Blizzard is hosting a live Class Design & Balance Q&A right now. I’ve weeded out all of the wasting-the-devs-time-with-support-class-questions Q&A, and have listed just the important topics below… specifically, the Hunter Class Design & Balance info.
Some key points…
- Along with the removal of ranged weps, hunters will lose the ability to parry. Not a huge deal, considering our parry chance blows.
- If you have a melee weapon that you want to RP with, you’ll be able to equip it for show in Mists of Pandaria.
- Hunters will be able to cast Scare Beast on enemies affected by Transmorph Trap (trap that turns an affected target into a beast, with a Hex type effect, e.g. loss of control over abilities).
- Exotic pets will still be BM-only.
- Spec DPS balance should be level across all three specs.
Anyway, here are the official responses from Blizzard…
Q: Hello Blizzard! Will the hunters be able to parry with bows in MoP? :O
A: No. Hunters will lose parry as part of the trade-off for losing minimum range.
Q: Will hunters be able to equip melee weapons instead of a ranged weapon in MoP, even if just for show ?
A: Yes.
Q: Hello, for the hunter Talent; Transmorph Trap. Can more of a description be given on it? Is it the same as a hex effect, or can you also fear the target after while they’re turned into a beast?
A: Transmorph Trap is a nature trap (and so can be placed at the same time as Freezing Trap), and allows you to cast Scare Beast on the transmorphed target. It will have a similar duration to Freezing Trap.
Q: Since in MoP you guys plan on getting rid of relics for pallies, shamans, druids, and stat sticks for hunters are you planning on boosting stats in other areas to compensate? Or are the range slots for the other classes being removed as well?
A: The ranged slot is being removed for everyone in 5.0. Relics are gone. Ranged Weapons will be usable in the main hand by appropriate classes. Wands will become a type of main hand weapon. This effectively is a slight nerf to the stats of everyone equally, so doesn’t cause class balance concerns.
Q: As a hunter I love collecting the odd pets that only a BM can but I dont get to use them much while raiding because to max my DPS I raid MM. I spend the time and effort to get these pets but noone sees them very often. Will we in the future see hunters be able to use these pets in any spec?
A: We’re actually excited to see how spec balance for Hunters turns out in 4.3. We’re pretty confident that their raw damage is competitive between all 3 specs now, and so hope to see more exotic pets in raids, as well as survival hunters, and specs chosen based on the situational utility that they offer. We definitely want to reserve exotic pets as a BM-only perk though.
Q: Considering the remove of melee weapons for hunters in Cataclysm, will the currently existing utility spells that require a melee weapon be replaced. (especially Raptorstrike Glyph)
A: Removing melee weapons from Hunters and removing their minimum range on their attacks will have many different balance implications. We will carefully evaluate all their defensive abilities to make sure they don’t become too survivable, or conversely too easy to kill. Mechanics on glyphs will be kept in some form if we feel they are valuable to the design, but some glyph mechanics may go away as no longer necessary.
Q: im saying this for most hunters but y hasnt the snake trap damage been increased i have used it at max lvl a few times but the trap when the snakes attackk each one only does like 25 damage each is there a way you can fix this trap so that it does more damage
A: Snake Trap is intended to be utility, not damage. The damage on it is just there for flavor, really.
Q: Aspect of the cheetah/pack have seemed a little outdated with the daze on hit mechanic and can’t really use them effectively in raids or pvp. Are there any plans to change these aspects to more a cooldown spell like stampeding roar or a self run speed for aspect of the cheetah?
A: Yes, we plan on it not dazing you but turn off the speed bonus for a short while when you get hit in those aspects (or at least Cheetah).
Q: Have you considered having a pet stampede spell where our 5 pet stable rushes our enemy for a 5min cd? Too epic for GC?
A: Yes.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3565947089?page=2
Another Blue post on hunters:
As you know, we are limited by the quantity and quality of the questions we get, and there are only so many answers that we’re willing to provide. We simply don’t want to load the community down with a bunch of “We’re not sure” or “We don’t know yet,” responses. There are more paladins than any other class, so it’s not surprising we got a lot of paladin questions. We talked a lot at Blizzcon about how dramatically warlocks were changing, so we got a lot of warlock questions.
Hunters have a lot of damage coming from high values of static nonscaling Attack Power and high base damage, but severely lack longterm scaling, causing them to fall behind by the end of the expansion despite starting very powerful in the first tier. Especially Survival. Are there any ideas or plans to address overall Hunter scaling?
The developers meant to answer this specific question — they’ve said so — but somehow it slipped through the cracks. The answer is that we have tried for some time to keep physical attacks feeling distinct by designing some to be mostly weapon based, and others as mostly (or entirely) attack power based. This applies to most melee characters, as well as hunters. But we have continually been stymied by scaling issues and player confusion, so our plan in 5.0 is to make nearly all of these attacks scale by both weapon damage and attack power (or ranged attack power) to about the same degree.
Our internal 4.3 testing for hunters shows Marksman, Survival, and Beast Mastery very close. This doesn’t always play out in encounters, because players often develop different strategies when encounters go live (than they did during PTR testing). In 4.2 encounters, the three hunter specs were not as far apart in DPS as many players believe, but because the hunters who would get the most DPS out of any spec tend to play Marksmanship, there is a sampling bias towards Marksmanship. We sometimes see DPS averages drop for spec A when we buff spec B (and don’t touch spec A), simply because many very-talented players migrate towards spec B.
Totally understandable that the Snake Trap is for utility, but the snakes could last a little longer than dying in one single AoE. They have AoE reduction, but its not even close to survive “nowadays” damages.
One more Blue comment for you:
Xelnath:
Sometimes a spec is genuinely broken and trivializes the other classes. In those cases, we try to address the issue. However, sometimes players just haven’t discovered the optimal way to play a particular class. For example, Unholy, Survival and Subtlety have the capability to perform far better than most people realize.
Thanks for the summary. I couldn’t make it to the live chat because of work. The last one was later in the day, not sure why they did this one in the middle of the day.
I submitted a question asking what they intended to do about hunter balance in PVP, given our extremely low representation in competitive PVP for years. Having a hunter win the tournament doesn’t mean that this is no longer a problem.
Unfortunately, they didn’t address hunter PVP at all. Sigh. It would seem an obvious topic for a discussion on Class Balance…
Q: Aspect of the cheetah/pack have seemed a little outdated with the daze on hit mechanic and can’t really use them effectively in raids or pvp. Are there any plans to change these aspects to more a cooldown spell like stampeding roar or a self run speed for aspect of the cheetah?
A: Yes, we plan on it not dazing you but turn off the speed bonus for a short while when you get hit in those aspects (or at least Cheetah).
Thanks for that addition Fawatam. The Q&A was still ongoing when I posted this. I’ve updated it with a few things I’d missed.