Ok so we have all seen the bunch of threads out there say that the hunter nerfs are way too much. 99% of the hunters out there know that we are going to be neutered when the PTR goes live. There have been countless threads showing numbers that proove we are not leaps and bounds ahead of people. What it has shown is that we don't scale with gear like others do. So we started ahead and now everyone is catching up ( and many are passing us). Yes Hunters have good dps but we are supposed to. Just like rogues, mages, and lockes are supposed to.

Can we get a response from GC saying why Bliz thinks we need 15-20% DPS reduction when just about every single raiding Hunters' IN GAME LIVE EXPERIENCE is telling us that everyone is pulling even and that we are not really out dps'ing anyone by a noticible margin? Anyone who has done even a single raid with a have decent guild knows that we are not ahead enough or scaling enough for a nerf. I do understand the BW-Readiness as does everyone. But even then some of that damage needs to go back into our instant shots for some kind of burst damage.

Oh and volley definitely does NOT need a nerf at all. We finally have an aoe worth using and everyoen wants to have it reverted to crap again. Mages do well more damage with blizzard and druids have a wicked storm as well. Maybe we should make those useless mana drains with no damage either? It costs over 1000 mana per volley and will destory our weapon in a raid if we constantly use it (cause you guys wont' fix that bug). So, yes it is balanced.

So GC are all the Hunters out there wrong? Or is there a possibility that Bliz jumped the gun and wants to swing the nerf bat way too hard and way way way too early???


Yeah I am sure I sound mad, but hell a lot of Hunters are. Those of us that are true Hunters have for the most part given up on PVP and we tune ourselves to our one niche....PVE damage. We are built horribly for PVP and we get nothing. We are built excellent and we get neutered.

Leave the flaming and trolling to other threads please.

I think GC is on holiday vacation.




Anyways, Hunters didn't get PvP nerfed. You got PvE nerfed. Arcane shot and other shots are not reduced mana cost. Who knows though. I'm not a high level Hunter.

Protip: For BM Get Go for the Throat, i can't believe you wouldn't,

---

Q u o t e:
I think GC is on holiday vacation.

---

This^
If I were GC, I'd be as far away from a computer as I could possibly be.

buff shaman

The nerf they did to ret pre-wotlk, was pretty dead on... even though every ret and his mother said it would break the class at 80.. Yet they are still doing really good and they are buffing dps in the next patch.

I would let blizz do their thing for the most part. Utility and PvP balance is more of an issue then PvE DPS atm.

Thank you GC for responding. Yes I do understand your job is extremely difficult. And I appreciate the time and effort you are putting forth. If we need to be balanced i am totally ok with that. I just don't want to see Hunters drop to the bottom of PVE because of a bunch of hybrid QQ.

---

Q u o t e:
Something else worth pointing out is the whole concept of "your mileage may vary." Not every player has the same timing, gear, situational awareness or even rotation. In many cases our calculations are based on the higher ends of the spectrum -- the damage potential generated by the best players in ideal situations. For a class like the hunter that does require a fairly high amount of skill to master that may mean that your damage didn't drop as much (because you weren't using a technique that the experts were using to coax every bit of dps out of their attacks) or your damage may drop a lot more (because the experts are able to switch to other sources of damage more readily than a less skilled player).

---

I think this point you are making here actually cuts to the heart of why experienced hunters are particularly distraught about the scale and scope of these nerfs.

If you take a close look at WHERE the "extreme" hunter damage was coming from, it was almost entirely coming from a very limited set of "broken" or clearly too powerful mechanics and/or scaling systems.

Specifically:

1. Scorpid Poison and Cat Rake doing ridiculously high percentages of the pet's and hunter's overall DPS.
2. Call of the Wild stacking where hunters and pets could achieve ludicrously high Attack Power figures.
3. Beastial Wrath + Readiness enabling hunters to stack a large amount of damage in a short amount of time (and stay Wrathed throughout buffs like heroism, for example), something that became quite obvious especially during relatively short fights like Patchwerk.

Look at any - ANY - WWS report where hunters had very high numbers and you WILL see these dynamics in action. Because the fact is it is impossible to produce the nerfworthy output WITHOUT these mechanics.

Remove and/or reduce these issues and hunter DPS drops dramatically, back to the pack with other DPS classes. And, in fact, when you consider how poorly hunters (and BM hunters in particular) scale with gear advances, "with the pack" is actually a somewhat poor place for hunters to be. We are already being passed, and will continue to be passed, by other DPS classes. BM hunters are, in effect, hit-capped and haste "capped" (at a point where haste becomes dramatically less beneficial), and that, combined with their poor scaling, spells long-term trouble for hunter DPS.

