They want to reduce our percentage of damage from "filler" abilities (for lack of a better word) like Steady Shot and Auto Shot. GC during beta even said that they think the damage contribution from autoshot is still too high (~30% in some instances).

I think they are intentionally trying to tone down steady shot to help make each hunter spec more specific to its bread and butter damage source. For BM it is pets, for MM Chimera Shot, and ES for SV hunters. I would guess they'd like the bread and butter damage sources to equal 30-40% of your total DPS, while making sure steady and auto contribute no more than 20-25% of your damage each.

I think MM is probably the best balanced tree in that aspect. SV hunters don't get enough damage contribution from ES, and BM hunters get too much from their pets. When the PTR is released and testing starts, don't be surprised to see significant ES buffs (to offset the ~8% DPS loss from steady and to help close the gap), and further pet tuning based on how the PTR evolves.

I think he is referring to pets doing 50%+ of a BM hunter's DPS. I would guess he would be OK with a BM hunter's pet doing 30-40% of their total DPS, assuming this is the range they want to keep the bread and butter damage sources. MM and SV pets will probably do closer to 20% of their total DPS if this is the case.

Ah thanks, good point. Just looking at the tooltips, are they meant to do the same damage and have the same scaling, minus talents?

Perhaps one tweak would be to allow Aimed/Multi to proc Cobra Strikes, and/or add a talent to the BM tree that reduces the mana cost of one or both. Scaling would still be an issue, but I think it would be fun to have one of them in our rotation. Making some of the talents for boosting Aimed/Multi accessible for BM would also open up more spec options.

I agree that current Patchwerk-25 is not a good gauge of anything given how short and stationary it is; I never have to use Viper at all. I do think we should be balanced around longer fights and the use of Viper as a DPS-throttle even in stand-and-nuke situations, otherwise the mana management mechanic is uninteresting, like it was on my old Mage main pre-WOTLK.

Well, he's done a terrible job of that, frankly. Yes, Hunter pets are over 40% right now. But as gear improves, they will fall off quite sharply. Less sharply now they've nerfed one the only two other significant sources of Hunter damage, steady. And as you note GC is not in favour of autoshot damage contribution increasing (except as a result of these changes, it will since its untouched). And without buffing to make the special shots worthwhile, that simply leaves BM...scaling very badly.

Zwaineroth, yes, aimed/multi scale identically. However, there's the issue with your idea that multi-shot is sometimes unusable due to CC (and as GC notes, he dosn't expect the current AoE fest to last into future raids), and that leaves BM hunters dependent on taking a MM talent so they can do their "intended" rotation.

I'm not certain what you mean when you talk about BM's unique raid-buff. Ret paladins also bring 3% damage, in addition to 3% haste, with their aura. No one was stacking hunters for Ferocious Inspiration--they were stacking them for Call of the Wild, and that has been removed from the raid buff status. Which, as most of the other people feel in this thread, is not the sky falling.

As far as the utility BM brings to the raid, all you can claim is Ferocious Inspiration (Ret replaceable), Call of the Wild (Unique), and RoS damage splitting (which can be done by any Tenacity pet, but usually most efficiently by BM).

The nerfs will make FI and RoS (again, not BM-specific) the only raid utility that BM brings. Before anyone starts wailing that now we'll never be brought to raids over ret paladins, remember that Rogues have even less utility than this. The devs have pretty much nailed their mark in the raid-buff redundancy department. In a 25-man environment, you're almost 100%-guaranteed to have every gosh darn buff in the game, so you don't go "We need a hunter for FI!" or "We need a prot paladin for Imp. Devo!"

This frees up raid leaders to evaluate personal DPS more in making their group situations. There is no more "the shammy does 700 DPS but we're bringing him for Windfury." BM's slot in a raid will always be determined by the personal DPS performance of the player operating it.

Basically what this means is you will not be guaranteed a slot in a raid. But neither will any other class. The emphasis is on the player, not the class--and few can deny that it's a good thing.

-'-

On the exotic argument, BM hunters already feel (voluntarily or involuntarily) pigeonholed into specific pets. I understand a lot of people love their cats and don't want to feel forced to get a devilsaur, but by golly, I love my devilsaur and hate feeling forced to get a cat.

I loathe cats in this game. In real life, I love them. But in WoW, it's like walking into a crazy old cat lady's shack every time you go into the IF Auction House and find 25 night elf hunters with King Bangalash. I know most people love them, and it's very lucky that they just happen to be the highest DPS choice in many scenarios.

