Words with Ghostcrawler from Blizzcon

[AdamSavage]

Here is a nice article about Hunters I found on Warcraft Hunters Union:





At Blizzcon this year my Track Ghostcrawler ability was working again. Though I stayed at the same hotel, I never saw the big GC in the hotel halls, but I did see him in one of the convention center halls on his way to lunch after a panel and I got to ask him a handful of hunter questions, which he graciously answered even though I think I delayed his lunch.

Of course I did not get to ask him everything I wanted to — these were just the first things to come to my mind when I saw him and influenced by the direction the conversation went, and I didn’t have a lot of time.

I think my favorite quote was when we were talking about fans and I said something to the effect of, “Yeah, but I also have a small but rabid group of anti-fans.”

Ghostcrawler laughed and said, “Yeah, so do I.”

So here is the stuff we talked about, as I remember it through the haze of Blizzcon:

Raid DPS Data

I asked Ghostcrawler if they had some kind of awesome data about raid dps that was like our World of Logs parses, but including everything. He said that yes, they did have that kind of data but that they also paid attention to the World of Logs. He said that they watch WoL stuff a lot so that they know what the players are seeing, as well as all the info they’re seeing. He gave an example from back in Wrath when they felt like players didn’t appreciate how tough bubbles were and couldn’t figure it out until they looked at WoL and realized that it didn’t credit absorbs as heals, because of the way the combat log reported things (this has long since been fixed, of course).

He also said that they had some really cool tools for testing dps. He said that unlike players, they can make actual bots and they can program in an exact rotation and run long in-game tests on various targets and see exactly what the potential of each spec is in various situations (which makes you think about how they feel BM is not as far behind as representation suggests). He noted that sometimes players come up with clever ways of improving rotations that they didn’t think of and they have to reprogram the bots — but he also said that they’ve occasionally found rotations that the players haven’t found that are higher dps than what the players are using. Not for hunters, but for at least one other dps class out there they have a better rotation than what is being used.

Hunter PvP

I asked him a very carefully phrased question to the effect of, “So do you guys think hunter PvP is a problem?” Ghostcrawler was pretty adamant: he said hunter PvP was bad, that it was a problem. Of course this was before a hunter team took first place in the arena championship, but I think it’s still true. He said the problems were mostly based around focus regen and LoS focus regen — though removing minimum range should help. He also talked about the challenges of improving hunter PvP without making things overpowered, and how the smallest changes to something like a defensive cooldown can quickly become imbalancing.

So we know that hunter PvP is on their radar. He also noted that there was some talk that removing minimum range would make hunters want to stay in melee with other ranged classes and they were considering some kind of mechanic to discourage that (this was very speculative). I suggested that we aren’t generally going to want to sit in minimum range with anyone most of the time

Minimum Range

I had to know whether removing minimum range was a purely design decision, or whether it was based on the overwhelming player feedback, so I asked! Ghostcrawler said that it was a 50/50 thing. He said they knew there was nothing else they could do that would make hunters as happy as removing minimum range. But then he also talked about how difficult it was designing with minimum range in the game (something I’ve talked about often) including talking about flagging bosses for no min range in Cataclysm fights.

Hunter Pets

I asked about whether hunter pets would keep their talent trees like they have no, or if they’d change to something more like the new player talents, or go away entirely (note that in MoP you’ll be able to take any pet and just choose whether it will be tenacity, ferocity, or cunning).

Ghostcrawler said that this wasn’t something they had decided on yet, but they were considering just removing pet talents entirely. He said they don’t feel like there are really meaningful choices in the pet talent trees as they are now, but that they could possibly move to a talent system for pets similar to that for players if they could come up with meaningful choices to make.

So it sounds like pet talents as they exist now are going away. We’ll either have no talents and pets will just innately have what they need based on their spec, or it’ll be a minor version of what players will have in the expansion. I got the impression that they were leaning toward just doing away with pet talents, so that’s something we’ll have to lean on them about!


Dual-Wielding Ranged Weapons

Dual-wielding ranged weapons is a possibility. It sounds like the main thing preventing it from being really strongly on the table is the difficulty in adding all those new animations (which have to work with all the races, genders, and armor sets).
Stampede

The idea of a stampede ability for hunters or BM hunters — something where you’re whole stable of active pets rushes the enemy at once for a few seconds — is something that has been talked about a lot by the design team. It’s a definite possibility that hunters will see something like that, though not something that is currently in the works or definitely planned. Ghostcrawler pointed out that if they did it it would not be “actual” pets that you control, but instead just a bunch of pets (possibly random, possibly your active stable of 5) that charged whatever there was to attack and munched away for a while, possibly applying random pet abilities at the same time.

I seriously hope they do this. It would be so awesome and I’m thrilled that it’s something that’s at least being talked about!

