Latest news from the PTR for patch 4.2:
- Careful Aim now grants additional critical strike chance against targets over 90% health, up from 80% health.
- 8 new rare tamable beasts have been added, each of which provides a unique taming challenge. Will you be the first hunter to tame Deth’tilac, the rarest and most powerful of them all? Players will need to progress through the Hyjal Regrowth and Molten Front daily questing areas in order to unlock access to the full gamut of taming challenges.
New rare tamable pets is cool, and it sounds like they’ll have more phased terrain and some of the new pets will only be available when you’re in the right phase. Fair enough — we’ll get more excited about these once we see what they look like.
But the Careful Aim nerf is pretty huge. This cuts the Careful Aim time in half. While this nerf hurts the dps of all hunter specs, it’s really slamming Marksman and seems designed specifically for them. The Careful Aim and hardcast Aimed Shot combo is pretty massive, and this might be Blizzard’s response to all of the hunters complaining about MM scaling better than the other two specs.
While Careful Aim will likely still be a talent worth taking for MM, it’s very likely we’ll see the other specs abandon this talent entirely now.
[Update:] I just wanted to point out that we don’t know the intent of this nerf yet. Perhaps the idea is just to bring MM more in line with the other specs, in which case this will absolutely help. But if MM is scaling far better than the other specs (something I’ve been looking into with pretty inconclusive results, by the way, but I’m still digging — if you have evidence that MM is scaling disproportionately from T11 to T12, please forward it to me), but if this is designed to fix a scaling issue then this is a poor solution, since it doesn’t address scaling but is instead more of a one time dps fix.
Gah! My stable is already jammed full of pets! There’s going to be some tough choices ahead
So Frost dont you think this is ass backwards instead of doing some work with SV and BM so they would scale as good as MM because both needed the buffs
They nerf MM
I think that if there is a scaling problem with MM, this is a poor way to fix it since this doesn’t fix any underlying scaling issue — just nerfs their dps now, and affects SV and BM slightly.
This wasn’t really a balancing change between the specs, this was a balancing change between DPS classes. To say that after Arcane Mages, Hunters can reliably shoulder the rest of your DPS sustaining anywhere from 25k-30k through a fight can be a little frustrating for the other classes is an understatement.
Even as such, Mages are seeing a nerf/change to their specs which is going to make Fire more attractive in Firelands and bring their DPS in tune with the rest of the pure DPS classes so instead of letting us reign supreme, again, they are taking steps necessary to avoid that. Although I’m still not sure which method is correct in this, I understand the reasoning.
By messing with one of our “signature” shots for the MM spec, they are forcing us into a rotation that is based more around the other, CS, for a longer portion of all the boss fights. This is all fine and dandy for PvE (which is where I’m focused) but I don’t think this is the right option as EVERY spec of hunter is under-represented in high end Arena.
Stupid nerf is stupid. Aimed shot scaling is the core issue here, not CA. A nerf was needed, but this is a sloppy way of fixing a spec specific scaling issue
Very annoying. BM was finally starting to show (43k dps on Halfus last night, 25-man normal… woot
and now this. Agree with Erthanas, just nerf the AS coefficient, Marks is WAAAAY ahead on all scales and data I’ve seen, not just of SV and MM, but of all classes/specs.
Halfus is a very bad fight to gage and compare DPS!
I’ve never been a fan of careful aim for non MM specs anyway. Yeah, your overall dps goes up but on fights where you’re not barely beating the enrage or where the first 20% isn’t the hardest part of the fight, you’ll help your raid more with talents that improve your dps on the parts of the fight that matter.
i don´t think this is the correct way to “scaling” BM&SV with MM, i mean this nerf is the “fast way” nerf the Spec with more dps to equilibrate.
Might add I actually play MM, and I still think AS scaling is overkill
A little surprised that this little change hasn’t been mentioned….
•The Aggressive pet stance has been removed and replaced with the Assist stance. This stance will cause the player’s pet to attack the player’s target. The pet will not change targets unless the master attacks a new target for a few seconds.
