I’ll more than likely be posting anything new I have to say over there. So you know where to find me

I also have started and finished my final year project for this course. We were given a choice of 40 or so possible projects and we had to submit a short list of projects we’d like to do. I was allocated creating a Sudoku Solver. The project started in September and finished in late March. I had to learn a fair amount over that time in order to create a solver that would implement the more advanced solving techniques. I also then ported my solver over to work on Android, another steep learning curve. Although I say I’ve not enjoyed my course, I still enjoy programming when I’m given a specific task. I’m pretty happy with how my project turned out and hope to get a good mark for it. Maybe I’ll go into detail about my program some time.

Another thing that’s changed over the last 15 months has been my weight. Anyone that knows me will tell you that this time last year, I was a very porky guy. In July last year I was at 255lbs. Enough was enough and I hit the gym and sorted my diet out. Nearly 10 months later, I’m now 191lbs (a loss of 64lbs) and a lot happier for it. I still have a little way to go (about 20lbs or so I reckon), but exercise is now a fairly large part of my life. This is something that I’ll be posting about for sure. I’m sick of reading articles online about weight loss being an impossible dream, or that you need some miracle product to make it happen. So hopefully my own personal experience and knowledge I have learnt over the last 10 months will  in some way help tip the balance towards sensible and sound advice.

I’ve also quit playing WoW. WoW was quite a big part of my life, but in September 2010, I stopped playing. I’ve had the odd month back on, but I am no way able to play like I used to. I can’t commit to being able to have 4 nights a week free for 3 hours. I just can’t have that level of commitment to a game anymore. I still however keep in touch with a few of the people from my brilliant guild. If  it wasn’t for the people in Inpakt, I doubt I would even have those odd months of re-actived subscription.

Anyway, it’s getting fairly late now and I need to be up and ready at a reasonable time tomorrow so that getting up for my exam on wednesday won’t be torture. Expect some more posts soon

We’re all used to the idea of making sure the tank keeps aggro in our raids. On the face of things it seems quite simple: make sure the tank has more threat than everyone else. However, this isn’t actually 100% correct, as there are a few more details behind the curtain than you’d first suspect. But firstly, let’s talk about how threat is generated.

For damage, it breaks down to a very simple 1:1 scale: 1 damage equals 1 threat. If you hit an enemy for 3,000 damage, that’s 3,000 threat. As a side note, Patch 3.0 changed it to 1 damage = 100 threat. The reason for this change was to avoid slow floating point computation and instead use less computationally expensive integer calculations. However, this change only changes the internal workings and a 1:1 ratio generates the same results and theory.

For healing, it breaks down to 2:1 (or 1:0.5). This means that for every point of healing done, the healer will generate half that as threat. A 5,000 heal will mean 2,500 threat. This threat is of course spread amongst all the enemies in the current combat. If there were 2 enemies with the previous example, the healer would get 1,250 threat on each enemy. Although this sounds like the healer will have a lot less threat because the coefficient is much lower, healers are generally healing a lot more than you are dealing damage. Of course, there are class and spec specific modifiers to these threat calculations.

This all sounds simple enough, but there is one more thing to consider. Most people assume that having more threat than the tank will cause you to pull aggro. This isn’t actually true. To pull aggro from a tank, you actually need 110% of the threat of the tank if you are in melee range. To pull aggro at range, you need 130% threat of the tank. This is one reason why classes such as Hunters and Mages should always use their threat clearing abilities often, and not just when you’ve pulled aggro. Here’s a simple scenario to illustrate why:

We have the following threat table during a boss fight:

1st Warrior Tank 1,000,000 threat

2nd Hunter 1,250,000 threat

3rd Elemental Shaman 1,220,000 threat

4th Priest healer 1,150,000 threat

etc

Although the Hunter, Elemental Shaman and Priest are above the tank’s threat, they are still under the amount needed to actually pull aggro. Now, if the hunter pulls aggro, the boss is going to come to him and munch his face off. No problem, the hunter has feign death. The problem however, is that the boss is now in melee range of the Elemental Shaman and Preist. To pull aggro in melee range, you only need 110% threat. This will cause the boss to aggro to the warlock and the preist, munching their faces off and in all likelihood, cause a wipe.

This is one of the main reasons why you need to be aware of pulling aggro. You may well have a threat dumping ability, but it can still cause the boss to destroy the rest of the raid should they come into melee range.

