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.
– – –
Ghostcrawler: “As an administrative note, we deleted several posts that were off-topic to the thread. This is not a thread to offer suggestions, generic concerns, or opine about how you feel neglected. The first two issues are totally appropriate for other threads (the third is rarely appropriate). No offense is intended. Most of the posts in this thread should be some form of ‘I don’t understand how this mechanic works, so I can’t model it,’ or ‘Here are some calculations / estimations / or PvE parses.'” [link]
– – –
Zeherah wrote, “Based on my testing so far with the snake trap formula, it looks like snake trap is going to be doing enough damage (at least for SV) that we would want to include it in our rotation (assuming I calculated the scaling right).”
I’m glad it was buffed enough to not be a joke ability, but I wonder if it’s intentional or wise for it to be designed to be strong enough to be cast on cooldown in PvE, given all the effort that’s been put in to move hunters away from having to throw traps as part of the rotation. It also seems like it adds to the “too many summons” issue that you were talking about earlier (between snakes, a murder of crows, stampede and my pet, I carry a veritable army).
[link]
Ghostcrawler replied, “You’re probably right, and we don’t want Snake Trap to be used rotationally. We do want Snake Trap damage to be in the non-joke range. We’ll try to find some middle ground.” [link]
– – –
Precisiøn, a hunter, wrote, “In the current beta build, survival’s damge is being hindered by explosive shot ticking for almost less than a serpent sting tick. Even when piled all together with LnL it still feels really weak and disappointing since survival seems to pack the best utility for pvp, but has no bite whatsoever. Is there a plan to fix this? Or is survival going to be ignored for yet another entire expansion?” [link]
Ghostcrawler replied, “In ilevel 460, I show Serpent Sting ticking for about 6K and Explosive Shot ticking for about twice that. Overall, Explosive Shot contributes 3x or 4x as much damage as Serpent Sting. What are you seeing?” [link]
Precisiøn replied, “Even twice the amount of 6k is too low. And I’m speaking in terms of PvP as well, not PvE. If you look at the damage the other spec’s main abilities are putting out, it puts ES to shame, even when they’re packed into a triple LnL proc.”
- Chimera shot critting for almost 90k, and non critting for 30-50k.
- Kill command critting for 80-85k, non critting for 30-45k.
- Explosive shot critting for 35-60k, non critting for 25-30k.
and here’s the kicker: Cobra shot critting for 40-68k, non critting for 20-38k. Cobra shot itself is doing more damage than explosive shot. Arcane shot is also doing more damage than explosive shot. It feels extremely weak while PvPing, have you played survival in a bg recently? You can barely make a difference without spamming cobra shot.
[link]
Ghostcrawler replied, “Survival gets a lot of damage from dots, which is just a different model than Marks. We can push damage numbers around a bit (perhaps nerf Cobra Shot so it’s not quite so much of an upgrade over Steady Shot) but at some point that’s just going to mean the difference between MM and SV is the name of their signature shot. Dots also can be really powerful in PvP. I would want to see some more testing before determining that Survival needs very high burst damage to be PvP viable.” [link]
Precisiøn replied, “No, the real difference between survival and MM is the utility to kite with entrapment, essentially control when we want to burst with LnL 100% proc chance off of frost and freezing traps, and easily manage to keep serpent sting up with just casting cobra shot.
MM is more of a PvE type spec, with all the randomness of wild quiver, the constant damage of piercing shots, and the master marksmen stacks giving a free aimed shot here and there, but there is no kiting utility anymore in MM, and Chimera shot lost it’s “three headed” uniqueness when cataclysm came out. (Disarm, serpent sting extra damage, drain mana ), What’s the point of even calling it chimera shot anymore?
Can we have some on demand burst with survival’s LnL talent? for example, while LnL is active, all explosive shot damage is increased by a certain amount, or has a 100% chance to crit? Otherwise, even with LnL Tripple explosive shot, it barely manages to reach the damage of a regular chimera shot… Also chimera shot grants heals, so can Black arrow grant heals as well?, and have a dispel punishment? like the rest of the damage that would’ve been dealt is instead returned to the hunter as heals when it is dispelled, and LnL is immediately activated.