I quite like that. I don’t remember the last time I used aggressive so I probably won’t miss it although on very rare occasions it has been useful, too dangerous though.
It has been mentioned. Just not here as it’s not a new addition to the patch notes.
Only time I use aggresive is when doing Jin’do so my pet can gnaw on those pesky spirits.
Aye, this was discussed when it was added to 4.2 — for pve this is nothing bad, and can even be a good thing for all those random hunters and newbie hunters. For pvp, it’s a nerf (not auto-stealth popping pets)
There was, however, a change to the defensive stance -
“The Defensive pet stance will now only cause the player’s pet to attack enemies which attack the pet or the master.”
So now if someone face pulls, our pets won’t run into the fray if they’re not being attacked.
Darkbrew hit the nail on the head there. I was totally fine with changing aggressive to some new wonky stance. Nobody uses it except for pvp so no big loss. But now they are making defensive pretty much unusable so we will be forced to use the new weirdness.
Has anyone tested this new “assist” (terrible name, btw) stance on the ptr yet? It sounds like everytime your target dies the pet will run back to you and not do anything until you start attacking something else “for a few seconds”. So in an AoE situation your pet could be wasting a lot of time…
About 200 DPS drop in BM after switching over to 3 points in Pathing from 1 in Pathing and 2 in Careful Aim.
About 250 DPS drop in SV after switching over 2 points to Sic ‘em! from Careful Aim.
and….About 1000 DPS drop in MM after the nerf with no spec change.
So as we can MM will be taking the biggest hit here.
Even though I do not play MM as my main spec I don’t agree with this change of fixing BM and SV DPS.
In addition I think this is more of a PvP nerf if anything, and we don’t need a nerf in that department anyway.
You have to be trolling. For once, this is a pve nerf. aimed shot rarely gets used in pvp anyway and then there’s the above 80% thing.
I suspect a typo or a troll
I disagree with you both (no offense) – Aimed Shot is an awesome PvP opener from Camo IF u can pull it off. But, if it’s your opener it’s still gonna hit a 90%+ HP target so will still be as powerful as it ever was. Other than than that it is never used in PvP anyway (which is what I believe Erthanas is getting at) so this makes no difference to PvP imo.
Thumbs up to the new rare pets & taming challenges.
Fingers crossed i get an “Awesome!” looking one with a decent buff.
Toes crossed blizzard will find a better way to scale hunters if there is a “slight” problem.
Frost & Dark, can you think of any other ways they could scale all 3 specs better, rather than just basicaly nerfing the hell out of MM ?
This has gave me something to ponder over while at work.
Well sure, you could buff BM/SV. It becomes a question of how the hunter specs overall compare to other dps classes at similar high gear and skill levels (potential). If hunters are pulling ahead of other classes, then nerfing is in order. If hunters are falling behind but MM is on par, then you buff the others.
In full heroic T12 (sans trinkets and proper reforging) on Female dwarf the T12 4-piece was being attributed with more than 1400 dps as MM. Mind you, this was with Arcane shot disabled so the only focus dump was aimed shot. Getting a free, hard-ass hitting aimed shot is a hell of a lot better than getting a free arcane shot.
I think this nerf is entirely meant as a scaling nerf to MM. As MM’s damage increases proportionally better than the other specs in T12, this nerf is going to have a greater and greater impact on MM dps. For a heroic T12 hunter this nerf is easily up in the 2500 range.
Lastly, there’s a few things that I’ve always wondered about female dwarf such as how trinket procs (prestor’s talisman) are calculated. More importantly, however, is how the potion of tol’vir is modeled. Does the spreadsheet simply discover what the average agility or haste gained during the fight is and add that number to the shot calculations? If so, than the spreadsheet is ignoring the immense stacking potential of Careful aim + pre-pot + rapid fire + call of the wild.