Of course, in a raid you shouldn’t ever pull aggro as you should threat dump early and often.

That’s enough groveling from me today, I hope to have that guide up sometime tomorow.

After having to wait an extra 11 hours of maintenance on patch day (I hate being on Cyclone), I was finally able to log in and see the Coliseum in all its glory. There’s a real sense of buzzing activity at the Coliseum; not only from the large amount of NPCs there, but also the hordes of players. It’s been a good while (since the Sunwell) that there was an added quest hub that also housed the latest end game dungeons. One of the first things I did when I logged on (other than spending my 72nd talent point), was to get a group together for the Trial of the Champion.

Seeing that my guild is Ulduar geared, we went straight for the Heroic mode without reading any tactics. I had read about the bosses in passing on wow.com and other blogs but I never delved deep enough to look for the tactics. I’ll say now that it was because I didn’t want it ruined; not for the fact I’m lazy. We got a group together and headed in (once we realised which entrance was the right one).

I already had in my mind that it would be on par with how Magister’s Terrace was when it was added late in TBC. I was expecting something challenging but also some creative boss fights. I was expecting it to be a step up from the current Heroics and dungeons and give us competent raiders something complicated to enjoy. Oh, how I was disappointed.

To actually get the instance going, you have to endure a 3 minute or so introduction of your group to the on-looking crowd. I wouldn’t mind if it did this on your first time there, but doing it every single time gets a bit wearing. The first boss is a jousting related boss. You first have to fight 3 waves of 3 adds on horseback. Once dispatched, you then have to fight 3 of the opposing faction’s Champions, also on horseback. A lot of people moaned about the jousting boss but to be fair, it is the coliseum after all. What would the point of those dailies had been if we never had to use them in a dungeon of some kind? Once you have bested them on horseback, you then have to make the transition to normal combat of tanking, healing and dpsing. The transition is actually the hardest part of the entire fight as even good groups can make a sloppy transition. This phase is mostly a tank and spank and even if you do wipe, you can run in, buff up and start from the last phase.

The second boss/bosses starts with 3 sets of 3 adds. You can also get one of two bosses; either Eadric the Pure or Argent Confessor Paleteress. Once the 3 waves are down you then enter combat with the boss. Eadric the Pure is a fairly easy boss and is mostly a tank and spank fight. He does occasionally cast a radiating light that requires you to turn your character away from looking at him. If you do see the light, it dazes you and causes you to lose control of your character for a short while. He can also throw his hammer at you after stunning you. Other than those 2 abilities, he’s fairly easy.

Paleteress however had so much promise to be an interesting encounter. After you get her low enough, she casts a memory and makes you fight one of the many (25 in total) previous bosses in WoW. When I read about this boss originally I thought that we would have to fight a scaled down version of that boss with it’s abilities and use the appropriate tactics. If for example you had Hakkar, there would also be some Sons of Hakkar in the room and you would have to get yourself poisoned for the life leech. However, instead of doing this, Blizzard essentially just gave us a boss with the same abilities but with existing skins. No matter what the nightmare looks like, it requires the same tactic of nuking and not a lot else. Once killed, you just need to dps her down.

The last boss in here is the Black Knight. If you’re familiar with the Coliseum, you will probably have already done the quests involving the Black Knight. Well, he returns in this dungeon and interupts your applause from the crowd to be one final unexpected test. Of course, he’s actually fairly easy. There are 3 phases and none of them are particularly difficult. Once he’s finally killed, that’s it.

I know for sure that I’m not the only one feeling disappointed by this instance. It’s incredibly short and nothing in it stands out as particularly different other than the jousting, and that’s just a bit of a gimmick they had to include. The Paleteress encounter could have been so much more interesting rather than a fairly pathetic boss. I feel a little let down by the whole thing considering the amount of hype that was built around it. After doing the 5 man dungeon, I wasn’t expecting a lot from the 10 and 25 man raid. However, they’re a great deal better than the 5 man dungeon and I’ll be writing about them later this week.

Well, if you are a Hunter on one of the Cyclone servers, you may find that you have a 72nd talent point to spend. After the 9 hour extended maintenance, I finally logged in to find that I had an extra talent point to use. I was 4/14/53 but it said that I had an unspent talent point to use. I also had an unspent talent point to use on my offspec which I have yet to spend. Here’s a screenshot of my armoury at the time. I know I’m not the only hunter on my server (Terenas) to have this extra talent point either. Let’s hope it stays this way .

