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’ll find all of the official posts regarding hunters in MoP in the WHH MoP Hunter Guide.
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Lokrick wrote a post that Ghostcrawler replied to point by point: “First, this is a great thread. Thank you for both the moderation and responses. I hope you have similar threads even after MoP gets released. A few hunter comments and issues:
LR: “Dire beast based damage scaling was reduced from 0.5715 to 0.3572. That wasn’t documented, so I wanted to confirm that it was intentional.”
GC: “Dire Beast’s attack power scaling coefficient was indeed reduced from 3.2 to 2.0.”
LR: “The pet focus regen appears to be 5* the hunter’s focus regen multiplier. Is that correct?”
GC: “Pet Focus regen is indeed 5 base, and inherits 100% of your haste, so its focus regen should be multiplied by the same amount as yours. Or, an easier way to look at it is that since your base regen is 4, and its is 5, and both are increased by the same amount, its focus regen will be equal to yours * 1.25.”
LR: “The new explosive shot damage mechanics are great.”
GC: “Glad the new Explosive Shot mechanics are working well.”
LR: “Kill Command doesn’t refund focus on a miss/dodge. Because of the same massive dodge issue, it seems like it should (just like other focus-costing shots). What’s your plan here?”
GC: “Kill Command should be refunding on avoids in the next build.”
LR: “Focus fire didn’t used to cost a GCD. With a GCD, it interferes with a smooth rotation in BM and is simming as a very poor value CD (~1%). Is the GCD intentional?”
GC: “We just buffed Focus Fire further, to 8% per stack, and nerfed Frenzy to 8% per stack.”
LR: “The CD for Devilsaur’s monstrous bite interferes with casting Bite. The next result is that exotic beasts have noticeably lower stampede damage because they miss out on casting one Bite during the period they are up. Since the special abilities have their own CDs (e.g., monstrous bite has an 8 second CD), can the casting GCD be removed? The GCD interaction seems to add no useful constraint and just reduces the dps value of devilsaurs (and possibly a few other pets) below non-exotic pets.”
Similarly, there remains a (latency) delay between when a pet could do something and when it does. Thus even though the CD for Bite is 3 seconds, pets only Bite every 3.3 seconds.
The above two issues combine to strongly impact the value of the devilsaur buff (and possibly other similar buffs). The pets often do not reapply the buffs until they notice that the buff has dropped. This leaves a gap in the uptime. Because of GCD interaction, that gap may be expanded by casting other abilities. In dummy tests, it was not uncommon to get a 5 second gap between castings of the 8 second Monstrous Bite buff. If you were counting on reducing Warlord Zon’ozz’s heal, this would not suffice (a similar issue appeared with hyene’s though their buff has been changed in MoP). The net result is that my poor DinoMight both fails to bring a real buff and has lower damage than otherm more pedestrian pets. This makes Dino unhappy :)
GC: “We just did a pass on Hunter pet abilities, and took any that are expected to be kept up the whole time off the GCD. Also, if any had durations equal to their cooldown, we either reduced the cooldown or increased the duration, so that there’s some slush room for overlapping.”
LR: “Powershot was simming fairly low compared to just not using it at all in most specs. This seems partly because it suppresses autoattack so the opportunity cost is high. Are there any plans to change Powershot?”
GC: “Powershot (and that whole row) has been significantly buffed in the next build you’ll get.”
LR: “Currently Simc implements all the single-target hunter mechanics as we understand them. Thanks again for the communication on this thread!”
GC: “You’re welcome. We’re finding it very useful as well.”
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Zeherah wrote, “Is there a design purpose in why aimed shot, powershot and barrage all suppress autoshot? It seems strange to me that the 2.0 cast time shots do not and the 2.9 and 3.0 ones do. For MM in particular, it seems to conflict with the design of the mastery, since suppressing autoshot will reduce wild quiver procs and long cast time shots mean less chances for wild quiver procs as well. It also potentially creates a micromanagement benefit that I thought was intended to be removed when autoshot was changed to work while moving.”
Ghostcrawler replied, “Aimed Shot should feel different, like you’re distinctly pausing to precisely aim a perfect shot. That’s mostly a kit thing. In terms of gameplay, it reinforces that Arcane Shot should usually be your primary focus dump (but Aimed being a better dump during periods of high haste is cool and something that we do intend to continue supporting). Powershot was in a similar boat, but we changed our mind on that, in order to help balance the talent row; in the new build going up now it no longer interrupts Auto Shot. Barrage still seems weird to allow Autos during, but it does give you more Wild Quiver procs on average so handles the balance concern.”
Zeherah wrote, “Also on the question of design intent, I’m noticing that in my sims pet damage for BM is extremely high relative to hunter damage (in the realm of almost 60% with stampede included). Historically I thought the goal was always to keep pet damage at minimum lower than the hunter’s. Is the current situation just because you guys are still tweaking things or do you think it’s acceptable for such a high percentage of the damage to come from a pet?”
Ghostcrawler replied, “We’re not seeing pet damage that high in our results; it’s topping out at around 45%, which we’re OK with (for BM only, of course).”
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