The original dps value for MM from 4pc T12 was bugged because of an issue with the way it was treating aimed shot. The value is much lower now that I’ve fixed that bug.
Both prestors and potion of the tol’vir are treated as averaged. So yes, the value of stacking these is higher than what’s modeled but changing it to handle the stacking of many separate procs and cooldowns would require a complete rework and might result in even more warping of values. I am trying to come up with ways to better model proc based haste similar to how the cooldown haste skills (like rapid fire and berserking) are implemented, but it’s hard to make that scale to an infinite number of procs so I’m not sure yet if I can make it work.
“Deth’tilac, the rarest and most powerful of them all?”
I wonder if this means it is the most difficult to tame or if it means it will actually be a more powerful pet in some way.
Well I have no doubt that Deth’tilac will simply be a giant flaming sporebat, so yes it will certainly be more powerful.
Furthermore, could lease 8 pet be exotic and therefore only tamable by BM hunters? I doubt it, but if it is and one of the pets is more powerful than the others it may be a cheeky buff to BM.
I’m really hoping it is a cheeky buff to BM. BM needs it desperately. when your raid leader tells you “either you change specs out of the one you enjoy playing and pull perfectly viable DPS in, or you get booted from the raid” you know something is not OK. even the min-maxers should not be this elitist. granted there is the “human” problem of all the elitist kids out there, but still, people should be able to raid, or PvP in whatever spec they want, and not be overpowered or underpowered. If blizzard could do this, and make it so that any class or spec you play is balanced PERFECTLY, even if that means give everything a hard DPS cap/minimum DPS bar, have all fights do set amounts of damage etc, and just have everything set finitely, where, if you are doing your rotations correctly, and have your gear set up the proper way, you would pull a specific max amount of damage, in ANY spec you choose.
The only downside to this is it lowers the customizability and creativity for the players, and is a path that leads to heavy “cooky cutting” etc. and would make the game less interesting as a whole.
My point being –> Blizzard needs to get their acts together and start ACTUALLY balancing the game, or bust their butts to get TITAN out faster, and make sure it actually IS balanced and still EXCITING.
I just quit WoW because A: I couldn’t afford it (main reason). and B: all the drama based SOLELY around specs/classes/dps-lowballing/highballing etc.
A game stops being enjoyable when there actually are a set group of elites who are so much better than the rest that they set the standards and basically the rules of the game (for example those guilds that get the world firsts on heroic raids etc, who set the standards for strategies, gear, stats, etc). It is no longer fun to go home, sit in your office at your desk, and play a game, when playing that game requires you deal with all of the above, and end up having to work exponentially hard and dedicate a large portion of brain-power just to be able to actually PLAY some of the content of the game.
I understand there needing to be difficulty levels, but for jimminy crickets sake, make them difficulty levels, and not “ha ha! we’re amazing! we have 18 hours a day to play this game and STUDY it so we get to play the entire thing and you don’t because You can’t devote your life to playing because you aren’t in the 3% population that we are!
”
/endrant
I am realizing that half the things I just posted in my reply may not make sense, I am tired and i did not proofread, if this is so, to all readers of that post, take it how you will, I apologize for things that didn’t make sense. :/
Looks like the good folks on Petopia have found Deth’tilac. He’s a giant crystal spider (http://forums.wow-petopia.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=12173). Looks like a nasty train too.
This nerf indeed affects PvP, before it if the target is 80%-90% health, you get extra crit chance. Now if its 89%, you don’t get it. How are you saying that some1 is a troll by mentioning that …
It’s not game breaking for PvP, but still, less crits if you aren’t the first guy to attack a target.
Precaution, for the ‘pvp-nerf’ thing is getting old. And this affects pve way more than it does pvp. The time you spend shooting a PC above 80% is tiny in comparison to durin a boss fight, so this won’t be a gamebreaker at all.