Weird or what?

Halo Wars is a rare breed. Real Time Strategy games have generally fallen short on the console format which could explain why they are far and few between. However, Halo Wars shows us how it could be done and definitely goes a long way at setting the standard.

Firstly, the controls are nearly perfect. Controls in an RTS can make or break the game. There’s nothing more frustrating than having your arse handed to you by the AI purely because they don’t have to deal with dodgy cameras and jarring controls. Ensemble have done a great job in making the controls feel consistent and simple. Although this is a great thing for simple play on the lower difficulty settings, some more complicated controls for ordering specific groups of units wouldn’t have been a bad thing. Whilst playing through the campaign I repeatedly got annoyed from not being able to select a group of units, bind them to a key and then be able to select them on the fly. With that aside, the controls are tolerable and efficient.

The campaign and main story of the game isn’t terribly exciting or revolutionary, and can sometimes even feel a little disjointed. The variation in different units you are allowed change from mission to mission, leaving you feeling agitated by the fact that you aren’t allowed Grizzlies, air units or even ODST units. On occasion it allowed me to upgrade my infantry to full only to them let me know that it was mostly wasted as the ODSTs weren’t available. In one mission you are allowed to control a pair of Grizzly tanks that are seriously awesome, but they aren’t available in any other missions. It’s like they’ve let me sample the finest wine but then not brought me the bottle.

The actual story of the campaign is fairly generic. The characters are mostly copy and paste from other titles, with the main character being a complete douche. I honestly felt a stronger bond with my lunch than I did with Sergeant J. Forge and actually smiled a little when he dies at the end (whoops, spoiler); like “a true hero does”. The romance between him and Anders was completely shallow and never developed on, nor were their backgrounds or personalities. But hey, at least the missions actually make up for the story.

The missions are widely varied and it never feels like you’re playing the same mission twice. Each and every mission has a unique twist on it that makes it feel different to the others. Whether you’re deploying and defending tanks to disrupt a laser, destroying a half built scarab or simply cleaning the hull of the ship from the Flood, they all bring something different to the table. But like I said before, the only problem with this is that they keep introducing new units for a specific mission and then take them away as if they never existed, only to appear in Skirmish matches. But what also makes the single player re-playable are the skulls that are scattered throughout the missions.

The skulls; once collected, act as game modifiers. They can affect the game by making the enemies harder without upping the actual difficulty by giving enemies more health or by removing your minimap. They can also be used to make the game easier by giving you more supplies or lowering the time it takes for you to build units. They can also be used purely for fun, such as having scarabs shoot rainbow beams of love. The skulls that actually affect gameplay also affect the multiplier on your mission score, giving you another reason to play through the campaign. The skulls add a lot of re-playability to the campaign and can make some annoying missions (I’m looking at you Arcadia) really fun.

Like with any good RTS, there’s a Skirmish mode in which you can play against other real players or AI. XBox Live enables you to be beaten over and over by random people you don’t know, or you can always get beaten hard by your friends. The Skirmish mode also brings consistency to units available and lets you also take charge of the Covenant. Although you do get the choice between these two sides, I would have liked the oppurtunity to play as the Flood. I don’t think it would have been an unreasonable task as there are already a variety of Flood units in the game.

Although the story is lacking, this game is definitely fun. The cinematics in the game are some of the best I’ve seen. It’s rare for me to watch through cinematics a second/third or even fourth time whilst going through a game, but I still find that cinematic with the Spartans at the end breathtaking every time.

The cinematics are great. The controls are great. And most importantly, the game is fun. It might not be the best RTS ever made, but it definitely shines through as one of the best console RTSs made. Amazingly fun and enjoyable… even if it could be improved with a keyboard and mouse.

]]> http://desperatelybored.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/halo-wars/feed/ 0 loztaylor HaloWarsCut2 http://desperatelybored.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/hunter-qa-analysed/ http://desperatelybored.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/hunter-qa-analysed/#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:01:57 +0000 loztaylor http://desperatelybored.wordpress.com/?p=398 ]]> I said a few days ago when the Hunter Q&A was out that I’d be doing a piece on my personal take on it. I should have wrote this a few days ago but alas, here it is.

