Faerdael

If you really want to compare hunters to other classes, yes, we have an easier time farming things, but we also, by far have the most to purchase as far as raiding consumables go. If a hunter was to use all potential consumables, it would cost a fortune, and I believe not all of us do, at least on a consistnent basis.

Consider using this setup 100% of the raid time, or at least on boss encounters:
[Timeless Arrow] * 24
[Elixir of Major Agility]
[Elixir of Major Mageblood]
[Scroll of Agility V]
[Warp Burger]
[Superior Mana Oil] or [Fel Sharpening Stone] * 2
[Fel Mana Potion] - even our mana pots cost more than others
[Haste Potion]
[Flame Cap]
[Dark Rune]

[Scroll of Agility V]
[Scroll of Strength V]
[Kibler's Bits]
[Sporeling Snack]

Now I sometimes do this on DPS fights, like ROS and Gorefiend, and likely will on Brutallus attempts like this when my guild gets there (oh, then add [Elixir of Demonslaying]) but to raid like this night in and night out, I would have to become a pure farmbot, which I really dont envy.

So considering this, getting a break on ammo does not seem like asking much. I'm not whining about our cost of raiding, but saying we have it easier than other classes does not really compute to me.

 

Pandarus13

Has there been any thought on moving the quiver so that it no longer takes up a bag slot? We are the only class dependent on losing a bag slot so we can do our jobs. Other specialty bags are just that speciality and not need for every encounter and are a choice more than a requirement.

Keep the quiver, increase capacity and haste, but make it so we dont lose the bag slot.

 

KraxisSingular

Oh really? Obviously certain fights are easily FDed out of, Lurker, (MH mostly) a few in ZA. But overall wipes tend to happen more often early in a fight, say from 100 to 60%. In that period I have to FD on every CD to stay below, not because I generally risk aggro but a single resist would have me standing there like a fool for 30 seconds if I didn't... Leo in particular is nasty as I basically have to FD as soon as I can or risk aggro every time. If we wipe then I have to be lucky it happens just as my FD comes off the CD. And there is the issue of FDing too close to the boss. Might as well just stand up. Sometimes you don't have a say in where you are going to be placed in comparison to the fight... And being behind the boss is not good.

If you have that much luck in FDing I get a feeeling you aren't pushing as hard as you can. I could get similar results by playing safely, but that isn't why I'm there. I'm there to provide heavy sustained DPS at the best of my abilities.

Perhaps the 10% chance is due to where I'm raiding at the moment, but even so it was never a great failsafe to conserve gold after the change in mechanic.

 

Zurai

Other people have already addressed the bulk of your post, but this is a little known fact about the bolded section:

Our armor durability is linked to our pets getting hit. Sic your pet on one of the invincible mobs in Blasted Lands and watch your armor durability plummet.

 

mako

Warlocks.

Sometimes they even fill a normal 20 slot bag with shards in addition to their 28 slot shard bag.

<Bad> Dragonmaw US
www.damnwesuck.com

 

KraxisSingular

Agreed. And while I would personally love to get rid of the quiver (it is certainly not fair that we need it), I doubt it will happen. I'll settle with ammo being lowered in cost.

But eventhough Warlocks often (always?) have a soulbag, they don't really need it. Technically they could get another 20 slotter and not suffer any adverse effects. We would however. For farming or leveling it doesn't really provide them any incentive to keep it. Having 5-6 shards is enough for most puposes while doing quests.

 

Kaji-Boulderfist

Faerdael, I regularly carried all of those mats but to use every one of them in a fight rarely happened. If you need to pop fel mana pots, you can't afford to drink a haste pot instead. Flame caps screwed me over every time I used it I immediately needed a healthstone. Bad luck I guess. Also, Things like Scrolls were very hard to come by on my server. There was maybe 1 per day on the AH. I had a ton when I was doing heroic SP chest runs though

Zurai, Do you have a reference for that? I know there is a durability loss just for being in combat, are you sure that's not what they were talking about?

Kraxis, Every FD saves you money. It's hard to perceive money not lost is actually money earned but every time you survive a fight in the entire expansion is making up for the cost ammunition. Sure, There's upkeep, maybe more than other classes but I absolutely cannot see how it's THAT much more than other classes.

