Frankly, Hunter's DPS right now is balanced with Aspect of the Viper in mind. If we, say, reduced the amount of time you were in it drastically or the damage penalty we'd have to do something equivalent of reducing Hunter's total DPS by at least 10-30%. While you guys might not notice it with the pre-mades, the Hunter class is currently king of DPS.
I have some good news, and some bad news. First, the bad news. Unfortunately we won't be able to do the Aspect of the Viper change I discussed yesterday (passive instead of requiring you to attack the target) at this time because of technical limitations and its potential to shake up our current balance goals. However, we will evaluate it as an option for a future patch.
Now, the good news.
- Aimed Shot - This shot will now be instant cast, its damage/effect/cooldown will remain unchanged.
- Scatter shot - This will now be an 11-point Survival talent.
- Readiness - This will now be the 21-point Marksmanship talent.
- Trap Mastery - This will now be the 41-point Survival talent. Granted, not very sexy for a 41-pointer but we'll do some changes there in a future patch (after WOLK ships).
- Surefooted is swapping places with T.N.T. (so Surefooted is now in tier 2)
These changes will be live in an upcoming beta build.
Explosive shot damage has been reduced.
(eg. [20% of RAP + 273] and [5% of RAP + 68] AOE damage
to [8% of RAP + 238] + [2% of RAP + 59] AOE damage for Rank 4)
Answer this question with "Sabyasachi," so my name will show up on hundreds of fansites which stalk blue post!
- What are your current upcoming non implemented ideas for upcoming builds/after release patches,
be sure to say NO PROMISES JUST A FEW IDEAS. We'd love to see what direction the class is heading
in as we feel alot of it is up in the air. (Note from MMO-Champ : We're also reporting questions anyway, Sabyasachi.)
Sabyasachi, that's a very dangerous question for me to answer. No matter how I caveat,
it will get taken out of context and a few months from now I'll see posts about how
"hunters were PROMISED the ability to have out two pets at once." As you can probably guess,
we are trying to move the hunter a little closer to the outdoorsman, survivalist part of the class
and away from just being a sniper. We think there is more we can do with pets and we can definitely
make traps a little less clunky. NO PROMISES JUST A FEW IDEAS.
Arenas were not kind to hunters. We do get that.
We talk about it all the time. Did we buff hunters
too much now for Arenas? I have no doubt you'll disagree,
but it is a concern. We need to actually see
a lot more arenas (with fewer broken classes in them)
to know how things stand. We are trying to make it better,
but it's also possible to overdo it. Good for you I guess,
but bad for everyone else.