There are certain aspects of the Hunter class that are really emphasized in the Q&A. A lot of the issues brought up are ones that I and a lot of other hunters are aware of and are concerned about. For a start, Beast Mastery is too low at the moment even in regards to it’s more simplistic play style and that needs to be addressed. The concern however is that if a signature shot is put into the BM tree, it will just play similarily to MM and SV with just swapping Chimera Shot/Explosive Shot with BM Shot. The other route to take would be to buff BM pets, but then that raises the concern of them being too tough in PvP but also gives the problem of losing most of your dps in PvE encounters when your pet dies. A tough one to call indeed.

Ammo is also another item of keen interest at the moment so it’s not surprising to see it raised in the Q&A. It’s nice to find out that the delay is a technical issue rather than a design issue. I think they have very clear ideas about what they want to do with Ammo (something extremely similar to something myself and many other hunters suggested nearly 3 years ago on the main forums (I would link the post but it’s been buried and lost to the nether)) and it’s a change I welcome. I can understand why they’d be reluctant as it would be another Hunter only item. Most ranged weapons are itemized just for Hunters, so to include another Hunter only item on loot tables could be a concern. With that said however, many other classes whore the loot tables with stuff that can only be used by them (I’m looking at you healy Plate gear). I’m looking forward to the change so it’s nice to see it discussed again.

The Hunter “Dead Zone” was brought up aswell. I personally don’t know why they brought this up because it’s not a problem. Like Ghostcrawler mentioned, there used to be an actual dead zone of 3 yards where we couldn’t melee or do ranged dps. Now however, it’s ranged or melee. I think the solution isn’t to let us use ranged attacks in the melee zone, but rather give us a few more melee attacks centered around escaping and getting to a more comfortable distance. This is purely in the interests of balancing us for PvP and Arena, as there’s a serious under representation of Hunters there. An interesting idea might be to give us a skill that removes the lower bound of distance required by ranged attacks to 0 for our next attack or 10 seconds. Give it a minute cooldown or something and it won’t affect the PvE game.

One of the question’s response did surprise me a little. When asked about the possibility of moving Hunters away from mana, it seems like there’s going to be a discussion on this at Blizzcon. Mana has been an issue for Hunters for a very long while and this isn’t the first time Hunters and Energy have been discussed together. Back before the game even shipped and was on beta, Hunters were originally planned to have Energy. As we all know however, Hunters were given mana. I’m looking forward to the Blizzcon discussion on this subject.

They also skip over how they feel that Hunters are too cooldown limited. As a Survival Hunter, I know this more than any of the other specs so can certainly agree. Haste really only affects Auto Shot and Steady Shot so it can feel like a wasted stat at times. With that said however, it’s needed to hit the soft cap on the Steady Shot to allow room on the Explosive Shot cooldown, inadvertantly propping up our dps. Haste feels important but also rubbish at the same time. This is another thing that’s getting discussed at Blizzcon.

One final thing that does look good is that they’re finally going to revamp the Pet bar. They should be adding in a lot more available slots on the Pet bar which will be extremely beneficial. They also plan on sorting out abilities that are swapping to auto cast (such as cower) that made leveling extremely annoying. They also discuss the possibilities of doing away with the Stables and having a more Warlock based pet system, something we’re pretty close to already anyway.

I think Blizzard have done well with the whole Q&A series, and I think it’s been beneficial for both Blizzard and the players. I feel like there’s a more distinct direction with the class and it’s nice to see that Blizzard have the same concerns as many of the players. I think Blizzcon this year will be exceptionally interesting.

Hunter Q&A with Ghostcrawler and the World of Warcraft Community Team

Community Team: We’d like start this Q&A off by asking a question that players of all classes often ask in regard to the very purpose of their class. In this case, we’re looking specifically at the hunter.

Q: Where do hunters fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do we see them going from this point forward?

A: We solved a lot of perennial hunter problems in Wrath of the Lich King, from the shot clipping problems of Steady Shot, to bringing Survival back to life, and making pet choice and training a lot more meaningful and hopefully enjoyable. Going forward we have several objectives we still want to accomplish. We want to make sure hunters in PvP are as good in Arenas as they are in Battlegrounds. We think their damage is sufficient, so we want to focus on their survival and crowd control. We want to make sure their PvE utility is as good as their dps (especially making traps live up to their potential for crowd control). We want to resolve what a hunter is supposed to do in melee (Raptor Strike? Disengage?).

