3.1 Upcoming Changes - Page 9

Delvenar · 02/09/09, 7:45 PM

I am really interested in seeing how these changes come about. Curious about what exactly they are going to do with quivers. I was thinking maybe, since we only need one arrow/bullet of any given type now, that quivers, (and their recipes for leatherworkers) might be changed into some kind of "arrow enchant". It would be pretty crappy, though not unheard of, for them to remove them completely, or just make them totally useless, for the people who grinded rep to get those recipes. I know a couple people who went for certain reps first just for those.

I also hope they add some new rep, or at least level 80 ammo for 3.1 - Since LK released the best we could get was engineered, which was a first. If they had made a vendor version even remotely close we would not have had to farm every raid, so at least that will be going away.

alienangel · 02/10/09, 1:41 AM

Originally Posted by Iru

As ranged weapons already have a durability component (who hasn't had to repair after volleying trash all night), putting a durability component on the new ammo as well feels like double-dipping.

It wouldn't be durability though (doesn't get lost on death), it's cost of ammunition (only gets used when shots are fired).

All depends on how literally blizzard means "getting rid of consumable ammunition."

kabes · 02/10/09, 12:25 PM

Not all the ammo changes will make 3.1, but we will still lose the quivers.

In our 3.1.0 class updates post, we had announced plans to remove consumable ammunition from the game upon the release of the next major content patch. Our original plans were to change ammunition so that hunters would no longer need to utilize bag space, while adding some new functionality that would continue to make ammunition a compelling element of gameplay. Unfortunately, this intended change will not be completely ready in time for patch 3.1.0.

We still fully intend to move forward with this change when the additional functionality becomes available, and for 3.1.0 we still intend to remove the need for pouches/quivers by greatly increasing the stack sizes on arrows and bullets, and the haste bonus from the bags will be preserved in another fashion. We’ll be sure to inform our players with further updates once they become available.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Hunter Ammo Changes

tarus · 02/10/09, 12:26 PM

While our ammo will still be less of a hassle in terms of bag space it seems we will not be getting the additional utility that we were all hoping for. Correct me if I am wrong but didn't GC say that the ammo changes would affect our DPS hence why they would have to balance us once again for 3.1?

I think this also leads to 3.1 being closer then we may have thought.

Grimtooth · 02/10/09, 1:31 PM

HUNTER

•Consumable ammunition has been removed from the game. Arrows and bullets no longer stack, but are not consumed. Ranged attack speed bonus gained from quivers and ammo bags will be preserved in a different capacity.

A very much long awaited change to hunter consumables. Considering what they have done with BOA items being able to level with your alts, I think we might see a similar mechanic with ammunition and it's damage/haste, i.e., ammo that grows with your level or gear level.

•A new tier of hunter pet talents have been added. In particular, this allows Beastmaster hunters to improve their damage per second (DPS) with their 51 point talent.

The great unknown right now. Just what will these talents be and how will they boost BM dps. I am hoping that Blizzard has finally listened and will give 51pt Beast Mastery hunters a OVERALL pet dps boost instead of just exotics to make it a more worthwhile commitment to being a BM hunter as well as the additional talent tiers.

•Hunting Party – this talent has been reduced to 3 ranks and also grants a passive bonus to the hunter.

No comment.

•Piercing Shots – this talent has been changed. Your Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of damage dealt for 8 sec.

I am wondering how this would stack with other bleed effects and of course with a cat using the now diminished Rake effect. I am thinking DoTs upon DoTs would not be a bad thing for a MM hunter specifically when buffed with Mangle.

•Sniper Training – this talent has been changed. After standing still for 6 sec, you gain a 2/4/6% damage bonus to Steady, Aimed and Explosive Shot.

I am hoping that this is the beginning of the end for the abortion I consider "Trap Dancing".

•We are also looking to add additional trap functionality to Survival.

See my last comment above.

KraxisSingular · 02/10/09, 2:16 PM

Originally Posted by tarus

While our ammo will still be less of a hassle in terms of bag space it seems we will not be getting the additional utility that we were all hoping for. Correct me if I am wrong but didn't GC say that the ammo changes would affect our DPS hence why they would have to balance us once again for 3.1?

I think this also leads to 3.1 being closer then we may have thought.

I believe that GC posted what he did in a fashion that he can easily say that he didn't say anything like that. I remember the post being highly vague, but it did feel like it was intended to quell the wildfires of whining and screaming of the BM nerfs (which appear to have been completely over the top even by Blizzard). You can decide for yourself what you think of that.

