Hunter Q&A Released

Blizzard is almost done with the Class Q&A feature which started with the Shaman class and now it’s time for Hunters to take the spotlight. As you may know, the Q&A feature is there to find out what the development team is thinking about the classes for patch 3.2 and beyond. They go through things like design philosophy and changes they want to make or are thinking of making.

night elf hunter

Hunters are unique in that they are the only ranged damage dealers that rely on the mostly physical damage of their ranged weapon rather than spells. But what also makes them unique is the fact that they have pets and traps at their disposal. Despite being a ranged class, they still have some tools for melee combat. All of this makes the hunter design tricky. Ghostcrawler said that they want to improve on the interface involving pet control and improving what hunters do when they get in melee range of an opponent (more on these below).

Ammunition has always been a pain in the butt since the start for hunters. It’s expensive and when you run out of it, the hunter is pretty much useless. Eventually they want to push through with the mechanic that will allow non-consumable ammo wherein the haste benefit from the quiver/ammo pouch would be made up elsewhere. It seems like they need more time, probably another expansion, to implement this because of the problems it could do to data storage. For now they want to fix this problem by lowering the cost of ammo and also by changing the way ranged weapons scale so that hunter dps will still increase even if you didn’t have the best ammo.

As much as they still don’t want Hunters to be very good in melee combat, they want to give them a mechanic so that Hunters don’t always have to run away when they’re in melee range. They’re thinking of maybe a punishing attack on cooldown that hunters can execute while in melee range to give him something worth doing. Like other classes,they would like hunters to benefit more from haste. The only problem is that hunters are a very cooldown oriented class and haste doesn’t benefit that situation very much. They’ll about this problem more at Blizzcon.

Ghostcrawler mentioned that they would like to make a change that will help pet survivability in PvE. They think that AoE damage avoidance isn’t enough to help pets stay alive especially when dealing with bosses like Mimiron. the answer is to just not let certain things damage pets so they don’t die from something ridiculous because of the pet AI. Hunters already can heal and rez their pets and that’s enough. they also want to give pets more action bars because players currently have to switch certain abilities in and out. they want pet action bars to feel more like character action bars.

Lastly the devs are thinking about doing away with stables the way they are used now, making pet summoning more like warlocks in that they can switch pets anytime they want. If they do this, stables will be used more for storage of pets Hunters don’t really use but can’t part with.