We want to clean up some of the clunkiness that still exists around pet control (both the UI itself and what the pet does on the battlefield). We think hunters have a good niche as the only real ranged damage-dealer that focuses on (mostly) physical damage based on a weapon rather than cast-time based spells. We just want to make sure they live up to that niche.

Q: It was stated that we had intended to remove consumable ammunition from the game for patch 3.1.0, However, due to certain functionality not being ready in time, the change was put on hold. Is there any new information in regards to the functionality of non-consumable ammunition, and also a possible estimate as to when hunters may expect to see these changes implemented?

A: From a technical standpoint, what happened is that the quiver is considered a bag just like other bags on the character but also, most critically, those in the bank. In order to remove ammo we would have to move the location of all of a character’s bank slots on the database that stores all of the World of Warcraft characters, which would be a risky thing to do in the middle of an expansion, and could result in “missing stuff” issues if something went wrong. It was just one of those last-minute show-stoppers.

We still want to make ammo more of a gear choice than a consumable. We’re not sure if this would be as simple as getting the 125 dps arrows to upgrade your 120 dps arrows, or if you would do things like swap between your fire and poison arrows??? but that kind of thing is definitely on the table.
I’m not sure when we can do it right. It’s not going to be for 3.2 unfortunately.

Q: On the topic of hunter ammunition, currently, it becomes quite expensive for hunters to purchase Mammoth Cutters and Saronite Razorheads, especially given how much many hunters use in a given week. Are there any plans to reduce the cost, by potentially looking into the materials required to craft both types of ammunition?

A: The problem with upgrading hunter ammo currently is how we work the progression. We don’t want to drop ammo on bosses for what I hope are obvious reasons so long as they are consumed. We need to have ammo improve as other gear improves, however, or the hunter overall starts to fall behind. Therefore there has to be some barrier that stops freshly leveled hunters from getting the best ammo while letting cutting-edge hunters procure it. In Burning Crusade, we handled this through a reputation grind, but it still wasn’t a very satisfying answer. In Wrath of the Lich King, we went with Engineer-crafted ammo and more recently changed the way ranged weapons scaled so that they would keep improving even if the ammo did not.

For 3.2 we lowered the cost of the ammo quite a bit — only 4 gold for a stack to manufacture. If you were paying 50 gold a night, that should drop to say 16 gold a night. Long-term this won’t be a problem because arrows won’t be consumed.

Q: While we had previously reduced the range of the hunter’s dead zone, it’s still brought up as a concern. Is it possible to remove the dead zone completely? If this is not something under current consideration, what are the current design philosophies and balance reasons behind keeping this particular mechanic in-game?

A: It’s possible to do so technically, but something we aren’t likely to do. Personally I think calling the current implementation a dead zone is just confusing and trying to sell the problem as worse than it is. Back in the day there was an actual distance at which neither ranged nor melee attacks would work – it was a dead zone. Currently there is just a minimum range for most ranged attacks. The way we want the hunter to work is that when you get into min range with the hunter, then the hunter needs to switch to melee, or more likely escape back to ranged distance again. We certainly don’t want the hunter to unload with both melee and ranged attacks at once – that might make them operate better at melee than range. Casters by contrast don’t have to do this, though it is often in their best interest to do so since their cast can get delayed or even interrupted by melee attacks. You can argue it’s goofy to be firing bows or rifles at point-blank range, but really it gets more into how we want the hunter (and all ranged weapon attacks) to work.

I’ll add that the melee attack issue for hunters themselves is something we keep discussing. While we are unlikely to go back to a melee-focused build for hunters, we might consider a model where hunters don’t run away most of the time but switch to melee attacks – perhaps even a single punishing attack on a cooldown before the hunter Disengaged or whatever. This would be one of those things that helped hunters feel more different than actual magic casters, and might make them care about melee weapons as more than stat sticks. Additional feedback from the community on this sort of thing would be appreciated.

Q: Would we consider allowing auto-shoot to work while moving? If there aren’t plans for that specific change, is there anything in the works that will assist hunter dps in fights where a great deal of movement becomes necessary?