That's the danger of making the exotic choice a purely cosmetic one. Any link between cosmetics and DPS causes dissonance in the player's mind. Case in point: That stupid green leather cap you were wearing at level 30 because of the awesome stats.

Let's say for the sake of argument that we make BM the Talent a pet-scaling talent with the option of unlocking exotics. Thus, a Devilsaur will do equal DPS to a BM'd Cat, but it will do more DPS than a BM-less cat. From a pure game design standpoint, it's genius. The problem is it breaks the heart of BM-less hunters who honest to God love Core Hounds but feel obligated to do their highest DPS.

Here's the crossroads: If you make BM cosmetic, it becomes useless and no one will get it. If you make BM effective, it becomes "necessary" and everyone will get it. 51-pointers are not usually talents that people make "flavor" decisions on (although there are some exceptions to this, like DRW vs. Garg for DKs).

With all this rigamarole going on, I put my backing behind the idea of making exotics universally tameable through a glyph and going back to the lab on this talent. I don't see many other ways you can solve the "pigeonhole" problem.

-'-

Ironically enough, my resto shaman buddy that I chain heroics with had been pestering me to go survival for a while so we always had a guaranteed source of Replenishment. I love BM so much that I was extremely resistant to the idea, until I realized the thing I love more than BM is dragonhawks. Dragonhawks are to me what cats are to 85% of the hunter population.

I figured out that if I was Survival, I would have a more justifiable reason to bring a dragonhawk than my usual gorilla or devilsaur. Lacking some of the BM-centric buffs, cunning pets have several talents to make up for these (such as Owl's Focus and Roar of Recovery). So I rejoiced in the knowledge that I could finally bring a Dragonhawk with me to a group and not feel like I was gimping myself. Then these planned nerfs came out, and I was glad I hadn't dropped all my eggs in the BM basket.

The only issue I'm facing now is the stark lack of utility Survival brings. As I mentioned before, that doesn't really matter in a 25-man environment--but the lack of DPS Survival pays for its utility does.

I couldn't help but compare the Replenishment classes (big no-no, I know) and it's a wee bit depressing.

A Ret Paladin brings:
- Aura
- Blessing
- 3% Damage
- 3% Haste
- 3% Crit
- The strongest JoL, or JoW if none is present
- Replenishment

A Shadow Priest brings:
- Fort
- VE
- 3% Spell Hit
- Replenishment

A Survival Hunter brings:
- Replenishment

Now, one could make the argument that Survival also brings advanced CC, and that's valid to some degree. But on most boss fights, which is what everyone cares about, it means nothing.

So the wall I'm running into here is that I'm trading anywhere over 1000 DPS to go from BM to Survival, for the sake of Replenishment. Which is fine for my 5-man team. But the second I step foot into even a 10-man raid, I will get outclassed by any Shadow Priest or Ret Paladin who shows up--AND out-DPS'd. At that point I have sacrificed my DPS for absolutely no benefit whatsoever, and I believe that's one of the biggest reasons hunters are so reluctant to choose Survival over the BM war machine.

Getting to my point. With these nerfs to universal hunter damage like Steady Shot (and Blizzard states they're concerned Surv may be a bit low), is there any logical reason that Expose Weakness should not be opened up raidwide again? Even if Survival DPS is brought up to par, it's still the least utility-full utility tree in WoW. At this point, I think that raid-wide EW would be a well-deserved bone that could be tossed to Survival.

What are your thoughts on this? Would it benefit the class or just hamper us by stuffing us back into the "one token Survival per raid" status of TBC? Would something more be needed, or would this be too much?

To say it's a much larger nerf is an understatement. It all but ruins the BM spec -- among other things, it makes every pet-enhancing point worth 22%of what it was before (edit: this isn't exactly true, but it makes the general point easier to digest), because the only way pets will improve is through hunter gear/buff scaling at a 22% ratio, and only then for certain stats. You also make pets much squishier. Pets double dip and still lag well behind players in health -- if you remove the ability for other classes to buff them, then they become largely irrelevant in large group situations, which just encourages people to adopt specs and tactics that don't rely on them in raids.

We had a regime where pets barely benefited during raids -- WoW 1.0. It was not pretty.