The REASON you see so many hunters worrying about the proposed nerfs, especially the core pet nerfs to attack speed and damage, and worst of all, the horrible Steady Shot nerf, is because we have already seen how our damage is affected without the Big Three I see above - and so with additional nerfs, we KNOW we will struggle. The min/maxing you refer to relies exclusively on the mechanics I mentioned above, and all you need to do to "fix" hunter DPS is to change those.

Please, I beg you, take a closer look behind the hunter numbers you are seeing, and I know you will see the importance of leaving hunter fundamentals untouched, while limiting changes to JUST those areas I mentioned above that are responsible for essentially ALL of the excess damage from hunters.

You can't test hunters in a way you would test other classes, assuming competency and skill will make it atypical situation for majority of the class.

Get a 3-year old to test hunter class, this will be appropriate test representative of a hunter community.

My concern is not that we were nerfed, but the way we were nerfed.

We are at the absolute low end of content and gear for this entire expansion. So I'm about to take roughly a 13% DPS drop in the next patch. (The commonly used Hunter DPS spreadhsheet is startlingly accurate for these types of situations.)

The trouble is, instead of reducing the damage our shots do at the base level, you reduced their scaling factors, which cause them to ramp up far slower as gear improves. The same thing was done to pets; they had flat % bonuses reduced across the board.

You can see my gear in my Armory; you can also see by my title my guild haskilled 3 drake Sarth. We're a small guild of fun loving min-maxers with extremely competitive DPS. I run spreadsheet simulations, change pets and specs, min/max my gear, gems, enchants, consumables and rotations to do the best DPS I possibly can with my character. I'll regem my entire gearset if I have math that shows I can pull 10 more DPS out of this toon by doing so.

The upcoming nerfs will put me squarely in the middle of the pack for DPS on most boss encounters, and in the bottom half of the pack for the rest.

I hate this. Who wouldn't? What concerns me however, is because of the way we were nerfed, next tier my potential DPS will scale more slowly than the other classes', leaving Hunters further and further behind since we're a pure DPS class, and it will make more sense to bring other classes to raids.

I'm not trying to be confrontational here, but the history of Hunters as a whole in WoW has been of Blizzard not really understanding the math behind how our class works, and making changes we have to do ridiculous things to try to counter or overcome. There are numerous examples of this throughout the game - when a green bow was the best ranged weapon in the game because of its slow shot speed, then later when a low DPS gun from Karazhan was because of its fast shot speed... the whole Aimed Shot issue from pre 2.0... the list goes on.

There's a huge pile of people out there who really understand the math behind these changes. We're not crying because we're losing the "top DPS spot" this time - we're crying because we've been through this before: we're getting overnerfed in a way that will really hurt us not only now but in the next several tiers, and the fixes will be long slow in coming.

I do believe we need our DPS lowered, there's no arguing that. Please, look at the numbers again and listen to the community concerning how you do it. I don't want to spend the next 6 months as a junk class.

I know it will never happen but I'd be insanely curious to see where hunters are stacking up with these changes in say T9/10 level gear. I hope my faith isn't misplaced, that they've run these numbers (T9/10 performance) and will run them again (as mentioned above). Having to re-implement the hunters mark AP stack (in the 3.2-3.3 area) should be considered a failure by the devs should it ever come to it.

Hopefully the more snarky replies in this thread will be edged out by sensible ones.

And, hopefully Blizz will thoroughly re-evaluate their numbers and their testing sample. Going by the top top TOP players in the top top 25-man content will give you an example of the bleeding edge, sure, but that's it. Those are the players that will run with BW+Readiness, or stack Call of the Wild, tons of raid buffs, and they're great players on top of it. It's not bad data, but it's not the big picture. But the nerfs are nevertheless impacting the "big picture" of BM by attacking some of our very basic talents.

GC, you say that a nerf may or may not hit a certain player as hard because of their playstyle... but again, some of the nerfs are happening at the ground floor of BM. Talents are getting hacked up. Stuff that will impact us in any aspect of the game. It really seems like the problem isn't there... it's on the other end of the spectrum, the extreme players, the abundance of raid buffs and how they affect hunters and then pets, plus pets buffed all on their own.