Survival has no real good way of target switching at all, making it suffer in arena pretty bad, and adding a 100% chance to crit for explosive shot, plus some damage while LnL is procced could fix that. Survival’s burst is so gimp, that a warrior below 35% HP with second wind, literally out-heals all of my damage because I lack the burst to end it. Triple LnL Explosive shots and two kill shots still don’t do the job. I’d have to be really lucky and hope both the killshots crit.
All in all, Please add some sort of damage increasing mechanic to LnL so that we can have controlled burst.
[link]
Ghostcrawler replied, “What numbers are we talking about? Trying this out right now, 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.)” [link]
Zhe replied, “Why doesn’t Survival have any dot protection then? It’s not like hunters can multi-dot like casters due to being resource limited. You changed affliction to be more bursty and less reliant on low pressure dot damage and they still have UA, while Survival still has BA on a lengthy cd and can be dispelled easily along with Serpent Sting and Hunter’s Mark. BTW, is Explosive Trap sharing cd with BA an oversight or intended? It’s rather disconcerting that SV being THE trap spec can’t even use it now that the trap is useful.” [link]
Precisiøn replied, “Agree 100%, I think GC is too stuck on balencing for pve right now, not really looking into how sirvival feels in pvp, rather just saying “dots are powerful in pvp”, not really, especially when the enemy has heals. And survival has no burst even with the current LnL. Not to mention dispell protection, but dispells are on a 6 second cd now.” [link]
Ghostcrawler replied, “We are stuck on numbers for purposes of this thread, and numbers just don’t relate directly to success in PvP as much as they do for PvE. It’s easier (but not trivial) to demonstrate that (for sake of argument) Survival’s damage is lower than Marks. It’s much harder to argue that Survival has PvP challenges because of that theoretical disparity. If you have PvP concerns, those are totally appropriate things to relay somewhere in this forum. Not having enough CC or group utility or whatever aren’t really related to understanding theorycrafting and rotational analysis, which is the purpose of this thread.” [link]
– – –
Bullettime wrote, “The problem with Explosive Shot is that Ghostcrawler did not follow through on his response to my question during the Ask the Devs: Class in which they stated that AP scaling was too awkward and they would be moving many AP scaling abilities into weapon modifiers in order to give more linear and consistant scaling. A problem that also plagued specs like Assassination and Fury during Cataclysm.”
50 ilvls of gear between Heroic Dragon Soul and Mists epics makes a massive difference in weapon scaling potential but actually very little for Ability Power scaling.
Explosive Shot is scaling exactly as the coefficient described. The problem is that, its scaling modifiers were admitted to by Ghostcrawler himself to be very much flawed but it was never addressed in the actual game design.
Survival doesn’t need the higher burst on LnL as proposed earlier. It needs its abilities to scale correctly and have Explosive Shot and Black Arrow move to weapon modifiers and not pure Ability Power.
Otherwise, Survival will be in the same boat it was in Wrath and Cata yet again. Gets base damage massively buffed before the expansion launches to counter horrendous scaling, ends up OP in first tier, but then gets nerfed to oblivion and pathetic scaling prevents it from being competitive for the majority of the expansion.
[link]
Ghostcrawler replied, “At the time we thought it was a problem. I’m not sure it’s going to be a problem in Mists, but feel free to try and prove us wrong. Do you think that ranged weapon damage is going to grow faster in subsequent tiers than RAP is (keeping in mind that ranged weapons are now balanced like two-handed weapons)?”
Part of our testing is to look at theoretical damage in subsequent and even final tiers. As I said before, we don’t know yet what set bonuses and trinkets will look like, and it’s possible we will tweak the design or numbers of a few abilities by then, but we do have a pretty good guess of how things will fall out. (To be fair, we used to suck at scaling. In vanilla there were some abilities that did a percent of attack power and some that just did flat numbers and that was that. We have gotten a lot better at keeping everything scaling with gear at about the same rate, particularly in the last two expansions.)
– – –
To read Ghostcrawler’s previous hunter-related posts in the Beta Class Balance Analysis thread see:
Loading...