Hunter Changes on wednesday

[Wain]

I've split the later posts, which relate to the 5.4 PTR changes, into their own topic: http://forums.wow-petopia.com/viewtopic ... 50&t=20964

[Finduilas]

I'm a bit confused today. In the german patchnotes the changes for blinkstrike and stampede were under June 10th as release. We indeed had a hotfix on Monday. Yesterday I tried my hunters out. My stampede pets still used their abilities (got crit and mastery buffs as well as haste) and my corehound used his fire-breath on the target. But there's a tooltip on stampede that says my called pets only deal 25% of their original damage. Was something changed in the last minute? Are the German patchnotes incorrect? Is the date wrong?

[AdamSavage]

I noticed the same thing as well. I also noticed the cooldown on blink strikes.

[AdamSavage]

Stampede
40 yd range
Instant
5 min cooldown
Requires level 87
Summons a flock of fluffy teddy bears to fight your current target for 20 sec. Your fluffy teddy bears deal insignificant amount of damage while summoned this way, questioning why you summoned them in the first place.


They could give teddy pets new skills

hugs - makes the target happy boosting their damage by 10%
cuddles - makes the target happy boosting their damage by 20%
kisses - makes the target extra happy boosting their damage by 30%

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/262490-new-stampede/

[Lisaara]

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7616922833#1

This topic made me wanna punt a few gnomes....

[Ana]

migh as well go survival soon...

[Finduilas]

So now I did some trying, testing and verifying. Seems like they made an other hotfix where they really impemented the things announced for German realms on Monday today (wednesday).
My stampede pets don't buff anymore (like they still did yesterday), they don't use any special abilities (stun, disarmor, slow, whatever). AND the tooltip says they only deal 25% of their original damage (that's what it already said yesterday).

But my pet uses blinkstrike although I almost stood in the face of the target. Either the 10 meters are just around 5 or it's a bit buggy. I added a screenshot to show the distance. If I stood closer the cat just did one normal leap to reach the target, if I stood at this point she used blink stirke. Don't know but seems less then 10 meters for me.

WoWScrnShot_061213_193505.jpg (231.78 KiB) Viewed 2172 times

[AdamSavage]

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7616922833#1

This topic made me wanna punt a few gnomes....

Can't be as bad this stupid comment..

So we asked for hunter nerfs since their damage is ridiculously overpowered and instead they're pretty much getting buffed? Not sure if I'm catching your drift.

The changes we have coming for Blink Strikes are intended to assist with the regular complaint we hear about peeling Hunter pets. The change will mean that Hunter pets will only be able to Blink Strike once every 20 seconds and there will be a 10 yard minimum range to avoid the pet using it off cooldown when it's already close to the target. We hope that this will help with Hunter pets utilizing large amounts of glue to stick to their targets.

Our plans for Stampede are actually quite simple to explain; we are removing the ability for the pets summoned through Stampede to use any abilities. The end result of this change should be that the pets a Hunter summons from Stampede will only be able to auto-attack. As you are all aware, these changes will result in a quite the reduction of net damage for Hunters, because of this we have also done a minor 15% buff to the damage of Arcane Shot.

So we asked for hunter nerfs since their damage is ridiculously overpowered and instead they're pretty much getting buffed? Not sure if I'm catching your drift.

The damage gained from the buffs you can receive from using Stampede is no longer possible, which lowers Hunter damage. The pets summoned by Stampede can no longer bite/claw/nibble/tickle, they can only use auto-attacks, lowering damage during Stampede. Blink Strikes now has a 20 second cooldown making the pet easier to peel instead of them blinking all over the Arena to their target. These are all nerfs which are heavily targeted at pets which mainly effects Beast Mastery Hunters.

In regards to the "triple trinket" that BM hunters have; we have no plans to remove Bestial Wrath from Readiness at this time. Please continue to present your feedback on these changes though as we're always interested to hear your opinions on them.

We’re aware that the latest round of hotfixes caused some confusion for many Hunters, and want to offer some insight into the logic and reasoning that led to these particular changes.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... ?page=3#50

Patch 5.3 resulted in Hunters feeling a bit stronger in PvP than in 5.2, where we feel they were in a much better place overall. Stampede in particular has been proving troublesome. We originally designed it with an “empty your stables” theme primarily for flavor–we wanted you to be able to see all of your favorite pets. In practice, it turned into more of a “deck building” mini-game, where Hunters were managing their entire stable to bring as much crowd control, raid buffs, etc. as possible. That’s opposite of our intentions with the Mists stable redesign; we want you to be able to pull out whichever pet you feel is ideal for your current situation. If you’re instead filling your stable based on whatever’s ideal for Stampede, you lose that entirely.

Furthermore, this min-maxing led to Stampede being a bit stronger of a DPS cooldown than we’d really like, especially for Beast Masters (who are already quite bursty in PvP). The hotfix lets us tone Stampede back just a little, and once again allows Hunters to keep whichever pets they like in the stable.

With Blink Strikes, our goals with the original 5.3 changes were to reduce Hunter burst for PvP as well as give them a passive talent option. Generally speaking, we prefer active talents to be slightly superior to passive talents in the same tier. No one will choose an active talent if it requires more work for the same reward. So, we wanted Blink Strikes to be DPS-neutral. Instead, it ended up being a PvP buff, hence the hotfix.

Regarding the changes to Arcane Shot, Cobra Shot, and Steady Shot, we had originally only buffed Arcane shot, but there was some risk that it would change Hunter rotations, which wasn’t our intent. We simply wanted to compensate for the Stampede and Blink Strikes changes. Ultimately, our goal with all of these changes is simply to tone back some of the outlying behaviors that were causing Hunters to feel a little too strong in PvP in 5.3, without much impact elsewhere.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... age=12#226

[Zalani]

I was wondering why i was having issues with my raid soloing.
I kept pulling aggro of my pet so I ended up having to make a macro that's constantly using Misdirect.
*And now Stampede is useless. ugh

[AdamSavage]

This is funny.

No offense, but getting rotated out a progress raid because my DPS is !@#$ pisses me off. And with that I don't mean I don't care about PvP, I did in previous patches but now it's just becoming ridicules.

Lets see:
- Hunter PvE DPS is still the lowest pure DPS (for 3 patches now!) and as we don't bring utility we're benched a lot. The mediocre buffs we get never get close to fixing the gap.
- Marksmanship is completely useless and the buffs that are given to it are so lackluster no one uses the spec.
- For the past 3 patches, and lets include the hotfixes as well, Blizzard "tried" to fix hunters for PvP while lowering the already low DPS in PvE.

All the time and effort went into making hunters worse in PvP. We still have our bugs (Nâncy worked that one out nicely), we're still lowest pure DPS class who got all their utilities taken away from 'em and yet Blizzard can't seem to be able to fix us in PvP.

So yes, screw PvP, the overpaid developers can't fix it anyway. Just put it in a separate talent tree. I want to raid instead of sitting outside the instance. Screw the crybabies, you had 12 freaking seasons of fun globalling hunters and I never read complains about that. Blizzard didn't do anything about that until TWELVE seasons and NOW you start complaining?!

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... 33?page=34

[Morven]

As an MM hunter, this doesn't bother me too much, except inasmuch as it's again Blizzard implementing balance through homogenization. Blah.