Just... don't levy all these nerfs on the class based on the performance of a select few in a select environment.

*gives hunters blessing of "Salve" to ease their pain*

Welcome to the Ret Pally Bar And Grill, where we have the best Bar-B-QQ in Azeroth. We keenly feel your loss of bad-assitude, and give you these two droids in trade.

what I want to know is why mages, who are doing equal damage to hunters while at the same time being a far better class in arena, are getting zero nerfs and several buffs. It really feels like hunters are being singled out here for no good reason. How can our damage be too high and mage's damage be fine when they are equaling or even exceeding hunters on top wws reports?

GC,

Seriously, I appreciate this response, however I have to comment on some of these things.

Would it not be more prudent to base your class adjustments on information provided to you from real world play vrs controlled testing? You are making your decisions based on an extreme minority rather than a majority. If your #'s are different than most of people really playing this game, and paying for that privilege I might add, would it not be in the best interest of the majority to work with our #'s vrs yours? Who are you really trying to provide the best service to, your controlled testers, or me, your customer?

I cannot bring myself to accept that just because 10% of the people playing this game are experiencing a certain result, that you would make changes based on that. Would it not be better to work with the data being accumulated by the other 90%?


How about this...

Could you not request that all hunters participate in a information gathering experiment for you? We could all submit WWS reports to you with attached information forms to help you presort the reports. You could then create some filters of your own so you could more easily presort the information.

You know as well as I do that you would very quickly have a rich database of information in which to work with. It would require some time and effort on your part to sort through all the submissions in order to compile the best information, but you are all smart people, so I am sure you could come up with a system to presort that would make the task very easy.

Only by doing this can you really get an idea of how things REALLY are for us, your customers. Is the state of things so extremely out of balance that you cannot afford to take the time to compile evidence from your customer base, rather than your tiny test community?

Again, I an sincerely asking you to adjust your decision making so that it is more of a reflection of us, the MAJORITY of players, vrs a reaction to #'s generated by a small number of blizzard testers. WE ARE THE ONES WHO WILL BE EFFECTED THE MOST, SO IT IS NOT OUR IMPUTE THAT SHOULD BE GIVEN THE MOST WEIGHT?

---

Q u o t e:


Why did you release the expansion before it was ready?

---

Why do you think it wasn't ready?

---

Q u o t e:
My concern is not that we were nerfed, but the way we were nerfed.

We are at the absolute low end of content and gear for this entire expansion. So I'm about to take roughly a 13% DPS drop in the next patch. (The commonly used Hunter DPS spreadhsheet is startlingly accurate for these types of situations.)

The trouble is, instead of reducing the damage our shots do at the base level, you reduced their scaling factors, which cause them to ramp up far slower as gear improves. The same thing was done to pets; they had flat % bonuses reduced across the board.

You can see my gear in my Armory; you can also see by my title my guild haskilled 3 drake Sarth. We're a small guild of fun loving min-maxers with extremely competitive DPS. I run spreadsheet simulations, change pets and specs, min/max my gear, gems, enchants, consumables and rotations to do the best DPS I possibly can with my character. I'll regem my entire gearset if I have math that shows I can pull 10 more DPS out of this toon by doing so.

The upcoming nerfs will put me squarely in the middle of the pack for DPS on most boss encounters, and in the bottom half of the pack for the rest.

I hate this. Who wouldn't? What concerns me however, is because of the way we were nerfed, next tier my potential DPS will scale more slowly than the other classes', leaving Hunters further and further behind since we're a pure DPS class, and it will make more sense to bring other classes to raids.

I'm not trying to be confrontational here, but the history of Hunters as a whole in WoW has been of Blizzard not really understanding the math behind how our class works, and making changes we have to do ridiculous things to try to counter or overcome. There are numerous examples of this throughout the game - when a green bow was the best ranged weapon in the game because of its slow shot speed, then later when a low DPS gun from Karazhan was because of its fast shot speed... the whole Aimed Shot issue from pre 2.0... the list goes on.

There's a huge pile of people out there who really understand the math behind these changes. We're not crying because we're losing the "top DPS spot" this time - we're crying because we've been through this before: we're getting overnerfed in a way that will really hurt us not only now but in the next several tiers, and the fixes will be long slow in coming.

I do believe we need our DPS lowered, there's no arguing that. Please, look at the numbers again and listen to the community concerning how you do it. I don't want to spend the next 6 months as a junk class.

---

This is probably one of the best and most well thought out posts I've read.