have their rotations still working, while we now see that BM gets Kill Command as main shot and Aimed is out (other than a bonus shot after procs) for MM. BM and MM current rotations are no longer possible or prefered.
Now, so what I did is just see how our rotations would work out and how focus generation variations would influence that. Just to get a feel on how it works.
So I just enterred some MM rotations and made some auto-focus calculations. See what would work and what would not and how x% extra focus gen would work out.
What I noticed is the following:
1) Blizzard may want us to use priorities, but that is extremely unlikely. Regardsless of focus generation speeds and variations, you will alwayswant your main shot to be shot. So as an example, you shoot as a MM CS, then perhaps Acarcane and pump some Steadies. Then Arcane shot and some more steadies untill CS is ready, but … oh no, no focus so even though it is off cooldown you must postpone it.
All hunters want to prevent that, but regardless of exact focus gen speeds, you’ll always have situations like this. So they will offline cook and calc what works. I e.g. came up with a base rotation that looked like this:
Base rotation: Arcane and then 3x steady
Overrides/interrupts in terms of priority:
- CS when ready
- Venom just before every 3rd CS
- Aimed when off proc
With interrupts I mean that it literally interrupts the rotation and you continue as were you were after the interruption in your base rotation. It seems the old rotation macro’s are back
Now, don’t get on this exact rotation, because it may/will change, but issue is more, that the nature of the way Blizzard made focus, it is just impossible to use priority without a base rotation. If you do, you’ll always end up posponing your main shots by accident.
2) Now you may say, but we’ll get haste and that haste does more focus gen and I say indeed it does. However as it is now this doesn’t affect the above. I played around with various rates of focus gen increases and I was surprised how little effect they have.
But if you think about it, that makes sense. You can also make an estimate, since Aspect of the Fox is only 20% increase, all 5 efficiency talents also only 20%, etc that Blizzard doesn’t want us to get focus gen speeds that are e.g. double that of the base rate. In ballpark they want increases that ar enot a magnitude larger than the base rate.
I played around a bit with 1% haste is 1% focus gen or so. What happens is that at high haste, all that happens is you can kick out a steady ***OR*** plug in an *instant* like silencing shot or whatever else instants we may/will have. However adding a *non-instant*, will very likely screw up your focus gen a few shots later.
Again, things will change more that they stay teh same is my prediction, but my point here is that the nature of the focus beast doesn’t change that much unless you get to levels of double focus gen of the base level. This makes sense, as Blizzard doesn’t want it to change. They want us to be focus starved.
3) Now look at my core statement in (2): adding a *non-instant*, will very likely screw up your focus gen a few shots later. That is an issue, you do want to use a non-instant if you got some focus to spare, but not delay – see (1) – you’re main shot because you screw up your rotation.
Our human brains are just way to slow to solve this dilema. So I predicty a flood of add-ons. It is impossible already to manage the Aimed shot pro for MM already, but even more impossible to use fillers that are on the GCD aka the non-instants (like using Kill Command as MM/SV), without the risk of delaying a few shots later your main shot.
But you do want it if you have because of procs, bufs, etc the focus in order to get maximum dps.
4) Also the comments Blizzard made on Venom is spot on. I noticed that the venom is indeed very nasty. I first misinterpreted the venom as being like the rogue’s poison, so non-focus cost. So when I had to add it I noticed it screws up rotations very bad. Even though 30 focus seems like little, it is every 30 secs and coincides with the CS. The rotation I ended up heaving works with the venom, but the venom makes it very sensitive to interruptions (like having to walk etc).
It seems hunters are getting a lot more complicated (but perhaps also more interesting) because of focus.
Got my beta invite on Friday, focus is neat but man is it hard getting use to. The new hunter rotation is a lot like a druid cat rotation. Keeping a balance of debuff’s buffs and known what to cast when to maximize our focus. So far I have tested our MM and BM spec, just went survival today but it’s raid night on the live server so I’ll test tomorrow.
So to sum up…… Blizzard hates hunters.
@Dharion That’s a bit premature….
Anyway, I’d like some clarifications on the behavior of a few things from the Beta. We’ve got fluctuating costs so the rotations are up in the air and the talents are going to be largely shuffled around, but I believe we have the intended mechanic basics so it’s a few details on a couple of them.
Master Marksman: This will apparently only be triggered by Steady Shot and will proc an instant Aimed Shot in the same manner as Maelstrom Weapon for Enhancement shaman. However, Maelstrom has a diminishing effect at smaller stacks which hasn’t been mentioned for Master Marksman. Is there a diminishing effect for smaller stacks?
Focus Fire: Does this 15 second ranged Haste increase Focus Regeneration during the duration? This most likely applies to Rapid Fire as and Serpent’s Swiftness as well, but the main premise of the question is whether or not all haste affects our focus regeneration or if it’s limited solely to Haste rating.
Readiness: Does this reset Fervor and/or Focus Fire? (probably subject to change, but good to know since it’s apparently achievable in any spec at level cap)
Pet Focus: Do we have an approximation on the base pet focus regeneration?
Expose Weakness: This is nothing but a big blank for me to be quite honest. This probably can’t be answered succinctly, but I have to ask how does this behave?
But, yeah… open questions for those lucky gits who got into the beta that revolves around behavior rather than balance or numbers. As much as I like to speculate, this would really cut down on some of my guesswork so any information would be appreciated.
@Barker. First off, BM has 4 shots. Kill command, Cobra, Serpent and Arcane. Possibly aimed as well.
I also dont see any MM talent affecting Kill Command. If you mean Sic’ Em, that only affects the basic attack (claw/bite/..) which doesnt affect kill command. In fact, i dont see any talent regarding Kill Command outside the BM tree. Are we talking about the same game here?
Before im going to read your walls of text, you might want to recheck your talent tree and talent descriptions…
As for the exact numbers, wait till open beta at least. I remember the entire DK resource system being overhauled during open beta, who knows what’ll happen to focus…
@Myrdreon First off, I was speaking of Marksman. Second, Serpent qualifies as a “DoT to be maintained”. Third, the shots amount to Chimera Shot and Aimed Shot where the filler is simply that: filler. Aimed Shot will likely only be used in the beginning of the encounter or when proc’d via Master Marksman where it is free. This suggests an excess of Focus requiring a focus dump in what is likely to be the form of Arcane Shot, but Arcane Shot cannot benefit from the second mastery bonus of the spec. I suggest that there is a possibility that Kill Command will benefit from the Armor Penetration.
The prerequisite talent for Marked for Death in tier 8 of the Marksman Tree has the effect of increasing the critical strike chance of Kill Command and cannot give any other benefit as presented in the rendition provided by mmo-champion. It is called “Resistance if Futile”. With this in mind, I doubt 3 full talent points were arbitrarily made to be wasted for the spec on an ability which was not meant for use nor a mechanic generated based solely around that ability with the flavor common to Marksman.
Finally, the current rendition of “Sic ‘Em” only affects the pet’s basic attacks but is triggered by a crit from Arcane Shot, Kill Command (which shows that it is included), Aimed Shot, and Explosive Shot. As it has been expressed to date, Marksman does have tools capable of increasing the crit to Kill Command which BM does not have access to and (while subject to change) has no talent in the tree which increases the crit strike chance of Arcane Shot.
Also, the only number I’m asking for is Pet Focus. Everything else is operation on concept such as the behavior of less than 5 stacks of Master Marksman and whether or not the new skills are affected by a talent (Readiness) which explicitly excludes a current talented ability in the BM tree (Bestial Wrath) as the behavior may be true for other abilities without having had the tooltip updated.