Once again, saying "it does not add any raid dps to my ferocity pet" is not the same as saying "it doesn't add anything concrete." The tenacity tree sees significant, concrete benefits from having 4 extra points. We cannot make the argument that a 16-point gorilla is just as good at doing its job as a 20-point gorilla. It isn't. Even with 20 points to spend, if you try to get all three "end" talents for tenacity, each of which is useful for a tanking pet, you end up making sacrifices. Doing that gives you only two points to spend on cobra reflexes, charge, Natural Armor, Pet Barding or Intervene. Even Boar's Speed can be a dps increase for a tenacity pet, because they don't have dash and therefore lose dps uptime in any situation where they move from target to target, and charge doesn't last 16 seconds like dash does. And that's if you have 20 points to spend. If you only have 16 then the picture is even worse.

The same is true of cunning pets. If you want to use one for PvP (putting aside the fact that people are using tenacity pets for PvP atm) then you can't get all the dps talents and the PvP ones with 16 points. You can't max mobility (basically gives pet perma-dash/dive) and still get feeding frenzy, cornered and wolverine bite, for example. 51-point BM gives access to the chimera, which arguably is the best pvp pet for keeping melees off of you because of its ranged snare. If you skip the last point you're stuck with the hyena, which isn't as good for that purpose. And again, that leaves out any survivability stuff that you might find useful in PvP.

Even the 16-point ferocity pet can be lacking during raids. You can't get all the dps talents plus heart of the phoenix, for example. Last night while learning heroic Sartharion my pet died several times. I'm sure that will happen less often as I get used to the fight, but I nonetheless definitely benefited from having the extra talent points. Having a free rez every 10 minutes, where the pet returns with 100% health is "concrete". In pvp it means people having to kill your pet twice, effectively doubling its unbuffed health. I agree that the argument for the extra points isn't nearly as compelling as it is for tenacity, but that can be fixed by making the ferocity choices better ones. Lick Your Wounds, for example, is pretty stupid. If they changed that talent to, "2-piece Tier 5 bonus" then that would make it a lot harder to only get by with 16 points.

Even if the 51-point BM talent adds zero raid dps (arguable, as mentioned above) it is not the only one that adds questionable amounts of raid dps. 51-point frost does nothing to unstunnable raid bosses. 51-point Subtlety doesn't do much during raids either (unstealthed Ambush every 2 mins! Yay!). We cannot use raid dps as the barometer for usefulness overall, and once we disavow ourselves of that approach then we essentially have to stop pretending like 51-BM doesn't do anything.

Finally, whatever Blizzard's comments may have been about the Demonic Sacrifice spec (I'm not familiar with those comments so I'll take your word on it), that is not the same as saying that every 51-pointer has to be the most powerful ability in the tree, which is what I was getting at. GC (or one of the other designers) specifically said that they do not want 51-pointers to be so good that there is no point in investing in a tree without them. They want to preserve the option for people to go 50/21 if they want. It's not inherently wrong. We have to remember that the design documents for WoW, or the "vision" to coin a phrase from another MMORPG, is that talent trees are to help customize people's characters. We aren't supposed to just theorycraft our way to one spec that gets copied by a million players.

People are seeing that people are opting to go 50/21 or 51+/xx non-final talent and somehow concluding that means 51-BM final talent is useless or undesirable. That doesn't just turn logic on its head; it takes it out to the woodshed and beats the stuffing out of it. Why do we keep ignoring the fact that people actually are using devilsaurs and core hounds and camping spirit beasts and what have you? And it's not just a couple people doing this. How can we suggest, with a straight face, that no one wants a talent that a metric butt-ton of people are actually speccing into, when they clearly have the option not to (because it's not a prerequisite for other talents)?

As I've tried to show above, I absolutely disagree that all the 51-pointer adds is "flavor," (sorry for leaving out the 'u' -- I'm American) but even if that were true, apparently that's enough for a lot of people. At some point we should get over ourselves and let them enjoy the game too, instead of trying to armchair design talents so that there is only one reasonable spec for any given tree.

GC specifically said that they thought SV dps might be too low and would probably make up for the difference by buffing explosive shot, but that they hadn't fully decided.

And in a 10-man environment, it matters a lot what you bring. And, unfortunately for BM (and even moreso SV) Hunters there's quite likely going to be a Ret Pally in the raid, since they bring a lot of buffs and have a high personal DPS.

"Bring the player, not the class" breaks down in 10 mans, where chosing between two players of roughly equal skill is likely to be based on class, and the raid stacking it brings. The annoying Boomkin will help the raid more than the nice BM Hunter, post-nerf.