Two of the new pets have been found in a Petopia forums. So far we’re just looking at reskins of Olm the Wise and Gondria. Both spirit beasts, I should mention.
pretty lame damage adjustment here.
i’m not asking for real buffs for bm and sv, but i would love to see proper scaling among all trees. is blizzard blind to not see this, or are they just too lazy to let explosive shot/kill command scale better with weapon damage(along with other abilities for those specs)?
i’m already worried to be forced to play mm come 4.2, as i just won’t be doing competetive dps as a sv hunter anymore. as of now i at least have a chance in my 10 man raid to outperform others, but at some point i’m sure there will be no way arround switching to mm, with or without proper buffs…
they could at least try to buff the mastery bonuses, as far as i remember that’s what they were intended to do. although it would hardly be a god solution, as it would either only fix the problem for a few days/weeks until mm outrules the others again, or would make them completely op for the beginning of the tier…
blizz makes me sad
having a talent or even a skill that does something only during 10% of a fight (in average – think of sinestra, it’s even less there) is – sorry – just plain stupid. can’t say it differently. that’s not what i call “fun”. i’d rather see the crit bonus cut in half and the duration kept.
as we start a fight with 100 focus, ss and cs are casted less often then than in the other 90% of a fight. so i’m gonna give up that talent as a BM (for sv, i don’t know, maybe i’m just dropping the spec) and go for haste instead. i don’t think this needs any number crunching for non-MMs to make a decision.
it seems that they need to balance the nerfbat – sometimes it hits too hard at the wrong places. let’s hope they won’t leave it at that…
I can see it now, Devs standing around there little watercooler chatting away and someone speaks up with “Hey guys, we didn’t change anything with Hunters yet” GC peaks his head out of the huge end office and yells “Nerf em!” The new hott girl working around the corner starts to get teary eyed cause she won’t be taken to raids anymore so GC offers up new pets to tame while on the raids wait list.
I actually don’t care if the change goes live, it is already a poorly designed talent from the view of how much weaker it is now then when we first entered T11 raiding. As groups get stronger, the talent drastically loses its effectivness. Or maybe its just me getting old,trying to find reasoning and acceptance.
Something still needs to be about SV scaling, untill I see those changes, I am now just going to play around with random rotations and different forging.
If anything, the effectiveness of Careful Aim has increased in T11 raiding. When you’re fighting a boss with 180 million health, the first 20% is 36 million hp. Definitely worth it to stack as many cooldowns during careful aim range as possible.
Do we know this is definitely an act to fix a scaling issue? I don’t see how hard it is, mathematically speaking, to fix a scaling issue. It should just be to reduce the amount of damage from the variable part and increase the constant part – so it doesn’t hurt lower geared players.
Maybe i’m wrong but I am continuing to lose faith in the “common sense” Blizzard’s coders have when approaching a potential problem.
I’d be quite eager to see how hunters stack up vs. other classes in 4.2. Maybe our 2 set bonus is amazing and everything is being adjusted accordingly?
I would say it is not to fix the scaling issue, if there is a scaling issue, because you can just look at the Druid changes to see how they handle that. (Just as you suggested, reduce the coefficient, raise the base damage).
As a MM hunter I am simply annoyed.. I am in a ten man casual raid, I have always switched to what is the best dps, or to what is best for my raid. SV for Ads… To me this nerf just means I will need to pick a better single target dps spec, maybe. WOW is a game not a career. As a customer, of Blizz I am somewhat happy.. But slightly annoyed. Which translates into Blizz needs to do better. Or make it less annoying to respec every patch.
Love Val
Not overly concerned about the change as very little from my point of view, is affected.
We go from CA > 60% of health bar > KS to CA > 70% of health bar > KS phase.
Still as has been mentioned before, the whole reason for having both Mastery and the base non-shot ability given for each spec (animal handler, artisan quiver and into the wild) was to give classes fine tuning adjusment knobs so we would not see as much disparity between overall dps.
I hope they get back to that mentality which makes adjustments to those as they were supposed to be all server-side changes that could be hotfixed with only clientside adjustments needed to change the tooltips.
