Beta Class Balance Analysis Part II

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 (see Part I here).

– –

Cole wrote, “I’m curious about the Hunter technique of macro’ing Fox and Hawk into cast time/instant shots, respectively, to maximize uptime with the Hawk AP buff while moving. I’m not concerned about (nor is this the place for) discussing whether this is good/bad, or the issues that motivate it. I am curious about whether this should be modeled as a valid playstyle — consciously twisting Fox and Hawk between casts and instants — especially since it’s fairly easy to do via macros (until you get gkicked for screech spam).”

Is this something the devs are conscious of when designing? Is it considered acceptable? Or is it on the radar to be squashed, like the Rogue poison-swap addon from WOTLK, or subbing Drain Soul for Malefic? That’s all I’m curious about, really — whether I should be including macro’d Aspect Twisting as a shot cycle option, or not waste the time if the devs are planning to kill it at any point before release.

[link]

Ghostcrawler replied, “We don’t consider that fun gameplay. You’re basically opting out of Aspects as a mechanic and just always benefiting from the right Aspect because you’re “clever” enough to know there is a macro. Usually in this situation we put the “stance” on the normal GCD or make the shared GCD longer.” [link]

– – –

Zeherah wrote, “Now that I’ve had a time to do some ability testing, I have a few mechanics questions/observations on hunter abilities:”

A Murder of Crows:
This seems to reliably spawn 8 crows over the course of the spell, but the actual number of crow attacks that are done seems to vary (usually I get 60 attacks, sometimes 59 or 61). Since there are 8 crows, you’d think this would be a multiple of 8, so I’m not sure if it’s intentional that the number of attacks varies or if it’s some weird interaction with their despawn time. If it is intentional, I’m not sure exactly how the mechanic works that decides the total number of attacks.

Additionally, using readiness with this attack currently does not do what you’d expect- when I used it, I got 2 extra crows for a total of 76 attacks instead of the usual 60. If you’d like I can provide logs but I suspect this is easy for you to reproduce internally.

Dire Beast:
The pet spawned by this usually gets 7 attacks off in the window he’s around for, but sometimes it is only 6. I couldn’t figure out what determines this as my gear didn’t change and my distance from the dummy was consistent. Is it intended to be not the same number of attacks each time and if so, how does that mechanic work?

Pet Bite/Claw/Smack:
I did a bunch of testing and the rough formula I came up with for this is: RAP * 0.36 + 329.
This formula does not seem to be consistent with the datamined formula or the ingame tooltip so I’m not sure if my formula is correct and if the numbers are what they’re intended to be

Barrage:
This ability seems to do 400% weapon damage in total but it does not seem to be normalized, unlike powershot which is normalized (as well as just about every other hunter ability). Is this an oversight or is it not normalized for a reason?

Also a general observation regarding powershot and barrage- both these abilities suppress autoshot, just like aimed shot. I’ve never really fully understood why the longer cast shots suppress autoshot (given that steady and cobra don’t). It creates a disadvantage for MM because of reduced wild quiver procs, and it pushes hunters towards feeling the need to time their abilities around the autoshot timer, which is something I thought we’d intentionally moved away from. If the intention is to prevent breakage of CC while casting them, it could just not start autoshot till they finish casting if it’s not already active.

[link]

Ghostcrawler addressed Zeherah’s question regarding barrage: “Bug (and a slightly sneaky one).

The issues you raise with Murder of Crows and Dire Beast are one of the challenges with summoned creatures. It’s possible they won’t always get the same number of attacks off, but we can balance around the average.

As an aside, we have a lot of abilities that summon extra creatures for hunters, including Stampede. This can create client performance problems on lower end machines, so we may ultimately have to redesign some of them. (We don’t want to hear raid or BG leaders asking hunters not to use certain abilities.) Stampede would be the last one we touch.”

[link]

– – –

Ghostcrawler wrote, “Some follow ups on things that I said we’d investigate. […]

Pet Scaling: Still working on a more comprehensive description of our new pet scaling system. Please continue to report things that seem like bugs or inconsistencies.

Barrage vs Powershot: We’re currently planning to reduce Barrage’s damage a bit, so that it ends up being on par with the others on the row in terms of overall DPS.”

[link]

– – –

Ghostcrawler also clarified some points discussed earlier regarding Piercing Shots, etc. breaking crowd control. His original statement (from a different thread) was “We don’t want for dots just to ignore crowd control. It’s a test of skill for players to decide when to dot and when to CC. However, that’s not a fair requirement for attacks that you can’t prevent, such as Piercing Shots and MM mastery. Those probably do need to pause or do no damage to CC’d targets.” [link]

In the Class Balance Analysis thread, Ghostcrawler clarified, “If you CC someone (say Scatter Shot, Freezing Traps and Wyvern Sting) and your autoshot gets turned off but Piercing Shots or Wild Quiver merrily break the CC, then that’s a bug. If you CC someone and then keep shooting at them, then you’re a bad hunter, and it’s fine to break the CC. (In other words, you’re supposed to choose between CC or damage.) Serpent Sting is a bit of a gray area, because you do have control over whether you put it up. You could be in a situation where you have a dot up and then decide to CC that target, but that situation happens for a variety of classes. We provide the glyphs for that situation. (Like everything else we discuss in this thread, none of that is set in stone.)” [link]