Ghostcrawler on Hunter MoP Beta Feedback and the Future

In the Official WoW Mists of Pandaria Beta Classes forum, Luckiluciano wrote a post regarding the state of hunters in Mists of Pandaria:

First off let me start this off in a very positive way since most threads of late have been mostly complaining and the majority for good reason. I want personally thank Blizz for actually taking a serious look at our class for the first time in what feels like maybe 7 years/vanilla and say that we really appreciate it and can see some real effort already and we hope that you continue to listen to us and keep the interest in class balance…

I’d like to thank you for finally removing the range requirement and finally give us some real healing ability cause for so long we had to play at such a high skill cap just to compete against other classes that needed much less to be equally as effective. My main is my hunter but I also play every class other than a warrior so I do know which classes on average are harder to play than others with the exception of the person playing them. I’d like to thank you guys for what looks like the fix to our scaling issue with gear and I hope that this change deems successful. Just these changes in itself will put the hunter class in a much better position in the future than we experienced over last few years easily. Again Thank You. Now I’d really like to jump into some feedback on things that could really still use huge improvement and I hope to still have your attention. Before I go into just the new things I would really like to clear up some of the older ones that have yet to see changes that are extremely important even though may not be as visually exciting as new abilities.

Pets – The new option to choose talent specs is awesome and was a great idea, but we still have some bigger issues with pet mechanics. Pets still are really clunky when switching targets and I think we took a big loss when we lost our last pet stance which I believe was called defensive. Defensive kept our pets from attacking anything other than what would attack us. This was amazing cause we could leave a pet on one target and shoot another. It was also great to give us a heads up to where an enemy was attacking from if they were hiding. The mechanics in general if possible need to be tightened so we don’t have really late reactions to player switches which at times cause traps to break. Live and beta our pets are still really clunky.

Trapping – This is probably the most important issue we have that keeps us from being a really viable pvp class. For pve at the moment is fine though trap activation is still too slow even for pve. So lets talk about the difficulty average in pvp trapping and how our class is forced to set up the trap before even attempting a successful trap. The trap activation is so broken time wise with the 2/3 second activation that we have to set our traps up with a scatter shot and not only does that increase the skill cap opposed to classes with one shot control like Hammer of Justice one button, Blind, Deep freeze etc. but when we have to use scatter shot we also can randomly break the scatter with our auto shots making us waste scatter and the trap we are about to throw. The skill cap to trap successfully is insanely higher than other classes with one button auto control abilities. (Imagine this issue with the new dodge issue and lack of focus regen possibilities!) If you were to watch videos of some of the best hunters on the planet in arena you would see them miss traps all the time due to the trapping mechanics in live. I could suggest that making the trap instant would change so much of that issue. If traps were active instant and our scatter trap could not be broken with auto shots we could instantly be a viable arena class again and by viable I mean in comparison and balance to all other classes.

I have a suggestion that would greatly increase the hunters trap efficiency and as I’m sure you have seen so many other hunter recommend as well that we bring Ice arrow back. Or to keep balance a glyph that can turn your ice trap into ice arrow to keep from what some may say too many control abilities (Even if they are low efficiency control abilities lol.)

I’d also like to see a better focus regen too because after burst our dps plummets terribly. The 2 piece gear bonus felt right and that would be a good number to try to get to.

I’m going to follow this up below with another post going over tier talents and what seems to be by discussion what the majority of us really like and what we see could use improvements.

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Later in the thread, Ghostcrawler replied:

A few points on hunters, gathered from several threads:

We don’t want for dots just to ignore crowd control. It’s a test of skill for players to decide when to dot and when to CC. However, that’s not a fair requirement for attacks that you can’t prevent, such as Piercing Shots and MM mastery. Those probably do need to pause or do no damage to CC’d targets.

We’re still tweaking focus regen. It does feel a little slow right now.

Stampede needs to appear at the target or you lose too much of the brief duration with the pets moving to the target. It also needs to have a long cooldown and short duration, because it’s an awful lot of DPS to have so many pets out. The alternative would be that the extra pets do a lot less damage each, but we didn’t feel like that really delivered on the fantasy of “opening the stable.”

We want traps to be good CC. Traps are one of the signature hunter mechanics, and we’d rather make them good than just let players ignore them and do all their CC with shots. Improving CC in this way will also give hunters better synergy with other classes in PvP, rather than the hunter’s viability being determined by how awesome their burst damage is.

We’re still looking at expertise, dodge and running a lot of PvP tests right now. We do think it’s a bit disingenuous to argue that melee are always behind their targets in PvP. Just ask any Backstabbing rogue or Shredding druid. Overall, we’re still comfortable with the idea of ranged attacks able to be dodged. It’s a little weird to argue any of this stuff based on “reality” but heroes so awesome that they could dodge arrows or bullets certainly exist in literature and cinema. If you can leap through the air towards your foe (or backwards in the case of a hunter), shield block a giant, or cast a fireball, then being able to dodge a shot shouldn’t be the thing that breaks the suspension of disbelief.

(As an aside, when I was working on historical RTS games, I read that there was some evidence that Native Americans had some skill in dodging arrows, which may have been one of the things that led to their adopting firearms, given that firearms at the time were pretty inferior to arrows or javelins in most other ways. That still doesn’t settle whether dodging arrows in a fantasy game with paladins and mages is reasonable or not.)

If it’s an undue burden for PvP, then that’s another thing (though we think the jury is still out on that), but arguing it’s not realistic is a bit… er… dodgy.

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