Beta Class Analysis Part X

By
Tabana
– July 12, 2012

Blizzard is asking for feedback on class balance in the Mists of Pandaria Beta. This article continues our coverage of hunter-related discussions in the thread. You can read all of Ghostcrawler’s previous posts regarding hunters in MoP in the WHH MoP Hunter Guide.

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Fluttërshy, a Paladin, asked, “GC — if you dont mind me asking — what is the armor value for lvl 93 raiding dummies? Theck needs that data for some of his calculations.” [link]

Zeherah replied, “I’m not GC, so this isn’t official, but the armor number I’ve gotten from other sources is 24835 for the 93 dummies.” [link]

Ghostcrawler replied, “And yet, you never see Zeherah and GC anywhere at the same time. Coincidence? In any case, the number 24835 is correct.” [link]

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Precisiøn continued a previous discussion. Replying to Ghostcrawler‘s statement that “numbers just don’t relate directly to success in PvP as much as they do for PvE,” Precisiøn wrote, “I don’t see how you can think this. Honestly after I tried out survival on the beta, I really loved the fact it had utility, But I noticed I could never really get a kill in before eventually my health bar gave in when fighting someone, while when I’m in marksmen, If I catch someone in a aimedshot and chimera shot, that’s instantly 30 – 60% of their healthbar chopped off right then and there. So for the sake of not getting owned anymore, I switched back to marksmen, and I felt powerful, I felt like my shots were actually going through someone and it was causing some real damage.  Survival feels like it struggles to move healthbars, both initially, and during a lengthy fight with another player, or arena team.”

When healthbars are sitting at 380k+ right now, and almost every class now has a passive heal of some sort, explosive shot ticking for 10 – 12k and barely critting just feels so..weak and unappetizing. For survival, having more damage packed inside explosive shot does make a huge difference, because right now, against players with full pvp gear on, it’s barely moving health-bars as fast as chimera shot, and for some reason barely crits as much as chimera shot, even though I don’t see why not, since there’s no crit modifiers in neither of the shots.

I can’t really reforge into mastery as much as I could because now instead I have to reforge into expertise as much as I can without losing crit. I’m reforging haste into crit if there is no crit on the gear, and if there is crit on the gear, I’m reforging it into expertise. Normally I would be able to reforge it into mastery, but now I can’t if I want my shots to land against high agility players.

Replying to Ghostcrawler‘s previous statement regarding scaling, Precisiøn wrote, “Does this mean you foresee explosive shot’s damage being increased by gear alone?
Because if I understand this correctly, even if you’re wearing better gear, and explosive shot gets stronger, chimera shot and kill command also gain an increase, leaving them still stronger than explosive shot.”

In reply to Ghostcrawler‘s previous statement, “in 463 gear, with no outside buffs, a non-crit Chimera Shot does 40 K damage. Three Explosive Shots do a total of 80 K damage, non-crit. (It’s possible our numbers are different from beta at this point.),” Precisiøn wrote, “Definitely not seeing your numbers on my end.”

In the current best pvp gear, with red sockets containing 64 agi gems, and blue sockets containing 40 pvp power gems, with the 54 agi and increased crit damage meta, against a mage with no buffs, and max pvp gear with no buffs (except hunter’s mark) or CDs popped I’m seeing:

chimera shot non-crit = 28-32k damage
chimera shot crit = 53-60k damage(with this burst, plus piercing shots, the mages HP was brought down to almost half health and I only used one GCD…..)

explosive shot ticks non crit = 6400 – 6700 damage.
explosive shot crits = nothing higher than 13k.

I have screen shots to prove this.

[link]

Astrylian, a druid, wrote, “[...] Those numbers almost exactly match what GC said. You’re stating 30k Chimera, 6.6k Explosive Tick, on a target with 30% damage reduction. Without that damage reduction, those are 43k Chimera and 9.4k Explosive Tick. Each Explosive Shot ticks 3 times, for a total of 28.3k damage. Three Explosive Shots thus do 84.9k.”

GC said 40k Chimera and 80k Explosive*3 in 463 gear.
You said 43k Chimera and 85k Explosive*3 in 483 gear.
Those look like they match up pretty well to me.

