Please update the status of Hunters on PTR

#1 - Aug. 18, 2013, 8:29 p.m.

Dear Blues,

Can you please specifically quantify exactly which of the promises that were made to Hunters regarding performance upgrades before 5.4 drops has been met to your satisfaction.

I want to be sure I am clearly understanding and not simply make false claims / assumptions about what has and has not been done.

Promises made: (edit: statements I have taken as "promises")

1. There would be compensation for the removal of readiness; can you clarify.

2. It was acknowledged that Hunter DPS was low and that this would be specifically addressed

3. It was promised that there would be work done to make significant differentiation between all three Hunter specs

4. MM was to be made viable again, or at least on par with the other specs

5. Our mechanics (things like pet patching and glitching) would be addressed (edit: this has been pushed off)

It would be very helpful for a Blue to address which of these promises were kept and provide detail on how these promises were kept. Lore made many of these promises, so perhaps he can address these questions directly.

Thank you for your time and clarification in this matter.

Lore

Community Manager

#301 - Aug. 19, 2013, 6:39 p.m.

Alright, I'll bite.

08/18/2013 01:29 PMPosted by Cortland
1. There would be compensation for the removal of readiness; can you clarify.

We've already made all of the adjustments we had planned in the wake of the Readiness nerf. Yes, this means that you'll be less effective in certain situations (such as BM burst in Arenas). That was the point.

08/18/2013 01:29 PMPosted by Cortland
2. It was acknowledged that Hunter DPS was low and that this would be specifically addressed

We're still monitoring performance and tuning appropriately, and that will continue. It's important to remember that changes to other classes will have an effect on where you stand in overall performance. Comparing 5.4 PTR Hunter DPS to, say, 5.3 Fire Mage DPS would be silly, as Fire has been brought down considerably.

08/18/2013 01:29 PMPosted by Cortland
3. It was promised that there would be work done to make significant differentiation between all three Hunter specs

Indeed, that's something we're planning to do; and as I mentioned when I first brought it up, that'll happen sometime after 5.4.

08/18/2013 01:29 PMPosted by Cortland
4. MM was to be made viable again, or at least on par with the other specs

I haven't said anything along these lines, but keeping similar specs in line with each other is always a goal of ours. That said, players will always tend to gravitate towards whatever the "best" spec happens to be in a given patch cycle, even if the differences are very minor. If Survival ends up doing even as little as 2% more damage than Marksmanship, I suspect we'll still see many claims that Marks is "not viable."

08/18/2013 01:29 PMPosted by Cortland
5. Our mechanics (things like pet patching and glitching) would be addressed (edit: this has been pushed off)

I thought I was pretty clear when I brought this up initially: there is no blanket fix to pet pathing. The vast majority of the time, it has to do with how an encounter functions or how an environment is built, and nothing to do with the pet AI at all. The issues aren't unfixable, but we need to know specifically when and where your pets are struggling. "Fix pet pathing" doesn't help us (or you).