We respec less than any other class. If you aren't a serious Arena Hunter, You never really have to respec. My Respec before account cancel was 30g I believe. I don't know a healer or tank in my guild that had less than 50g respec and they respec more than once a week. Not only that, A warrior tank can't go farm any time he wants. Ever see your MT killing crap around the instance while waiting for the raid to get ready? Heck no. They're in town respeccing prot and getting their crap out of the bank while hunters are doing whatever they do while.

Ravenfire, You're correct, My guild disbanded before getting into Sunwell. I chose to just wait into WOTLK to return to raiding. I meant to state that in my original post. Yes we "Pay" for farming but we're the easiest farmers. Priest/Mages have to set and drink. This means you're doing nothing and boredom sets in and you end up farming less. Other classes require you to work your brain. Pallys managing short duration blessings/seals/judgements and killing multi enemies, Aff. Locks are like a fast paced chain pulling demons, Fury warriors are managing things like rampage and managing rage while having to eat after a few mobs. They're exhausting classes to play. A hunter on the other hand has zero down time, They move from one mob to the next without being overly complicated and they don't seem fast paced and your brain doesn't get exhausted. I know it sounds crazy but all of these things hold weight. You want to get the most of of farming while minimizing the tedious and boring parts. I find it odd that you say NO class should complain, yet it seems that you're complaining?

As for Ammo, 1.6g ammo it takes 5-6 shots to kill a mob. With 80 silver ammo, It STILL takes 5-6 shots to kill a mob. Why double to cost? Why should we be Min/maxing on Trash? No other class is doing it. They're using mana effecient spells, They're not popping trinkets and cooldowns until there's trouble. Why should we be shooting double the money to shave less than a few minutes off the duration of an entire raid?

I'm just not convinced that other classes have it so much better than us. I have read everything you guys said though and I'm open to all opinions.

Maybe we need achievements telling how much gold we spend on repairs/ammo/respeccs at level 80. That way we can see the real truth. Somebody suggest it on the beta forums. Maybe then we can have true evidence of each classes up keep costs. GOGO!

 

KraxisSingular

No this was about the Glyph for removing ammo usage (if not the requirement for ammo itself). That resulted in "meh, we don't need that." I think we do need a slight reduction in raidcosts seeing that we are definately up there. I never argued that warrior tanks don't have it hard... But they are about it. Holy Priests have it not too well, but the 33% healing to damage was enough to make them respectable. Geared well enough they don't need much to kill mobs either.

 

mako

I'm not going to touch on everything you said, but I'll make a couple points.

FD saves you what? ~4g in black temple/hyjal when you can manage to avoid a wipe. In sunwell there is enough aoe that you probably will get hit and die anyway (with brutallus being the "easiest" to survive). It is not feasible to think FD saves you a significant amount of repair money in high end raiding. We also wear mail. Mages, Locks and Priests wear cloth and have armor repairs roughly half of our own. So even avoiding every other wipe, we pay as much, plus food and ammo costs.

Arena as BM is not viable at all if you hope to be serious at all. Not sure where you got the notion it's viable, unless your raid spec includes improved stings, which excludes it from being a valid raid spec anyway. Even still, the lack of interrupts and control means BM's only real success is on a 4dps 5's team who's goal is to zerg the other team down. But you'd still want to respec if you are using the cookie cutter raid build.

As far as farming goes, hunters have it easy, yes, but most other classes have it just as easy. Affliction warlocks have 0 downtime and can fight multiple mobs at once. Shadow priests can grind 1-3 mobs at a time without ever drinking/eating, frost mages can sustain killing single targets for exceptionally long periods of time between their evocation and mana gems. And then you have rogues and the other melee. Even still, we are the only ones that need to pay gold to farm. In all honestly, if I am not concerned about being ganked, I spend time farming on my mage simply because it's more efficient in terms of money, and takes the same amount of time (and the concern is simply due to a lack of pvp gear on the mage).

Other classes do have it better than us in the costs department and it's something that sorely needs addressing in wrath.

<Bad> Dragonmaw US
www.damnwesuck.com

 

Arcazua

I have every right to complain about dailies. They're chores. Dull, repetitive chores. And contrary to what people like to claim to me, you have to basically do them one day per day raiding to compensate for the use of ammo, consumables and covering the cost of armor repairs. For every 3 hours I spend raiding, I spend 1 hour doing nothing but farming money. Using 25% of my playtime to do nothing but grind out the same quests every day is not enjoyable. I don't care how you want to spin that regarding the state of daily quests or arguing that I could earn the money through some equally irksome time-consuming task.