A: Moving should feel like a penalty. We don’t want ranged attackers constantly circle strafing FPS-style because it confers a defensive advantage without giving up an offensive one. Moving is supposed to be bad and how you handle it is a test of your skill. We do give instant cast spells to some classes, but it should always be a dps loss when they have to focus on these exclusively. We would consider giving hunters another way to pull off an instant shot or beef up their dots, but we would want to make sure these would only be used in true long-distance movement situations. What I mean by that is we think we’ve possibly already gone too far towards balancing the Arena around instant attacks that can’t be countered before they go off.

Q: Are there any long term plans to possibly removing the need for hunters to rely on a different resource system then mana?

A: I hate to do this to you, but this is a great BlizzCon question. For these Q&As, we’d like to keep the focus on each class’s current status and short-term plans, but at BlizzCon we’ll be happy to go into some more detail on our long-term vision for them.

Q: Are there any plans to increase the benefit hunters gain from haste?

A: There are two ways to answer this question. The more general one, which applies to all classes, is that we want haste to be a useful stat. Rogues, warriors, and some casters like it currently, and we need to get it there for everyone. As I have said in several of the Q&As, some stats have just fallen away from some specs even though they routinely appears on your gear. Sometimes this happens because talents prop up other stats so much that instead of being more attractive, they feel mandatory, and the ones that aren’t supported go from sub-optimal to junk status. We need the ability to put a variety of stats on your gear. We don’t want there to be an uber stat for anyone that trumps everything else to the point at which you don’t even look at the other stats. Gear is supposed to be a choice. I’ll say again that I think the online community sometimes focuses too much on the best-in-slot mentality, to the extent at which they consider everything except those BiS items to be worth skipping over. Remember, if it improves your dps, it’s an upgrade, even if another item would improve it more. That sounds so obvious, but I think there is a tendency for some players to stop thinking that way.

Now for hunters specifically, we think the class is just too cooldown limited, which creates problems with haste. We’ve driven in that direction in order to give hunters a more interesting rotation, and to be fair, we feel like we’ve done that. But being cooldown limited isn’t necessarily a fun way for the class to play and we think it’s one of those things that makes hunters feel more like casters than like ranged-weapon users. (Hunters are casters in the sense that they’re ranged dps, but we still want the emphasis to be on the gun or bow.) More on this at BlizzCon, too.

Q: How do we feel about the current state of stings? Are there any improvements planned for the way stings work, such as removing them from a shared global cooldown (GCD)? Are there current plans to improve individual stings?

A: The best way to describe stings is we want them to feel like warlock curses. They should be a meaningful part of your rotation and something you should want to keep up. We understand that some of the stings are much more attractive than others (though to be fair, curses have a similar problem) and we need to make the less-popular stings more useful or just end up cutting them. We aren’t likely to remove any damage-dealing ability from the GCD and we’ve even taken a second look at whether we have removed too many defensive abilities from the GCD. It’s there for a reason, particularly in a client-server based game with inherent Internet lag.

Q: Beast Mastery falls behind Marksmanship and Survival in regards to DPS, especially when the pet dies, due to how much damage comes from the pet when specialized in the Beast Mastery talent tree. Do we have plans to bring the potential damage the Beast Mastery tree offers to be more on par with what’s currently possible with Survival and Marksmanship?

A: Ideally, we want Beast Mastery to be able to do competitive damage with Survival and Marksmanship. Realistically with dps classes, it’s a math problem, and one tree nearly always edges out the other ones in most situations. That doesn’t mean we stop trying, but it also means we have to be realistic about what it will take to really get the specs to within 1% dps of each other, which is sometimes the point I fear we’d need to hit.

The buffs to Catlike Reflexes and Wild Hunt were intended to boost Beast Mastery a little without causing every hunter in the game to swing back to Beast Mastery the way they all swung to Survival a few patches ago. We don’t necessarily like buffing Beast Mastery through the pet all the time. However, Beast Mastery also doesn’t have a signature attack like Chimera or Explosive Shot. At the same time, we don’t necessarily want to give them one because then Arcane Shot risks just vanishing from the hunter rotation. But, we can’t just buff Arcane Shot (unless it is very deep in Beast Mastery) because Survival and Marks use that too. See the problem? Ultimately the tree is supposed to be about pets, so we would rather make the pet easier to control and give the hunter ways to get the pet out of trouble so that they don’t face the profound dps loss of pet death. And even then, having a pet that is 50% or more of your dps is always going to have design problems, so we can’t go overboard. Beast Mastery and Demonology (and even the Unholy death knight) are going to be at a greater loss when their pet dies. That’s just the cost of having a more powerful pet.

