Mania and BRK have already weighed in on the subject, and that should be enough for anyone, but what the heck, I love my Beastmaster Hunter. Been playing my Hunter all the time lately. So I’ll fire up my ‘Aspect of the Long Winded’ and take a shot at it.

First, let me quote Mania quoting Ghostcrawler’s post:

Hunters of all specs, and particularly Beastmaster, are doing too much damage in PvE.

We tested this a lot internally in beta and knew hunters were high but we hoped other classes would be able to catch up in a way they have as yet been unable to do. We want to be careful not to hurt hunter dps too much in PvP, so we’re taking most of the damage out of Steady Shot and Volley. Beastmaster hunters are in addition losing some of their pet dps. We still want BMs to have the best pets, but pet dps numbers are a little high at the moment. We are also still concerned about hunter survivability in PvP and taking the opportunity to jazz up Deterrence into something that looks and plays a little more interesting.

These are not all of the changes we are working on for hunters, but those changes we feel are ready for testing. We hope to get these changes up on the PTR so players will have a chance to test them out and respond before they go live.
1.        Steady Shot – now only gains 10% of attack power as damage (down from 20%).
2.        Volley – reduced the damage by about 30% for all ranks. Note that AE damage from many classes is very high right now and we are looking at all of them. Volley in particular had reached the point where some hunters were using it to the exclusion of most other attacks.
3.        Readiness – no longer affects the cooldown of Bestial Wrath.
4.        Deterrence – has been completely overhauled. It now allows you to deflect 100% of incoming melee or spell damage for 5 seconds, but prevents you from attacking while active. You still must be facing the attacker to deflect the damage (this is a limitation we are trying and might end up removing). 60 sec cooldown.
5.        Kill Shot – cooldown reduced to 15 sec (from 35 sec).
6.        Kindred Spirits – now only grants 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
7.        Serpent’s Swiftness – now only grants 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet.
8.        All hunter pet abilities with a cooldown longer than 30 sec have been moved off the global cooldown.
9.        Growl— threat generation increased by 20% (same for Voidwalker Torment).
10.        Call of the Wild – now benefits only the hunter and his or her pet.
11.        Rake and Scorpid Poison – slightly nerfed to bring them into line with other pet abilities.
12.        Spirit Strike – reduced the period on the dot so it will work better with Longevity.
13.        Improved Tracking – now benefits damage to all included creature types as long as you are tracking one of them. You don’t have to swap around what you are tracking as much.
14.        Aspect of the Wild – now raid-wide.

Okay, my first take on this. They will reduce pet DPS, which provides threat as well as the damage, and boost Growl’s threat generation to compensate.

From the bottom of my heart, may I say, “Thank you”.

Thank you for having the forethought to recognize that if you reduce our pet DPS, that you are reducing our pet’s ability to hold aggro off us as we solo.

You might think that is a no-brainer, but we’ve seen other issues in previous class adjustments. If you want to reduce the Hunter overall DPS, that’s okay, just please don’t put even more brakes on my soloing DPS because my pet can’t put out the threat.

The change to Call of the Wild surprises me quite a bit, though.

Oh, I’m not saying it wasn’t powerful enough to need adjusting. No, I’m just surprised they are making it apply to Hunter and Pet only, instead of leaving it raid or group wide and just reducing it’s overall effect. It’s as deep into the pet tree as you can get, and you have to make a solid commitment to having it. For raiding Hunters, having a raid-wide occasional buff is fun, it makes you feel like you are contributing to the group instead of racing on the solo DPS charts. It’s sad to think they’ll pull it. I’d personally prefer that, rather than yank it entirely, they would treat it instead like they have the healing component of Shadow Priests, and give the Hunter and his Pet more benefit from the ability than the rest of the raid, but still give back something.

But, “Hey! How about that Kill Shot change?”

“mmmMMMMmmm… nummy!”

I like Kill Shot, I like the damage it puts up there. It really feels like a ‘finishing move’… except the damn thing is usually on cooldown more than half the time when I’m soloing. Reducing the cooldown WILL cause me to use it a lot more, to be LOOKING for it to be available to use a lot more. I like the concept of a Kill Shot, a single finishing move that says “I have chosen to end your struggle…. NOW, bitch!”.

In fact, I think it would be fun to have a macro that added a /say to Kill Shot, so whenever I trigger it, my hunter yells “BOOyah!”

Okay, it would be fun for about 5 minutes, and then everyone around me would be sick of it.

Talking about the changes is all well and good, but let’s look at the core argument here.

“Hunters of all specs, and particularly Beastmaster, are doing too much damage in PvE. ”

Can anyone seriously dispute that statement?

I’ve been saying the same thing since 3.1 came out. Beastmaster Hunters are godlike in PvE, and it’s been damn fun. We’ve been SO powerful, so consistently explosive on DPS charts, that I’m fairly complacent about any upcoming adjustments.

Because from the list of changes GC gave us, it doesn’t look, AT ALL, like a knee-jerk reaction that will bring us to our knees and nerf us to the ground, before building us back up sometime later.

It looks a lot more to me like a careful, reasoned, multi-structured adjustment that will tweak some things up, some things down, and mix it up somewhere in the middle.

Who woulda thunk it?

Now if only we’d get some more Feral Druid news, at least something more than clarification that we would be keeping the bonus armor on weapons, but wouldn’t get a multiplier on that armor.

C’mon GC, give me something more to chew on!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 9:18 am and is filed under Hunter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.