Now, that said, I wanted to point something else out that arose during a thread at TKAsomething. Hunting Party is a neat talent, but the way it's written right now with the internal cooldown and then a scant +10% per talent point, it's not terribly helpful to add extra points.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...ntingParty.jpg

That's with current 20/30/40/50/60% and an 8 second internal cooldown. The "time to trigger" does not include the cooldown, obviously. Everything is in averages.

Although with a very low crit rate, you get significant mileage out of putting points into Hunting Party, (only 3/4 of the effect at 3/5 talent points,) nobody's going to have a 10% crit rate. Especially as survival. However, when you increase the crit rate to something more reasonable, like 35%, you get half of the effect of 5/5 for a single point. We've seen this sort of behavior with other talents before, like Frenzy and Expose Weakness, but this is absurd.


I don't know what a talent point is worth, exactly, for this talent. But let's stick to the 35% crit rate as an example and compare it to Thrill of the Hunt. Under current mechanics, Thrill of the Hunt has a 35% chance to restore 40% of the mana spent on special shots, or about 14% on average. Over a span of a minute, using only spam Steady Shot (pretend), that's roughly 4000 mana consumed and 560 returned. If we say we have a 7k mana pool, that's about 8% of the whole.

To produce a comparable effect, apparently we need only 2 points in Hunting Party. In Thrill's defense, a survival hunter doesn't purely fire Steady Shot under current mechanics, (but who knows during Lich King,) and Steady Shot also appears to cost a greater chunk of mana pool. To support Hunting Party, there is the added benefit of helping your group members as well.

But just how much is a point worth? Thrill of the Hunt was good for about 187 mana per talent point during that minute, or 2.6% of our pool. The first point of Hunting Party trumps that handily at 5.7%, however the additional points add 2.6%, 1.4%, 1.0% and 0.6%, respectively. Is adding 0.6% of your (party's) mana pool per minute worth a talent point? That's 42 mana for you, and probably not more than 100 for anyone else. If you said no, then is 1.0%, or 70 mana? 1.4% (98 mana)? Obviously the second point is still identical to TotH for you alone, so it's clearly worth spending. However, is it fair to say that as long as you get 1/5 of that amount, it's worth having during a raid environment?

I suppose the real question is to ask what your alternatives are for spending points. If you're determined to put 51 into the talent tree to get to Explosive, then going 2/5 rather than 5/5 frees up points to pick up both of PONE and Sniper Training, or any other lower-tier talent you passed on earlier (like Resourcefulness, Potent Venom, etc.) The amount of damage increase you get out of those points spent elsewhere might be marginal, but surv's a good utility tree as well and the min-maxer's of the raiding world tend to overlook that unless it's utility that creates damage, a la Expose Weakness.

The other possibility is that maybe you stop at ~47 points in surv and redirect those points elsewhere. Marks has an early glut of points, making it easy to spend 18 there, and BM can absorb 7 points without much difficulty as well. You *almost* have enough points for all of that if you only do 47 into surv.


So...is 5/5 worth it, or do we put the points somewhere else?

 

Mikari

One of the class designers is asking about what sort of shot rotations we are using as Hunters.

WoW Forums -> Your shot rotations

Though most of the responses are people using out of date shot rotation macro's so not sure how useful the info is heh, considering with the Auto Shot unlinking they would be harming their DPS if anything.

 

Catalept

Some... ok most of the posts in that forum make me shudder. I hope to God there's enough informed hunters in the beta to keep the signal-to-noise ratio sane.

Agreed. TBH, this sort of thing makes me wonder if Blizzard does anything more than the most half-assed theorycrafting. Changing it to a flat chance with a decreasing cooldown, or an increasing effect would be much better. IMO, any talent with a high falloff on return-per-point is a failure. I would've thought that after more than 4 years, Blizzard would have got the hang of it

 

orinaccio

Perhaps someone here can answer this. When I first got into Beta I messed around with a bunch of macros, and right off the bat !Auto Shot seemed to make it act wonky (my hunter locked up). Since then I took "!" out and it really didn't seem to make that much difference.

Since it seemed like a good time to do so, I just went back and did two quick tests, one using !Auto Shot and one without the exclamation point. Perhaps the more experienced and knowledgeable folks here can tell me if !Auto Shot is relevant anymore at all (see WWS logs below)?