Luck? If you recall, cats were basically useless, then they added rake in. They had every opportunity to balance rake, and they decided to make it a high-damage skill.

In any case, I don't think returning EW is a good idea, but there are other raid buffs they could add - see my previous post where I suggested that SV should get a talent which added the 2% physical vulnrability debuff.


TrevvyTrev - And how often do you see non-ferocity pets in raiding? It's raiding I'm largely concerned about...

Again, I'm thinking that the entire top end of the BM tree is looking expendible.

The maths is correct, but maths only gives answers, not truth

Blizzard isn't nerfing Steady Shot just to reduce our damage, they're also doing it to make Steady spam a last resort, not a first choice. The Steady nerf may result in about an 8% DPS nerf for the old rotations... but we won't be using the old rotations, will we?

Something does concern me are that even Glyphed, Aimed and Arcane seem a little too mana-hungry. Our mana-management is hypersensitive to shot-costs. A few percent either way can make a huge difference to how much time we spend in Viper. I'm hoping that Blizzard reassesses shot costs in the light of the new rotations they encouraging us towards.

The good news is that Aimed, Chimera and Arcane/Explosive can all be weaved into a 12-shot cycle, so there's no messy aliasing involved.

That depends way too much on player preferences. There's still a bias against ret paladins by a lot of people too. 10-man raid makeups vary greatly, and they seem to depend more on who your friends are as a general rule. I have yet to run a 10-man with a ret paladin -- not because we don't like them, but because we don't have a ton of them, and the one that we do have got saved to a different instance.

This is only my personal experience of course, but "bring the player" seems to be working for our 10-mans. The raid leaders grab tanks, healers, and whatever dps is available instead of trying to wait for the shadow priest or ret paladin or enhancement shaman or whatever to show up. In theory a ret paladin may bring more than I do, but no one has suggested that I reroll or sit out for one.

And if you recall, my friend, cats have been the highest DPS pets ever since WoW was released. The only exceptions were Ravagers (tied) and Windserpents (at top-end gear levels) in TBC, and a couple months on WotLK Beta. There's a reason Bigredkitty has been using that blasted Hobbes ever since level 60.

I don't mean to bash anyone who loves using cats, but when we start talking about choice in pets, it's only fair that the minority of hunters who don't prefer cats have a voice as well. So long as there is any talent that tells you what you can and can't tame, no hunter will have true choice over what pet to bring. That's the point I'm trying to make.

Also, I wouldn't be so quick to denounce tenacity pets in raiding. As it stands pre-nerf Scorpids are one of the three highest-dps classes available, and the ability to take all tenacity DPS talents in addition to ~15% less damage for the tank is a huge benefit. It's absolutely valid to bring tenacity pets under certain conditions.

Scorpids.

My point is not that the 51-point talent or non-ferocity pets are going to appeal to every person that is concerned mostly with raiding. My point is that people are projecting their own somewhat subjective assessments onto the talent, and making excessive claims that confuse our search for answers about what happens when you do what. This would not be the first time where people decided that the max-raid-dps-spec didn't include the final talent in the tree, even in WotLK. Boomkins are raiding without Starfall. Shamans are raiding without Thunderstorm. Mages are raiding without Deep Freeze. Rogues are raiding without Shadow Dance. Some people may be raiding with these things too, and they have their reasons. These forums are helpful if we can discuss exactly what those reasons may be and the resulting tradeoffs instead of harping about how a 21-point talent is worth more than a 51-point talent to a person doing x or y, which must be a design flaw because smaller numbers should never be better than larger ones.

In short, if you think that the 51-point talent is not worth it because you only use a ferocity pet for raiding and raiding is all you need a pet for and you don't have a need for any survivability talents, then say that. You don't need to say something like, "the 51 point BM talent doesn't add anything worthwhile, unlike every other 51-point talent in the game" (I'm not saying you said that), because that isn't remotely accurate or even useful.

What could happen and what does happen are two different things. Saying that having a paladin in your group is helpful is accurate, if not particularly controversial. Saying that you can't do something without one is both less accurate and more controversial. We ran two Naxx groups last week. Because of timing issues and some other internal politics (they didn't want all the guild officers in one group), the second group (mine) did not have a paladin. Our group did better than the other group did. We killed faster, wiped less, generally rocked. Your mileage may vary.