Personally I feel it to be rather unfortunate to have the Hunter community believe a major change of almost mindbogling proportion come in, and for it to turn out to be nothing more than what we have asked for so long, but apparently not more than that (while not everything has been posted yet I see no reason for them to withhold any other changes especially now), and now not even that. It is however a good direction.
Had we never been informed of this it would have felt much better as the changes in my mind were a fair bit overhyped by GC. The entire "just you wait for 3.1" attitude was so certain, combined with the entire theorycrafting issues etc. It is one thing to tell people a lie (which didn't happen) it is another to lead people to believe something and doing nothing to stop those beliefs despite it not being all that much. I guess it is the actions or lack of actions that feels wrong to me, rather than the actual 'lack' of really far reaching changes.

I do agree that 3.1 might be closer than we think. Or that the ammochange is not a high priority, though that would be odd given the time they have known about this as well as official stance on the matter. I honestly think they don't have all that much time left and have to do the easiest part, give us a 'passive' 15% haste somehow and increase the stacks of ammo insanely. And that's a fair thing to do. Even if it feels a little short of the implied changes.

Rache · 02/10/09, 2:18 PM

Originally Posted by Grimtooth

HUNTER
A very much long awaited change to hunter consumables. Considering what they have done with BOA items being able to level with your alts, I think we might see a similar mechanic with ammunition and it's damage/haste, i.e., ammo that grows with your level or gear level.

I really like that idea actually. But instead of the ammo being a bind on account type of thing, they could make a hunter only quest chain at certain levels to get upgraded ammo. The first chain could be part of the pet taming quest we all remember doing years and years ago. The "ammo" you get could scale with your level up to a certain level and then you would get another quest chain to get it upgraded. I've always loved class only quests.

theArk0s · 02/10/09, 3:21 PM

Class-only quests were a great part of the game back in the day, and it *would* be great to have them back...

However, based in the latest comments re: the changes, all I'm now expecting in 3.1 for hunters re: our ammo is that it'll stack up to something like 5000/slot and the +15% haste is moved from quivers to the ammo itself.

Maybe 3.1.1 will bring more interesting updates to ammo (effects, itemization, quests/variety/BOA)...but for now it seems they're backsliding a bit and just freeing up some bag slots for us. A nice win either way, but probably not as interesting out of the gates.

Kiera · 02/10/09, 3:22 PM

removed

TrevvyTrev · 02/10/09, 3:25 PM

Originally Posted by KraxisSingular

Personally I feel it to be rather unfortunate to have the Hunter community believe a major change of almost mindbogling proportion come in, and for it to turn out to be nothing more than what we have asked for so long, but apparently not more than that (while not everything has been posted yet I see no reason for them to withhold any other changes especially now), and now not even that. It is however a good direction.
Had we never been informed of this it would have felt much better as the changes in my mind were a fair bit overhyped by GC. The entire "just you wait for 3.1" attitude was so certain...

This would be a fairer comment if it was remotely close to what GC actually said. It started with this:

I did say these are not all the hunter changes we're working on. Some we haven't quite worked out yet and others (one exciting one in particular concerning ammo) won't be ready until Ulduar or so.

So the ammo point was described as ONE change that "exciting." Some people might find the mere fact that quivers and stackable ammo will eventually go away as exciting. But even the recent comment suggests that ultimately they plan to do more with it than just eliminate the need to stack ammo and use a quiver, which will be possible when they get the new tech. It was also pretty clear that the ammo change wasn't the only one they were working on. I don't see how you can conclude that there won't be "anything more than that," especially when they said in every single post about 3.1 changes that what they were announcing wasn't all there was.

As for why they would hold things back at this point, the answer is in this very discussion. The risk of announcing a change too early is that you have to later announce that it will take longer to complete or that you changed your mind. This leads to posts using words like "unfortunate," "backsliding" and "overhyped." But if they say nothing then people assume that there aren't any plans at all. And if they say, "we have some plans" people say they are too vague.

Speaking of overhyping things, that was the hunter community that did all the overhyping, with rampant speculation about what possibly could happen. People all but ignored GC's attempt to rein in expectations:

The Ulduar comment I made has been widely mininterpreted, but I made it because so many players were using the argument “We may be okay now, but we won’t scale.” While some players understand “scaling” perfectly well, it also gets thrown around a lot by less-informed players as the generic reason for why something fails (”RNG” occupies that niche on the PvP side of things sometimes). In the hunter case, it may be that they do scale just fine but it is irrelevant because we are rebalancing hunters for 3.1.

Again, "rebalancing hunters for 3.1" implies more changes than ammo, particularly in light of earlier statements. But he also said in various threads that people shouldn't confuse the idea that changes are a-comin' with the idea that classes are going to get rebuilt like the Bionic Man:

I said we have a plan for that in the Ulduar patch (we hope) so how Steady Shot stacks up at some future date isn't productive for you guys to worry about because by the time you get there the numbers will be pretty different. It would be like comparing LK's Steady Shot to BC's or to the hunter class before Steady existed.