These are 1:1.5 shot rotation tests by the way. These aren't meant to gauge performance in any way, its intended just to see if the !Auto Shot macro function works/is necessary or is irrelevant with unlinking of steady shots.

Test 1 with !Auto Shot in Macro
Wow Web Stats

Test 2 with no ! in Macro
Wow Web Stats

 

Toastradamus

Does the ! modifier work with Raptor Strike in macros in the beta?

 

Mikari

The only macro's that are required now is macroing kill Command to all of our shots, the reason macro's are so widely used in TBC is because of the Auto Shot clipping, that is no longer the case in Wotlk so macroing Auto Shot isn't needed.

 

Chul

Well, perhaps now is the time to ask why we need to create macros that add in Kill Command to every shot. It doesn't add any value since we don't care about it - the macro does it for us.

I think for WotLK, they should reexamine the ability. A few suggestions:

• Make it a pet ability, which requires a minimal amount of focus (which still doesn't trigger, nor be affected by, the pets GCD), but does roughly the same damage it would now
• Make it a pet ability which consumes all the focus of the pet, converting the used focus to damage
• Put the 'Kill' back to the ability, by making it do a lot of damage when the target is low health, with a longer cooldown (say 30s)

 

TrevvyTrev

Except the designers are *addressing* this. They are upping the damage tank specs are doing as part of an overall shift to shift tanking from being all about mitigation/avoidance to more of a balance. The spellpower changes are a huge boon to healer classes, who will have "damage" gear on all the time by default. They won't do as much damage as damage specs, but at least Blizzard is trying to make it less painful to farm in a non-dps spec. And that doesn't even include the possibility that switching between more than one spec becomes easier (such as having two specs to toggle), which the designers have said they are "looking into."

 

Cuer

Some announced changes to shots:And more!

 

Arcazua

Tranq Shot as our new dispel shot. Odd. Not sure I like that, but it makes a bit more sense, I guess. I'm glad to here tranq is getting the effect I felt it should have had all along though, in removing enrages as well as frenzies.

 

Catalept

Well, it makes Tranq.Shot more than just an extremely rarely-used novelty... plus, a non-damaging dispel has its uses

Blizzard's assertion that Chimera Shot should completely replace Arcane Shot is actually very heartening, because it means that Blizzard fully intends it to be an "A List" shot rather than a weak DPS shot with intermittently useful side-effects.

Buffing Serpent Sting can't happen soon enough... the 0.1 coefficient was always too weak. Hopefully they'll put it up to 0.2, and SV hunters will have a viable option in Potent Venom (and the effective coefficient would become 0.26 with Imp.Stings, making Chimera+Serpent more than just a slap with a wet bus ticket)

 

MetallicaRulez0

I'm not sure this is true. My first night on Beta I was using Steady straight out of the spellbook, and spamming it as I thought I could, I never got an autoshot off. I could weave them between autos just fine, but if you just spam steady the way you do your current macro, auto is still clipped. I swapped back to my current macro from live on the beta and I found I could fire autos during the steady shot cast. I'm not sure if anyone else has any other experiences to share with this, as I found it very odd.

Another fun bug, Bloodthirsty gives your pet MASSIVE AoE aggro, to the point where he dies constantly in 5mans. I turned off all of my Devilsaurs abilities except for Cower and managed to pull aggro off a Prot Warrior on the last boss in The Nexus.

 

Chul

From Beta forums:

Very good news.

 

Terp

More than that, arcane as is is just flat out obnoxious for other classes. It's one thing to make buffs visible and over-encourage dispelling, it's quite another to just tie it into a shot that's going to be spammed anyways. I realize this is mostly a buff in that hunters will need a dispel shot that more important shots don't trigger the cooldown for, but it really is a great change for everyone.

 

Tyranna

Hmm. I hope they make Tranq Shot a true dispel meaning two effects per cast. Reducing the cooldown imples it will still have one unlike a priest's Dispel or a shaman's Purge, but I guess that would even out the ability to remove enrages and our 5 yards extra range.

 

Chul

@bold line:

What would be a very interesting change, if they considered going that way, is if it refreshed the duration of all stings on the target, just like how a ret pally naturally refreshes all the Judgements during a fight. That way, they wouldn't necessarily have to buff the damage of the stings (although it should scale better than 10% of RAP), and it would also make a MM hunter a valuable asset.

Thoughts?