It looks like 4.3.2 will hold a nice change for SV according to MMO-Champion: Lock and Load will no longer consume Arcane Shots. Kaivax embellished on this change and Blizzard’s thoughts on hunters in general in an informative post:
Lock and Load not being caused by Arcane Shot is an intentional change. As many players have pointed out, there is just no need for it any longer.
We also intend to make sure Black Arrow is used over Explosive Trap, probably by buffing Black Arrow slightly.
We are looking a lot at hunter DPS right now. We think it is in a good place when compared to other ranged DPS specs (in equivalent gear), but falls short when compared to ranged DPS with Dragonwrath. The guilds currently posting heroic combat logs have a lot of Dragonwraths, and unfortunately, hunters are the only ranged DPS who don’t have access to a legendary weapon. When more hunters have Deathwing weapons, their DPS will go up compared to the Dragonwrath users who won’t be upgrading their weapons, and we’ll see what hunter performance looks like.
It’s likely that future legendaries won’t be usable by so many classes and specs. For the present situation, one option is to just buff hunters to make up for their inability to have legendary weapons, but when you look at DPS casters who have no legendary, it’s a tough option to take. We’re not sure yet of the future of the attack power buff in Mists of Pandaria, but in the short term we want to make sure that there are some situations where melee can do really high DPS rather than routinely coming in below ranged DPS (which is how we felt about the last two raid tiers).
If we buff hunters, it will more likely be through other avenues.
So, the takeaways are these:
- Blizzard is monitoring the state of hunter DPS “a lot” but big changes are unlikely. They are aware of the DPS disparity of hunters with other ranged, but view it as a problem with their design of the legendary staff rather than a problem they need to fix with hunters.
- A buff to Black Arrow to put it ahead of Explosive Trap is likely.
- Adding hunters into the melee AP buff is unlikely.
Also, Kaivax confirmed that Vial of Shadows only using melee AP is indeed a bug. Zeherah found that this bug caused her dps to decrease (with her gear) by 363, so if Blizzard fixes the trinket it should make for a decent gain for the hunters who have it.
But we do have a legendary… from Sunwell… perhaps… Blizzard might consider changing their legendary policy and, similar to Heirlooms, have a sliding scale on its stats depending on the iLvl of the character….
The legendary from Sunwell is a possibilty I suppose but it would be VERY easy to get now compared to the staff, so I doubt that will happen.
On a slightly related topic…..I was victim last night the the new disengage bug that was introduced when they “fixed” the warrior charge. I was literally knocked out of the air while disengaging a number of times by rogues and warriors during Tol Barad bgs……I basically have no way to escape these guys now if scatter shot is not available……just another way we have been “nerfed” :(
I think the best way to fix this is making an NPC like the etherals that do the transmog , that if you have a legendary he will give you a quest for you to gather this crazy amount of really rare materials and pay like 50K then the NPC can “reforge” your old legendary to a new legendary. That way more players can have a chance to have a good weapon that at the same time is not gonna be easy to get, cause there is still the 1% drop rate for the rare or the items to make the rares, like the bindings for thunder Fury or the shards for Val’anyr. I agree that some legendary are a bit easier to get than others but that does mean is that it doesn’t take a lot of time to get them
Legendaries by their nature are overpowered, unbalancing whatever class is able to use it. There is an easy fix: Remove Legendaries. Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa’s Rest was too widely available, with many guilds have two casters with the staff. The first part of the Rogue Legendary chain gave every Rogue in existence rapid access to i397 weapons long before anyone else gained access (by back is still sore from early 2′s matches).
Legendaries, while neat, are not really needed to keep the game interesting, in my opinion. Remove them, keep the game balanced, and players will be happier.
Oh, who am I kidding? Give everyone a Legendary! Welfare Legendaries for the masses!
I have a hard time believing that “Tarecgosa’s Rest was too widely available”. I read that about 30,000 people have completed the staff. If there’s 9 Million people playing WoW, that’s about 0.33% of all people playing. I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider that “widely available”. So complaining about game balance for 0.33% of all people playing the game seems a bit…silly?
The majority of those 9 million players aren’t even eligible to use the item, so to include DKs, warriors and hunters in that comparison is just stupid. Even if you did, 0.33% having access to a legendary is massive but, as we shall see, it gets worse once you do the maths correctly.
I don’t know about the distribution of classes, but suppose they are about equal between both classes and specs within classes. There are 10 classes in total; 2 pure dps caster classes (mages and warlocks) and 3 hybrid dps classes that can use the staff (shadow priests, elemental shamans and balance druids).
I’m going to assume that all dps casters want the staff, so all mages and warlocks, about half of the priests and about one third of the shamans and druids. That’s 10%+10%+5%+3.3%+3.3% which is about 31.6% of those 9 million players.
So about one-third of the WoW population (roughly 3 million) are eligible to use the staff and out of those, 30,000 has it already. That’s not 0.33%, but three times as much – closer to 1%.
Furthermore, the legendary staff isn’t evenly distributed among all casters but concentrated to end-game raiding guilds. The 1%-figure is when we include scrubs who still fool around in BoT, grind dailies, farm herbs, jump around in Orgrimmar or do PvP. Excluding them narrows the population even more, further driving up the percentage of those who has it.
So let’s take of how many casters actually _can_ get the staff (as in: who have actually raided firelands) and say that’s about… what, 25% of all casters? One in four casters play in a guild good enough that they can get their hands on the staff, or 750,000 players. Still 30,000 has it, which makes for 4%. Out of 25 casters who have a chance of obtaining the staff, 1 has it already.
So yes, it is widely available. Very much so, in fact.
Reality: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. They can’t win no matter what and someone is gonna bitch and gripe.
For hardcore raiding guilds, the legendary is readily available. Most progression guilds (top 100) have 6-10 players in guild with the legendary.
Personally I think hunter DPS is viable on many fights, but in general we could use a small buff. I don’t care how they do it, but even a small dps buff would help us compete on some fights where other caster classes excel.