Now I will say again that you should not interpret our telling you that we have some future plans for your class to mean that we think your class is just a quivering mess and needs to be totally rebuilt.

Maybe the bolded part is where the "overhyped" idea came from. But notice how that doesn't talk about ammo? Why assume that ammo is the only (disappointing) change, when every other statement seems to indicate that ammo is only one of several changes they are working on? Even if ammo is the only one, why assume that the only change is that it won't stack? There's still room for several of the other completely speculative ideas to take place -- they just won't take place in 3.1.

Originally Posted by tarus

Correct me if I am wrong but didn't GC say that the ammo changes would affect our DPS hence why they would have to balance us once again for 3.1?

Unfortunately, you were wrong. As noted above, GC didn't say that AMMO was the reason they would have to rebalance hunters.

alienangel · 02/10/09, 4:35 PM

Given that even the minimal effect of having ammo stack higher and not require a quiver for 15% haste is massively better than what we have now, I don't see how anyone has any room to be "disappointed with 3.1" already. That alone is an excellent change, and they've said it's not the only one. Therefore 100% of what we know about 3.1 is positive.

The fact that it opens up the way for future improvements (getting rid of ammo, more interesting ammo, faster haste, etc.) is great, but it makes more sense for the improvements to be made in stages instead of all at once, since there are other things to improve about hunters other than ammo.

Noctivagant · 02/10/09, 5:22 PM

Originally Posted by alienangel

Given that even the minimal effect of having ammo stack higher and not require a quiver for 15% haste is massively better than what we have now, I don't see how anyone has any room to be "disappointed with 3.1" already. That alone is an excellent change, and they've said it's not the only one. Therefore 100% of what we know about 3.1 is positive.

The fact that it opens up the way for future improvements (getting rid of ammo, more interesting ammo, faster haste, etc.) is great, but it makes more sense for the improvements to be made in stages instead of all at once, since there are other things to improve about hunters other than ammo.

If the original post had just said ammo now stacks to 1000 per stack and you get 15% haste for just breathing, it would have been a great change, so this isn't really a big let down at this point.

Separating this out into two problems: The PITA aspect and the cost aspect.

The PITA aspect is pretty much fixed with the less aggressive changes (provided the stacks are HUGE). The cost factor is still not fixed, and that sucks, but the first step is still a nice quality of life change.

KraxisSingular · 02/10/09, 9:43 PM

Very well, I seem to have remembered the comments out of sync.

I'm not dissatisfied with getting more bagspace and getting rid of the quivers, I quite like that. But even if the 'big' change had gone through, it would hardly be "one exciting one in particular concerning ammo". It would be nice and great and all that, but downright exciting? Exciting would be a change of how ammo works how it adds DPS, not some goldincome issue.
The point is that they announced the 'big' ammo change, then had to retract it. Fair enough honestly, you can stumble at times. But so few days after the announcement? They must have known they were walking the line when it was posted. I don't know any area where you give up so fast if we assume they hit a very new issue right after th posted changes. So this is was deemed ok to include but the other stuff is deemed too risky apparently. Well then it begins to feel like there won't be more stuff along the line of the Steady Shot comparison (whatever it might be, doesn't have to be Steady Shot) since if the safe stuff is that shaky right now, how stable is the unsafe stuff? And if it isn't shaky at all, it might be a good time to give a very small glimpse as to what it might be.

Fierra · 02/11/09, 7:44 AM

Originally Posted by Grimtooth

HUNTER

•Sniper Training – this talent has been changed. After standing still for 6 sec, you gain a 2/4/6% damage bonus to Steady, Aimed and Explosive Shot.

I am hoping that this is the beginning of the end for the abortion I consider "Trap Dancing".

•We are also looking to add additional trap functionality to Survival.

See my last comment above.

I'm looking forward to both the improved Sniper Training and additional trap functionality for trap dancing; TD'ing is a great increase in dps for those that can execute it correctly, and it'd be nice to see maybe some short-range fired traps. Instead of having all the traps at 30 yards, maybe make the damaging traps (Immo, Exp, Snake?) have a 10-20 yard range; or perhaps the trap changes will be included with the arrows: arrows that have a % chance to proc a trap on shot, provided a shot isn't on CD. That would certainly be interesting, especially if a LnL could proc off of that.

pedroja · 02/11/09, 7:50 AM

as engineer/enchanter(recently rerolled) i got to thinking it would be good if engineering bullets lost thier appeal/requirement, it would be cool to be able to enchant your ammo with a small, chance to proc, utility buff, e.g. slowing effect or a small amount of additional magic dmg. i remember seeing some new ammo icons a while back, anyne hear anything about them?