Armor Sets on the Blizzard Store

I asked whether there were any plans to make armor sets with no stats for sale on the Blizzard store as a vanity item that you can transmogrify your gear into. He said that a couple people have brought the idea up at Blizzard, but then he said that making armor is very expensive (meaning a lot of man hours, I assume) and there are no plans for that right now. He said that things like mounts and vanity pets are actually really easy for them to make, comparatively.

On one hand you could easily argue that they’d make a heck of a lot of money off of it and more than pay for those man hours, but on the other hand you’re essentially pulling those people off of making actual content for the game. And you can’t always just add more designers — at some point it makes things happen slower than faster.

Podcasts

Ghostcrawler had added to his Developer Watercooler signature the line that “he probably listens to your podcast.” I asked him how many he did listen to and he said he listens to a lot of podcasts, but not every week. Each week he listens to various different ones.

He noted that he found that podcasts were a good source of information and player feedback, since the effort to make a podcast is high enough that you can generally expect well thought-out arguments on them. I imagine they’re also good in the sense that the collect and curate a lot of the general feedback of the playerbase at large.

And yes, it turns out he does listen to the Hunting Party Podcast from time to time. Yipes!

Um… That Could Be a Problem

I asked about the new Transmorph Trap and whether you could use both that and a Freezing Trap to CC two targets at once (or if you could only have one active at a time). He said that yes, you could. I then asked if I could Transmorph Trap a target, then Freezing Trap another target, then Wyvern Sting yet another, Scatter Shot a fourth, then use Readiness and do it all again.

He paused a moment and said… yeah, that could be a problem.

So that’s what I got — and writing it up now that’s an impressive amount of information for how short the conversation was. I was kinda rapid firing as many questions as I could in there. The only other thing he mentioned (that I can recall) was that they did indeed name an item after Zeherah in 4.3 (he asked me if I had seen it yet — I hadn’t, and still haven’t). He said it was one of the valor purchases, so hopefully we’ll find out exactly what soon!

[Vephriel]

I think Pet Talents could easily be taken away. Most people use the exact same build for an optimal Ferocity/Tenacity/Cunning spec. If pets could just have those things built in and then we could choose their type on top of it we'd be good.

[Lisaara]

yeah I wont mind if they took away pet talents. They have cookie cutter sets just as the normal talents do now.....maybe they can make something like they did with player talents.

[Kalliope]

Thirded. Let us pick a pet and which set of talents we get to choose from and we're good to go. (Limited pet family ability choices, which I've mentioned before, would be icing.)

[Monica Gems]

While I really don't have anything nice to say about that website (or even GC, frankly), this looks very... hyjvgukdfghfhk.

GC comes off as "Your class is fine, QQ moar, lolz!!!", then when cornered, he admits the class is having issues. He even hits the exact issues we're having; we're painfully low on the dps totem pole. Granted he doesn't seem to realise WHY and is basing it on raid situations and player error (the issue is high base dmg and pisspoor scaling), but he realises something is wrong anyway. This is good to know.

Don't really like taking away pet talents; some of my pets do have varying talents depening on what I use them for. Also, wold thi eliminate the abiltyfor a dps croc or a tanking dragonhawk? That wasn't discussed and was my biggest questio, since it's something everyone is interested in.

[Lisaara]

While I really don't have anything nice to say about that website (or even GC, frankly), this looks very... hyjvgukdfghfhk.

GC comes off as "Your class is fine, QQ moar, lolz!!!", then when cornered, he admits the class is having issues. He even hits the exact issues we're having; we're painfully low on the dps totem pole. Granted he doesn't seem to realise WHY and is basing it on raid situations and player error (the issue is high base dmg and pisspoor scaling), but he realises something is wrong anyway. This is good to know.

Don't really like taking away pet talents; some of my pets do have varying talents depening on what I use them for. Also, wold thi eliminate the abiltyfor a dps croc or a tanking dragonhawk? That wasn't discussed and was my biggest questio, since it's something everyone is interested in.

I think he knows what he's doing. Sometimes it's hard to word it right to get the thoughts across. Also he acts like that cause the wow forum is typically full of idiots, and he's even said that (I think he said that at Blizzcon actually! LOL!).

Nah. It wouldn't take that away. We'd still have the trees but we'd get the special abilities of that tree. (Tenacity gets Thunderstomp for example).

[Kalliope]

I think he knows what he's doing. Sometimes it's hard to word it right to get the thoughts across. Also he acts like that cause the wow forum is typically full of idiots, and he's even said that (I think he said that at Blizzcon actually! LOL!).

100% agreed. And really, we all know that the WoW forum is typically full of idiots....he's not the bad guy here.

[CrystalKitten]

I'd be okay with losing pet talents, as long as they somehow still gave BM extra ones <.< Example.. Suki must always have heart of the phoenix. Always. For personal reasons, heh. It also lets my tank pets have all the extra aggro, and even some extra healing/armor talents. Not only that.. but I do currently have some tank pets that are specced SLIGHTLY more for dps, which I've found useful when helping friends/guildies gear up in regular cata stuff.