I’m actually a little worried about these “cool new pets”. For a couple reasons. The first being, I don’t enjoy playing BM, I’m a MM/Survival kind of guy so if it’s just a bunch of cool new BM pets, I will be severely disappointed. And “Deth’tilac, the rarest and most powerful of them all”, makes me imagine a 24 hour camp-fest on the spawn point to have a tiny chance at getting a pet. One that I will now assume I need to pull top DPS.
I see this becoming the ‘Wolf of WotLK’ where every hunter and their mom is going to be trying to run around with the exact same pet.
Once tamed, it will be just like any other pet. “Most powerful” in this case simply means “most difficult to tame”.
I’m not surprised that there is confusion about this. The notes definitely could have been worded more clearly.
2 of the new pets have been revealed so far….
Banthalos (Spirit Beast Owl) – http://huntsmanslodge.com/9555/banthalos/
Ahnka (Spirit Beast Tiger) – http://huntsmanslodge.com/9546/ahnka/
2 Clues of Deth’tilac (it should be a sporebat, but is a beast with a shell)
Deth Metal – (Deth’tilac’s molten shell heats up quickly, increasing movement speed. This effect is reset when Deth’tilac suffers damage.) http://ptr.wowhead.com/spell=101261
Deth Strike – (Deth’tilac strikes an enemy, instantly killing them. This attack cannot be dodged, blocked, or parried. Costs Deth’tilac 10% of maximum health.) http://ptr.wowhead.com/spell=101226
Yeah all pets are normalized after taming. I just hope they are not all spirit beasts. I don’t expect them all to be but there is a chance of it happening.
I am bored with SB’s, they are all the same pet with different skins, I don’t have 10 spare slots in my stable for the same pet. I will probably ditch Gondria for a new SB and keep Skoll and Ghostcrawler, already promised myself no more than 3 SB’s.
That said these pets might include the reintroduction of hydra’s as a tamable pet. Wasn’t there some speculation on this idea a while ago?
I am also really curious to find out if we will be getting new buffs or if these rares will simply all belong to one of the current families, which I think is more likely at least for most of them.
With MM now carrying the hunter class at #5 representation, I can’t imagine we won’t see some hunter buffs. Maybe something like mastery tweaks or Arcane Shot. That said, if none come 4.2 will be a very unhappy time for hunters.
Since MM was the best DPS spec for PVE prior to this nerf, which becomes the better PVE option after it is implemented? SV? BM? or does MM remain on top?
5 out of 8 are spiders. Yes, 5. 2 more are repurposed Gondria models with “hue” difference but the same in game gimmick. The 3rd is a transparent owl.
5 PvP pets, 2 based off a very crappy model, and an owl.
Exciting design.
Very disappointing. I was hoping for some of the new models, like the bone hounds and firehawks. I appreciate the work that went into the taming challenges, but 5 pets of the same species? Can’t we have a bit more variety?
What kills me is the wording of the careful aim nerf. It’s written like someone thinks they’re doing us a favor.
3 new pet skins hyped up as 8 new pets and a nerf that was pretty much completely unneeded unless they also think about 4 other specs doing the same or more damage than MM need to be nerfed, but we haven’t seen any. Honestly though it’s just midaly annoying in pve; however, it’s yet another burst nerf for for a class that needs that sort of thing the least in pvp. Our sustained damage in pvp has been laughable for months now, the small window of burst we get from rapid fire while a teammate holds a target in place is all we have in terms of pressure. The vast majority of hunters that see glad level ratings (over which that are a famine like quantity of in comparison to other classes) did so during a few key periods where we had something in our favor and/or on the backs of stupidly overpowered partners such as resto shamans with a Arms Warrior or later/currently with a Frost DK. Not to mention most had to que dodge like mothers just to get winnable matches.
The least tourny viable class (see: all specs, not just one you other classes) does not need even more nerfs, end of story.
But I’m sure the new pets will make up for it, gotta catch’em all guys.