[link]

Bullettime, a hunter, replied, “[...] When he says 3 Explosive Shots adding to 80k, he’s referring to the individual ticks. The problem is on the current beta client, it’s not doing near that. My Explosive Shot hits almost as hard on the live game as it does on the beta at level 90. Ghostcrawler is likely a build or two ahead as the devs normally are and he’s experiencing something that we’re currently not.” [link]

Ghostcrawler replied, “I meant the entire shots, not ticks. Remember that the periodic effect is rolling now, so looking at individual ticks can be misleading when multiple Explosive Shots are chained back to back to back, so we look at entire shots instead.” [link]

Bulletime replied, “[...] In regards to the Explosive Shot ticks vs shots, why in the world are we comparing 3 individual shot casts to a single shot? [...] Fact of the matter is when I cast Explosive Shot at 90, it’s not hitting a whole lot harder per tick than my Explosive Shot does on the live game with an additional 50 ilvls. That’s why we’re so concerned. Our other abilities seemed to have scaled up “decently” and maintain a similar % contribution but our Explosive Shot just feels to have…stopped. Is there a discrepancy in what is currently on the client and what you all have on your builds?” [link]

Ghostcrawler replied, “That was the context. The original (probably hyperbolic) claim, IIRC, was that a Lock and Load proc didn’t beat a Chimera Shot. It’s not intended that every attack in the game do equal damage, and as I said before, we think the choice of hunter spec would be pretty lame if all you got was a different icon and name for essentially the same attack.  Lock and Load is two free / instant shots, and a Survival hunter tends to fire about three times as many Explosive Shots as a Marks hunter fires Chimera Shots, and the three Lock and Load shots is the burst damage that a Survival hunter would want to use for a kill window in PvP. The comparison seemed reasonable to me.” [link]

Bullettime replied, “Much appreciated. Just wanted to make sure where you were coming from is all. The end result is still the most important but it’s still a bit disheartening to see that Explosive really didnt’ scale up that much from the live game. [...] [link]

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Bulletime wrote, “In regards to Ghostcrawler’s response to me about weapon scaling vs AP scaling. Yes in fact. RAP values scale for less as tiers go along relative to weapon damage. Otherwise Assassination, Survival, Beast Mastery wouldn’t have also experienced a downward slope as the tiers went despite starting very potent but required bandaids as the tiers went. Weapon modifier scaling is simply more fluid and linear. It benefits from both weapon upgrades and from additional AP as more AP boosts that +WDPS% that gets calculated in our shot coefficients.”

Go back to logs you have during Wrath and start of Cataclysm. Now compare Marksmanship to Survival and Beast or Assassination vs Combat. You’ll likely see a chart that shows Survival and Beast at higher starting points but relatively rapidly drop while Marksmanship starts slightly under but gradually increases. It’s because of RAP scaling values having higher emphasis on base values and do not generally scale as fast as a weapon modifier would unless you give them some ridiculous RAP coefficient like Kill Command which then backloads an enormous amount of DPS into a single button press. Giving abilities, primarily signature style abilities (Explosive Shot, Kill Command, Chimera Shot) a weapon modifier will help give an easier to manage and tune numbers while providing the abilities and specs themselves more linear scaling instead of the peaks and valleys the specs tend to go through.

It’s quite frustrating going from tier to tier and realizing that while spec A was awesome in this tier, it scales badly and is replaced in this tier by better scaling spec B. We saw this majorly with Survival/Beast vs Marksmanship in the transitions from 346 gear to T11 reg to T11 heroic to T12 reg. There was a quite large drop in damage potential simply from AP based scaling coefficients not keeping up with the rate Marksmanship would gain damage, benefiting substantially from both AP modifiers and weapon damage increases.

[link]

Ghostcrawler replied, “Totally agree that certain classes/specs have scaled slower or faster than others in the past, but we’re not convinced that the only solution is to make everything an equal component of AP and weapon damage percent.”

These are just hypothetical numbers, but if you have two shots, one of which does 100% weapon damage + 1700, and one which does 60% Attack Power, both of those shots will stay the same damage both in 463 gear, and gear at the end of the expansion. If you upgrade just your weapon, the 100% weapon damage will be ahead. If you upgrade just your armor, the %AP one will be ahead. We’re fine with the idea that when a new tier of content opens up, and you get a new weapon, Marksmanship (for example) gets slightly more of a boost from that than Survival. But if you upgrade a few pieces of armor first, Survival gets slightly more of a boost. And once you upgrade all of your gear, they’re equal again. If the two didn’t reach the same target (which has happened in the past) then there would be a problem.

[link]

Judgesyou, a Paladin, replied, “But I don’t need them to be equal when I’ve cleared all the content, I need them to be equal when I actually getting the gear and I need my abilities to scale.” [link]

Ghostcrawler replied, “If we were talking about a situation where the hunter with the new bow gets a 10% DPS increase and the hunter going for armor had to piece together an entire set of armor to get that 10% DPS increase, then that could be a problem, but it’s not nearly that extreme. It’s more on par with one spec that prefers haste and gets a haste trinket while the guy who likes crit has to wait a couple more weeks for a crit trinket. We want different specs to favor slightly different types of stats and items, and it’s always possible for one player’s current collection of gear to favor one spec or another at that moment. We don’t see it as an inherent advantage for Marks, and in fact it can be a disadvantage if the weapon drops late in the zone, or has no vendor equivalent. We can take another look at the damage scaling from just weapon damage in subsequent raid tiers (for all specs) and make sure it feels appropriate to us.” [link]

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