World of Warcraft

[The Dreaming]

You may notice that this thread has gotten a lot LESS traffic since wrath came out. That should be telling you something.

(We are all very very busy)

[Nav]

The graphics engine's looking really nice in Wrath, I'm almost tempted to start playing again, but levels 68-70 took me a solid 13 hours of play each, rested. The levels are going to be absolutely huge near the cap and I'm not sure I want to invest all that effort only to have nothing to do but grind rep at 80 because I don't have enough time to raid and I don't enjoy PvP in WoW.

[Sorus]

I can't imagine ever getting bored in WoW - there's ALWAYS something to do. As for leveling from 70-80, I'm getting there much faster than I got from 60-70.



Most of you are probably sick of hearing about my obsession with Gezzarak the Huntress, but I was successful tonight.



That's her summon animation - pretty cool, eh?

[I'm Murrin]

Very nice - how'd you manage it?

[lucimay]

omg !!! YOU GOT IT!!! YAHOOOOODEY!!

[Sorus]

Very nice - how'd you manage it?

Well, for the last two levels I took haste gear whenever it was offered as a quest reward, no matter how otherwise useless it was.

That was enough to get my passive haste rating to about 500.

I also had the Thorny Rose Brooch from a quest reward, which gives an additional 212 haste for 20 seconds, and the engineering glove 'enchant' that gives 340 for 8 seconds. Plus a standard haste potion, which gives 400 for 15 seconds. PLUS the food that gives a buff of 40.

That wasn't enough, but it was close.

So I went to the AH and replaced any armor that didn't have a haste rating.

That put my passive rating at about 750.

There's about 8-10 seconds between when you summon her and the first teleport. Not enough.

You have to pop all your cooldowns the instant she teleports and hit tame the instant she rematerializes.

If you miss it by a second it's over because even though the window between the second and third teleport is about the same, you won't have enough health left by that time.

I got her on the third try last night.

[edit] Congrats on 80!

[I'm Murrin]

You got it down to less than ten seconds, then? Very nice. I guess you'll be holding on to that gear set for a while, heh.

[Sorus]

Nah, aside from the trinket and one of the rings, most of it isn't good for general use, at least for me. A lot of caster gear, cloth and leather. I lost 5K health and a good amount of DPS while I was wearing it.

Couldn't see any reason to keep it; though haste is certainly useful, the other stats didn't make up for it.

If spirit wolves were still tamable I might give it a try - which would require getting the spell down to 8 seconds or less. But they aren't, and it's just as well - I'm out of stable space.

[I'm Murrin]

For reference, the upcoming Hunter nerfs.

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 we’re 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.

* Steady Shot – now only gains 10% of attack power as damage (down from 20%).
* 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.
* Readiness – no longer affects the cooldown of Bestial Wrath.
* 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.
* Kill Shot – cooldown reduced to 15 sec (from 35 sec).
* Kindrid Spirits – now only grants 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
* Serpent’s Swiftness – now only grants 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet.
* All hunter pet abilities with a cooldown longer than 30 sec have been moved off the global cooldown.
* Growl— threat generation increased by 20% (same for Voidwalker Torment).
* Call of the Wild – now benefits only the hunter and his or her pet.
* Rake and Scorpid Poison – slightly nerfed to bring them into line with other pet abilities.
* 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 don’t have to swap around what you are tracking as much.
* 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 did say these are not all the hunter changes we're working on. Some we haven't quite worked out yet and others (one exciting one in particular concerning ammo) won't be ready until Ulduar or so.

We think MM was too high and BM was way too high. Survival is probably a little low. We are looking at buffing Survival, possibly through Explosive Shot, but we haven't finalized that yet.

The Deterrence change is defintely something we'll need to see in action on the PTR.

I don't want to do a disservice to all the good PvP feedback by attempting to boil it down too much. However, in general a lot of hunters were concerned about being able to do damage as much as they were concerned about being able to survive damage. We don't expect the Deterrence change to solve the former problem obviously. We're still working on that one, but we wanted to go ahead and announce what changes we have now so that you guys can be chewing on them.

Nerfing classes is never fun. It means that our initial tests and estimates didn't play out in the real world, which is a failing on our part, not anything the players did wrong. While buffing is a lot more fun, we think we'd get to crazy land too quickly by trying to make current BM dps the new benchmark. That would mean touching virtually every other class and spec as well as many encounters. While it might produce more positive PR in the short-term, it's a ton more work in the long-term that we would rather spend on new content or other problem areas.

Also, the sky is not falling. We're posting here so we can get feedback. Threats of rerolling or that sort of melodrama aren't really giving us any information we need. I can understand while you might want to vent a little bit, but posts with nothing but QQ aren't helpful.

blue.mmo-champion.com/28/13275172587-upcoming-hhunter-changes.html

[Sorus]

Hmm... disappointing, but not completely unexpected. As long as my cats can still hold aggro I won't complain too much. Volley will still be decent, especially if I can raise my crit rating.

[Moxinomal]

Meet the newest addition to your server.

I got bored and decided to make a toon theree.

[I'm Murrin]

Oh it just had to be the pink mad scientist hair didn't it

[Moxinomal]

I wouldn't expect anything else from Mox.

[Sorus]

Welcome to the guild!

[wayfriend]

Just wanted to say I saw the World of Warcraft episode on Southpark a couple nights ago, and thought it was the funniest thing ever. Now I know what you guys do...

[Sorus]

I'm going to have to watch that one of these days...

Especially since I am now wondering what it is we do - or at least what the South Park-watching world thinks we do.

[Gadget nee Jemcheeta]

Listen, I'll admit I didn't read the thread. It's 68 pages long. Is there a consolidated list of KW members and the servers they play on?

[Sorus]

Most of us are on The Scryers realm. Here's the guild page:

www.thewatchguild.ihugny.com/phpBB3/

[Moxinomal]

/joined

[Gadget nee Jemcheeta]

Is this a US or EU server? :)