Well, the good news is that we got Malygos down last night, the second guild on our server to do so. It was the third phase, where you are on dragons, that was giving us so much grief.
All the hunters were discussing the upcoming hunter nerf. I admit it, when I read the changes, I was gutted…if this makes it to the live servers as planned, it will remove most of our raid viability, other than one token hunter being used for misdirects.
The text of the post reads as follows:
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 were 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) Serpents Swiftness now only grants 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet. (EDIT: Still grants the current bonus to the hunter.)
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.
Improved Tracking now benefits damage to all included creature types as long as you are tracking one of them. You dont have to swap around what you are tracking as much.
13) Aspect of the Wild now raid-wide.
EDIT: The “only” on Serpent’s Swiftness meant 10% pet attack speed instead of 20%. The hunter bonus is unchanged.
I can’t tell you how sick this makes me. I could care less that they’re preserving hunter dps in pvp, since that’s not my focus…and I don’t think that hunters as a class are viable for arena, anyway. Hunters excel as raid dps, and honestly that’s what I love. It is estimated that if this is implemented in its present state, it will result in a decrease in hunter dps of about 30%.
30%. Dear god. I don’t think that hunters are overpowered in their present state. Our WWS reports show hunters in line with other top pure-dps classes, such as rogues, mages, and deathknights in AOE-friendly encounters. All of the top dps in our raids are doing something in the range of 3000-3600 dps, and differences between the top six players is slight. We have to min-max like crazy to be there.
Yes, volley was slightly overpowered, but it was in line with other AOE-capable classes. (And boy was it fun!) The statement about hunters using it to the exclusion of all else is idiotic – it is not used in raids on single mobs, that would be inefficient and silly. So we’re being faulted for all the huntards out there who can’t play their class? Ridiculous.
Steady shot is the bread and butter of hunter dps. It’s one thing to have a rotation with arcane shot, etc., when you’re fully buffed in a raid, and you have unlimited mana – but it would be terribly inefficient to use it on heroics, etc.
BM pets were doing a lot of damage…they were supposed to. If a BM hunter and his pet are two halves of a whole, then you have to have good pet damage. If we didn’t depend on a pet for our dps, we’d be MM or Survival hunters.
Meh. Pah. A plague on all your houses, developers. I feel gutted.