[Worba]

I think Pet Talents could easily be taken away. Most people use the exact same build for an optimal Ferocity/Tenacity/Cunning spec. If pets could just have those things built in and then we could choose their type on top of it we'd be good.

^

I mean it was a rush having them back in 3.0, but probably more because of what it wasn't than what it was, e.g. after 2 years or w/e taming throwaway pets and spending points just to get "Bite - Rank 4", ANYTHING was bound to look good by comparison. ^ ^

[Kalliope]

I think Pet Talents could easily be taken away. Most people use the exact same build for an optimal Ferocity/Tenacity/Cunning spec. If pets could just have those things built in and then we could choose their type on top of it we'd be good.

^

I mean it was a rush having them back in 3.0, but probably more because of what it wasn't than what it was, e.g. after 2 years or w/e taming throwaway pets and spending points just to get "Bite - Rank 4", ANYTHING was bound to look good by comparison. ^ ^

This is also true. The other thing is that pet trees, though smaller than player trees, still suffer from talent bloating. With player trees getting massively revamped, this is even more apparent now.

[Vephriel]

*nodnod* I think, if they do decide to keep the talent options, they could just truncate them and bake in most of the necessary buffs/abilities and leave us with a few fun choices (such as Heart of the Phoenix perhaps).

[Kalliope]

*nodnod* I think, if they do decide to keep the talent options, they could just truncate them and bake in most of the necessary buffs/abilities and leave us with a few fun choices (such as Heart of the Phoenix perhaps).

Absolutely! Something like Rabid is going to be baseline for a ferocity pet, and call of the wild too, most likely, but other choices, like HotP and lick your wounds would make for fun choices.

[CrystalKitten]

*nodnod* I think, if they do decide to keep the talent options, they could just truncate them and bake in most of the necessary buffs/abilities and leave us with a few fun choices (such as Heart of the Phoenix perhaps).

This would be perfect. Even if this was mostly applicable to BM (afterall, it was BM that usually had the "extra" points to stick into fun talents), though I'm not sure how something like that would work out code wise. I mean, afterall, if they scrap pet talents entirely, BM will lose HALF of the bonus, and arguably, the main bonus with a "real" effect of what is currently their top tier talent/ability :/

[Kalliope]

*nodnod* I think, if they do decide to keep the talent options, they could just truncate them and bake in most of the necessary buffs/abilities and leave us with a few fun choices (such as Heart of the Phoenix perhaps).

This would be perfect. Even if this was mostly applicable to BM (afterall, it was BM that usually had the "extra" points to stick into fun talents), though I'm not sure how something like that would work out code wise. I mean, afterall, if they scrap pet talents entirely, BM will lose HALF of the bonus, and arguably, the main bonus with a "real" effect of what is currently their top tier talent/ability :/

Well, the exotic pet abilities could still be reworked, so every pet family has one, but only BM hunter pets can use them. That'd be a lot of work, though.

Another possibility is that BM hunter pets could get access to an extra ability from an existing tier....if pet talent trees get redone to work like the player ones. Considering how much those trees would be pared down, even just one ability would be a lot, proportionally speaking.

Just spitballing.

[CrystalKitten]

Nope, spitballing is good I'm just thinking nomatter how they do it (player style, or just poof all together) BM should get SOMETHING. As a large portion of out top tier ability was those extra 4 points. Sure, we also got exotics with an extra ability, but I argue that as a slightly "weaker" ability (don't get me wrong, I LOVE my exotics, but as far as something that has a lot of utility/dps that we didn't already have.. there isn't much added). It's nice for soloing, but doesn't actually increase our dps (for the most part), or provide any sort of other awesome bonuses, especially when grouping since most buffs are covered anyways. I understand a lot of that might be considered opinion though.

I'm just really hoping we get to keep some of the neat "fun" abilities. Heart of the Phoenix is one. Charge/swoop is fun too. Pretty much, I like the fact that because I was BM, it meant I could make more individuality choices, not just with myself, but with my pet too, since we had those extra points, heh. So if they find some way to keep that aspect (and let me keep Heart of the Phoenix for Suki.. so she'll never be gone again ) I'll be happy.

[Slapperfish]

(deleted)

[Lisaara]

It annoys me that nobody has really bothered to ask Blizz about Exotic pets yet...

Someone actually did at Blizzcon, wanting MM to use Exotics and GC explained that thats not gonna happen.

[Lisaara]

I think he knows what he's doing. Sometimes it's hard to word it right to get the thoughts across. Also he acts like that cause the wow forum is typically full of idiots, and he's even said that (I think he said that at Blizzcon actually! LOL!).

100% agreed. And really, we all know that the WoW forum is typically full of idiots....he's not the bad guy here.

Yup. On the wow forums, you gotta put up the idiot shield at full power. I can't even stand to be there for five minutes without going "Oh god! My head! It hurts!"