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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Zeherah replied to a previous post by Ghostcrawler, stating, “I’m not convinced 20 focus is low enough to make it not an issue, especially in the case of thunderstomp, dash (30 focus) and charge (35 focus), which are not specific to a single hunter spec. BM has some ability to regen pet focus, but outside of fervor, SV and MM regenerate pet focus at an abysmally low rate.
On the subject of the effect formerly known as wild hunt, when I last tested this effect on beta (quite awhile ago at this point), it was doing 120% more damage for 100% more focus. This is consistent with how it works on live, although the tooltip stated (and still does) that it does 100% more damage for 120% more focus.
I always assumed it was just a tooltip error that you guys have yet to fix, but the fact that you just restated those numbers makes me wonder if you guys either intend it to work that way or just haven’t noticed the error. I don’t see any logical reason why it would be intended to work as the tooltip states, it makes far more sense for the increase in damage to be higher than the focus cost increase. Otherwise it’s quite a penalty for your initial pet attacks if your focus regen is poor, which it is.
The last time I ran the math, working on what I assumed was the intended functionality and not the tooltip description, it was to our benefit to pool focus to make sure our pet attacks stayed within this range. This is worrisome since it encourages pet micromanagement that seems excessive.
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Ghostcrawler replied, “Actually, this was a bug. It had been intended to be a way to bleed off excess focus at a reduced efficiency (similar to Heroic Strike for warriors). However, it was actually acting as a *more* efficient way to convert focus to damage, which was a bug. This unintended functionality has the downside that it encourages you to only use Claw above 50 focus, to maximize damage; autocast won’t do that, so you have to do it manually. So, after discussing this a bit, we see 3 viable solutions:
A) “Fix” the bug, making it less efficient above 50.
B) Change autocast logic to only autocast above 50, and preserve the “more-efficient-above-50” functionality.
C) Change it to simply be 2x damage for 2x cost.Option A, while the originally intended functionality, would feel punitive at this point, so we’re leaning away from that. Option B might cause your pet to waste significant focus when she gets surges of focus, such as from Focus Fire or Go for the Throat, and hits the focus cap. So, we’re leaning toward Option C, since there wasn’t really much engaging gameplay from this anyway, and this just allows it to be an overflow valve for excess focus.
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