Q: In regards to the survivability to hunter pets are there plans to make additional improvements? The resilience change should help somewhat in PvP, however in end-game PvE environments, the hunter’s pet can die pretty easily, especially given the specific encounter. One suggestion made by many hunters was to add a passive ability that healed the hunter’s pet when the hunter received a heal from a party or raid member.

A: Honestly, we aren’t happy with some of the current solutions to keeping pets alive. In particular, the area damage avoidance mechanics just don’t work well. They are frustrating for other players in a PvP setting when Bladestorm or Arcane Explosion can’t really hurt pets, and they don’t keep pets alive on a 5 million damage Mimiron missile. What we really need is a system where certain PvE attacks just don’t hurt the pet (maybe they can’t set off Mimiron mines for instance). We don’t want players to have to pay the price because the pet AI is in fact just an AI. This is something we’re working on.

We’d rather not have to come up with additional mechanics needed to heal pets or keep them alive. We’d rather just the pet didn’t die in situations where a player that can make intelligent choices wouldn’t have died. Hunters do have abilities to heal or rez pets, and those ideally should be sufficient.

Q: As a follow-up to the previous question, do we have plans to make it easier for the hunter to bring a dead pet back to life, such as reducing the casting time of the base ability?

A: We talk about this a lot, but the trade off would be a much more fragile pet. In some ways we think a system might work better where the pets were easy to kill, especially in PvP, but the hunter (or warlock) could bring them back say every 30 seconds or so without a huge loss to personal dps. But in that situation, we would nerf pet health quite a bit so that the pets would crumple quickly when focused. The death knight (especially with an unglyphed Ghoul) works a little more like this currently – they have like 12K health without the glyph. But to make this change we would have to solve the PvE pet-gibbing mechanics referenced above.

To be clear, this is a hypothetical different model than I’ve been talking about in the rest of this Q&A. I don’t want to confuse anyone by saying pets should both be hard to kill and hard to rez, and easy to kill and easy to rez.

Q: The Cunning pet-type was originally designed to be optimal for PvP use, however, most hunters feel that the Cunning pet-type falls short. How do we feel about the current state of what Cunning pets are offering, and are there any current plans to make improvements?

A: We made an effort in 3.1 to get the Cunning pets up to speed by giving them talents like Roar of Sacrifice, and normalizing all of the pet stats so that Cunning pets had the same stats as the other two types, modified by pet talents. Crabs are still fairly popular and they probably should be a Cunning pet given their crowd control ability, but the carapace also made them feel like they should be able tanks. And selfishly, I had no problem with seeing a lot of crab pets. (No, I’m not serious.)

This is something we would love to see more feedback on. Hunters in the online community tend to focus a lot on overall PvE dps or overall PvP survival and not get too much into pet comparisons. Someone theorycrafts the best pet and then hunters just go and get it instead of discussing what the other pets would need to be more competitive. To be fair, there is some of that discussion, but it’s not always easy to find, and I have looked. It’s not super high priority given some of the other hunter design issues we’re looking at, but we do want pets to be a choice.

Q: Due to the number of abilities available to hunters, many level 80 players have expressed concerns in regards to placing all necessary abilities on their action bars. Are there any improvements coming that will assist hunters with this particular issue?

A: We recognize this as a problem. We need to get more buttons off of the bar. We made some progress with streamlining say tracking and aspects, but we’re not there yet.

Q: Additionally, do we plan to expand upon the number of pet action bar slots? Due to the current number of slots available for pets, hunters frequently have to swap pet abilities in and out of their spell/ability book.

A: Yes, we definitely want to do this. The whole pet bar needs a little work. There are still some bugs relating to which abilities can be moved on or off the bar and whether they default to autocast or not. We want the bar to work much more like character action bars.

Q: Are there any plans to allow Tranquilizing Shot to play a larger role in the hunter’s arsenal?

A: Consider that on the one hand this ability just used to be for Magmadar, and on the other hand I just acknowledged above that hunters have a lot of abilities to manage. Given that, we don’t really want Tranquilizing Shot to be in your rotation like Steady Shot or even Kill Shot. It’s a bit situational, and we’re fine with that. We did make some recent efforts to make Enrages feel more like a major mechanic that you’d want to dispel the way you dispel magic and other effects.