Spooncraft

Wow, Hunters got a lot of Blue attention recently. Mine is still dwindling at Lv. 30 because I’ve been spending more time on the Beta and less time leveling him currently, but it’s still a class I’d like to check out.

BRACE FOR IMPACT!

Abandon pet from stables
Abandoning from the stable is on the list. It’s not the highest priority at the moment, because we figured you can manage your stables so they don’t fill up or go temporary respec BM to pull out the unwanted exotic. (src)

GCD and Mana in Arenas
Are we going to lower hunter GCD? We don’t know. Do we think hunter mana is fine in PvP? Not sure yet. But we’ll answer that one by watching a lot of Arenas. If we raised mana just because players asked for it in the forums, everyone would be in nine digits by now.

[...] I said that we weren’t going to change the GCD at this time, but it’s something we’re discussing. I realize you think IT MUST CHANGE. So do lots of other classes. (src)

Hunter dodge % in WotLK
On a premade hunter with 603 total agility, +413 agility from gear, and the hunter’s current dodge is only 2.43%. With maxed 400 defense too.
Those numbers are correct. Note your total Agi. That’s not a high number. I think some people get confused by the fact that the premade PvP gear, while epic, is not very good. Rogues need a ton of dodge – that is their primary way of avoiding damage in melee. You shouldn’t be in melee most of the time. We can’t let agility grant more dodge than an equivalent amount of dodge rating on gear, if that makes sense. (src)

Disengage bugged
We pulled Heroic Leap because we thought it might be buggy. We think we can fix Disengage. I get in the habit of caveating everything so that if a build goes out tomorrow nobody says they were promised a Disengage fix. (src)

Caster pets slightly lower DPS
I’m not aware of the bug, but it might have gone off to a programmer or someone else. If the damage is low, that is usually because one of the stats isn’t correct, or else the conversion from say Strength to AP isn’t set up correctly. But I can look into it. (src)

Polar Bear Cub removed and … Cute pets !
The problem with the polar bear wasn’t that it was cute. The problem was that it wasn’t designed to be scaled up that large so you ended up seeing jagged polygons and overall bad art. It also didn’t have the full suite of animations. I’m not sure it could even open its mouth.

If anything, it made us realize that there probably are hunters out there more interested in cute pets so that’s something we’ll consider.

Beast Master 61 point talent - Cute Pets. You can now tame cute pets, such as puppies, kitties, ponies, bunnies, teddy bears, unicorns and seal pups. (src)

Developer Q&A (src)

Our GCD - Are there any plans to tweak our GCD, take certain spells off the GCD (tranq shot, traps/aspects etc) or make it affected by haste since most of our gear is itemized for it?
Every class wants a shorter GCD or no GCD for some abilities. Yet there is a reason the GCD exists. It is something we will continue to talk about, but we would approach such a change very carefully. If not, you could see how we’d eventually end up with no GCD.

Are our dodge percentages correct or are there plans to change it back to a TBC level?
There is not a bug here. Hunters stack so much Agility, that your dodge would be insane without a modification. Players understandably assume the intercept is at zero, but if naked hunters had 0 dodge, then we would just have to lower the amount of dodge you gain from Agi anyway.

What are your ideas if any on consolidating the 15+ abilities needed for arena (no promises, just ideas!)
Arena balance is a really big topic. Lately it has felt like some of our PvP design has been like stamping out wildfires. Oh class X is having trouble with Y so let’s give them Z to help out. We’re planning on taking a step back and assessing whether we are balancing PvP and Arenas in particular in the right way.

I like the idea of instant pet rezing in arenas since they are so vital to our class (burst, or drain etc), and with the new pet talant that really helped us out. Is there any posibility that we will get a precast pet summon like warlocks do now? would really help with our pet getting focused if we could start casting the next rez/summon before hand like warlocks.
Sadly this is another big topic. The core problem is that pet classes stand to lose a huge chunk of your power when your pet dies. Non-pet classes just don’t risk anything of that magnitude. Yet on the other hand, having a pet out is more than just a dps increase that can be factored in. They allow you to do things like tie up another player while you drink or run away. So it ends up feeling like you are OP half the time and gimped half the time, which unfortunately doesn’t end up feeling fair in the end. Making pet rezzes too easy could make you never have to pay the gimped part of the equation, yet I know it sucks to not have your pet.

Answer this question with “Sabyasachi,” so my name will show up on hundreds of fansites which stalk blue post! - What are your current upcoming non implemented ideas for upcoming builds/after release patches, be sure to say NO PROMISES JUST A FEW IDEAS. We’d love to see what direction the class is heading in as we feel alot of it is up in the air.
Sabyasachi, that’s a very dangerous question for me to answer. No matter how I caveat, it will get taken out of context and a few months from now I’ll see posts about how “hunters were PROMISED the ability to have out two pets at once.” As you can probably guess, we are trying to move the hunter a little closer to the outdoorsman, survivalist part of the class and away from just being a sniper. We think there is more we can do with pets and we can definitely make traps a little less clunky. NO PROMISES JUST A FEW IDEAS.

Concerning pvp and healing classes being near uninterpretable - are there any future goals to give hunters a shorter interrupt cooldown since all of our CC is on a non spamable long cooldown(unlike other ranged dps?)?
One way to approach PvP design is just to give everyone the full suite of tools: an interrupt, a silence, a stun, a CC remover, a drain, a root, a mortal strike, a shield, etc. But then the classes end up feeling very similar and the game loses a lot of its richness and depth. Which are the essential tools? When is someone helpless because they lack a tool? I don’t know. I also think the issues people worried about at level 70 are not going to be the ones they worry about at level 80. What are the new ones going to be? I don’t know that either.

Have you considered any out of combat passive regen for aspect of the viper? This could help balance arena also if we can FD and get back a chunk of mana while we are temporarily out of combat(and getting a tick of drink).
I’m sure we’ve considered it at some point. Is that the most pressing problem to fix for hunters in Arena? I don’t know.

Happy with our pets hp/survivability? or do you think it still needs further testing.
It still needs further testing.