I'm not sure what kind of response you're looking for. Tahma makes some well-thought-out points and from there the thread quickly deteriorates into rerolling plans or conspiracy theories.

I sometimes respond to shorter questions or points because they just take less time to respond to than many lists of issues. I'll try to quickly address a few of Tahma's original points though.

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Q u o t e:
Hunter Survivability

As it stands, cloth mages, warlocks and priests can live better than us in arena, and that’s sad. Your excuse to this has always been we wear mail, yet people wearing cloth or leather have way better surv than hunters. Deterrence needs to be put on a much lower cool down, try 2 minutes, and also work against magic. Lev had a great post about letting Deterrence reduce chance on hit by magic/physical by 50% for 10 seconds, that’s a great idea. It does not require us to have our faces to them, it helps us VS magic and is more useful than what we have now.

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We think survival against magic is a legit concern, and unfortunately gets overshadowed by (some) hunters concerns versus melee. We are discussing changing Deterrence.

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Q u o t e:
Aspect Of The Beast

I think its quiet useless to add a melee buff to this aspect *or to the class in general*, we have enough key bindings ( more than any other class in this game ) on an already difficult class for arena. Make it SIMPLE GC, not complex. AotD = melee+range aspect and AotV = regain mana. The end. AoTD should also benefit from the 10% melee buff. Do not gimp out AotD’s AP boost or dodge boost, leave them as they’re now on beta and simply add 10% melee buff to it. Not sure if this will make it to WoTLK Live since I hear it was taken out of the game. Hunters don't need melee buff anyways, we need ways to get OUT of melee!

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We're not sure what we're going to do with Beast, but as you said, for now we basically consider the choice at 80 to be Dragonhawk vs. Viper.

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Q u o t e:
Dismantle

I would like to hear from you GC what your idea was behind giving rogues this ability. You’ve already nerfed every single ability we had vs a rogue.

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I think discussion of this one would end up taking over the whole thread. Bottom line is we wanted to give rogues a cool new ability. Many of their new abilities for LK were very situational (though honestly this one is too).

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Q u o t e:
Disengage

The leap you take is not nearly enough to allow you to recover from the snare spam and have a chance to do anything. As i've seen so far, when you leap back, you're snared, and still can't move fast enough, you simply get blinked into, interceped, shadowstepped, and are back to where you started, being in melee range for another 30 seconds...Add Masterscall into Disengage and remove the pet need, making it give us 4 seconds of immunity while we leap back so we can get away and stand a chance.

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As I have explained before, the slow leap that occurs when snared is a bug. It shouldn't remove the snare, but the leap itself should not be slow.

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Q u o t e:
Unfinished Survival Tree

This simply is not acceptable, simple as that, their abilities need to be finished so they we can see what we have, and can discuss *or try to discuss* with you the issues with it, not after you release the game, then make hunters wait 7 months for you to "patch" us with the ability, this will simply drag for too long and should never happen. Many hunters are unhappy about this, as am I. Finish our class, focus on it more so than others, I don't think they need help, except for shamans, the rest are FINE the way they are and have got tons of amazing abilties to make them even better.

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This issue is misunderstood a lot. In our minds *nothing* is finished. We always believe we can improve on every aspect of the game some more. If we really thought something was unfinished it, we wouldn't ship it. I hope players don't use our willingness to talk candidly about our future plans or things we'd like to change as ammo that we would ship something unfinished, or you'll just find less of this talk in the future. There is more we want to do with Survival, but that isn't the same thing as somehow giving you a half-baked tree.

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Q u o t e:
Freezing Arrow

I really don't know one hunter who PVP's who likes how this ability works. When compared to other levle 80 abilities, this one is seriously lacking. You're making way too complex of a mechanic for something that should be so simple. Remember, SIMPLE, remove arm timer from it, and make it shootable to any target you target, not shoot into the ground, and hope someone is dumb enough to not see the entire animation of your cast + see the trap on the ground and still run over it. Our CC is already enouhg of a joke as it stands, on LONG 30 second CD, don't make this ability a joke too.

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Freezing Arrow is a way to remotely deploy traps. It is not intended to be an unavoidable, instant cast, long range, instant effect, 10 sec crowd control that you can reapply every 30 sec. I can understand why you or any class would want an ability that reliably and unpreventably takes a player out for 33% of their time though. :)

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Q u o t e:
Traps and Damage

Our traps really need to go back to how they were, they should have a chance to break on damage, not break on any damage. I don't care if you can't figure out how to fix pet AI, we'll simply make a macro to call our pets off and put them on passive when we throw a trap. Revert this back to how it was. Even tho IMO you should really, with all the wealth you have as a company, be able to fix a simple pet AI to not attack frozen targets, not 1 year from now, but before we hit 80.

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Sorry, but we care. WoW is a game with 11 million subscribers and we have to be very careful when making changes for the most hardcore players that have the potential to confuse so many more casual gamers. By their very nature, these players aren't as active on forums etc. to even understand the change and certainly aren't making macros to call off fheir pets. In their minds, traps would suddenly go from something that worked (because Fluffy wouldn't break them) to something that didn't. We still plan on implementing them the way that you want, but it will just take a little more time.

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Q u o t e:
EDIT: Adding to the recent post on GC calling our pleas for change and our issues "theorycrafting" Are you serious? PLEASE! Tell me the difference between a hunter at 70 and one at 80? FREEZING ARROW? Dodge % being the same as it was before you nerfed us at 70 and not scaling up like it should of to 80? Will any of the issues above go away with leveling to 80? Honestly?

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I understand your point, but we still are always going to be very skeptical of players who claim that they are able to see into the future. I have acknowledged that hunters were way too underpowered in Arenas for far too long. We don't want to see that happen again. We made some changes to try and address that. I understand they are not the changes you wanted or would have made if our roles were reversed. :)

To name just a few examples, we think the hunter mana situation is in much better shape now, we think your base attacks are not so dependent on shot rotation mods or macros, and we think Disengage is a button worth pushing. We tried some Arena maps with fewer LOS-blocking elements and no safe starting rooms. We gave pets some cool abilities like Roar of Sacrifice and decent crowd control.

I know that the rest of this thread will be filled with counterarguments for why these are terrible ideas or won't work for whatever reason. That is the way these things go, where you need to argue from your point of view. So ultimately, it is probably best if I just say we want hunters to be good in Arenas and are willing to make changes that perhaps we weren't willing to make before to get to that point.

P.S. I have no problem with theorycrafting in general. It's not a dirty word. I just always try to remind players that just because you see a ranked order of what dps every spec can do generated by someone's spreadsheet (even if it was a very good spreadsheet) does not mean that will match reality.

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Q u o t e:
Im just hesitant to brush off the opinions of Beta hunters as much as has been happening. I mean, I know its hard to get definite answers from something small like that, but ball-parks are always good. Isnt that what Betas are for?

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We don't at all brush off the opinions of beta hunters, or good or knowledgeable hunters in general. I want to make that very clear. I didn't intend at all for my responses to be interpreted as QQ MOAR. We discuss these issues quite a bit. I replied to a couple of hunter posts today because I had at least two discussions at work where a fellow designer said almost verbatim "Hey, did you read that PvP hunter thread? I thought they made some good points."

You should never interpret the lack of a blue response such as "Good idea -- we'll get that in right away," to mean you're being blown off.