Readiness Nerf and Hunter PvE

#1 - June 20, 2013, 9:24 p.m.

For those who haven't seen

-Readiness now finishes the cooldowns on Rapid Fire, Feign Death, Deterrence, Disengage, and Camouflage when activated (was all Hunter abilities with a base cooldown of less than 5 minutes).

This is a wonderful change for PvP. It's a nerf but also frees Hunters from having to be balanced around everything being doubled up, especially the CC breaker on Bestial Wrath.

My concern here is that it's still a nerf to PvE performance. Beast Mastery for example does a Readiness triggered double Bestial Wrath on the pull while our RPPM trinkets are still in effect to give us a large up front starting point. With the change, that won't happen anymore, resulting in a direct loss, while also losing the double Bestial Wrath every 5 minutes after for another gain. This is an effective loss of two Bestial Wraths on the average fight, a noticable loss.

It also reduces us two Glaive Tosses, two a Murder of Crows (if you still use it,) and two Dire Beast/Fervors over the fight which still add up to a net loss. The loss of two extra Dire Beasts for example is a 30 second loss of uptime on the effect for BM which is pretty big.

Will Hunters receive compensation for this change? Hunters are already not doing so hot when it comes to PvE performance, pulling in middle pack damage AT BEST in our best spec and being pretty much the low men on the totem pole in the other two specs. An extra nerf without compensation is crippling, especially when the nerfs hit Beast Mastery harder than Survival and Marks when Beast is our best hope at putting out decent PvE numbers currently.

Lore

Community Manager

#383 - June 27, 2013, 7:33 p.m.

They probably have nothing concrete to report for the time being and don't want to start listing ideas they are considering for fear of people seeing it as changes they will do. Afterwards you get the angry posts for changes that did and did not make the list.

All we can really do is keep posting feedback and hope for the best.

This is pretty much the case, but just to hopefully ease your minds a bit, we do intend on compensating Hunters for the change to Readiness and its impact on overall DPS (particularly in PvE).

We've mentioned this a few times recently, but it's important to remember how the PTR process works. For the first several weeks, we're focused primarily on changes to mechanics: adjusting how spells work in general. This can be a lengthy process, and in most cases it honestly just doesn't make sense for us to worry about DPS balance if we're not yet sure that the mechanics changes are even going to stick.

What we'd rather do is get all the groundwork done -- the basic changes -- so that we have a complete idea of how everybody's spells are going to work before we start tweaking how much damage those spells do, or how much healing, and so on. Once that's done, we'll do what we call a "numbers pass" and make sure everyone's still able to do their jobs effectively.

If you (and this goes for any class) feel you're not doing enough damage, or you're not survivable enough, or your healing output isn't cutting it, etc., then sure, let us know! That's valuable feedback, and it's definitely not falling on deaf ears. We just aren't at the point where we're implementing changes based on that feedback just yet :)

Lore

Community Manager

#394 - June 27, 2013, 8:20 p.m.

Appreciate your comment Lore.

But can you at least make it known to the devs about the state of Arcane Shot vs signatures in 5.4?

The gap between them is pretty minuscule after the change, especially in the case of Beast Mastery. We're seeing identical results by not using Kill Command, the spec's core rotational ability, entirely.

Has already been brought to them, actually :) We don't have anything to report yet (for the reasons I mentioned before) but it's something they're aware of and would like to fix.