MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Upcoming hunter changes

2008-10-14 22:43:12

Two changes coming up:

We aren't happy with how Aspect of the Viper is working in PvP, but it seems fine in PvE. We're going to try changing it so that 50% of its current regen is passive, leaving the remaining 50% active. That should give hunters some more mana in Arenas in particular when dealing with opponents who manage to get out of LOS a lot. Yet, in PvE where hunter dps is very high, the difference in regen shouldn't be very noticable. We are also going to let Viper return mana from melee attacks for those cases where a melee opponent is too close for comfort.

The second change is to some of the numbers on the special attacks of exotic pets to make sure the pets are around a 10% increase from normal pets. This should make exotic pets a reasonable benefit for the talent point (especially when you also count the bonus pet talents) without making every BM hunter feel like they are limited to just those pets.

Ghostcrawler

2008-10-14 22:52:46

Re: Upcoming hunter changes

Q u o t e:
1) Take the mp5 you gain currently from using viper actively
2) Half that value for the active gain
3) Make the other half of the mp5 a passive gain.

Yes, something like this. We'll try per 3 sec first because that's better for performance, but we can go to 1 sec if need be.

Ghostcrawler

2008-10-15 00:00:36

Re: Upcoming hunter changes

I don't think you do your fellow players a service when you respond to blue posts on one topic with a lot of discussion about other topics. But that's just my opinion.

Here is the actual Viper change we're going to implement: The per attack mana regeneration has been reduced by 50% but it now generates 4% of maximum mana every 3 sec. In addition, the per attack regeneration now also works on melee attacks.

Ghostcrawler

2008-10-15 14:00:25

Re: Upcoming hunter changes

On the exotic pets issue, I have said before that we want to be very careful with the balance here. If the pets are immensely better, then the talent becomes a non-decision (which isn't so bad) but the exotic pets also becomes a non-decision, which means that the tree that is supposed to be all about pets has fewer options to choose from.

At a slight dps increase, the particular pet you choose is still up for debate. On a boss where you need to go all out and the pet's debuff isn't imporant and survivability isn't important, then yeah maybe you take the devilsaur or core hound. But when farming, running heroics, PvP or in other situations you still can bring which pet you want.

We did a big pass at pet dps and found that while some exotics were near the top, others were near the bottom. We made a big numbers pass to consolidate things a little better, and make sure the exotics were all near the top or at the top. Cats and other pets without a strong debuff should also do good dps as well.

Ghostcrawler